Suggestion: Increase the price of palisades

We play open maps, cause it is about moving out, it’s a battle over map control.

Fact is, that eco in aoe2 is extremely vulnerable in comparison. It needs to be protected otherwise you lose basically every time you move out. So if you don’t have walls to buy time, you basically can never move out and fight over ressources, you only can move out if you have the opportunity to raid yourself.

Meaning without walls the game would be a pure raiding feast. There would be no need to fight over ressources, trying to get good unit comps or even bother about military standoffs. Just going for the eco all the time. Boring.

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Does anyone think castle age is too cheap? Builds that allow skipping of all fuedal play are so strong there’s very few extended fuedal games unless you at a pro level. You can get to castle and being able to make such a dominating unit the knight and TCS instantly I’ve wondered if another 500 - 800 Res to age up gave the game a better pace you could keep walls as they are then and fuedal pressure would be on less of a short timer. civs like Khmer would be less dominant or even all eco focused civs would be less dominant and more military based civs have a better chance Vs these top tier eco civs like Khmer. I feel like increasing fuedal age duration would be enough of a nerf to walls. You’ll have longer to break through and do more damage.

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Agree, I think Castle age is overloaded:
Extra TCs
Siege
Castles
Castle age Units shred feudal ones to pieces.

If you compare it to imp, which you often just make to get trebs and it’s worth it, then you see that castle age powerspike indeed is basically no comparison to it’s cost.

I think that there would be many different ways to address it. One would be to make castle age just a bit longer to research. This would give a feudal agressor a bit more time trying to break in.

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If you watch some pros play they can make minimal army behind walls and then fastplsy into TCS and you have no answer if they Khmer unless you siege push them heavy fuedal play is so risky and often not worth it because it’s too short of a time window. The cheapness if castle age means players can sometimes stone walls areas or just keep adding TCS and outboom their dying to siege pressure. More fuedal play would add more value to a point in the game that is too short. Would help stop people FC into extra TCS and then castle drop to be impenetrable if they were under more resource strain from upping

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Yeah also a nice idea.
Make castle age a military upgrade at first, hide extra TCs (and maybe Castles) behind a university tech (that mostly costs time).
This would also solve the issue, giving the feudal agressor the chance to close the military tech gap and set up for a castle age all-in before the castle age player can snowball the tech advantage into a too big eco advantage which can’t be compensated anymore.

And by nerfing the FC powerspike actually the “turtling” strat is indirectly nerfed too, as walls can only buy time and the longer the time they need to hold, the more fragile is that concept.

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That’s a very good idea actually we definitely need some kind of delay in castles timing and yes TCS added so early is in the same boat. Not sure what’s the best way to go around doing it. I’m sure it won’t ever be a thing in this game though because it’s too much of a drastic change for an old game

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If you ask pro players what civs are best in this game it’s mostly civs that are eco focused as even if they have weaker early military games they can still use eco to get to this strong power spike of castle age/use their eco to skip a lot of the risky stage of fuedal play and win. This lowers the strength of civs that have bonuses more on military especially. Like for instance Magyars Vs Khmer Magyars can have a tough time early on even with stronger military presence the idea of increasing fuedal play by increasing castle age cost /time research would make a better balance between primsrily eco based and primarily military based civs. Maybe not the best example but just seeing it from fuedal perspective Magyars can probably not have many early chances to exert their early military advantage Vs Khmer

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In response to some previous comments.

In my opinion, the HP of palisades is very well balanced because, if it is not a wall of disproportionate size, it generally holds up just long enough to send a villager from nearby resources to repair or build behind it. It is not a problem that people choose to wall themselves in. The problem is that deciding to wall in, even without information on what the opponent is doing, is entirely worthwhile as it does not cause the slightest significant delay in subsequent strategy.

