When playing single player scenarios in AOE 2 I sometimes encounter battle situations where I have small amount of units. In these situations against enemy ranged units or castle/tower it is often worthwhile to let one fast unit pull enemy arrow fire towards him while dodging it. This allows to improve battle result by a lot and can be very satisfying to successfully pull off. It is especially important against enemy castles. I find this mechanic fun and am quite disappointed that AOE 4 doesn’t allow it. To be honest it feels like cheating when arrows work like homing missiles.
It feels natural, that melee units never miss, because melee attacks hit fast up close. But arrows take time to reach their target, which gives expectation, that it should be possible to dodge them. Especially when target is fast unit far away. In order for arrows to always hit such targets without trajectories feeling unnatural, they would have to move extremely fast, which would feel unnatural in different way.
In summary I find dodging arrows and other projectiles to be fun and also find it impossible to set arrows work like homing missiles without it feeling unnatural either according to their trajectories or speed.
Do you think each arrow or sword slash was incrementally lowering a person’s “health” until they just died? It still only took one killing blow.
Maybe it takes a hundred arrows to kill a knight, but that’s only because the hundredth arrow hit a vulnerable spot and the others did not. This is abstracted pretty well with HP.
Actually if your shoot mail with arrow or trust with spear etc the tip will often go thru ring few cm a and hurt you a little. Also blunt force is accumulative so yes to a degree your “hit points” will go down.
Very very big agree here.
Missing arrows is quite pointless in an RTS game and adds more randomness.
This is not what the community wants.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
Bowmen in aoe3 are perfectly balanced.
Most of them had a positive damage multiplier against heavy infantry (like Musketeers and Pikemen), no multiplier against light infantry (like bowmen and scirmishers), negative multiplier against heavy cavalry (melee cav that is supposed to shred bows/scirms) and a positive multiplier against light cav (such as dragoons which is ranged anti cav in aoe).
Plus heavy cav (melee cav) usually had 10-30% ranged resist, while the bows had a reduced damage multiplier versus heavy cav, so let’s say they dealt
only around 50% of their damage against them.
This is a very very good way how to balance the game.
Unlike aoe2, going pure bows Vs cav is equal to attempting suicide in aoe3.
You always always always need protection like a good amount of pikes to block the cav and ACTIVELY micro them because pikes to any ranged unit like butter, so you can’t keep them in the front fire or inside the army but also gotta quickly pull them in to block cav.
Aoe2 doesn’t work like that and hence aoe2 veterans who haven’t given aoe3 a chance, get very confused here.
I recommend every aoe2 player to play some aoe3 DE and then come back and judge about the new system.
Some opinions might change dramatically…
Yet in aoe3, arrow ballistics feel natural, despite high accuracy. People actually complain about the way it looks, and then the terrible balance between archers and cavalry. Both can be fixed by reducing accuracy. But it is not only way.
why? It makes sense in an actual melee that you’d block some blows and not others. no way of knowing how many you’ll block or not, it depends on the person fighting. I think it makes units feel more alive and less like chess pieces personally.
If you are in the final game of the biggest tournament of aoe4 and you lose because of rdm feature, it’s a probleme. You can’t compensate everything with tactic if your opponent is the same caliber as youu ^^.
But Starcraft 2 has this and is the biggest tournament RTS in the world. So RDM on units really doesn’t matter. Make your armies, and don’t rely on one tactic and strict numbers to win. adapt and make back-up plans. assume that things will not go your way and plan for it. that’s what makes these things fun. If everything is already pre-determined by numbers being static, there’s no point to playing and thats how you get a hard meta - which you DON’T want in an RTS. because then everyone will just be playing the same way.
What kind of rdm factor sc2 have appart the one vs one marines? (which is a feature not liked by players, and i don’t think it was done on purpose but more by contrain).
I completely agree with all of them and can’t understand these weird decisions by the game designers. Making the game unrealistic, less fun, less rewarding because you have no way to quickly act and dodge the trajectory or arrows.
I think Relic did an excellent job so far regarding micro management choices.
They only gotta polish the animations, attackmove and general auto attack behaviour of all units.
Seeing the recent improvements from the last beta onwards, I’m quite positive aoe4 has a good chance to become amazing!
So homing arrows is a good thing? Yes amazing micromanagement. No way to react and dodge, arrows can hit you even you get out of the range of that building or unit.
Of course, it’s actually realistic.
Imagine you walk into a lion’s cage and face the animal.
Would it make sense to just casually walk back out again when he is in your face and dodge his hits?
Come on LOL
I’m happy that you show respect.
Do you mean my post?
If yes, I’ll explain it:
It makes perfect sense to take damage once you enter the firing range of the enemy’s defenses.
Why should you be able to evade it?
I tried to give an example with a lion’s cage.
because dodging is an actual tactic people do against arrows. They don’t travel at very high speeds, and they’re fairly large projectiles. Thats why typically archers loose in volleys.
If anything the closest thing to what you’re talking about are crossbow bolts.
LOL