New patch seems good. The problem has always been simple. To win, you need to siege. To siege successfully, you also need counter siege. Suddenly a decent chunk of time and momentum is lost just so you can transition into this awkward sphere of mechanics that ignore the rest of the game.
I think it’s good that an archerball which survived feudal and castle can be useful in imperial via sieging. I think it’s good that opponents can’t camp out in their base with a shit ton of springalds and counter units.
Siege as it exists in the game now shifts everything. You can’t even play Castle age with trebuchets peacefully because springalds are always summoned. It begs the question why we even have these units to begin with. They prolong the game in a way that doesn’t symbiotically cooperate with your existing army. No, they exist separately in their own little world.
The PUP shows an alternative where Springalds aren’t there to just slow down the game even more, but to add to the destructiveness of units. More resources will be spent on destroying armies, massing new ones and trying to get an upper hand through microing your own armies.
Mangonels still counter archers. But, instead of dropping everything you’re doing to build springalds, now you simply micro your existing archers to kill the mangonels. Lapse of attention? Too bad! This keeps the rhythm of the game going. It keeps the ball rolling. It doesn’t stop everything because they exist in their own class of function anymore.
I’m hopeful this works out. I think it’s far more fun to build springalds to destroy infantry than it is to build them to deal with siege. And it’s a lot more fun to micro your existing army to deal with mangonels rather than relying on springalds. Most importantly, I’m hoping the flow of the game will be far more fluid. Going castle, pushing and not being shut down by an awful super long range counter siege unit. Or just going straight into imperial and being able to use your archers to deal real damage instead of having to rebuild a whole new composition just because it’s a new age.
Ultimately these changes should help games END. It’s a strategic RTS for sure, but there’s nothing strategic beyond 40 minutes of a counter slogfest hoping to out-endure the other player. Get your army killed against archers? Well now they can truly punish your base too. And there won’t be any saving grace of Springalds to prevent incoming siege just to stall the game either.
The more i think about it, the more i think the changes are good.
I really like what they did with Janissaries, and new tech in university is interesting too.
My only concern is that Nest of Bees and Great bombard are probably a bit too powerful.
I have no idea how we are going to counter great bombard + janissaries. Before the preview, the only valid counter to those was springald, anything else you would lose. So I have no idea what we going to do against it.
And what about NoB + Spearmen?? Seems very hard to counter.
But I dont think they should nerf too much mangonel, because then a mass of archer crossbow, would become a problem as its often the only valid counter against critical mass of ranged units.
The mangonel are probably fine, but NoB and Great Bombard seems a bit OP in the current preview
Making so many sweeping changes to siege is just too much.
Mangonels not having tracking means that ranged units don’t need to take damage with micro. Add in the fact that they take anywhere from 2-4 damage per shot, and it’s pointless to even build them against ranged masses.
They absolutely need to not have mangonels (and all other siege units) take so much damage from ranged units. Removing anti-siege as an option means that siege is not useful in any capacity outside of attacking buildings, as we use an army to take down trebuchets and bombards. Yes, this removes the defenders advantage… but at the cost of every game being a race to build a deathball.
When you nerf something to the point of it having no use in being used in a match, that’s a failure in design.
Hope everyone enjoys the archer mass in feudal, because I doubt any game will be free of it after this patch.
I think it is also important to think ahead. Despite the sweeping changes here, it is likely that this is still in motion. You’ve noted some issues that will result of these changes, and it is likely that this is understood. However, making changes multiple steps ahead is hard to justify considering the shortsightedness of players–backlash is always a risk.
Additionally, you also want to see unforeseen consequences. So as for the issue of archers, it might be better to allow it to happen and see how it plays out, to then consider a real solution instead of a hypothetical one. The answer likely being something to do with horsemen or knights–which in of itself puts spearmen in question, especially with the recent changes to springald, and so on.
In other words, the fallout of changing the dynamic of Siege will be in play for multiple patches to come. Fundamental relations between the unit types will have to be reconsidered and rebalanced, but it is good to do so one step at a time. The ultimate reward should be worth it, as flowing Siege gameplay that compliments armies should feel much better.
I’m normally all for waiting it out. But I’ve played the PUP, and I’ve been watching games from tournament level players as they also test it. Most of what has been added or changed is positive, but mangonels are designed as the only effective hard counter to massed archers.
It is immediately obvious… now is the time to have the discussion. After all, that’s what the PUP is for.
This patch has archers countering mangonels wholesale. Using the same cost of a mangonel, 8 archers can clear any number of them. To keep them safe from that you would then want to keep them out of range of the unit they are designed to counter. So now they’re vulnerable to cavalry and are attacking infantry instead of ranged.
By the way, this only gets worse with crossbows and horse archers.
