totally agree with u in all the points.
In feudal we have a very solid paper-rock-scissors meta. The problem with tower is exacly that, they break a very solid core of the game.
Pretty much like playing stax in MTG card game.
??? It’s one of the most garbage civs in the game, only really passable on water.
Only according to people who dont know how to play anything that even slightly deviates from meta. We should stop nerfing things based on feelings and use statistics…
We can also say goodbye to defensive towers with this idea, if you get attacked by some ranged units, and you add a defensive tower, even adding 2 militia would nuke your defensive tower.
Yeah, that’s the difficult part. Fixing a “design problem” at this stage is very difficult,
yet OP offers no fix ideas for the problem, just say “this is a design problem”.
On second thought, one can move tower into a building that is available in castle age, just like moving villager bonus to castle age.
Then you’re really taking out a very important option to defend against early aggression. If you don’t have your archery range up yet, and you get surprised by some archers, you can basically resign
As you can see, it is very difficult to fix this “game design problem”. Devs have done the best they can by nerfing tower rush so it becomes less favourable, yet people still complain. What else can dev do? Introduce feudal ram like Cumans? Idk. I just don’t think there’s a whole lot they can do aside from changing game balance, which means this “problem” also becomes a balance issue.
The thing that frustrates me is that these rounds of nerfs keep going round. Some time ago people were complaining about towers, so they got slapped with a huge nerf in feudal age. Problem is, the best way to deal with wallers is towers. So then they slapped walls with a huge nerf. Now we’re on round 2 of complaining about towers…
Some people might just need to accept that the pressure of playing an open map isn’t for them. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing closed maps.
With such nerf rounds, eventually feudal tower will become a glorified archer that cost 125 stone, and wall will become nothing more than a piece of paper until castle. Such fundamental change could easily cause a chain reaction if not done properly, which nobody knows how.
Honestly, for me playing against AI 80% of the time, I don’t build defensive tower much or do tower rush as AI wont do the same. But even so, tower rush as-is should be fine for the most people.
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The numbers are what matters. 30 is a massive amount, almost 5% of a towers HP. But that doesn’t mean 10 or something wouldn’t be balanced. Or maybe arson needs to be in feudal age with this bonus attached. Plus this only needs to affect watch towers. You could have guard towers and keeps have +5/+10 tower armor to mitigate the consideration in later ages. Or you could do something else.
The reason they keep going round is because they don’t fix the fundamental problem. Towers are great against walling, but re-walling + towering is great against towers. So the same dynamic that makes tower rushes suck to deal with defensively also makes tower rushes feel super risky/limited offensively. There’s no composition adjustment you can make to make the trush more effective, all you can really do is be better at villager micro and tower placement.
Put another way, balance is all about equilibria. You want the game to allow both players to gain an advantage and allow both players to cancel out the opponents advantage. This means most of the game involves players’ strategies and tactics being in a sort of equilibria where no one gains an advantage. Almost always in AoE2 these are unstable equilibria where, while currently canceling each other out, players attempt to change strategies or tactics to gain an upper hand.
However you can also balance a game using stable equilibria where, once players get into a certain strategy and tactics pairing, the game does not encourage changing strategy or tactics. Tower rushing/defending is a stable equilibrium. Neither player is incentivized to change strategy OR tactics while the tower rush is still occurring. Why? Because towers + villagers are their own worst enemy. Anytime you have a strategy or unit which is countered by itself this occurs. It only ends when the game dynamics change (e.g age up to castle age) or one player decides on a dramatic change (e.g. give up the trush or evac their base).
Needless to say nerfing tower HP does almost nothing to change this dynamic. It makes other units slightly better, but as long as villagers + towers are the best choice against villagers + towers the dynamic will remain.
Thanks, that was a nice analysis.
Exactly, that’s why I already hated the change in DE already. Tower rushes were always quite risky to do, because failing to do enough damage/failing to deny crucial resources meant that your opponent goes castle, makes a few knights and you’re completely dead.
Inca tower rushes are stronger than the standard for sure, but imho the only big difference is just that you can’t use villagers against their villagers.
But otherwise you can even just throw militia at the villagers, you’ll eventually cause your opponent to either invest far too many villagers into the attack, and you go ahead in eco, or they go back home, and the game will turn more or less meta.