Forst round of GL2 has concluded and while the format was unique, I Can confidently assert the results did NOT conclude as I nor how most expected. Yes in a may the top 8 heck even the top 12? Were the bames we all expected but the order from 6th place up were surprising?
After listening to the recap from someone of the top players i would like to summarize what i hope relic can learn from this experience.
No stonewall and no keeps tends to lead to constant back and forth play and or one big decivise clash!
No stonewall and no keeps also means turtle strat, some FC/FI strats are nonviable .
I think should be done to marry the offensive and defensive timing strats.
One way to allow for both opposing playstyles is to make ALL stone costs go up!!! However also make all stone buildings much much stronger.
For example a KEEP should now cost 950 stone and take 4 mins to build. But now have 7000 HP and 1.5 the current LOS; everything else about the keep remains the same.
Next stone walls needs to have 6000HP!!! BUT cost 50 stone per segment and take 16s per segment to build starting at 1% build HP.
CHANGES like these will make turlting harder!! YET if you pull it off it will be way more rewarding and impactful.
In this format it did not help to produce too many villagers, it was also not easy to get locked in, and the opponent was punished due to the higher cost of stacked wood, the game was very aggressive
The problem with Keeps and all ranged things in the game have 100% accuracy!
In AOE2, accuracy plays a huge part at the beginning of the game.
Players have a chance to micro and turn the tide of the battle. Or at least units can be saved at the last moment, whereas in AOE4, going into range of a keep is an obvious death since it has 100% accuracy! This is where AOE2 shines and have an ability to show micro skills at its highest. AOE4 is just a macro game, where units go back and attack. This is why lots of players already left AOE4.
It is not a problem, it unifies “shooting skill” of pros and newbies, because both hit the same amount of shots. Make the arrows non-targetted and you disbalance the game a LOT.
I think keep them targetted and make some improvement on top of that, instead od removing the targetting.
Like I would like to test a mod where castles would serve more as a hard-to-kill but less damaging building, which serves the purposes that it is very slowly damaging units around it, but for a longer time. So that when there is an enemy castle near your base, or anywhere, you can happily just keep fighting “under it”, and not take extremely decisive losses, but also, it would disallow you to just go gather gold with villagers when there is an enemy castle.
So the mod would change:
BUFF: castles have 2x hp (or 3x)
NERF: the fire only 2 arrows (instead of 3), and garrissoning them does not increase amount of arrows shot (garrissoning would serve just as a safe shelter)
But that’s just a random idea. The point stands, I would prefer them having targetted arrows.
That will make everyone hate keeps!
And it if fires only 2 arrows it will not damage any unit, and no one will care to destroy it, since it won’t deal any damage!
You have no idea what you are talking about…
Your idea won’t improve the keeps!
Let me disagree, but games that are geared towards micromanagement of units are in the vein of WC3 or SC2, not AoE.
I am not telling you that there is no micro in AoE2 (there are more than in AoE4), but I am telling you, if they made only a couple of changes to the mechanics of AoE4, I would already have a micro similar to AOE2.
If they made stonewalls and keeps stronger but at the aame time make them more costly; then you’d have situations where its hard to get the structure up but then just as hard to bring it down; this woulf give greater respect to strongholds while keeping the investment honest.
I’m sorry if I have distorted the thread, I just say that the words of the partner @SubotaiMGL about the AoE4 micro are wrong, consult a professional gamer about how to micro and the importance of ambushes, tactics, vision and focus fire, etc.
Regarding the issue of the keeps (the stone wall does not seem like a problem to me, it has already been nerfed enough), perhaps I would take away 1 attack arrow and perhaps I would increase the stone cost a little more for all the emplacements (except Arrowslits) but not much else either.
aoe4 arrows aren’t 100% accurate, that’d imply they can still be avoided if you pay attention (like balistics and thumb ring in aoe2), they are target locked instead
I didn’t understand the first post because I didn’t watch the tournament but I think from my personal experience that stone walls are too weak currently. Walls especially take a long time to build now. Most of the maps are very open and it takes way too long to secure anything with stone these days.
I can rarely get a stone wall completely up before harassment begins. It’s never worth it because the enemy only needs to break 1 segment to nullify the entire thing.
2 trebs or 2 rams can punch through a stone wall before my army can even get there in time to react. Any cavalry civs just punch a hole and pour cavalry through to the trade or farms like the wall was never there.
Forget repairing stone walls, that is completely impossible now. Stone towers are never, ever used anymore because they’re too expensive and too slow.
Walls should be WAY stronger IMO, to the point we actually see siege towers with infantry being used instead of rams and cavalry. It should take a long, long time to ram a stone wall down.
The absolute best fix for keeps and stone wall is so simple:
Make it so that it cost STONE, not WOOD to repair them…
That’s it, it doesn’t really need any other fix. The upfront cost is fine. Sometimes you need to protect yourself early on. The low repair cost make them too hard to destroy though.
Would make is so much harder to repair them and I wouldn’t spend 10 minutes trying to destroy a keep being repaired non-stop. It doesn’t take that long to exhaust all the stone on the map, compared to wood. Also it would just make more sense thematically.
And also please the Berkshire palace make the game too long. Range need to be 12 max, not 14.
