Stone Walls - Am I the only one bothered by them?

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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Hello !

I absolutely love playing this game with my brother, but as we climb the ELO (instead of ranks…) we face more and more strategies that are diverse and interesting. But I’ll tell you what’s not… 80% of the maps we end up playing are maps with little to no openings that lead to the opponents’ side of the map. These “choke points” maps could be interesting in themselves but since stone walls are available in the second age, it nullifies all our attempts to cause early damage… The only option we find is to try and boom better than the opponents, but since it was their decision to play defensively, they already have the lead on this aspect, maybe by getting some economic landmarks or by opening 3 tc and 4 markets, I don’t know.

We tried our fair share of trying to stay in age 2 by building rams and a big ball of units to try and punish the greed of the opponents. It ends up taking too long to actually destroy the walls and get to the other side of the map… it seems like 2v2 specifically have huge maps for what is really needed. Map size in team games being another topic, it doesn’t help in trying to stop the early walls that cost close to no ressource (150 stone on some maps) to stop an entire 1000+ ressource army for at least 3 minutes, time to build a forge in response, research siege engineering, taking wood to build a ram, build the actual ram, and ram out the hp of the X layers of walls that are up. The sheer time it takes to break through, the opponent has time to muster up a better army while having the defenders bonus of close by military buildings and TCs / outposts…

We also try to do a “timing push” of some sort in the castle age, get veteran units, good siege like 2-3 mangonels, trebuchets, rams… even with this, the walls don’t come undone unless you do some heavy hitting, and don’t even get me started on the number of units you can lose when stone tower walls are up too…
and the timing push comes with great ressource investments that are not geared towards a favorable end game, so you NEED to be decisive with the push, but usually, after breaking the X layers of walls, we face the situation that the opponents have a slightly weaker army, we push back some, and then after trading back and forth troops, the opponents are better off since we couldn’t get to the economy assets in time.

I don’t know what I want… but right now stone walls feel so wrong, the other day I tried to get to the opponent’s wonder, they had walled off the middle of the map on mountain pass. We got rid a the wall but there we’re 100 grenadiers on top of and 50 handcanonneers, you can’t deal with them realistically since they take 0 damage on top of walls while having a range boost. So I passed as much knights as I could through the wall, when I tried to get to the wonder, 4 vills were walling it in… props to the player he rushed the prebuilding of all the foundations before my knights could get in. But since the villager hit his magical hammer on the ground, this invisible, intangible wall prevents my knights from accomplishing anything… The same thing applies when trying to prevent the early walls, you can’t reasonably stop a villager from hitting his hammer on the ground 5 times… All of these arguments leading to the fact that stone walls are a cheap and easy defensive structure that pays off so fast you don’t even have to question their use.

I would strongly advocate for a nerf on stone walls, I like what they represent and are really useful, but I feel like the fact they can’t get hit by regular units make them too polarising. I would like either for them to be hittable by any units or make them available in age 3.

Note that my 1vs1 experience is lacking, maybe this nerf wouldn’t be needed in the 1vs1 maps size… But since the actual rules of N4C prevented their use and outright banned the stone tower walls, I feel like the games we saw were very interesting and more dynamic than what I see on a day to day basis.

All this being heavy in my heart since I’d like to love the game as it is, but the fact is that in its current state, I can’t bear it, at all. Please let me know your point of view, where I am wrong, what can I do differently. I just don’t want to play the game for an half hour to play out an endgame that is very boring and repetitive.

With regards
Francis

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You hate them because you don’t utilize them yourself it seems.

It sounds like you are the aggressor in matches, however you should be able to do early damage before the opponent is able to build them. If they were faster than you in building a stone wall at a chokepoint, you should have rams researching once you start making your first units. In order for early raids to be effective, you should include at least 1-2 rams with your units.

It’s expensive and a sacrifice to stone wall. You lose villager(s) for the build time instead of getting resources. They also recently just increased the time to build stone walls.

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Stone walls are not too strong. They are too weak actually. Now they take much longer to build but are not stronger.

