What about a change to Gold collection?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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The reasoning:

Currently Gold units dominate the meta. I think there is nothing wrong with using a Gold unit as bulk of your army but I would like to encourage more the addition of less Gold intensive units also on earlier stages of the game. Especially for Team Games.

The idea:

Gold Collection becomes number-depending. Mining from one pile with multiple VIllagers reduces the Gold income. The probably “easiest” way to implement this is to reduce the base Gold collection rates of vills by about 15 % but for every pile of Gold you currently have a Miner on you get an extra about 25 % collection of a standard Vill (It is even thinkable of giving this extra income without taking the ressource away from the gold pile).
Technically it could be similar to the current Poles Stone mining bonus but only apply to the very first vill on each Gold pile.

This would mean that if you have a mediocre amount of Gold miners and all of them on different piles, you would actually even get more Gold income than currently. But if you oversaturate your Gold your income per vill would shrink. Meaning that to make full Gold comps you would need overproportionally many villagers on Gold than if you make a balanced economy and a gold/trash army composition.

At the same time it would encourage to make some army with the extra Gold income if you just put a few vills on it, so it passively even reduces stalling/griefing tactics.

Lastly it would encourage more positionnal / expansional play in the midgame as it then becomes a relevant factor of how many Gold piles you control. Whilst you currently can spam a lot of units by just putting 10+ vills on your main Gold this would be reduced by a fair margin. But if you have control over most of the other Gold piles you could make even more Gold units than currently, giving you an advantage over players who try to hide in self-made arenas.

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It foundamentially change the game. I think the previous idea that adding some neutral gold when will mine in 30% rate but with infintite value would be better

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3

I don’t like this way very much. Even AoE3, known for its complex mechanics, has never had anything like this.
This encourages micro in even the economy aspect and makes the gameplay more cumbersome. If the villagers are not allocated properly, the impact on the early gold income will be too great. But if it’s impact doesn’t matter much, it’s just a redundant mechanic.

Infinite natural resources on land will drastically change the balance. AoE3 never had infinite gold mines either. You can imagine how much of an advantage the person who holds and occupies it will gain. This is definitely not a smart alternative.

If I understand correctly, you want to get more use of non-gold units in the early game.

My advice is that you could try to make Gold Mining/Gold Shaft Mining (and maybe even Stone Mining/Stone Shaft Mining) only provide the +10% instead of the current +15%, and then introduce a 3rd stage tech in the Imperial Age to provide + 10%. Total +30% that is no change.

Then, make some civilizations have access to all the techs, and some civilizations can’t, to create differences and balance.

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TBF If you want to compete at high elo you have to micro your eco regardless already.
This would only make it more appearant also for mid elo players that is a real thing.

Well we already have relics… who thinks relics are a problem?..

More mid game, yes.

Nah, I don’t think this really fits what I want to achieve here.

It’s only one way. Ofc there might be different and probably even more “elegant” solutions to that. One other example could also be that you can build some kind of mine on top of a gold pile and that mine also has an automatic gold income. But when there are no Gold Miners mining the mine will dwindle.

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The vast majority of players are not what you called high elo players. Even many people only play campaigns and AI games. This will change the experience for all players, and I believe sure even high elo players are unwilling to complicate things at this thing. In harsh terms, this change is asking for trouble.

Relics and common resource sources are fundamentally different. I thought this needed no explanation. For example, the Relics are movable, and the gold generation rate of Relics is fixed and must be invested before it can be harvested. However, the more villagers are tasked the more gold the infinite mines provide, and it does not need any prior investment.

Well, honestly it doesn’t feel elegant, at least to me.
The really most elegant way is to simply adjusting the stats to achieve the goal without any new mechanic.
If it’s something unique to a new civilization, ok fine I would wait to see how it works in the practical games.
If what you want is a global change, such as adjusting the base tech tree, then this just feels like a complex and redundant change.
For example, assuming Poles hasn’t been released yet, I believe people won’t like to see the mechanic of Folwark applied to many existing civilizations.

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Well this is basically true for almost every unique new mechanic…

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I hate this idea.

It seems unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive (and the game already suffers from some unintuitive mechanics).

Also, part of what makes the AoE economy management much more interesting than games like Starcraft and Warcraft is the fact you can have infinite number of villagers (physical and population space allowing) on any resource node and have your collection scale accordingly.

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That’s just wrong. If your oversaturate your camps your collection efficiency will go down quite heavily already.

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Perhaps you didn’t read my comment carefully:

(physical and population space allowing)

Losses in efficiency are a natural result of the space villagers and things take up. Not some artificially introduced “rule” working in the background.

The point is it’s not like Starcraft where if they are on one base they will gather exactly X amount of resources per second. In AoE you can go heavily into one resource or pair of resources or whatever (at the expense of the others) depending on what you are currently trying to do.