I used arabia as an example because 61% of the games are on that map and in elo +1650 RM 1vs1 are 77,7% (1 vs 1 map statistics.), but we can include all maps that in most cases usually have similar dark age and feudal dynamics, such as ghost lake, serengeti, gold basin, gold rush, valley, etc. We can also talk about hybrid maps in which palisading is not a delay in the strategy: Baltic, Mediterranean, Scandinavia, four lakes, etc. I’m not talking about totally equating the investment of a feudal army to the cost of placing palisades around your base or in short around the resources, nor that the palisades disappear, simply that placing palisades responds to map readings and that this affects subsequent actions, being able to put fewer farms, or be more limited in resources to build an archery range to reject a drush / men-at-arms + archers who attack your walls or have surprised you with a few walls, take a ship less or can not go triple dock, etc. In short, what I’m saying is that setting up palisades shouldn’t be something mechanical like setting up the two initial houses, it should require some knowledge of the game and it should be reflected in subsequent actions.

EDIT: I want to make it clear that at all times I am referring to walling in with wooden palisades.

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Well, if you scout your opponents base and see him walling early, you can skip it for the time being and set up a fc build.
That’s how too early walls can backfire in real gameplay.

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If you realise that your opponent is going to play fast castle, walled from dark age or early feudal and you decide to go open castle age or even walled from feudal it translates into a negligible advantage over the opponent who has walled first, not to mention that you have produced some army that is usually easily rejected which puts you completely behind. However, going offensive against a closed player to break through their walls is usually an all-in and even going militia by a late reading of the opponent’s walling strategy already puts you behind a player who has been walling since dark age. It happens in general, but look at +2k games, as soon as a player walls or is walling in the vast majority of cases the other player chooses to do the same or just go to castles as well and the game automatically goes to castles. The ease of walling with wooden palisades has reduced feudal to 15 minutes of farm simulator where the only action is 3 militia attacking wooden palisades that are walled in from behind with a villager or a small group of archers trying to move some villagers from resources the minute before the opponent goes to castles and has to run back to base, if they have not been driven away or killed first by a skirmish or two.

yeah look at them, and you will see they basically never wall early. Because it’s a terrible strat, it’s killing all possible early agression momentum.

And yes walls are supposed to protect the base from dumb raiding. What low elos don’t understand is that the game, if both players play it flawless, is about skirmishing and map control. Especially in open Maps. You don’t need to kill a lot of vills early on in the game, you can get equal value by just threatening to do so or gaining map control.

I’m sick about the players who just always want to kill their enemy with their first rush. It’s not how this game is supposed to be. It’s about skirmishing, getting map control, getting intel, strategizing… If you only want fast games where the one which kills the most the fastest you are wrong in aoe2. It’s that easy.
And to execute good defence is so much harder than being good in offence. As I said stupid early wallers are easy to counter. You just have to look what they do and adabt. If you just want to stick to your silly “always scout/archer rush into castle ftw” than you can’t complain if there is also a meta counter strat against this. Which is early walling and then make counter units.
The problem isn’t that walls would be too strong. The thing is there will always be a counter meta and people who don’t understand that in an rts every strat must have a counter strat will just have probs against that counter meta if they can’t adapt. It’s that easy.

Don’t coplain, just go FC next time you see your opponent walling early, take map control and pressure him, don’t allow him to have a comeback. That’s the counter strat - stop complaining, just do it.

If they wall later on, which is the current meta, the game turns to that skirmish it is all about. One side will try to outboom a small advantage the other one will try to get the military advantage or somehow getting some raids in.
There will be the fight over map control and the different strategies, micro and macro play out. In the end one side has the advantage and can add siege to push. That’s what is supposed to be good aoe2.
If you are just about fast raiding wins, you are in the wrong game.
Ofc it’s totally allowed to go for that strat, but you can’t complain if the opponent just executes a counter strat. It’s how it works. Try next time to counter his counter strat, which is actually quite easy, one of the simplest things to do. just go fc and take map control. What can be easier to execute?

Sorry for that rant, but I’m sometimes pissed of by players who just play meta and think they must always win with it. It’s not how this game works. Every strat has its counter strat, also meta. It’s just usually so that the counter meta strats are in general very easy to counter themselves if you just have a basic understanding of the game. Thats what makes the meta meta. Not that meta would be winning always, but the counter strats are bad in general.

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To me this thread just seems like the OP hit a wall in the skill level (pun absolutely intended) as he moved up a bit on the ladder. Opponents reacting better to early pressure than he’s used to, and alas, a thread was born.

