I dislike castle drop but I don’t think it should be nerfed
You deserved to get dropped if you are not ready for it.
Opponent pulled bunch of villagers to build forward castle so you should have some advantage in military to deny it or you can pull more villagers from base to build a defensive castle which shouldn’t be slower.
Castle drop is quite common on Arena and the players who cry about it usually went for full boom while the opponent is launching an all-in attack.
This is why it will never get fixed/nerfed, because too many aoe2 players ‘like’ it even while they say they dislike it. Apparently you ‘deserve’ to get castle dropped unless you have ten eyes constantly fixed on all sides of your base even when some of it is out of line of sight and your army has to be the correct size, composition, and location in order to be able to stop it, and don’t forget everyone knows about quick walls too to keep their castle builders safe. Well Ensemble Studios themselves didn’t think anyone ‘deserved’ to get castle dropped so they made it impossible in all of the games they made since AOE 2 (AOM, AOE3 and even Halo Wars). It is even funnier that everyone expects to get castle dropped on Arena, they know it is coming, and they still can’t prevent it.
you can see forward Castles coming and the solution is called scouting, if you refuse to scout you got outplayed.
At high level opponent can’t simply mine 650s without being punished and at low level if your macro is too horrible to punish a guy mining Stone hence not doing army or adding TCs, l2p issue.
Also Castle drop is the ONLY took one has to force the issue in Castle age, AoE2 is already a very defensive game and not every game has to be a 3TC vs 3 TC boom fest like in 900 elo.
you can also make Outposts or at high level you scout with army. One does not simply drop a Castle for free unless we are assuming some 900 elo gameplay and I ask: why should we balance around 900 elo? Even if you get Castle dropped if you have ANY army (I’m assuming here 900 elo gameplay where they just Castle drop with only Villagers and no supporting army), you can easily deny it, 8 Crossbows stop any Castle drop.
literally nobody Castle drops in early Castle age on Arena unless they are playing for fun, it’s not meta for reasons I won’t go into explaining but in short having a fast Imp time is more important on Arena than having a positional advantage (both count).
The Viper gets castle dropped ALL THE TIME. Pros have a lot of difficulty stopping it. Insisting that it is only a ‘low ELo thing’ (and the usual contempt towards people who can’t move the mouse as fast as others) is simply untrue, just watch the Viper’s stream anytime. And yes it is meta, when I used to watch AOE2 content it happens constantly on Arena. Constantly. Just search you tube for Arena games and see for yourself.
and he still manages to win games where it happens, what’s that say?
debatable.
but they aren’t game ending castle drops. It’s part of a larger strategy, like Turks using Jans, or Portuguese using Organ Guns. It isn’t the castle alone that is killing people, which was your complaint as seen…
and here
and here
and here
and here
so yeah.
After thinking a lot over this I think Forward Castles shouldn’t be fundamentally changed.
In Arena they are one of the key strategies. One of the few viable strats. And they are often the only option to even put some pressure on the opponent.
On open maps, forward castles can give you a very important foothold when you apply pressure on the opponent. Which is very much needed as when you move out, you take a lot of risks and a forward castle just gives you more flexibility what you can do with these forces.
I’ve seen a lot of times recently that players moving out without castle support get beaten up but as they don’t have a forward castle that needs to be dealt with by the opponent they often immediately lose the game from their as they don’t have enough time to replenish their forces.
Sieging always has been risky and the Forward castles just give you a tool that alllows you to beseiege with taking less risks. I think it’s a very important mechanic in the game and i don’t want to see what happens if it isn’t anymore.
Ofc we have the “pro gamer move” forward castles to get back into a game. But for me this is also fine. Comeback mechanics are important and for me there are only those 2 with castling forward or raiding. It’s already slim enough, no need to take away one of them.
Don’t forget that a forward castle with no followup is in a lot of cases just annoying but, rarely provides any value as it is kinda easy to contain and ram down if the position is abandoned.
I posted a suggestion back in July that could help dealing with the Castle drop strategy. In this post of mine I suggested that a new unit called the [Staff Slinger] could be available when reaching the Feudal Age and trained from the [Siege Workshop], which can be built during the second age but it can’t train all of the other siege units from it until reaching the Castle Age and afterwards. The [Staff Slinger] will serve as a cheap but short ranged siege unit that will be effective against buildings in numbers.
TheViper always trolls on ladder, if he wanted, he could deny 90% of those Castle drops, you just don’t understand the game at a high enough level to see what’s happening behind the scenes.
Viper on ladder plays in the greediest way possible like 90% of the time, which means do counter units and 3 TC boom. More generally, most games have 1 player being the attacker (generally the one with the worse Imperial Age civ/faster Feudal/Castle age civ but not always) and one being the defender. Making a Castle forward is not necessarily a game-winning move, as it depends on who reaches Imp first, on what terms and so on. Just people in low elo panic, Castles give you positional advantage, but to win the game you need to make actual units.
