Players right now just need to instaclick(that is click super fast to block approaching melee) to generate walls. This causes melee units to be blocked BEFORE the attacker even realizes their block and pathfinding to act up before a wall is in progress.
Alas this is really a unfair bonus for the defender.
Initial wall segments can be walked over but players only need to complete 5% to effectively block a player. Can game developers change this to requiring walls to be completed befor ethey block the army and take longer for walls to complete.
When de first came out they already changed the blank wall segments which used to block players but the current version of walls is still favouring projectile armies over melee. Lots of abuse with walls among top players.
Yes or let partial walls function like berry bushes where army can still walk through.
Walls are considered by the expert community the defacto defense because of their cheap cost and I’m by no means saying players shouldn’t wall. But it their should be some risk and not just a millisecond click that renders melee useless. That melee second click your blocked is the problem.
It does offer defense, you don’t need gates to wall yourself.
All you have to do is to delete the piece of wall you want to pass through and rebuild behind, or build immediately when you see an ennemy unit coming. This is what we mean by instaclick.
Originally it was not issue because slingers could destroy walls. But now, nothing destroys walls and players can just go to bronze age without any problem if they just keep their villagers inside the walls.
The rusher who uses melee will lose several time and ressources trying to rush, which kills the tool war that used to last around half an hour if not a hour in serious games.
Yes perfect example of instaclick walls. Look the walls aren’t even fininsh but sufficient for advance player not to lose villagers. This method is ripe with abuse it top level of abuse to the point it’s absurd. Now imagine you have 15 blue villagers being chased by that many axers. players can just find a choke point and click and they are safe.
i dont agree with this as this is something which can be used by all players. Having a delay in % for build time in wall makes no sense and will only confuse players. If you remember in old version people can just shadow wall and the units got blocked which was way worse then what we have in AOE:DE. You need to click in the right time to block the army unit following you and many people still fail doing it (including the experts). With the recent changes, the games are not only rush & 10 min gg anymore. This was what the community as a whole wanted.
to be clear I’m not saying you can’t wall. I’m saying you can’t just instaclick block wall. For instance if builders required to finish wall it means players can’t just rely on instaclick blocking and are forced to engage more which will create a more rich gameplay.
Basically instaclick walling as is will mean the game is limited to bz and iron play which is a waste.
I think no change is needed. That is the function of the walls, at the first hammer blow it becomes a structure in process and cannot be crossed, it was always like this, and this is how all buildings work.
Also, walls are built very fast, what difference does one second more or one second less make?
This is excellent question idinow. Let me explain the problem. The problem of walls is prior to the age de their used to be something called shadow walling(where 1 hp walls would block opponents). This got fixed but in a way has actually made it worse . Before with shadow waller the attacker could also wall the defender to trap the villagers to combat defender instaclick. But this shadow is clearly not desirable as its hacky. But so is instaclick walling.
what is happening now is top players have adapted to feeling safe because if approaching melee is coming they can just hotkey wall and the melee army is blocked WITH NO WAY OF GETTING INTO the player on top player. Even worse due to network communications the attacker sees the pathfinding changes due to instaclick BEFORE the wall even comes down. But the main problem lies that the wall only needs a few percent complete to block melee thus defender have streamline the process to wall a few % complete because it achives the desired effect at a low cost. In a way this is still a extension of shadow walling the only difference is now the villager has to put 1-2% to be active. As Al Qaex pointed out the player can also delete the walls and rewall. Your are not really penalized this as defended and even get a refund. And keep in mind walling is CHEAP(5 stone per tile).
If for instance walling required 1 s to finish and have to be completed to block this would have a dramatic positive for the game as it would meaning that if you didn’t wall in advance and army is coming you the defender will be penalized but the problem right now among top players who defend is they just wall JUST IN TIME which is within millisecond. They simple don’t need walls in advance due to instaclick. they just need to lay down walls in a few millisecond complete a few % and they are done. If attacker attacks further the wall they just complete the wall. And keep in mind wall is no longer as vulnerable to slingers so it’s very hard in tool to get into a players walls.
To give a full 360 viewpoint, some players have raised concern that in hill maps where no water that delay in walling would bring on more scout rushes but I believe this is completely ludicrous. Players have adequate time to wall if its put down to 1s but they won’t be able to just wall in their villagers partially to avoid scouts coming in which is hacky. And players again can wall this and affect the other player pathfinding BEFORE the wall comes down.
Let me give you a good analogy that I think demonstrates this imbalance very well. Imagine age of empires was the classic game of chess. In chess if two knights are on your side and you just counter right click and now you make a wall of pawns to block the knights this would greatly imbalance the game. I say this because the imbalance instaclick wall would promote only large groups(ie siege warfare) and basically hinder any skirmishes(which is exciting to watch especially in realtime). Even if you are very skilled with the knights it will greatly hinder your ability at the least. As such since the patch update this is happening RIGHT now because since the patch range units have been nerfed against walls and the nash equilibrium has more or less shifted from tool warfare because the reward vs risk is TOO LOW to bz warfare(because you need to get significant units numbers not to be penalized by economy and be able to take the wall fast enough incase opponent walls again). But it’s not just tool warefre ANY melee warfare can be affected by instaclick. For instance you can move 1-2 villagers with your chariot archer army to block cavalry in large groups to render cavalry useless. This happens in very high level strategy as well.
In a nutshell delaying to 1s would greatly balance the game and prevent it from being a exploit as their would be more risk to walling instead of automatic safety.
What is exactly the problem you are trying to address?
One second delay will not affect walling small(like woodlines-pit-woodline) since for those you always have adequate villagers and warning to make it in time.
For using vils to block melee charging your ranged army you can just use houses, in fact, using walls is the worst option for insta walling because they are so slow to cover an area.
It won’t greatly change the way villagers running from melee will work because the first villagers will lay down the wall and the last vil(s) will block the melee so the wall will still come up. And this will feel even worse in games with lag.
What will be affected the most will be walling big(against scouts, smaller extent other tool army) because you will always try to rush the wall. This will mean you will need a lot of annoying micro(especially with lag, what is 1s when you have random ping across oceans?) and more villagers to wall. This means walling big into brz gets hurt the most by this.
While it might marginally improve melee vs insta walling villagers it will mainly hit walling large and going brz against scout rushes. So I don’t think it’s a well targeted solution to the problem.
PS. It would really, really suck to play with. We just got rid of most of the lag with the server based solution and now you want to add artificial lag into the game. Pls no.
This has nothing todo with latency. This has todo with the fact that players are building partial walls to block completely faster then players can move in to the enemy within the millisecond domain which renders melee quite mute. Thus making dominate attacking archery and shifting nash equilibria to projectiles.
There is a fine line between clever, clever exploitative to exploitative /hacky. I have never said I can’t use this I’m just saying what’s the best for the game. Rationally if you have a dominate strategy like insta click walling you will use it but if it shifts the nash equilibirum towards projectile and bronze age army then by definition it’s a dominate strategy(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_dominance). So hence it makes melee a throw away unit when you consider the probability of unit effectiveness.
Casual players will do 12 min tool rush but the point is mute. Players will just instaclick walls just in time and block the opponent thus the nash equilibirum(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium) has shifted away from melee combat as I described above.
Why you quote Wikipedia articles for an RTS game? It has no relation at all. I think it is weird to do so.
Just learn to adapt. In the old AoE walling was way worse with shadow walls. Now it is fair.
If you are fast you can block any rush for a certain period of time. This is what the insiders and testers were aiming at beside some balance changes that work really well imho.