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10

Gold mining isn’t broken, so why do you want to fix it?

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11

You still need to justify why this type of change is needed. In the reasoning part of your post, you claimed that Gold units dominate the meta. I won’t dispute this… but this observation alone does not warrant a change into how gold is collected.

So far you’ve given details for your idea, and given some reasons for why you think it would make the game better. But no clear reasons for why they’re necessary in the first place.

Let me first see if I understand your idea correctly. (Not an attempt to discredit, just to understand)

The probably “easiest” way to implement this is to reduce the base Gold collection rates of vills by about 15 % but for every pile of Gold you currently have a Miner on you get an extra about 25 % collection of a standard Vill (It is even thinkable of giving this extra income without taking the ressource away from the gold pile).
Technically it could be similar to the current Poles Stone mining bonus but only apply to the very first vill on each Gold pile.

Let’s just assume, for simplicity, that the current rate of harvest for a villager mining gold is 1.00 gold per second.

So you would like to cut the rate of harvest for gold by 15% across the board. BUT, you want the first villager on each gold pile to mine 25% faster than standard vills. (I’m going to assume you mean 25% faster than 1.00, not 0.85)

And my recollection is that on your standard map of Arabia, every player gets 1 large gold mine, and 2 medium ones. The large consists of 8 piles, and the mediums consist of 4 piles each. Giving the player a total of 16 gold piles in total. Let’s assume that this is ALL the gold they have available. Each pile having 800 a piece.

Under this scenario, if you wanted to maximize the value of your gold piles, you would have 16 villagers dedicated to mining gold, no more, no less. Each of these villagers is assigned to one gold pile gathering at a rate of 1.25 gold per second.

You also included that this extra 25% is not deducted from the golds stock pile when mined. So if one villager mined 100 gold from a pile, the player would collect 125 gold, but the pile would only show that you mined 100, leaving the pile with only 700 gold left (as opposed to 675 normally).

So with your idea, you could technically gain 1000 gold from a pile that contained only 800. Thats 16,000 gold you could get if you were to harvest it using only one villager per pile. This would take you 13 minutes and 20 seconds to fully mine each of those piles with a single vill.

This would mean that if you have a mediocre amount of Gold miners and all of them on different piles, you would actually even get more Gold income than currently. But if you oversaturate your Gold your income per vill would shrink. Meaning that to make full Gold comps you would need overproportionally many villagers on Gold than if you make a balanced economy and a gold/trash army composition.

So now let’s apply your idea another way by using multiple villagers per pile instead of 1. We’ll assume again that you have 16 gold mines, with 800 in each pile. And furthermore, let’s assume that these piles are not all clumped together like they usually are, just for the sake of argument. So with each of these 16 gold piles spread out, you could theoretically fit around 10 villagers onto each gold pile.

Hypothetically, you’ve now got yourself a total of 160 villagers on gold(unrealistic, but roll with me). Each pile, will have 1 villager mining at a rate of 1.25G per S, and 9 mining at 0.85 G per S.

  • Every minute, the 1 vill will collect you 75 gold, but will deduct only - 60.

  • Also, every minute the other 9 vills collect you 51 gold each, for a total 459, and deducts - 459 from the pile.

  • So every minute, you will collect 519 gold per pile.

  • Without your new idea, you’d be collecting 600 per gold pile.

  • So in this scenario, with your idea implemented, you would be collected 81 gold less per minute than you would normally.

You also mentioned “especially for team games”. Wouldn’t players just make more trade carts to compensate for the less gold income?

And if players chose to hide in a corner and build themselves a little fort, aren’t they already at a disadvantage because they can’t trade with anyone?

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I said I want to encourage more to add the trash unit of the compositien earlier, especially for the players in the mid-elo segment.

I think I actually did the opposite. I gave pretty clear reasoning why I want to do this. The technical details are actually more of an example how it could be achieved.

You are actually very focussed on the technical details and effective gatherrates. It’s just an example how it can be achieved, not something I have deeper elaborated.

I actually hope that they either add some trash units or try to transition earlier to trade eco instead of the currently usually hard cut which often leads to a very convoluted phase when this transition happens. Imo TGs would feel smoother with a more gradual transition to trade.

13

Yes, your clear reasoning was to make it harder for players to hole up into a corner because they wouldn’t have access to as much gold, while the other player has access to the entire maps gold piles.

But the player(s) controlling the map already have a huge gold advantage, because they have trade. So there is really no need to do this at all.

Few questions:

How would you go about determining which villager first had access to a gold pile? What if two allied players each had villagers on the same pile, how does the game determine who was there first? And what’s to stop one of your allies from ground attacking your gold vills with an onager forcing them to stop what they’re doing, so they can then have the first vill on the gold pile.

