What do you think makes a balanced civ?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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What do you consider a pro? Because this statement is kind of odd. A pro would generally know how to play the majority of the civs to very high efficiency.

Not really. If you have no synergy between tech tree and civ bonuses, you get civs that have very poor performance. Burmese is exactly the right example. Its civ bonuses don’t have any kind of synergy and you can’t really build a game-plan with the bonuses. So it matters very much for balance. Same with Cumans. Before the cheap archery range and stable buff, you had a civ with a bunch of random bonuses (some of them even mutually exclusive in practice) and therefore the civ had a pretty poor performance. Tbh the civ design itself still sucks, but the new bonus is just plain strong enough to make the civ work via a strong feudal all in

This game itself is very much centered around powerspikes if you observe it very closely, a lot of strategies depend entirely on them, so dismissing them would be rather unwise.

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They’re literally a Crossbow counter so not sure where you are trying to say here.

We were actually discussing being a civ viable at all stages, not at what stage of the game the specific civ exceptionally shines.

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um, not really. only in mass numbers, and that requires 80 food each, which is really going to eat into your ability to boom. knights are a much better option for fighting crossbows. they have 3 less attack then knights, attack slower, and have less health overall.

and here’s the thing - all civs are VIABLE. period. in all stages. some are stronger in some stages then others. Mongols are weak in the castle age, especially early on.

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That’s more than debatable.

Lol. Do you play this game in ranked? Booming and Fast Castle aggression are like opposites.

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Youre not going to get much fast castle aggression out of light cav. Nor cav archers.

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The majority isn’t the entirety. That’s my point. You can use pro data for a lot of civs but not all of them. For example using pro data for Saracens in games where they don’t abuse the market anywhere close to what its capable of is obviously problematic. It’s leaving money on the table. So those games have to be thrown out for the obvious reason it doesn’t represent what the civ is capable of, it only represents that a player hasn’t practiced/analyzed the civ enough.

I mean if you asked every pro “Do you feel confident that you know civ X inside and out such that you’ve found and can execute the strongest strategies they have to offer? Remeber “strongest” is relative to the civs other available alternatives, not whether you win with the strategies. Rank your confidence from 1 (least) to 10 (most).” There’s no way you’d get average scores of like 9-10 for every civ.

It’s still irrelevant for balance considerations because you can separate them. You could literally brick Chinese by nerfing their tech discount into the ground to like a flat 5%. The synergy with the wide tech tree is still there but you’ve nerfed it. The property of being synergistic is independent of the balance for this reason.

More importantly basically every single civ bonus relies on boosting eco, defenses, or units. It is very hard not to get any synergy from a bonus. So clearly it’s an insufficient condition. So if you start incorporating magnitude you end up needing to gauge when the magnitude is too large or too small. But this means likely relying on balance at some point.

If define synergy in terms of balance that prevents you from defining balance with it. Circular definitions between two terms can be used to define a relation between the terms but not the terms themselves.

Just because the game is played that way doesn’t mean a winning strategy necessarily must be centered around power spikes. I’m not dismissing them I’m saying you shouldnt presume that they are required to create a balanced civ. You could equally create a civ that negates enemy power spikes while having few of their own (like Byzantines).

Your method of defining balance is basically:

  • Assume players/civs have to do/have one of X to be successful
  • change the civs so that players can do/have one of X.

The problem with doing this is you are basically guaranteed to screw up in defining X. You will assume sufficient things are insufficient and unnecessary things are necessary. It’s the same thing that makes if-else rules in AI not feasible at scale.

That’s why it’s best to leave out assumptions. Stick to a generalized framework that allows definition of an identification criterion. Use the causal relationship that exist between units + identification to tweak things at the margin.

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That’s effectively almost the same as removing the bonus entirely, so it’s no surprise that the synergy is gone. And this is exactly why just having a broad tech tree by itself is meaningless. Chinese aren’t amazing just because they have a wide tech tree. They’re amazing because their civ bonuses actually allow them to use their wide tech tree. The early eco boost with the Chinese start, coupled with the cheap techs, means the Chinese can do any opening in Feudal Age, making them very hard to predict, and allowing them to reasonably transition to another unit/strategy during the game. It’s exactly the presence of this synergy that makes them so good.

But not impossible. And those are the civs that tend to struggle. The ones that can’t build on their civ bonuses consistently or meaningfully. When you look at the Spanish for example, most of their bonuses are either useless on 1v1 Arabia (team bonus, cannon galleon bonus), kick in very late (blacksmith gold discount), or have no strong use-case most of the times (faster building). Conqs would be the Spanish powerspike unit, but they’re just not nearly as strong as they were pre-DE.

