I like the dark age except for the sheep mini-game which only exists for the sake of nostalgia and pleasing a big proportion of old aoe players who would be upset without seeking sheep. I would rather just have some sheep at spawn for each player (regardless of the number).
If you donāt like it - skip it.
In game setup you have the choice to begin in any age.
In ranked not really xD .
I am against the 12 vills start but donāt like the way you respond. You are telling him to create a custom game and hope he gets people at his level? Matchmaking queues exist for a reason
Of course, you need standardized settings for an objective competition. You may think thatās good or bad - you just have to live with it.
But nobody prevents you from starting a custom game if itās more fun.
Are only ranked games the ultimate gaming experience?
And what I personally donāt like: when āeSportsā fanatics want to force their views on others.
even if unranked people would like to play with others near their level not one sided or stomp games
Iāve always said that thereās certain cadence thatās classic to AoE games. AoE has longer matches and thatās what the community likes. There have been and will be other RTS franchises that cater to those who want faster gameplay. For example, I like SC2 a lot, but it feels like Iām playing in fast forward, so I donāt feel like I enjoy it much.
Taking AoE out of its usually calmer, more strategic and longer matches for the sake of pleasing Twitch viewers will drive away a lot of its devoted, long-time fanbase. Standardizing to 12 vils would be a big step towards that.
I agree with the general sentiment here that the Dark Ages need a serious revamp, instead of simply sweeping it under the rug with faster age ups.
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@EricGonzalezM
Agreed.
I donāt know exact statistics, but I strongly assume the major part of AoE fans comes from earlier AoE, even AoE1 (1997). These people like the mix of beginning settlement over clever strategic development upto final epic battles.
Heavy gameplay changes towards faster processes will result in merely braindead massacres. Iām sure faithful AoE fans would not like this. There are many other games out which fulfil these expectations.
Though Iām afraid many of the game changes point to eSport and streaming channel delights, I hope āthe soulā of AoE will be kept alive.
PS ā¦ concerning DarkAge revamp
Just a funny idea was, not to age-up easily, but to search or conquer ābuild plansā which enable desired landmarks.
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correction: pleasing āSomeā twitch viewers.
There is usually much selection bias in this kind of topics. For instance, even if the majority is happy with 6 villagers and prefers 6 over 12, they wonāt make threads on the forums or reddit about preferring the status quo or that they prefer 6 over 12 or 8 or whatever. Only those who are not happy are vocal so they make threads to complain/make suggestion. Thus they are the only ones among players to get observed out of the whole population. This can easily mislead or give the false impression that they are a majority of the playerbase and that āalmost everyone want 12 vills start because there are lot of post about itā.
And this is why I actually respond to this kind of posts rather than staying quiet.
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Well it all comes down to personal preferences but speeding up the game wouldnāt lead to braindead massacres and I donāt know why people say that. If anything, the skill ceiling increases and the gap between skilled and unskilled players becomes bigger. It is just way harder to make the right decisions when having less time.
Apart from that I agree that the AoE community just prefers a slower pace and making it faster might just hurt the playerbase. Although I think AoE3 might be a little bit different in that regard from what Iāve heard (I never played it).
Letās say the devs decided to implement another game mode like AoE2ās Empire Wars. Can we be sure that splitting the community would also hurt the playerbase or could it lead to a bigger one since players who previously thought the game was too slow would pick it up again?
An other biasis is those who found aoe4 too slow have already left the game and are not here to share their point of view.
I was conq1-2 but i left the game because of how boring he can be sometime (and its definitly unwatchable, most of the time nothing happend before 10 min). The couple of game a watched recetly (12 vils start) are a wayyyyy much better from my point of view.
I am pretty sure if the game was more like that at the beggining, the amount of players / viewers would have stay much highter (itās probably too late now)
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100% agree. Many of those who left the ship were, among other things, due to the slow pace of the game and soporific games.
It cannot be that the average of the games, in his time, was approximately 25 minutes (and for almost 10 minutes with hardly anything happening).
Fortunately, the metagame has changed for the better and it is the general public (not just a forum) that should give their point of view (I still think that 12v for important tournaments like RBW seems necessary to me).
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Ironically they are spending too much time complaining in the forums even though they are supposed to have quit the game ages ago.
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I am also one of those guys. I do not play AoE4 anymore and switched to SC2 months ago. I follow the progress of the game from the sidelines though as I really liked many things of the game but found the slow pace and repeating static situations quite tiresome and demotivating.
play Rus if you prefer an interesting dark age. WIth three scouts hunting and scouting, you can play your next steps very well, as well as having still enough intel on what the opponent is going for. If you shorten the early game, this phase suffers. As mentioned by BilboB1887 before, if you have less time for decision making, strategy suffers. They already increased the villager count after the beta.
To my mind it could be interesting than dev try to make a survey on this point. I have spoken with some people and the opinions are really divided.
Maybe dev could be trying to make 2 kind of ranked (6 vill and 12 vill) during 1 season only, and watching witch one is the most played.
To bring back sc2 player or players like this, change from six to twelve vill is maybe the only one way. But maybe its to late i agree
We can retain the 6 starting vils and the slower pace most of us like, but one old convention the AoE franchise needs to do away with is the ādark age means almost no militaryā.
If you go back in history to the actual dark ages, it wasnāt what the name implies. There was still innovation and quite a lot of diversity in warfare. Iāve always said that AoEās āDark Ageā should give you at the very least basic but varied units, like simple archers, militia, light cavalry, basic siege, etc.
The closest analogy for AoEās starting TC is a new settlement from an existing, larger civ. Youāre not starting from scratch technology-wise. AoE3 had the right idea with the home cities concept (the fact that it wasnāt well received is another story, though). Itās very hard to force yourself to believe that in the early middle ages the technology couldnāt come up with anything more than a frickinā spearman considering some few years back there were catapults, triremes, chariots, hoplites, composite bows, etc.
This is a problem affecting all AoE games with the exception of AoE 1 which had the excuse of really starting from scratch in the Stone Age.
The biggest challenge for a new small settlement in the Middle Ages was basically just surviving the first few years. Disease, wild animals, lack of food, raids. Iād be great to make some sort of mini survival game out of the first age in AoE and exploit the rather simple city building aspect of it as it is right now.
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they should make 12 vils at release. Too dumb they did not do it.
Do you use these extra 6 vils in the queue to go and make some coffee?
who live to see pikes vs pikes in dark age? why?
the only way 12 vils at the start.
Simply increasing the pace to x1.5 could also be a way to go here in order to test the general feedback of the community on a faster more action packed game mode. I might oversee something here but balance for both 1.0x and 1.5x pace should be the same. Some strategies might have a higher ceiling due to APM becoming more relevant which might eventually lead to distinct balance tasks but in general there shouldntāt be much additional work for the devs. I think they could ignore the balance for that gaming mode completely for a potential test season as wellā¦
@ZerrDerHearte
Rus dark age is not interesting for me because it doesnāt have a very high ceiling. I have the APM for doing the hunt but what if I do that nearly perfect? What comes next? Where can I further work on myself becoming better so that the gap between me and my opponent becomes larger? Thatās what the hunting lacks for me: limited ceiling which eventually leads to no motiviation to play.