Also, at what point is a villager officially “assigned” to a gold pile. Would it be when the player orders the villager to the gold pile, or after the vill actually starts mining it? And when the villager has a full load, it has to return to the mining camp to drop it off, does this mean they are no longer considered to be “mining” it? Or are they considered to be mining the entire time until the gold is depleted?

What happens if two different players who aren’t allied with each other are mining the same gold pile? Do both players get the first villager bonus, or does it only apply to the villager belonging to the player that mined it first?

What would happen if you were to scout your enemies gold piles, and ordered one villager (trapped behind a palisade wall) to mine it? This villager is technically assigned as the first to mine that gold, even if it isn’t physically mining it. Wouldn’t that be a way to prevent the enemy from ever having the 25% first vill bonus? By simply ordering some trapped villagers to mine them?

Your idea affects the entire game. Respectfully, one would expect for it to have a bit more thought put into it. I just provided a bunch of ways that your idea could be exploited.

You are actually very focussed on the technical details and effective gatherrates. It’s just an example how it can be achieved, not something I have deeper elaborated.

Of course I am. You propose an idea to the public, and then the public asks questions about your idea. Now it is your job to defend your idea. That’s kind of the next stage if you ever want to get it farther along the implementation process.

If the originator of an idea won’t defend their idea against criticism, or unwilling to refine it to make it better. Then the idea is tossed out is it not?

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What are you even talking about 11

So you know about an “implementation process” here? Now I’m interested 11

There won’t be an elaboration from me. Cause it’s about the general idea, not the actual implementation. I decide on my own what I will do here or don’t. It’s that easy.
Ofc you can ask for it, but I just say I won’t. At least not atm cause ofc there are a lot of factors to think about. When you ask questions like this:

Why you don’t just answer it on your own what you would prefer in that situation?
Cause the way you do it here it looks for me fishy. As if you will critique me regardless what I chose.

But maybe I can come along with an elaborated implementation idea if I knew what would be a favorized outcome by the community. That would definetely make it easier to elaborate.

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Why you don’t just answer it on your own what you would prefer in that situation?
Cause the way you do it here it looks for me fishy. As if you will critique me regardless what I chose.

The questions I asked were designed to figure out how much thought you put into your idea. Is it fully fleshed out? Or did you just think of something cool, and wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts on it?

It’s cool either way.

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Nerfing trade and reducing starting gold should be enough on TGs. Maybe a nerf to gold collection could also work but I dont think it is necessary

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That most significantly nerf Monk play, which is currently already niche play. why just nerfing trade income or movement speed of trade unit?

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18

this stuff never works

it just means mayans get to spam xbow and other civs struggle

problem is xbow = broken unit and farms are too expensive
put actual economy in the game (fishing), and people may be able to afford non-xbow units

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Neither. I just thought off how we could get out of the monocultural gold unit “compositions” that have become meta in the mid elos. And in my opinion the easiest way out of that is to reduce the Gold collection efficiency the more you put on Gold.
I think we had enough “Knight v Crossbow” driven by increasingly optimised buildorders and it’s time to encourage more diverse gameplay.

I even would like to put forward the question if for players ranked below eg 1500 elo it wouldn’t be better if we played at 1.5 speed? Cause with all the macro going on I see most of them actually kinda overwhealmed and struggling. Ofc APM is and should be a factor. But I think we need to differ between semi-professionals who know what they’re doing because of thousands of ours of gameplay and those ### ##en’t quite there yet.
If your effective apm doesn’t really allow you to effectively use army comps as they are in pro games I don’t wonder many mid-elos just try using one unit. But I think it’s then a fault of the developers if they chose a general game speed in ranked that’s too fast for most players.

The concept wouldn’t impact pro play that much as pros already use army comps way more extensively than most mid-elo ranked players.

Well, I don’t believe that tbh. I think you could think out yourself how you would answer these questions and what would be your preferences and then put them forward here.

Or just change Trade so it doesn’t gives Gold exclusively but also some food (and potentially also some wood).

As I put forward here, I don’t think a direct nerf to Gold collection is the right choice. I would prefer if just the efficiency would go down if you put a lot on Gold at the same spot.

Not so sure about that. Afaik if you play monks you usually make it kinda low eco. So you don’t even have that villager mass to greatly oversaturate your Golds. Also you usually want to add some pikes to your monk/siege also so you need eco for that too.

Well mayans are broken and need to be nerfed anyways.

Meanwhile knight civs dominate gameplay…

Possibly. But at the same time this design actually gives agressors some time to punish greedyness. So I’m fine with that kinda high investment into food eco. You see what happens in many water maps where there is often almost no (land) agression until the midgame.

What are you even talking about? O.o

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go play any teamgame that isn’t some custom scenario map like arena

it’s literally just decided xbow spam. 4 range xbow. whoever makes more wins. no counterplay. no strategy. just spam