Tower rushing and resource logistics

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

In the game, tower rushing has become common. There are lots of reasons that tower rushing is bad. its one dimensional, it lacks counterplay, its too easy to do as mongols, it makes entire classes of units pointless, its unrealistic etc.

End of story tower rushing is BAD.

However, simply nerfing the build times of towers, or nerfing their strength or making them unable to attack has unintended side effects. So, the question needs to be asked… if tower rushing is so effective, why don’t we see tower rushing in real life? In other words, why aren’t forward bases deployed to rush enemies?

The answer is logistics. All structures need to have their resources (steel, concrete etc) carried to them before construction can begin. At the same time, why do shipping vessels exist? Logistics. Materials need to be carried back to the central hubs for processing.

I think AOE4 would be a better game if logistics were involved in some way. Logistics would naturally make tower rushing more difficult, and would make raiding and harassing enemy structures more economically damaging. It would make the game better because cheese strategies would naturally become impossible without overcoming the logistics problems.

So, here is an outline of how logistics could work.

  1. ALL units have the capacity to carry resources. food, stone, wood, and gold. In addition, the food/gold/wood/stone universal supply that players have is now removed.

  2. Structures can have wood, food, stone, and gold deposited to them, and once a structure has enough of a resource, then it can begin production. During construction of a structure, a foundation is created, and then the necessary resources are dropped off at the structure.

  3. A new unit the pack animal can be created. They are meant for only carrying resources. They can have routes assigned to them to pick resources up at one structure and drop them off at another.

  4. If a unit or structure is killed, the destroyers get to carry as much of their resources that they can carry, but the rest of the resources are destroyed. Raiding isn’t just for the mongols anymore!

2

tower rush??? each time you build a tower you must upgrade it, its a very useless strategy. You mean you build towers all around the enemy? why spending resources like that??

3

It’s more like they build a bunch of towers and then single unit garrison all of them and suddenly your TC in age 1 is surrounded by 6 towers shooting 6 arrows killing all your villagers.

It truly is the scummiest strategy, however it’s been around in one form or another in age 2, cossacks, etc

While I appreciate the spirit of the op, I fear the fix you suggest is too complicated to ever be seriously considered by the devs, it’d take a whole rework of the resource system and villager pathfinding, resource gather rate, etc.

Im honestly not sure of a solution to tower rushing, age 3 limited towers but I’m not a fan of that, maybe an exclusion zone around town centers, also an age 3 feature.

4

oh but I wasnt suggesting a change, i thought the game is like that, I mean that towers wont fire until you upgrade them, thats why I never build them, I got everything wrong then???

5

limit the tower of age 2 and you will see to it will be done.

6

Oh no I’m sorry the lower part of my message was at the original poster, you’re right that they don’t fire by themselves unless upgraded but they will fire if garrisoned by any unit

7

So, I tried tower rushing as a low experience player against a high experience player: A response to the Tower rushing and resource logistics - YouTube

It was a comfortable game to say the least. I’d hate it happening to me all the time, but it shouldn’t be changed. We should just see adjustments to counter it from Mongol players or whatever.

The idea to promote a supply-lines type system would turn it from an RTS into a Castle Sim game like Stronghold.