It looks like demo become super situational as intended. But my thought is they nerfed little too much. Demo ship can make water battle more dynamic with area damage like mangonel. Nerf them is understandable because now 2 of the ship line is ‘melee’ ship. I hope they should serve some role after rework.
Related to this I feel water still snowbally due to limited use of demo. Demo is good for losing side that can take down clumped enemy ships. If we go from just fire vs fire to fire/Hulk vs Fire/hulk. I am not sure what we are achieving here.
Hulk low pierce armor make them bad against archer/skirm. I think it is good for some dynamic between land unit
Looks like Vikings longboat building bonus damage nerfed? I hope they keep losing fire and getting demo instead.
This is so bad for games preservation. I don’t want to play a new and different game, I want to play aoe2DE. Can we at least have an official and supported data mod which lets us play without these changes?
I agree on the other things (and I honestly even dislike the new fire ship techs) but… Are you missing the prior water triangle, really? Its not like its the same water ss the OG, fire galley rushes massively changed that slready
kinda of, originally HD did not have fire galleys. They were introduces in african kingdoms. I kind of miss galley micro, but also like the fire galley addition. I don’t like the new version
If your complain was that the balance of the Hulk is bad I would agree, and even if I didnt I would be fine with that argument
But to say that the prior balance should be kept is ridiculous. Its good to get more stuff expanding on boring stuff, its what the Conquerors did back in 2000. The prior water gameplay was insanely limited by unit variety. It would be as if land gameplay was limited to knights, xbows, pikemen and bombard cannons
Also, the argument of “game preservation” is ridiculous when the HD and Voobly versions are easily accesible. The features should be criticized by their implementation, not “I like x old thing”
i enjoyed the game as is, i don’t want it changed drastically against my will. how is this controversial?
not necessarily. i don’t want a game with 400 different civs and 10 different generic ship types. it’s a game not a simulation. quality over quantity.
conquerors was an expansions that you could buy if you wanted to. even if you bought it, you could go back and uninstall it.
what if it was? limitations make the game interesting
aoe2DE was meant to be a modern version of the game. not a completely unrecognizable monstrosity. At this point almost 1/2 of all civs are new, or changed so much that they barely resemble the original civs.
If they want to make a game different from aoe2, they should make aoe5. stop changing the game, or at least provide us with a way to play it as it was. this isn’t an early access game, this isn’t a beta test, this isn’t a live service game
The water game wasnt quality over quantity. It was stale and overly limited.
It didnt for water. Water wasnt interesting.
And what if you didnt want
It nade clear that there would be plenty of changes
You are being ridiculous, its ONE new ship with no weird out of place gimmicks…
If yout argument is “me nostalgic” then I think your opinion is unconstructive, and I honestly think that “I dont like new stuff” is bad for discourse in general because it drowns actual criticism
that’s your opinion. mine is different. hybrid maps were amazing with the previous water balance.
what?
with conquerors: you like it, you keep it installed. you don’t like it, you could uninstall it and keep playing the base game.
Here this change is forced down everyone’s throat. The two don’t compare
not at all: First of all it’s called “definitive edition”. The word means that there wouldn’t be any major changes anymore.
The first DLC wasn’t even announced until over a year after release. (December 15, 2020 vs November 2019)
one new ship + shuffling of techs + being able to garrison in dock + docks now shooting arrows. This completely up-ends the water meta
Nostalgia is one of the main reasons people play aoe2. There is some new stuff I’m in favour of: give me more campaigns, give me more game modes (eg empire wars), add better AI, expand the game horizontally by allowing more than 8 players in a match. Anything that gives players more choice is good.
But don’t force any changes on people
So you want constructive criticism:
do:
-actually improve path-finding. Other games manage, even aoe2 had better path-finding in the past.
-fix lobbies. external websites do a better job of finding lobbies than the in-game lobby browser
-expand the game to allow larger lobbies (no reason we can’t play 10v10)
-other quality of life improvements: stick together as a team after team games, better in-game stats (why do i need to pay for another tool for that??), better replay options (eg pick a point in a replay to start playing). so many things that would objectively improve the game
-make campaigns for the civs that don’t have any yet (happy to pay for this as DLC)
-make leaderboard scenarios like Barbarossa or Mangudai Madness again
-communicate honestly
don’t:
-make rip-off DLC like V&V
-reinvent the wheel with overhauls
-add anachronistic or magical civs like Romans and 3K
-lie
I only watched one or two of the matches, but from what little I saw, demos were overnerfed. They probably need some anti-ship bonus damage. I think it’s fine for them to be weaker against land units (their ability to delete armies was a bit ridiculous), but it looks to me like they’ll no longer work in their water role (too expensive for their damage against enemy ships, and have to upgrade individually when other ships upgrade as a block - ultimately not good for water gameplay). And demos don’t really have the damage to be worthwhile for taking down buildings quickly.
what sucks is subjective. I liked the previous water system, it has worked for us for 20+ years. change so far were relatively minor. The biggest was adding fire galleys and demos in feudal age, but that’s still only a tweak compared to the complete water overhaul that was forced on us
This has nothing to do with game preservation. And being against change is stupid if said change is objectively good in every way possible. So if you can’t argue against changes based on game design, including history, graphics, general looks, how fun the mechanic is, etc. then you don’t have a valid argument.
Personaly I don’t like suicide units, and the practice of boarding is clearly missing in the game even though it’s one of the main ways sea battles were fought.
I would probably change the counters to galley > fire ship > hulk > by giving fire ships high melee and low pierce armor, hulks high melee and pierce armor, and fire ships a simple attack bonus against all ships. This would mean that fire ships are still effective at dealing damage to galleys once they’re close, but easily destroyed anyway.
there is objectively good and bad game design, old vs new water isn’t a case of that.
a) it isn’t objectively good in every way possible
b) even if it were, I don’t want changes forced upon me.
game design: aoe2 made a clear choice of having the combat system on water be simpler than the one on land. with very few exceptions, maps are designed around land warfare, with naval warfare being a secondary concern.
aoe2’s strongest aspect was that each system is simple, their interplay giving rise to complexity.
history: warfare in the middle ages was mostly on land. naval warfare was largely in the form of ships exchanging arrow fire and then boarding, basically again being hand-to-hand combat. the biggest factors in naval battles: wind, waves and tides are completely absent. Adding those would be a complete upheaval of game mechanics.
graphics, general looks: what? they don’t really affect game design. you can use a mod to replace galleys with a pikachu skin for all I care
how fun a mechanic is: 99% subjective. As you prove in your very next sentence:
suicide units are THE best thing about water battles. demo ships are the main thing that make hybrid maps fun to watch. they are the best way for a player who’s behind to make a comeback. (in that way they function as a higher-risk version of mangonels)
in the end gameplay will always be more important than historical accuracy. this is a game. not a simulation.
the new water changes have not made water more interesting, as the recent tournament showed.