Your vilagers can’t gather resources when they build weak stone walls. Furthermore stone is only used by stone walls, tc and stone towers. So your opponent will also have less units normally.

The game already favors rushing and raiding very much. The person who plays defensive usually loses.

I think defense structures should even be stronger.
Bombards are by the way too strong. They make too much damage against buildings and units.

Tribuchet are fine. They are strong against buildings but weak against units. But not both.

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You’re definitely not the only one since they banned stone walls during feudal age in the latest tournament. Though I’ve definitely felt the difference from the recent changes to build time.

I would suggest parking a scout near the pass so you can harass any villagers that try to wall, and immediately back that up with a couple of spears. If you kill their villager, that’s a huge time loss and they may not even try again. You get the opportunity to place a wall down yourself.

I won a 2v2 on mountain pass yesterday by sneaking a villager into their side. They started walling and towering mid, but had to pull away to deal with my sneaky forward base. Giving my ally the chance to take control of mid. Walls didn’t play any relevance that game.

I would like to see stone walls go back to their old build speed, but make them passable until completion. Tapping down 5 segments over a bridge gives a ton of map control for the cost of about 5 seconds and 50 stone. Should be able to cross over an unfinished wall or destroy unfinished segments.

Waiting until imperial age, all the way until after your opponent has completed a doubly-expensive wonder is def not the way to handle a wall.

I feel like siege towers never get used. Maybe they need a buff. But I bet if you had 1 siege tower unload M@A on the wall during that timing push, would have made a huge difference.

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I think stone walls should be weaker in feudal and stronger in imperial. I would like to see a technology that allows you to upgrade your walls at each age. Get stone towers in castle.

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Not everyone wants to play your way. If you have issue, don’t play on close maps.

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I might be wrong as hell in what I’m about to say since I’m still new to AoE4 and my knowledge of 2 is limited and rusty, so if someone with more experience and knowledge thinks I’m writing total ■■■■■■■■ then feel free to correct me.

I’m more used to 1v1’s than 2v2’s but the simplest way to think about it is that the enemy is wasting villagers on stone early in the game to get his stone walls up as fast as humanely possible while you’re not. It’s something that’s incredibly easy and relatively safe to scout no matter what so if you see villagers on stone near the first few minutes of the game, you just have to ask yourself whether that stone is going to be used for a second TC so they can boom harder or if its going to be used to create stone walls. What’s guaranteed is that if someone is wasting vills early on stone at lower level is that they are not planning to be aggressive at all. They just want to sit their ■■■ in their base and turtle away and boom.

And best way to counter that sort of boom is early aggression. It’s civilization dependent but I think, as it stands, every civ can be fairly aggressive early game without much of an investment to stop or delay the stone walls from going up. Honestly all it takes is just a 4-5 archers to 2-tap any one villager while using the scout to watch out for any possible stable counter. If you want to go harder on it, go for it, just understand the risks involved.

The other alternative is to mine stone yourself. If someone is building stone walls and you played your scouting game properly? They’re going to be forced to wall themselves in instead of walling you out. Which means they will be ceding map control so you can more safely boom by dropping early TC’s in Feudal, expanding on the map to steal resources closest to the enemy, and wall them in on their side of the map to starve them of their initial resources as you work backwards. But this doesn’t mean you’re foregoing military until you’re at post-Imp. You need a good scouting game. You need infrastructure set-up. You need to start producing mangonels and trebuchets. You need to aggressively plant down keeps to keep them boxed in. You need to exert pressure, attack their walls to force them to panic and waste resources repairing or putting a new layer down. Look for openings so you can slip in and raid them or scout them again for new information. So on and so forth.

The biggest problem you had was that you somehow allowed them to sit on their ■■■, gather 6000 of each resources, plus another 500-1000 stone to build a monument and wall it in. To me that just reads like both teams afked for an hour playing eco.

As the elo increases obviously stuff changes and people know how to eco and military at the same time with stone, but I feel any game that gets anywhere close to a wonder victory is not that kind of game.