It’ll be interesting to see what is in store once the two remaining native civs have been updated, if we follow the formula the Euro civs should receive several unique cards to help “modernize” them. Nothing too major but just something to freshen them up a bit. If support is to continue well into 2022 or even 2023 (which we’re all hoping for) that gives them plenty of time to do this. We just have to be patient.
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Heretic
20 chars of Thanos in Endgame
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That was exactly what inspired me to improve the cattle that have been around since 2005 without practically doing anything.
There are already enough ideas and suggestions for older civilizations and all ancient content in general to be improved. Ideally, this should be improved so that the new does not overshadow the older.
Perhaps it is something on purpose that the animals move too much. Makes the player need to be more attentive.
That is a very short time. Ideally, 4-5 years of support and content for 4-5 years, and after that technical support and updates from time to time.
Asian civilizations are very well designed. They just need a few adjustments just like the old European and American ones.
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It seems like they were rushed with a bunch of stopgap features.
- The whole export system could be removed entirely. Mughals need their own cannons, not European ones
- Cherry orchards and mango groves should just be a fancy type of berry bush or tree, not some indestructible building
- Monk heros should be replaced with Generals/Emirs/Daimyos
- Shrines should be a separate building from houses and built by actual Shinto priests
- Age up with alliances like Africans. China could choose things like tributary states and Japan could have isolation options
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Honestly the thing that bugs me the most about japan is the twin heros and escape option. You can’t kill them with your hero and there are two of them so they get more livestock than you can. Livestock helps them quite a bit more as well.
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I agree with almost very thing you sound about the problems of new civs but disagree with your solution of changing old civs.
The new civs are the problem ever since tad ever more uncontroversial overloaded civs.
Since they won’t get removed these new civs, games is really hard to fix. But atleast don’t also make the good and balanced vanilla civs changed.
Vanilla civs are by no means balanced. Even in vanilla they weren’t. They are only “balanced” by fan patches after more than 10 years of lack of official support and new contents, ironically.
Balancing is not the only problem. It can be eventually achieved. Biggest problem is vanilla civs are boring as hell. There is no point of playing them if one new civ can do almost all the strategies, and even get most of their units, despite better or worse.
Also some new gimmicks like mortars targeting units would not affect balance at all. Even Swedes do not typically go for that. But it simply adds more fun. Competitive players can always go for the more traditional, optimized build for old and new civs alike, but old civs would become more interesting with sth like that.
BTW TWC added a lot of new stuff to vanilla civs. TAD in turn was a bad practice (as we agreed on that) so it should not be followed.
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go play aoe2 for a bit, come back and tell us the vanilla civs are boring and one dimensional
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It speaks in relative terms compared to the new civilizations.
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Wow the standards are already this low now? Where is the pride as “tHe MoSt DiVeRsE aoe EvEr?”
Let me tell you one thing: I get bored at aoe2 even faster.
Am I authorized to say vanilla civs are boring?
BTW even aoe2 vanilla civs get quite a few new units and techs in FE and DE.
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I don’t find the vanilla civs boring at all but that’s just me and boring is subjective. I do agree however they have suffered from outdated design philosophies. Mexico isn’t going to vault into my top 5 most played civs. it’s a fun civ for sure. I’m sure after a few patches things will be fine.
After that maybe the devs can focus on updating the vanilla civs, though people should keep their expectations in check, we’re NOT getting entire civ reworks. A few new cards and modifying some existing ones is much more realistic, and that should not be underestimated.
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When I say “boring” I mean lack of options and contents.
For the old civs, some parts of the game are so bad that are almost rarely considered (many cards, livestock, mercenaries), and there are very few options to improve them to viable. Some cards are by all means worse versions of the new ones. When I want to do something a little different than the optimized and most effective build, there is almost nothing else viable.
I wrote in another post “having 5 A-tier builds and 10 C-tier builds could be the same as having 10 A-tier builds and 5 B-tier builds, if you only need 5 A-tier builds to be viable”. But clearly the latter is a more interesting design.
And they almost all have the same unit skins with only name and stat differences, the same factory cards (must-have for every build), the same “XXX combat”-formatted cards with the same type of effects and the same type of icons.
Not to mention the historical references. Where is the reference for the Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The English Civil War? The French revolution? The industrial revolution? And also geographical/ethnical variations like the HRE electorates? Austrian frontier peoples? Scottish and Irish (or even Indian) regiments in the British army? French foreign legions?
Yes there are a few, but not a lot, especially considering they can dig so many historical references for each US and Mexico state.
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Do you think that is at least in part due to the fact we’ve been playing these civs for the past 16 years? I do think Mexico is more bloated than the others in terms of strategies but other DE civs are fine. Mexico was sold to us as the most versatile civ so I’m a bit reticent to say this is gonna be a huge problem going forward with future civs if we get them.
