The balance nightmare of the feitoria and why it needs to be reworked

I personally believe that the feitoria is one of the worst designed ideas that AoE2 currently has. While it has the advantage of generating infinite resources, it obviously has the disadvantage of generating resources slower than the equivalent amount of villagers or trade carts, which sets you back economically and results in the following:

  • There is almost never a reason to build a feitoria before the resources on a map run out, which leads to the feitoria being essentially useless on almost all maps.

  • In team games it is always preferred to build 20 trade carts instead leading to the feitoria being useless in team games as well. Unless you want to generate stone and the market prices are bad.

  • However, on maps with low resources (mainly water maps) running out of resources occurs more frequently and makes the feitoria too strong. It means that the portugese player can essentially outlast the opponent even when taking worse trades.

  • The feitoria makes up for going for a castle drop (closed maps) with almost no economy. This can be currently seen in TTL, in which players drop a castle, produce a few organ guns and then use the market to go up to imperial age. Once in the imperial age players then drop feitorias and can make up for the lack of economy. However a castle drop into fast imp should always mean that the player who executes this strategy should have a worse economy than the one defending (assuming that both players have a smilar skill level).

My idea:

Assuming a portugese player has a feitoria, whenever an opponent sells resources at the market, a certain percentage of that sale goes towards the feitoria stockpile. For instance:

Market tax 10%

Player 1 sells 100 wood for 70 gold and gets 63 gold

Player 2 (portugese) gets 7 gold

The resource goes to the feitoria stockpile. You can then cash out the resources (getting the same amount back directly) or reinvest them. For instance:

Portugese player reinvests 700 gold and receives x % more than the investment after y seconds. The more feitorias the faster the reinvestment pays back.

My idea for team games:

In team games the tax woould be divided by the amount of portugese players. If team 1 sells at the market, the market tax is 10% and team 2 has 2 portugese players, then each feitoria stockpile receives 5% of the transaction.

The given numbers are simply examples and further adjusments most likely need to be done on them.

Then nobody would use the market against a Portuguese player.

3 Likes

Just seems like you’re an Arabia or open land map player. On closed maps and Nomad, its quite common to go imp with low eco and add feitorias after monk rush or organ gun rush. Its very rare to see games where this isn’t the case on closed maps.

This is ok for some maps like Fortress or Oasis or Black forest and on other maps its fine in the long run if game stabilized. But on maps like Arena, Nomad and even some of the common open ones like Arabia, it takes time to establish trade, and there’s a huge risk of opponent military running into trade if you don’t have the military lead yet. Whereas feitoria is tanky and you’re going to have enough time to call your ally to protect it. And even if it gets destroyed its not very expensive and can be rebuilt again.

Surprised that you followed TTL and yet felt feitorias are useless on almost all maps. In the map pool of TTL, sparing Arabia, Kilimanjaro and Acropolis, this strategy and thereby Feitorias are useful in almost every other map.

This is just extremely useless. You’ll probably get like 270 gold when your opponent sells 6000 wood and another 270 gold when opponent sells another 6000 food. Barely pays off the Feitoria cost. Even if you adjust the cost of building a feitoria to only wood and remove the pop space it takes, this is still quite useless.

There are simple ways to balance the feitoria play. The rate at which each new feitoria generates resources should decay gradually over time, something like generation rate reducing to half its current value after 5 mins of construction. Another way is non-linear generation rates with more feitorias constructed ie when a second feitoria is constructed, only 1.6x the resources are produced, not 2x and only 2.1x with 3 (or some other logarithmic function like the Gurjara mill bonus adjustment). So the players can add 2 or maybe 3 feitorias but more than that isn’t worth it.

1 Like

My idea for feitorias:
They don’t generate any res automatically, instead must be smaller (max 3x3), available earlier (even in feudal) and serve as drop point for any res. Every time villagers drop a res, feitorias give you certain amount of gold based on what and how much villager dropped.

My main problem with the feitoria is the infinite resource generation, therefore I like your idea.

Relics exist in the game since 1999

2 Likes

didnt even read ur sugguestion beecause i expect it to be bad, when u say terrible design.

the Feitoria needs masive buff. like x1.5.
REssources on the map should never run out in the first place. And the Feitoria should only be viable when u r pushed back so much that u have littoe access to cvertain ressources and then decide to makje Feitorias.

Please don’t Necro topics.