What AoE2 needs

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Some would say, nothing. The game was unchanged for 15 years. Even with some overpowered civs, lots of players enjoyed it.

But all activities benefit from network effects. If you can get your friends to try your hobby, you’ll enjoy it more. People joke about collecting rocks, because most people find it less interesting than other activities.

Changes mean development costs. The developers of the Age of Empires series recently got hit by job cuts. So, what AoE2 needs:

  1. More revenue. Make a ranked ladder that costs $1 per game. All the money goes towards tournament prize pools. Each game gives 1 point for voting on which tournaments to fund. Discourages quitting at start of game. Should be able to queue for it at same time as normal ladder (only affects players with extreme rating).

  2. Attracting more types of players. Biggest audience that AoE2 fails at is female players. Barrier to entry, i.e. learning curve, is part of this. The first hour of playing AoE2, for the very first time, should be fun, even in multiplayer. There are plenty of simple phone games that attract female players because they are social: by playing the game, you help other people. In many of these games, you can help other players who aren’t even online. This will never happen in AoE2, but expecting the first X hours of gameplay to be against AI, or 1v1 multiplayer that starts with a string of losses to find the correct rating, is a losing formula. Two ideas: [Important] Making AoE2 more friendly for new players and new viewers!

  3. (stuff about ladder ratings, finding opponents, measuring skill, setting degree of challenge, map-based modifier to estimated skill, variety in game settings, etc.)

  4. (unit balance, including ‘ranged melee unit’ balance, siege damage type, Thunderclap Bombs damage type, armor piercing mechanic, etc.)

I’m skipping #3 because it’s too long. I mostly watch Rage Forest games, where the ladder’s matchmaking system is not involved.

For #4, a few suggestions for unit balance.

FIRST BALANCE SUGGESTION:
Give ‘melee projectile’ units penalty against siege, with negative damage like Royal Heirs. Currently too effective against rams https://youtu.be/xWIvBJqArFA?t=1256. Siege as ‘units that are good against any unit that isn’t close’ is a good type of unit. Jarls: currently do 10+4+3 = 17 against Battering Ram. Even if -7 damage vs siege, still do 10 damage, from 5 range. Against War Chariot with +3 armor: 14-3-7 = 4 damage. HCA does 2 damage.

Not having archer armor class is already a big advantage for these units. Don’t need to be good against both skirmishers and siege.

(I also think the bonus that Mamelukes have against Cavalry should be reduced. ‘Cavalry with a melee damage ranged attack’ is already very strong, as seen with Jarls.)

SECOND BALANCE SUGGESTION:
Change ranged damage types. Original was based around trebuchet and ram armor. Make all siege weapons use pierce damage, give bonus against ram armor. Rocket carts still ignore armor, but gain more bonus against siege weapons and buildings. Justifies changing Thunderclap Bombs to all use pierce damage, so Grenadiers don’t do pierce with main but melee damage with bombs. Make Thunderclap Bombs ignore armor with only half of their damage. (Somewhat similar to having 2x base damage but doing half damage after armor is subtracted.)

Change other armor-piercing units to also ignore armor with only half of damage. Halberdier with Wootz Steel attacking ETK: 5+0 = 5 damage. Make the ‘armor ignoring’ half also ignore other armors, like cavalry armor on Cataphracts (maybe no other cases).

Reduce ram pierce armor to around 150, similar to trebuchet. Reasoning in 1998 was, Bombard Cannons must do melee damage so they can damage trebuchet. This means they do the same damage to all ram types even though siege rams have 195 pierce armor. But with traction trebuchets and several more siege ships that all do full damage to rams, trebuchets doing just 5 damage to siege ram makes no sense. (Bombard Tower doing 1 damage to rams also makes no sense, but it’s a separate issue. Note that Citadels gives castles bullets that do 3 damage to battering ram, 3x as much as Bombard Tower’s cannonball.)

With bombard cannons etc. doing pierce with bonus against rams, remove ram armor from traction trebuchets.