Well, all the generalist civs tend to struggle in practice, so I just don’t really see how a powerspike-less civ would look like. I would be very happy and interested to see one in practice though :slight_smile:

They tend to die hard in Feudal, they are really vulnerable to meso civs, to strong scout rushes. Their powerspike is the fast imp, but getting there is hard.

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Again you’re using synergy to define balance but implicitly using balance to define synergy. I don’t think it’s possible to comment on the magnitude of a synergistic bonus without invoking balance.

So you can’t use synergy to define balance, only that the relationship between synergy being sufficient for strength (which is again not the same as balance as too much strength is not balanced).

“Struggle in practice” and “die hard” need to be quantified. As far as I can tell they do fine in practice and don’t die hard. What they are is slightly below average.

Also you have to be open to the idea that players develop and reinforce habits in each other which benefit early aggression civs while simultaneously biasing players away from the optimal strategies to use with the less aggressive civs. For example byzantines have cheaper trash and their trash is very cost effective in combat. If players treat:

  • beat/bypass enemy army → do eco damage to enemy
  • beat/zone out enemy army with cheaper units → boom slightly harder

Asymmetrically (which they shouldn’t) then that is going to be a problem for Byzantines. Daut made famous the trash offensive as well 11.

It’s similar for wide tech tree civs who have the ability to field very cost effective armies vs the enemy if they properly mix units (like genoese xbow + xbow). Since the aggressive civs don’t need to mix like this it might bias players against it.

There are a lot of decisions made at lower resolutions than they should just because it simplifies the search space.

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I agree that the Roman counter unit bonus is magnificently useful. Those Camels may not have Bloodlines, but they are cost effective for dealing with Knights. In addition, this bonus makes the Spear and Skirmisher lines even more economical.

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being able to withstand whatever other meta/high tier civs generally go for strategy-wise and counteract to that.

For example, if Magyars were meta, being able to mitigate their 19 pop Scouts would be important in order to be a “balanced, good civ”. Of course same considerations apply to their early Castle age Knights flood/all-in.

Mind you, when I say “mitigate”, I don’t mean only having the right counter units (e.g. Japanese Halberdier to counter Frankish Paladin), I also mean not falling behind in the game in general. All too often, some civs CAN do the right army composition or strategy, BUT they “get there” too late where it doesn’t matter. Brilliant example being Spanish who have insane compositions in theory and all the counter units that you can hope for, but just can never get as competitive and “fair” fights because due to lacking eco bonus, for example when you push out 4 Knights, the enemy has already 6-8 (because they have a slightly faster Castle age time due to having e.g. Frankish berries).

Stuff like this matters a ton in high elo where tech transitions and countering are not only about choosing the right unit but also about having enough time and economy to mass enough relevant units. The game is half about having the right units and half about timing and transitions but also knowing when you are ALLOWED to transition without dying.

Low elo players fail to grasp this incredibly hard, for example when I play vs 1000 elo players and they are, say, Mongols, they systematically go to Stone at the 15-16 min mark (sometimes even earlier) because they hope to build a Castle and get out Mangudai which is a rly good power unit. Their linear approach to the game makes them think that even if they take some damage, Mangudai will make them recover *that can be true), but more importantly that I will somehow let them. In low elo this works very often because such greed is generally unpunished, but I generally punish it instead. In the specific case, by putting ~5 vills to Stone (1/6 of your economy in Feudal), my opponent hits Castle Age 1-2 min later. I then do either 3 TC boom right away and get to Imp first, or more commonly all in him with Knights just as he hits Castle age. It is really really to sustain the pressure if I already have 6-8 Knights when you are making your first ones or first Camels. Even if he makes counter units, I will add Scorpions, Monks etc.This of course on top of me scouting for the foundation of the Castle and trying to kill as many Vills as possible if not deny it altogether.

This is why in the case of Mangudai, for example, you generally go for it AFTER you did damage to the opponent or took a lead, Stone is a HORRIBLE resource to gather if it’s an even game because the Castle can’t move around the map and building a Castle means a lot of lost eco, on top of not being “incremental” in the sense that with day Gold, every 75g gathered you get a small reward in the form of a new Knight that you can use immediately, with Stone you must float 650 Stone before even building a Castle and 649 and 0 Stone are practically the same in terms of game outcome.