I get that the players who struggled with siege love the idea of it being ineffective, but that’s shoddy work.
Why is the unit it counters able to trounce it with 0 losses and hardly any damage taken? Keep that nonsense in AoE 2.
It’s not lost on me that several players disliked how siege impacted gameplay. It’s just that they hit mangonels with so many nerfs it’s pointless to build.
It’s not great design to take a unit and remove it from play, or make it too painful to be useful.
It’s also pretty awful for gameplay that the attacker will always be able to overwhelm the defender. These changes have made it much more difficult to pull out a win using cunning and strategy, as it boils the game down to smashing armies against each other.
Siege was meant to create huge swings in fights, and that’s gone now.
this update completely ruin game, except those knights’races, such as french,mongols and so on.
aslo, this update makes this game a copy of aoe2,and it makes me feel disgusted.
Good. Siege only interrupted the flow of games. One mangonel would halt an army. Stalling defeat for 3 more minutes and potentially dragging the game out even more.
Mistakes should be mistakes. AoE4 already has many forgiving mechanisms that allows mistakes to keep piling up and allowing the game to continue. Like continued production while being housed, allowing players to pop out units immediately despite losing armies–making said mistake harder to punish.
Too forgiving. It is better to have Siege units that contributes to destruction from both sides. It is too easy to build up and too hard to tear down currently. I like defenses, but there can’t only be one way to deal with buildings. Torch damage is a large reason of why AoE4 drags on for so long too. There is no damage scaling (like Knights doing more due to higher melee damage). Everyone deals the same torch damage. So the effective solution is to simply build Siege and waste another 5 minutes because your opponent is countering it with a springald.
Bo-ring. I like my sim-cities. But, the current iteration of Siege is its own separate game. These units should interact with each other and not just with other Siege.
What surprises me more than anything else is that they seem to have taken a large amount of direction from people disinterested in the game, or people who play the other age series games more than this one.
There are so many problems with the PUP, apart from the fact that the MAA troop is pretty much wasted, how do you counter the Ottoman Great Bombard and Janissary combo?
And how do you counter Delhi’s War Elephant troop types?
Also almost all of the good Chinese troop types are half-wasted, and a nation that relies on infantry for its main battles is becoming very weak.
At least as the content stands now I’m pretty much in denial, why don’t I go back to playing AOE2?
I’m getting more and more convinced that the nerf to Elite Army Tactics is also connected to siege. They don’t want siege deathballs in Imp, so they need powerful cavalry that doesn’t easily die to Spears. The +2 Archer range buff serves the same purpose, to keep siege at bay in Imp.
I’m optimistic and I think a lot of the changes will make room for more dynamic and more fun games, that are also more fun to watch. The only slight concern I have is with mass ranged units. The key here is how effective Mangonels are against a huge mass of Archers. I hope they tested this internally and it went well. Without Custom games and with so few players, PUP is not the best for PvP testing.
we are going to play Aoe4,not Aoe2.5.
Many of the changes should be rolled back a bits, including changes to infantry and our archer range art, but if the production team really wanted to use their big hands to make the game a cavalry and bowman game, and melee infantry was almost completely abolished, then a significant number of players would quit the game, for the reasons I said at the beginning.
we are coming to play aoe4 not aoe2.5.
At the same time, I do agree with some of the changes in this patch, including the nerf of siege weapons. The current version of siege weapons gives me a headache, which becomes especially severe when facing the Chinese. It is time to overhaul siege weapons so that they no longer require opponents to train their anti siege to counter them. This turned into a game of sawing and sawing for the siege equipment, but at the same time, did the production team take into account the disruption of some civilization balance caused by these changes? For example, I was happy to use mangoel against England in my matches, but after this balance change, with the plain attack speed bonus - the Castle network system - will the matches against England be easier? I don’t think so.
If the university technology changes for melee infantry are completed, then perhaps the unit onna-bugeisha should be removed, wondering what unit was really effective they against in imperial age? They’re even as fragile as a piece of paper.
And that’s just one of the units that was severely damaged by the patch.
I think the ranged units in game are already strong enough, only way can counter it in late game is siege, but they even buffed it, nerfed the infantry, I just cant figure out why
Some infantry were equivalent to cavalry, I think they needed to differentiate more. Maybe they could revert the infantry nerf, but they would have to buff the cavalry more, because it is faster and more economical to create a mass of maa than of knights. And Maa shouldn’t be a soft counter to knights
Maybe the crossbow will be a problem, how we counter Archer + spearmen + crossbow? Add ribauldequin to this combo and the English will be unbeatable.
But I think they went in the right direction with nerfing siege weapons against units and buffing cavalry. There will certainly be adjustments needed for ranged units.