Although the new admiralty is not so bad, I definitively preferred more the original version that let you have more ships. I miss the extra monitor, frigate, galleons and caravels. That let me have better control on Yucatan and Island maps.
why was this decision taken? I know AoE III players are very land based, but is naval warfare so underused that having more ships was seen as irrelevant?
Quite the opposite. The original card was considered overpowered.
I would say that you can have too few ships nowdays so you can’t make a great naval battle. This is actually an era where you should see lot of naval warfare - the age of gunpowder.
Why? In my experience, war ships are quite expensive. The cheapest one cost 400 recourses and scale up to 1000. Even with settlers or equivalents at the maximum number, still takes a while to produce a big fleet.
And they cost a lot a wood, which tend to run off on the map if the battle goes on for too long, making the players go for factories, trade routes or buying on the market (That eventually gets expensive). Of course I can only speaks from my experience, but for me its quite hard to create and maintain a big fleet. So I don’t know why a card upgrading the limit of war ships would be overpowered.
Why it was considered that?
the original admiralty/schooners cards warped the water aspect of the game so much that if you didn’t have those cards it was almost impossible to contest against equally skilled players. in-fact I think the schooners cost reduction on fishing ships should have just been removed outright and replaced with more hp/move speed/los. the current implementation doesn’t go far enough.
there are still major problems with the naval aspect of the game not including performance, but its better then it was before especially with the removal of accuracy from ships.
if the number of ships available is too low, the original admiralty can be added as an imperial tech equally available to all civs. preferably however, we keep the lower ship counts and instead have them be stronger/more expensive with a single universal imperial upgrade for all ships. pathing with a large fleet was a huge problem in the original and in bigger battles you spent more time trying to get ships in position/range then actually engaging in the naval battles due to the small maps and larger ship sizes.
I’ve done custom mods with bigger naval limits and it was basically 6-8 ships fighting and the rest waiting to get their turn. ship and map scales don’t allow for the massive fleets of aoe2, you would have to greatly increase the size of water maps to allow for that sort of scale, which in turn increases performance requirements. water maps where already taboo in the original due to the lag it caused on a large number of peoples machines, increasing ship limits and map sizes will only make water maps even more niche and avoided then before.
with people already struggling to play the game as it is right now due to performance, increasing ship limits will probably due more to alienate those people from playing water maps and the game as a whole than give any benefits to increasing them.
I agree. The new card might not seen like the old one. But Water is much more doable now. Not so overpowered for those civs that can abuse it. And gives chances to other civs to contest water if they want to. Or just stay land if wanted. Water on RE is a win Condition without much counter from LAND
If you are involved in a single battle you could be right, there could be a queue. But what happens when you want to engage in different battles in opposite sides of a map like Yucatan, Ceylon, Borneo or Honshu? I think that the default number of ships makes such engagements very ineffective, and frustrating. Admiralty was available to all civs, so fairness was already there.
Admiralty used to be a must for me, now I just completely ignore it.
agree, overpowered is the galleons and fast fire ships in AoE2 where u can spam 200 of them easily and conquer an entire water shallow and a coast without much effort as they are cheap to build and can defeat almost any land unit, in AoE3 you can destroy ships with the artillery foundry units very easily, even a small army of pikemen can do the job, it’s just not hard to counter the ships in AoE3 and they are pretty valuable units because of their cost.