Forward Castles are a healthy mechanic for the game just so that every game doesn’t play like Glacial Lake/race to Imperial behind walls.
I don’t know how did you get this conclusion or you are just kidding me.
Literally nobody want to get castle dropped. There is no way I " like " an enemy castle in my face, but I know how to deal with it. Get good and learn to defend yourself if you want to boom otherwise be aggressive.
Here is a simple solution for you. Why don’t you drop your opponent first if you think defend castle drop is much harder ? You should take the easy way and let your opponent to do all the hard work as you said.
This is AOE2 forums. we don’t talk about other games.
Castle drop isn’t free. it’s considered as a fail if you can’t do damage that worth 1k+ resources.
Good players take less damage, noobs get destroyed.
Ahh yes. This claim without a shred of evidence to back it up. Show me one definitive statement from the devs that this is why stuff was different in the follow up games.
You can’t. Which means this is literally you projecting opinion as fact
Ahh yes. Well, it is a fact, not an opinion that they disallow it. Why is quite obvious, they didn’t want it to be possible, if they did, it would be. Here is the evidence. In AOM and AOE3, when you try to build an outpost or castle too close to the enemy’s town center, it says ‘Too close to enemy town center’ and won’t allow you to build it. Halo Wars doesn’t even allow you to build anything, all the bases are in predefined places, so in a way they made it more and more restrictive in each successive game. If castle dropping is such a great design mechanic and is so fun, how can you explain why is it NOT ALLOWED in any of their games after AOE2? (At any rate it made me quit playing and play AOE 3 instead, I’m sure I’m not the only one.)
You can’t. Which means this is literally you projecting opinion as fact.
If you’re an AoE3 player, why are you trying to push changes for AoE2 that the community may not actually want?
I guess you could nerf it by not allowing stone walls, palisades or houses to be built within a 5 tile radius just while the castle is still a foundation. That would force the castle dropper to back up the villagers with army.
I can’t speak for AoM (haven’t played it much myself but looking forward to Retold), but:
This is why there’s both a “protection zone” as well as an artificial building limit for Towers and Forts in AoE 3.
For Halo Wars, I assume they went with prebuilt bases as this was programmed with consoles in mind and only later ported to PC.
Castles in AoE 2 are weaker and riskier by nature as they cost 650 Stone (excluding civ specific stuff) and both require Murder Holes and Ballistics before they can unleash their full potential. In Castle Age, you still can tear them down with rams as these are arrow sponges and in Imperial they’re no match to Trebuchets.
There’s lots of reasons to change stuff.
Halo wars is a bad example as it was literally designed with consoles as the play so you have to make it easier to play, so preset bases is the way to go there.
Aoe3 had certain mechanics that make “castles” easier to get (not having a 4th resource thats largely for castles) and other things as well, but @FloosWorld summed it up nicely.
The point i was making though, is that the devs literally never said they changed it because “castle drops”. They could have changed it for any number of reasons. Yet you act as if its 100% sure set in stone that its castle drops are the reason for the change
Not that they are more accessible. Not that they are by nature cheaper or harder to spot coming in aoe3. Nope
Strictly castle drops themselves.
I wasn’t pushing, I ignored the AOE2 board and played AOE3 for the past 2 years, I only reposted in this thread while viewing the AOE3 forums because my post was liked. As I said a few posts up, I recognize that too many AOE2 players love using buildings offensively so there is a possibility it will never be nerfed. Since this board is for the purpose of players giving feedback on the game, I gave feedback on the game in this thread, and why I don’t want to play AOE2 and what would make me want to play it again and buy whatever new expansions came out since I left. I did play AOE2 DE for 1000 hours before giving up, and played the HD version before that and the original version 2 decades ago before that so I am an ex-AOE2 player who quit AOE 2 and played AOE3 instead, mostly because of castle drops but also because there is a greater variety of cool units and the action happens quicker and there is less importance on memorizing an exact build order. Also I am not forced to play non standard game modes, such as arena or that map where there is a gold pit at the center. In AOE3 there are different maps but they don’t drastically affect gameplay as much as gold pit or arena vs Arabia for example.
Also, when 1/3-1/2 of the games you play involves someone sneaking up a castle or tower overlooking your resources, it just isn’t fun. It sucks. It is just ‘oh another guy looking for an easy cheese win’. I want to use UNITS, not buildings. That is the main reason I quit AOE2 and went to AOE3 (and also AOE3 DE had just come out at the time, so there wasn’t really a choice before that). Maybe if they came out with a new civ that had a unit or units which made castle/tower dropping impossible/unfeasible, so that people wouldn’t attempt it versus that civ. For example in AOM, the faction ‘Gaia’ has an ability that makes it so buildings cannot be built within a certain radius of a Gaia structure if I remember correctly. So a person such as myself who doesnt want to have to deal with castle drops could select the anti castle drop civ and not have to deal with it anymore.
