Interesting that you point out the villager count to be the problem.
Iâm totally on page with OP regarding the Keeps are to strong.
I would not like to see some flat restrictions on the villager count, it can be an disadvantage to have too many villagers same as, to many army, finding the right balance is part of the game and should depend on your techs, civ and state the game is currently.
I like the strategy aspect of not being strictly limited in any way.
Maybe you want pop-efficient units and need more vills, like knights or handcanoniers. Or you have to stick with trash units because u run out of gold, then it could be beneficial to have a bigger military size to make up for it and trade more cost-effectively. There is always an optimum depending on a lot of factors and your strategic approach, but to find it should be up to the players and not limitations.
Lets say player A has 80 military pop and player B has 60 military pop. Player A has 33% more army population. That can massively snowball and outweigh the extra villager income.
Right now keeps, walls, and to a some degree, towers are preventing the bigger Army to utilize its strength in the lategame and grant the defending player valuable time.
Every second no one is fighting it is beneficial for the player with more villagers.
and here is the issue, the player with the bigger army size and 200 pop is on a timer not the one with less army! His main objective is to take with his bigger army a good fight asap, but a single keep can delay the push by minutes and would equal out the military advantage if u fight under the keep or if u have to build siege to take it down. The other option is to deny resources. This takes usually long until your opponent runs out of it and he could again free villager at some point and pick the fight with a bigger bank, more pop efficient units, techs and such âŠ
Even though its super lategame, you face the same problem as in feudal, where single tc all in is such a big risk to take with the new TC.
Even tho in later stages it has a bigger potential of success, it becomes not so 1 dimensional, but it is such a big risk that players like to play it safe both with their options, that leads to the âaggressorâ waiting for its siege to do its job and the defender usually with the better eco, trying to play the long game.
For me the issue is not the villager count that you can build, it is imo just a side effect of the current meta. The defensive structures are too strong or the counterpart to weak, that prevent the player with the bigger army to accelerate and apply damage.
Mainly keeps are the issue in late-game, fighting under a keep is such a big disadvantage, that you need currently trebs to deal with them, this is slow and time consuming and 3 trebs diminish the military pop space advantage again. If you go bombards, it could be sniped with springalds or culverins, if it succeed it adds again minutes on the defender side.
Together with the productions close to the defender side, having the army lead and being pop-capped can be a disadvantage now, if u cant make use of it in time.
Letâs assume 140 vills, get one extra minute because of a single Keep drop and a minute is super short for a keep that u have to siege down. Just this one minute with a average gather speed of 50/min ⊠You gathered 1000 resources more than your opponent or 7000 total resources.
The auto targeting of defensive structures introduced more than just the 2. TC meta. It also stretched out the mid and late-game and benefits a defensive eco approach even in late Imp games, where u then start to turtle up until you have everything you need to win.
I wish they would have done something in between. They could have introduced an ability, that allows a defensive structure to auto target for a period of time when activated, when the 30 seconds are over, it is on cd for another 30 sec and would behave as before. It is on you to get more value out of your defensive structures, it would delay pushes and be still strong, but is not overperforming, it helps more casual players and would be something in between.
They could also make it toggable as an option, so it auto activates on the first ram attacking the defensive structure, this way even super casual players that âsleepsâ a bit will not directly lose their keep to a single ram pushing it with a small army. All others can try to get more out of it by timing it well and defending it with their army when itâs on cooldown.
The devs like rock scissor paper, but they oversimplified it with the defensive structures, they went for a non-skill-based approach, which is just boring. It can be also balanced through sheer stats rather than mechanics, but it will remain less interesting to play and watch. I like to get rewarded for my plays, horsemen on top of the archers, demo ship into springald ship, if we can get something on the defensive structures and sieges that leads to a back and forth would be nice. The old targeting system was providing the back and forth and could have been tuned or redesigned in an interesting way to make it not so micro-intensive, but by exchanging it with an auto-fire mechanic ⊠the game lost something big imo.
3 Likes
this is the type of game that I donât like with more than 140 villagers and whoever produced the most villagers wins
You say games with 140 villagers slows the game but logic says the opposite. More villagers mean more eco, and more eco means more technologies and more army rebuild capacity.
In a game with less villagers players will ever be more cautious because they will know that losing army will have a greater impact in the game, making people to be more afraid of taking risks and playing more turtling.
Also, and because you always are showing the pros as example, if you check the resources they always are using them all. That means they really take advantage of that extra resource incoming from villagers, and thus reducing the villagers just will slow the game.