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BTW one reason palisade walling is so strong is simply because villagers repair at the same rate across all ages. Houses, walls, buildings, etc are all repaired by the first villager at 12.5 HP per second. Repairing 12.5 hp per second is nuts in feudal age when even MAA (the most cost effective anti-building unit for the age) only do 3.5 DPS each. 1 villager being able to hold off 4 MAA for like 3 minutes costing basically only the idle time is total BS. 4 MAA runs you like 15 villager minutes and despite being “strong against buildings” can only break down a palisade if it’s unguarded.

You can bring along an archer or 2 to prevent repairs but then all they need is a skirmisher or 2 to push back the archers.

The fact that building HP is staggered but repair speed is not is frankly mind-boggling. I mean it’s almost impossible for a single rate to be balanced across all ages.

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Well, for this reason i said in an earlier thread, that it would be benefitial for the game if 3 maa could outdamage a single repair vill at that stage of the game.
But only maa should be able to, as they are supposed to be the “siege” of feudal.
On the other hand, I think it would be benefitial for the game, if vill repair speed would either increase with the ages or there would be techs to improve it. As in later stages of the game it becomes nevertheless harder to execute defence - as repairing walls against eg a flemish revolution… well good luck with trying. So I think players who have the micro capacities to do this defense at later stages of the game should be rewarded - and it needs higher repair rates at that stage of the game to make it even possible.

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Maybe it is due to my inaccurate use of English and I am not expressing myself correctly. But I have the feeling that the situations I raise are not being understood or perhaps require more nuances and explanations. Really, I mean it, I really appreciate all the comments and the interest in participating in the debate I have opened. But I think that from the very beginning we should have shared our personal statistics to avoid taking certain mechanics for granted and to better qualify and describe other mechanics and situations. I don’t understand why the forum profile is not directly linked to the player’s account. It is complete nonsense.

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Lmao are you really good enough to call a 17xx player low elo?
aoe2 should be a dynamic game about adaption, skirmishes etc. and exactly this is why the walling meta is bad. If someone goes ‘‘blindly’’ fc (no checking what the opponent does, not taking the own map too much into consideration) and it works then thats bad as the adaption part of the game completely failed. The dynamic part fails as well as there is not much the game can evolve from then on. The counter-strat of going fc yourself is first, more of a mirror than a real counter-strat. The advantage of walling later is very neglible and offset by not having the eco focused on fc from the beginning. Furthermore, it makes the first 15min a complete waste of time.
Walling meta also doesn’t just mean going naked fc every game, but going drush into archers into relatively fast castle sitting behind walls, not doing any difficult decisions, snowballing small decisions into a safe win.

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Well, it’s a raiding meta and walling is just part of counter strats.

And actually walls enable that skirmishing you talk about. Without walls it would be a complete raiding feast, no strategizing, no skirmishing, no map control, whatever.

Don’t try to bend the perspective, walls only work effecively against simple rushes. And that’s the current meta. It’s a counter-meta strat.

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Without walls these concepts would still exist, just that military units would take the function of walls of protecting your eco. If you want to see how the game on Arabia would look like, here is Viper vs Yo on a no walls mod: TheViper vs Mr_Yo | No Walls Hun War! - YouTube
As you can see, less of choosing the right strategy but more military tactics, army positioning etc.
The discussion wasn’t about completely removing walls though even and the argument wasn’t that walls are unbreakable, it was about their hp and cost of building them, how these stats influence how a game plays out.

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yeah it’s a full feudal raiding feast… brilliant.
I mean, some games like them are fun at least to watch, but for the long run this would be terribly boring. There would be like 3 or 4 different scenarios how each matchup can play out… after you had all of them like 10 times you would get completely sick of it.

Isn’t it a bit extreme to propose nerfing a whole age rather than a dark age piece of wood?

What is it with calling people who disagree with you noobs all the time? Did the OP call you a noob that needs walls to survive? I don’t think so.

If only there was a more expensive, yet much better version of palissade walls…

Lol flemish rev is just an abberation, only thing that must be changed because of memish rev is the tech itself.

By this logic then Arabia matches have only been “strategic” in the later years of the game’s lifespan. Sounds dubious to say the least.

Because AoE fans totally got into the series thx to their love of banging against a wall.