Thunderclap Bombs example: villagers building tower dying https://youtu.be/s3ObKKuAVyw?t=2603 Probably does not even need base damage increase to compensate for the nerf, since it’s already strong due to not damaging friendly units. Also maybe doesn’t have tapering blast radius?

Add smoke trail to rockets, to make them more visible?

Synchronized stuttering of melee units: https://youtu.be/s3ObKKuAVyw?t=2608 Like last samurai to pass below trebuchets at https://youtu.be/s3ObKKuAVyw?t=2611 If there are enemy units, continuing to move towards a location is always better than stuttering. Maybe need a new goal for pathing: ‘move towards tile with enemy units’ instead of ‘move towards a specific enemy unit’. Goal is unchanged if enemy units move a bit. Valid goal if armies are approaching each other, not as good as ‘ballistics-type prediction’ if enemies are moving away. Or maybe average movement of enemies just changes the destination tile. Target region can be larger than one tile, and movements can be averaged over a short period of time (relevant for when enemy units stutter).

Reduce accuracy of rocket carts (secondary projectiles), radius of rockets, so that ‘larger splash radius’ of Heavy Rocket Carts is from more projectiles (can also give Heavy Rocket Carts more dispersion than Rocket Carts). Reduce radius of Thunderclap Bombs too, so explosion graphic better matches area of effect. Fix the legacy, ‘AoE attacks with low accuracy don’t damage units within their area’ design (if not already fixed for Grenadiers with 0% accuracy). New unit statistic or flag affecting dispersal: rocket carts firing at short range should disperse rockets over same area as at long range.

TC sub-building placement visual bug https://youtu.be/iF-2hA7ObHQ?t=703

Tl;dr:

Make a ranked ladder that costs $1 per game with all the money going towards tournament prize pools?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but low priority
0 voters

Make efforts to attract female players?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but low priority
0 voters

Reduce the damage that projectile melee units do against siege units?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but low priority
0 voters

Make Thunderclap Bombs explosions do pierce damage, both from Grenadiers (that do pierce damage with main attack) and from Rocket Carts (that currently do melee damage with main attack)?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but low priority
0 voters
2

So many people having fear of Activision… An now this post suggests things that are worse than anything people predicted from Activision… Congratulations.

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War games are mainly targetting a male audience if you want to have fun just play SP like the majority of us.

Gender really dosent matter this game or any other MP games are hard for people at first as you need to fight against actual people.Having over 50 civis doesn’t help either.

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Please tell me you’re joking.

Can you share a tl;dr of the linked post?

I think that RTS games are an overwhelmingly male genre for two main reasons: because women are (usually!) raised in a less competitive environment, and because RTS games have been marketed towards men for decades.

One way to tackle this imbalance could be to advertise an element of gameplay that isn’t really advertised: co-op campaigns, and team games against AI. It’s really fun to team up with your friends, whatever your gender. I don’t think any gameplay changes are needed for that.

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This post smells like a troll but you never know how crazy some peoples ideas actually are.

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There is a decent number of women that play this game. We just are not all loud about it because men act weird about us.

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They do? (20 characters)

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I think OP is just really bad at communicating this idea. I think the idea was a ladder in addition to the current ones. It’s still a really bad idea and a hard no from me, but it doesn’t make me think OP has malicious intent. Here’s some of the reasons I think this is a bad idea:

  1. 1$ per game would mean you would only play it in order to get a vote to cast, so why is there a game involved?
  2. Making a pay to vote system would mean the tournaments are for sale which means only the whales and lobbyists would be capable of deciding the direction of the game. None of which would actually care about the game itself.

I think that’s one of the reasons AOE2 has survived as long as it has. It didn’t get caught up in all the modern social issues (politics) which have ruined so many other franchises, but it stayed (mostly) true to its roots, so it survived. Having a larger female audience would have destroyed it because, as OP points out, women are more social than men, and so the social problems of modernity would have slipped in.

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Disgusting. Our existance is not “politics”.

Though, thankyou for proving my point so quickly.

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dude… i get what you meant, that trying to cater to a different audience would deprieve the game of what makes it fun, in this case tuning down the violence because woman are (supposedly) less violent. but what a terrible way to say it…