This game is never going to be balanced unless

A council of players could be created and devs delegate to it the balance of the game. Not neccesary all the players of the council should be top 100 because in lower elo there are other lawsuits as well, but all the players of the council should be well-known players either in streaming or in the forums.

I really feel that this game has lost many players due to bad balance that can turns the game boring. The game has a lot of stuff overnerfed, some civs very strong in comparison with others etc…

I think that if this is done, game balance could improved considerably in the coming months

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Thats why I have given up to talk balance anymore (unless something really obviously unfair and I have spare time to organize data).

I understand the game will never completely balance, but the game are always leaded by some specific civs and ruined the game back and forward. Excluding they make the DLC civs to be OP at the beginning on purpose.

Mostly eco civs keep being adjusted to top tier by turns, this time Sweden make it OP and next time Port, after USA then Sweden again. The game has been 2 year still like this.
Rush civs just kept being nerfed to the ground, with units quality are worse than normal already, still nerfed becoming less amount from shipment, keep being removed eco card from what they had from the beginning. What these civs are having worse unit quality than general, worse quantity shipment than general, worse eco initially than general but still being remove eco card. AND people remain here still crying they still have this and that bonus, which completely do not worth mentioning compared to eco civs. What is their fault is only because they are aggressive civs. Later people still come to troll you are not giving enough early pressure something like this.

People should understand one concept, if a eco civ is already OP in 1v1, it will be more OP in team game. If an aggressive civ is already UP in 1v1, it will be totally trash in team game. I don’t know why treaty game are also considered balance but team game was never.

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Agree well said. There are a lot of opinions as well as motivations here. Many of them bad or simply misinformed. There is almost no way to reveal the truth aside from real win loss statistics to which we have no access.

Then again the devs should have this and glaring problems perpetuate on and on so maybe it’s impossible.

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Isn’t that private discord where content creators and expert players give input for balance changes?

The issue is experts will input their own biases, and I think the experts, or at least the former ones, had opinions that ran contrary to the direction the game is going. Aoe3 obviously moved towards fun gameplay > a balanced meta. If the experts of old had their way, there would be no development, and we’d be stuck with semi FFs, boring cards to not rock the balance, and the same ol tried and true vanilla civs dominating. I think the devs could do a better job of listening to the community, but giving power to a select few experts or a panel isn’t the best idea.

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Well the problem is that if your hear wayy too much regular players and casuals, the game will end more unbalanced because some mechanics won’t be OP at lower levels because at such levels, people still need to figure out how to properly use it, but the higher the level goes, more skills are so players start to abuse such mechanics to gain ELO just with that vs other strong players (can happen the opposite too, one civ has a strong thing that at low levels can be too powerful but at high level people know to fight vs that), but ofc that bias is bad too (I remember Kaiserklein and Poissondu stopped playing the game mostly because how broken some units/civs/cards/bonuses were abused at their levels but as well some bias is here, (Kaiser left because didn’t like the new civs at all).
Another thing that happens here is that AOE 3 has a large amount of mechanics and units with different habilities packaged on 22 civilizations that can be often hard to balance and be different/unique enough so end up being either too useless or completely overpowered. and that can drove off older players.
Things are much more different on AOE 2 DE where, despite now with 42 civilizations, all share the very same tech tree just with some variations and unit replacements, and the UUs only do one thing at what are supposed to do, and for pros, even when can be truly overwhelmed with the amount of civs, end up loving the new content. Though at the same time there are some old OP civs that haven’t been touched for years (Britons) or even newest ones (Poles).

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I’m not that deep on this game rank and community but the balances seems reasonable till now

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Council. AoE.

Uh oh.

I’ll leave it at that.

Anyway, one of the issues stemming from the Anniversary patch is that there was no PUP for it so we couldn’t test it out beforehand. Aside from that, a game like this will always be next to impossible to balance so where does it end? You could put 1000 players in a room and everyone will have a different opinion on balance. Not saying it isn’t important but I also think people obsess about it too much to the point where they’ll never be happy.

It is tiring to see a constant cycle of people complaining about op this op that and then when the devs try to rectify it people are then displeased by an overnerf ie ( the feitoria card nerf)

Right now, it seems like 3DE is on the backburner until the Spring update comes out, let us hope World’s Edge handles it better this time around.

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No they don’t, it’s just really hard to balance and they’re on a timeline. When USA first came out it wasn’t seen a super OP and it took time to find the really strong strategies. Malta and Italy also weren’t seen as super OP on release.

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No. Here the council of players would make a list with all the changes.

Literally there are a lot of stuff useless in competitive. Things that debs change many times are not things that a competitive player would do, the game is unbalanced and With a patch every several months that changes a few things (some of them overnerf or overbuff things), a correct balance will not be solved

Something is balanced, when 50% say it’s op, and 50% say it needs nerf :smiley:

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spoilers, many cards are intentionally not designed for competitive play, and thats fine, sometimes having smt silly in there adds charm to it, and that may not attract someone hardcore competitive, but it will attract someone super casual and looking for smt to have fun with

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@KG19991380 yes i know. But there are a lot of stuff that should be competitive and there is not. Or things that were competitive in the past and were overnerfed and devs doesnt remember them anymore, etc…

speaking of which, remember the original game’s admirality?
i miss that, but ye, some overnerfs should also be reconsidered (looks at sevastopol mortar), ik sevastopol mortar still has decent dps, but given the 8 pop cost, it could use like at least 350 damage per shot instead of 300

as for pure balance vs pure fun, you can’t have both at once, best case is 50/50 split between, which aoe3 (and 2) imo delivers, unlike the “certain installment that shall not be named” but you know which one it is

You are confusing balance with simetric civs. A balanced game always going to be more funny. For example I have seen some people leaving competitive for being boring and repetitive. This cant be funny.

Many of us eagerly await new patches with the intention that they reinsert some things into the meta game. But we were generally disappointed

ik pretty darn well what i’m talking about, this has nothing to do with faction symetry, you can make A S Y M E T R I C boring af as well, and vice versa (darn you filter)
even if 2 factions share nothing, if both are mundane, it will be almost anti fun

Then explain me please how a less balance game could be more fun than a balanced game.

i’m specifically using word pure, reason being, if the development focus is in the middle of the 2, it’s gonna be more appealing in the end vs going purely into 1 extreme, 2 extremes being balance and fun
if anything, you’re not fully comprehending my use of words, not meant as an insult, just an unfiltered observation

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Civilization games are far from being balanced. There are civs or leaders that are trash even in pve. Still a lot of players. And they consider using weak civs to win the game a challenge.

Yes it is a different genre. But the whole RTS genre has also already fell out of the esports spotlight for long. Moving towards balancing is neither practical nor possible. I think the only right direction of RTS games is more sp contents and casual pvp.

EDIT: and there’s one peculiar observation: AOE2 has a larger and more serious pvp playerbase. But whenever a new DLC comes out, the casual player community (not in this forum of course) I see talks a lot about the campaigns, and there are soon many playthrough and cheese videos.
In AOE3 however most just directly jump into balancing of the new civs. Because sp contents are too few.
This is ironic because the entire deck system and civ design of AOE3 all point towards a potential of very rich and diverse sp gameplay. But in this game people are equating fun with pvp balancing.

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