There should be Dark Age Aggression / Feudal Age needs to cost more gold

I believe that every age should have some form of meaningful aggression. The most recent changes in the last two patches have done a great job at making the game much more active and allowing aggression to take place, which in turn makes for more interesting games.

One thing that I would really like to see is meaningful dark age aggression (and not tower rushes). Currently by the time you make the starting barracks and the starting units and walk to the other person’s base, they are usually on their way to Feudal Age already, and are building their landmark under their town center so you can’t harass them. This makes dark age aggression meaningless because it only gets you behind. They are on the way to Feudal and can then make archers to counter your spearman when they get there and I cannot physically stop them from getting there.

My suggested fix for this is to make Feudal Age cost 50-75 more gold. This would allow for an opportunity to push the opponent off of gold and make them make units or a tower to reclaim it, or just mine somewhere else, thereby delaying there feudal age making the investment in dark age units worth it. it allows for counters to thinks like French knight rush or HRE MAA rush because you have the option to delay those attacks.

I’m not saying I should be able to walk across the map and kill my opponent with dark age spearmen, but I should be able to stop them from aging up if I make a barracks immediately and send units to their base.

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Make Dark Age Feudal Age again.

I would love to see Dark Age aggression to be more of a valid option. Right now i agree with you, It just feels like a very risky strategy that is unlikely to pay off.

Anything under TC is effectively no go as dark age units lack the armor to withstand arrows. And there’s no ranged units to pick villages off from range (except for towers, but that’s been nerfed pretty heavily).

I second having to pay more for advancing to feudal age. Wether to go up an age or not should be a strategical decision for all ages and not mandatory. Maybe villager number that can be garrisoned inside the starting TC could also be reduced in dark age so that pushes become more viable and players really have to be cautious.

Also I think the recent tower nerf is a good thing if devs will give dark and feudal age more options to push with units.

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Imo i’t a little delicate.

In other RTS games you don’t have ages so you naturally build to have access to higher buildings and units. Because of this a military building early is an option.

In Aoe we have age Progresion. So…
1.Lets say they increase the price to go to next age. This potentially might be a nerf to Abbasid.

  • Then the question is: Can you build military and arrive at your opponent base before he starts the next age?
  • If yes then It’s not worth to start the next age and there’s only one option. To build military units yourself.
  • And by the time he arrives in your base you have more units than him. So the agresor is at a dissadvantage.
  • If no then its like now but the time to go to next age is increased.

So if they want more agresion in Dark Ake they need to think carefully.

A better option, might be wrong, is to introduce barracks as a requirement to go to next age.

I think that rather it is the civilizations like the mongol that forces you to respond and delay your move to feudal and maybe there will be more aggressive civilizations in the dark ages

I truly agree , feudal should at least cost 400 food and 600 gold minimum

tbh, I kinda miss the Building requirements in order to age up. That would slow down reaching feudal. Award Dark age aggression as they could burn down required buildings. + add added resource cost to age up, but without being to punishing.

example: You need 2 mining camps 2 mills and 4 houses to age up. As well as the 200gold 600food.

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Making feudal or castle expensive will stale the game. There are currently two civs that can do viable dark age aggression. Mongols and English. The rest can do if you are playing with dock.

HRE or Abbasids (edit: even china) can play double dock into spears. Because you have consistent supply of food from fishing and wood from villagers you can play long dark age that is still rewarding even if you keep losing units just to delay their eco or aggression. An example is HRE vs French on water map. You can easily win against french. Go double dock (put all villagers on wood with prelate) and drop barrack and spam spears to french dock. You can burn it down in dark and opponents knights wont be able to stop them.

Dark age aggression is still viable in different scenarios. But forcing such changes will degrade the experience. Tower rush wasn’t as bad as people are making it to be. I think pre-patch tower rush was okay and did not need changes. Almost all civs had a way to deal with it if they were not being too greedy.

The main problem with dark age aggression is balance. A slight disadvantage in dark age can accumulate to huge disadvantage in feudal or castle. We might never see games going to castle or imperial. As soon as units difference becomes large it would be GG. Right now if opponent has large army it is possible to counter them with next age units. i.e mass spears get countered by feudal archers. Mass archers in feudal get countered by mangonel in castle. Making age-up cost more will not make this age-up advantage that viable. As new TCs are even worse at holding back units. Most game will revolve around dark age aggression to feudal age ram rush. Dark age to get eco and unit advantage and feudal to kill opponent.