Why Mexico gets a musketeer/grenadier hybrid and stealth skirmishers is strange indeed. Perhaps the devs want to fit as much as they can in order to entice people to buy it, not pay to win per se.
As for historical references ES is no longer so we can’t ask them. For good or bad AoEIII has become a Frankenstein of 3 different developers.
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Yes of course that’s the reason. That’s why I hope they could bring more life to those old civs, not interfering with the well-established gameplay (I’m a little annoyed having to emphasize this over and over again or someone would come and argue about it). Some changes that come with the DE itself are good. Aztec changes are good as well.
And…not just Mexico. Compared to US, or even Swedes, the original civs are still quite lacking.
For example, I mentioned the Swedish card that allows mortars to attack units. That’s not a very useful one and even Swedes players are typically not using it. But at least it is fun in some occasions and I think most civs should have something similar.
I don’t really have a competitive 1v1 supremacy brain so I never got the idea of “you’re not going to use all of the new mechanics anyway so new civs are not that different”. I think it’s very different.
That’s why I call it a “content creep”. However even if ES is still handling the game, I guess we’ll still have the same imbalance now. It happens to a lot of games managed by the same team. But I also think this should not be the common practice.
Again, I think the new Aztec cards are good enough. They have some reference and are not drastically different.
At least give the old civs some new merc cards that fit their historical backgrounds. That’s a good starting point.
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Yeah I’m not talking about you when I said we shouldn’t expect entire civ reworks like some others have asked for. I find your suggestions to be realistic enough to implement if the will is there.
All we can do is be patient and see what 2022 brings. The devs already know we’d like some updates to the vanilla civs and with the updates to the native and USA civs I shall remain optimistic we’ll get them.
Maybe I’ll start bringing it up to them on twitter too.
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I prefer this to have 40 new cards for each civ, specially for euro like civs. Also this XXX combat cards arent that bad, they boost every unit of that type as mercenaries or natives.
Im not agree with devs making new cards that are 2old ones in a single new card.
About unique units…regular was unneeded (RG musk should was enough), soldado is ok cause 2pop cost (enough difference).
In my opinion, Devs should Stop of spamming new civs and think about balance and fixes. African civs were enough for the 1st year of the game (remember that we had 2 new ones too, so they could wait a bit more for that DLC). Also they should to be sure that this ones are balanced before release new civs
I don’t get your argument. Despite being content creep, “op” and what not for new civs, vanila civs have been dominating the meta since DE. The only new civ that was meta for a significant period of time was sweden, and even that wasn’t so popular, and vanila civs like ports could beat it too.
The new civs are very high skill floor, but with a single braindead strategy that history has shown us will be nerfed into oblivion. People just play them on release for a bit before they get ironed out and then go back to the vanila civs.
Vanila civs are fine. If the current trend continues, they will get some new cards to refresh them a bit. But this takes time, this isn’t easy to do. So have some patience and enjoy the brain challenge of not using the braindead strategy for the new civs.
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This man has a point.
Because vanilla civs are simple and effective. I brought this up several times. DLC civs are typically “balanced” by giving them a poor/slow early game economy (either at the release or after a few patches) despite the tons of new mechanics and options stuffed into them. I do not like this practice. Most of them would have some seemingly broken combinations but “are hard to get because of the poor economy and large investments”.
As I said I do not have a competitive 1v1 supremacy brain, so I would not enjoy going for the same few builds every time with the old civs, especially when there are a lot of in-game mechanics still unusable for those civs.
On the other hand, if those seemingly broken builds for the DLC civs are not easily accessible so they are very balanced, how would they affect the old civs then? Shouldn’t they also be fine because they are equally difficult to access for the old civs? Swedes have improved trample, mortars targeting units, and case shots, but still do not usually use them in 1v1 supremacy. Balanced? Yes. Would it add more fun? Yes.
Again I am not suggesting overhauling old civs entirely (I’m tired of stating this over and over again because whenever anyone suggest changes to old civ, “they are fine” arguments pop out everywhere). All I’m asking are:
- Some minor universal improvements to the underused parts like livestock, mercenary and natives
- A few new cards like the Aztec ones, especially keeping up with the new natives, mercenaries and regions (there wasn’t even an update to fit the Asian theme in TAD, not to mention African)
- Improvements of some very useless or clearly out-of-date cards and techs, especially those that have bundled effects for the new civs.
- A few additional options that require specific builds and investments like the new politicians, Nizam reforms or Spanish Gold
- A few late game options and varieties that do not interfere with the standard 1v1
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100% agree.
Everyone’s crying so much about the mexico FI atm but it’s the same story as the hausa rush, next patch it will be nerfed into oblivion never to be used again.
Most top tier civs are original vanilla civs, those like Brit, Ports, Dutch, Spain etc and they’ve been consistently in that position.