There are no infinite resources in AOE3, only a few OP civs that everyone hates such as Japan and Sweden have access to infinite natural resources (Dutch have limited numbers of banks but still have to get other resources such as hunts from the map), and really only Japan because Sweden’s torps run out eventually. Yes you can make Mills (farms) or Plantations (gold) but if you try to do that before the natural resources on the map run out, most players agree it is an automatic lose due to the high wood cost and slow gather rates of those buildings. Games without Japan in them involve both players having to get map control for hunts and gold mines, which run out and require further map control. There is a ‘protection zone’ in AOM as well. We can debate ‘why’, but we cannot debate the fact that forward defensive buildings are disallowed. Whatever their reasons were, obviously they thought it would be a better game by disallowing it. Their goal was to make a more fun game to play, that sells, as opposed to a less fun game to play, I think anyone would agree on that. When they designed AOE2, my OPINION is that they designed castles and towers as defensive buildings and didn’t consider the possibility of tower rushes and castle drops.
Interesting that you pick this very sentence from my post while ignoring the rest and then exactly explain that there are infinite resource sources in AoE 3. Estates and Mills are the reason why I use the word technically. Also, there are cards you can send infinite times for all three resources that provide a small amount of them.
Also, while you can’t drop a Fort straight into the face of your opponent in AoE 3, this protection zone is still small enough to get significantly close to the opponent’s base - just like in AoE 2. As mentioned before in this thread, Forts in AoE 3 are weak anyway and get destroyed quickly as basically every building is paper in AoE 3 once you’ve got some mortars.
Just like in AoE 2 - Castles and Towers are just used to secure map control over precious resources like Gold. If you see a Castle coming up close to your base, you counter drop that Castle and tear it down with Siege.
As said earlier - I can’t comment on AoM. What I know tho is that Stone was also removed from that game which plays into the decision of making both a building limit as well as a protection zone. As you know, Stone in AoE 1 and 2 is almost exclusively used for Towers and Castles (as well as the Murder Holes upgrade).
Yup, which is why AoE 2 is still seen as the most popular entry within the franchise (excluding AoE 1 in Vietnam which is still the most popular one).
I don’t think so - they were definitely aware that Castles and Towers can and will be used in a push (which is something that btw happened in medivial history) and preventively nerfed that by requiring both Murder Holes and Ballistics let alone Blacksmith upgrades as Towers in AoE 1 could be dropped quite easily since their upgrade only cost Food. Villagers in AoE 2 also have a hidden +6 bonus against Stone defense which comes into play vs Towers.
The only nerf against unforseen gameplay Ensemble ever did by itself was making Town Centers more expensive by adding +100 Stone to its cost and removing the +6 range Teutons had on theirs as TCs in Age of Kings originally only cost 275 Wood, leading to the infamous Teuton Deathstar. There’s still the ####### ###### but as TCs nowadays cost both Wood and Stone, they’re riskier to pull off. (Edit: oh boy, for whatever reason the name of the infamous Persian TC Drop strat got censored)
You’re not forced to play them in AoE 2 - just ban them in ranked or don’t join a lobby with them.
Then kill the units building that castle or if you can’t prevent it, tear it down with Rams and Trebs and add your own castle from behind or have an outpost ready? I don’t see the problem here. Most castles I see and build are used to secure map control and if you damage those, you force the player to repair them thus not using stone for further castles.
Also, as mentioned earlier in this thread (I made the effort to read through it), ‘cheese’ are outside the box strats and castles are probably one of the most standard things ever. Resigning because of a nearby castle is one of the most Low Elo things ever alongside spamming the Town Bell.
Gotta love when a moderator gets hit by the censor. Seriously, can it just be toned down to hit actual slurs, and built up from there already?
Considering that they literally had the possibility of doing such actions in aoe1, and evwn some campaigns required you to build forward towers, i find it highly unlikely that they didnt consider the possibility of people building forward towers and castles
Also.
Arena and gold pit are maps. Not game modes.
It turns out this argument can (just about) be resolved objectively. Here’s a quote from this Q&A with AoK developer Sandy Peterson, about two weeks after the original release:
we wouldn’t want to make castles take longer [to build] — a “castle rush” is historical and we’d like to support it.
Tower rushing is mentioned in another Q&A from a few days later.
So if they didn’t consider the possibility of using castles and towers offensively during development, they were at least aware of and in support of it only two weeks after release.
(Personally I find it almost inconceivable that they didn’t consider the possibility of castle drops, considering I realised it was possible and potentially powerful as a teenager playing the demo version of AoK.)