1 Like
Biased conclusion, Kasva with less than 100 villagers produced 61 military units, more villagers only use them to collect stone and make more walls or sacrifice them with the keep on the face or make 70 farms, they accumulate a lot of food and defend themselves with spam from spearmen and riders that cost only 20 wood.
Why so much economy and what are they going to produce if you only have 60 leftover population and the siege will occupy at least 10 or 12; I don `t share your opinion
Here I mention the disadvantages and how to compensate them
Villagers has 0 relation to game duration, as you can see in other leagues that people donât usually build more than 80-90 (for example in gold) and games can also last as long.
If you think that you must provide some evidence not just games that lasts 40 minutes and people having more than 120 villagers, because OBVIOUSLY a game that lasts more than 40 minutes means that everyone had time to build as much villagers as they wanted.
How not! If a player has less than 90 villagers in the late game, the game is lost. In this game Leenock gave up when he had 80 villagers left, but if he had 150 villagers and was left with 130 he would not have given up and would have stayed in the game, do you understand?
and watch the minute of the video so you can see that with 120 villagers Kasva quietly won the game, he made an army of 59 and 21 in siege
You oversimplify everything.
Kasva got more army, kasva hit the whole ranged army of leenock with 2 mangonel and took 70% of their HP, kasva had the map control, kasva was siegeing the leenock base.
There is a lot of things happenning in that moment, but you just think that kasva won just because he had more villagers.
You make conclusions based on incomplete analysis. You see kasva with more villagers and automatically think that he just won because that, but there are tons of things happenning that lead leenock to throw gg.
I asked you a lot of times to give a complete analysis about why do you think that having more than 120 villagers leads to larger games, but you donât because yoy simply canât.
More villagers means more eco and more eco means faster games.
you put words in my mouth, I just show that 120 villagers is enough to produce an army, who if I win with more villagers was Beastyqt
Look at the transmission, it is the penultimate game
I gave you an answer there. Who I have to convince is the developers, not you!
This is very outside the AOE.
But I personally think Trade should play far more important role.
infact, I think there should be a Villager limit. (example: 60 villagers).
If you want stronger Eco, you MUST trade. (an all civs should get the option to at least select what trade they want, going for wood/gold/food)
Trading Eco is much more dynamic, harder to defend, and becomes tactically viable.
Sure, some maps allows you to huddle up trade in the backline, but itâs still a vournarable part of your eco that is hard to set up defenses to cover the entire trade.
Blockading becomes an actually thing (deviding armies and attention).
Patrols might actually become a thing. (running a few units in patrol along the traderoute to prevent opponent from raiding with say, 5 archers/horsearchers.)
More resources gets dedicated in making backline defense. (which isnât a problem as Mongol do this all the time, and upcoming Mali and ottoman also encourages it. Abbasid aslo had feature that greatly benefits running risky traderuns, armored caravans + healing from keeps)
It dosnât just become a Multiple TC printing villagers Meta.
it actually becomes far more important to think strategically, scout, gain map controll and strike decisivly.
Personally I think this balances it out, and puts a Eco VS Military aspect into things.
The more you eco (more traders you have) The less map controll you are able to get.
The more military you have, the more map controll, but in return weaker eco to replace said military.
This does require some map rebalancing though, especially on maps with only a single neutral trade. There needs to be minimum of 2 neutral traders, position in such a way both sides can take advantage of it.
40 minute game
Bee with 150 villagers (this ensures that he does not lose due to the difference in villagers), he accumulated 13 thousand food and beat the rival who made fewer villagers, you can see it in the game history
Kaup made 150 villagers too late, Bee annihilated 60 villagers and in the next 2 minutes Kaup lost the game
150 villagers, accumulate a lot of food and eliminate villagers later, well it seems like a disgusting Meta to me
Betten than limit villagers or some strange things that only would limit the game reduce resources over the map, so trade become more important.
Intuitively Iâd say a high villager count indicates strong structures that can be used offensively and defensively. Army seems to be not cost efficient anymore hence more villagers. Also buildings do not need any population space. Again my proposal would be to just decrease the power of buildings (TCs and keeps) in general.
2 Likes
But people say this is a great RTSâŠlol.
I think devs has a complete different vision of the game and Microsoft asked them to copy age 2.
I like the speed of the game and the double production speeds up the game, it just needs some polishing
Please no, this is such a fiddly solution.
Keep costing population maybe, but donât limit villager and especially donât make arbitrary rules that make no sense of 120, this is worse than having strange variant civ names.
It would probably make no difference in game length anyway.
I think if the game had higher population limit, the game would be way less reliant on defensive building.
Donât necro old posts please.
Topic closed.
1 Like