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I don’t think that every civ needs to have dark age aggression. Many civs only have one unit available at that point.

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The cost increase needs to be a small one because most civs only have dark age spearmen and so we dont want to see big fights because the person with the bigger numbers wins.

Some civs are designed on a quick Feudal like French and Abbysid. We dont want to make that impossible for them, but we need to add some counterplay. The problem is that Mongols and English cannot stop a player from going to Feudal Age. Literally, if you make a barracks immediately and start spearman immediately and walk across the map with 2 spearman, civs that don’t start with a gold penalty like HRE or China will have the gold they need to advance to feudal by the time you get there, making your barracks and units a waste of time. If every civ’s goal is to advance to Feudal as fast as possible because there is no meaningful play in Dark Age other than to advance, then Dark Age should be removed and just start the game in Feudal.

My main point is I feel that there should be counterplayer to stop a civ from advancing to feudal.

Instead of increasing the cost of advancing the same thing could be done by reducing the starting gold. However, some civs already start with no gold, so that would be a buff to those civs.

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why?
Do you love water maps?
Cause your idea will repeat exactly the same scenario.
1 unit to play in Dark age == unpayable garbage. (one ship in feudal == devs redo water)

The real “solution” - create different maps.
3dBee vs MarineLord on hybrid rushed with MAA as english.
Cause map allowed, wood was far away and it was possible to rush.

It come from Map.

Imagine play only blackforest and ask to balance civs, cause noone play feudal because it’s super easy to wall.

It’s an interesting idea, but oops I don’t think the Chinese can live to reach the Song Dynasty if it become a reality, because they’ll have to build two landmarks LOL.

I don’t think it has to be this way. Let’s say we increase the gold to advance in feudal age by 75 so it takes 2 minutes of villager time to earn the extra gold (they return roughly 40 gold per minutes if I recall correctly).

This means that if you want get to Feudal, you can certainly make your own barracks and spearman to defend an attack.

However, anybody who goes barracks first is sacking some of their own economy to send units so they won’t be able to bombard you with masses of units and the TC is very capable of defending small numbers of units. What a higher costing Feudal Age will probably do is make a build order change. Start getting gold at the start of the game so it is collected before the units can get there. Then you can safely get the food you need under your TC. My hope would be that doing this build order means you have to stop villager productions for a few seconds or maybe even one villager so that there is a cost to rushing feudal

True Chinese would be hit extra hard by a cost increase, which is not desirable. This would be a reason to reduce the starting gold instead of increasing the cost.

I guess then you have to pay more attention to the HRE, because they are already start with 0 gold.

Yes I did already mention earlier that would be a buff to them if the devs took that route. That could be offset by an increased prelate cost, but I’m looking to keep the discussion on ideas around changing and/or adding counter play to the Feudal Age rather than the full cycle of all changes. For this thread it is sufficient to just acknowledge that change x or y will buff/nerf a particular civ and then a discussion about rebalancing based on those buffs/nerfs could be had if the idea gets traction.

Its an interesting suggestion,

The only thing is that right now balance between civs is actually not bad, but a change like this could drastically change things.

I remember back on closed beta civs would start with 4 villagers instead of 6 which already led to some longer dark age, so maybe instead of changing cost they could always bring the old 4 vill start back, but then again i dont know how much that would impact the game or if the change would be positive

Also another issue with dark age aggression is that there is no rock paper scizors dynamic either and some civs would have a big advantage in production time, like mongols and chinese

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Although this could be fun, i think the devs designed the Dark Age as a kind of preparation phase to Feudal, where the game really kicks-off, even if you play an early agressive style or with civs like Mongols or English.

In the Dark Age, while you’re doing a mostly scripted basic eco setup for your civ, you’re supposed to explore the map and pinpoint the resources, points of interest and enemy location and think about your strategy taking this data into account from both perspectives.

Then your first Landmark choice and position will be the first major strategic decision and a kind of “hard start” to the game.

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So an old topic, but still valid as it gets…
I mean where to start?
Horsemen 8dmg and costs almost 3 times Villager, which deals 6dmg but still cannot win villagers not even in 1-3 numbers. Here is a nice clip showing how I lose the trade eventually and waste resources to utterly useless horsemen and the enemy ages up.
This game feels so broken, I don’t know what happened to early aggression. When the game launched you could actually do aggression in Feudal Age.
And then it’s completely another story when trying to snipe villagers with horsemen. It’s almost impossible to force the enemy in defense when you can just hug your TC and age up.