Erchere is right, booming is a huge part of treaty. If people just want to start with a stockpile of resources and go straight to war, then there’s deathmatch mode for them.
Well the scope of this topic is treaty alone. Thus, there really isn’t even a surprise factor in treaty since you can see anyone’s decks from the start after they’ve selected it.
I also don’t believe that allowing the players to hide or show their deck isn’t a good idea either. In casual games with randoms, how could anyone trust their teammate to know what they’re doing if they chose to hide everything? After 40 minutes of booming and someone’s score is super low, it would waste everyone’s time to see that someone brought a rush deck into a treaty game, but was able to hide it from everyone.
EDIT:
I’ve been thinking, if the devs really want the ELO system to be the determining factor of players’ skill levels for all game modes (including treaty), then why not incentivize people to play ranked then?
The problem is that people aren’t playing ranked treaty enough to get an accurate ELO rating in. So the solution must be to get more people playing ranked games then.
This doesn’t even have to apply just for treaty. If you put incentives for people to play ranked games in general (like to unlock explorer skins, rare customizations, etc.), then I’m certain that people would be willing to play more ranked games and get a more proper ELO placement in.
How me and my brother play treaty is start with high resources, 20 min treaty age up quick and boom. It’s the same as playing a 40 min treaty but faster. We started doing this because a lot of our opponents were easy to beat so it saves a lot of time. But if your new to treaty start by playing 40 min treaty and try to get decent at those first. Because you will learn how to play treaty better that way
Treaty is lots of fun when you have equally skilled players and civs that are balanced. Unfortunately I stopped playing treaty because of how bad Aztecs are in treaty. Also the fact that some civs can have factories, banks, overpop villagers ect while others can’t. Makes treaty kinda unbalanced unfortunately imo.
Native civs have always been weaker in treaty, but they make up for with some of the most explosive starts to treaty fights in the game. Aztecs are the Kings of overpopping, the Lakota can break through a dozen walls in under a minute, and the Hauds… well, they’re a little less explosive but still good. Light cannon spam supported by teammates is very difficult to counter.
But the Natives need some heavy-handed adjustments to their gameplay and economies if they’re ever going to be viable in treaty games.
The lack of artillery made it very difficult for the natives to be in the treaty model, and the development team had to find a way to get them to have artillery in Era V, even if they were weaker, but to give them the means to effectively counter the artillery fire of other civilizations, and the Aztec soldiers in the treaty were too weak
Very true, a lot of the non euro civs don’t get a good artillery substitutes and pare that with a lot of them get a somewhat weaker eco depending on which non euro civ your playing
Thanks everyone for your feedback. Great to see that many of you share that view.
My point however is not to change treaty as a whole. As many pointed out, there are customizable game modes (dm, high res, nr20, etc.) that allow you to play the game however you prefer. Civ balance is yet another topic that I didn’t mean to cover here.
My point was that the current ranking system and lobby setup leads to too many disappointing matchups for all players - the good ones and the beginners. Making all matches ELO ranked solves several issues at once. Having a more enjoyable and competitve game should be in the interest of everone, incl. the devs.
It would also solve another phenomenon at the top of the ladder that I haven’t mentioned because it only affects a limited number of players. Many of the top 20, certainly top 10 players don’t play ranked games against each other to avoid loosing elo (there are exceptions to this ofc).
There are countless examples of games that moved from a skill-based ranking to a “participation trophy” incentive scheme to attract new players but in the long run has not paid off for any of them. The ELO ranking has a lot of potential to keep players coming back, trying to beat their all-time high. It’s an easily measurable system that psychologically works great and gives players the feeling that they have to grind through to get to the top.
Would be great if we could get some dev feedback as to whether this is being considered and if not, why.
