What if Towers had a 'targeted mode'?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

I’ve been musing over tower rushes, especially with regards to civs like the Sicilians, who for a long time have been either #1 or close to it at lower elos, with near to 70% win rates in the earlier parts of the game, while simultaneously being really bad at higher elos.

Part of the issue, I think, has to do with the fact that towers are very ‘fire and forget’. You plop one down and ignore them from then on, which is particularly advantageous at lower elos where your attention and apm are divided. Meanwhile, at higher elos, towers fall behind because, in order to be AT ALL balanced at lower elos, they kinda need to be bad at elos where you DO have the attention and APM available.

This raised an interesting idea in my mind: what if towers had two different attack modes?

The default mode would be akin to currently, but slightly weaker overall, perhaps via lower accuracy or a slower fire rate. It would still serve the same general purpose as an area denial tool, but weakened enough to not be quite so oppressive at lower elos.

But then, if you select the tower and manually target an enemy, the accuracy and fire rate would improve dramatically! Techs like Yasama show that you can triple the damage of towers and not be too overpowered. In my ideal world they’d at least be able to outdamage a single repairing villager on an attacking Mangonel.

This immediately biases towards higher skill players, because you would basically need to be constantly flickering around, selecting towers and manually picking targets, something that low-apm players would find challenging. Basically, it increases the skill ceiling of towers, accordingly increasing their allowable maximum power!

This could also have some interesting benefits with things like garrisoned healing and garrisoned arrows; at present, pros rarely bother with garrisoning archers in towers, because it’s usually not worth much, but with this, every tower could serve as a multiplier for units garrisoned inside, really encouraging that sort of combined gameplay.

Of course, it WOULD require the nerfing of the baseline tower, so that’s a point of consideration. But maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing?

2

Defending against trushes is highly technical (and tactical) demanding.
It’s a “noob basher strat” that can’t be easily fixed. That’s why we nerfed the common trushing civs some time ago.

But recently towers themselve have been buffed without reflecting that this will ofc bring back the “trush the noobs” griefers.

It’s way more complicated than a simple adjustment could ever fix. And for my knowledge the noob trushers often do exactly the opposite, focussing just on their aggression and nothing else.

3

Well, part of the reason for this is because attacking with towers is relatively easy to do. They’re simple and straightforward, so low-elo players can spam them and win.

But once your skill/attention/apm get better, you can stop them - and there’s no way to make the towers any better, so tower use just dies.

That’s what this is aiming to fix. By making towers more skill-focused(You have to manually target the towers to get the most from them), you raise the skill ceiling and lower the skill floor.

Translation: Less OP at low elo, better at high elo.

4

I see your argumentation, I just doubt it will work.
If the trushers are already focussing on their aggression they just need a little bit more apm to manually target, whilst it will be way harder for the unexperienced to defend (witht their own towers).

5

Well, I’m trying to think it through, see what would happen, right?

Say they build a tower over your gold. If you just counter-tower right away, then things would be much the same as they currently are, both towers just taking each other down faster. No major change there, because the tower bonus effects both sides equally. But once the attacker starts spreading their forces around, it will become harder and harder to spread attention around; trushing already takes a lot of the attacker’s apm, it just enhances that because each tower kinda gives you some ‘free’ apm, you know? So you can afford to look back to your eco for a bit.

But you might imagine you focus-fire something and then look away? Before, when you look away the tower handles itself pretty well, but now, if you don’t look back to direct it regularly, it’ll swap back to the more generalized and weaker automatic attack mode, so now it’s weaker than before, easier to repel.

So on the whole, tower rushing at lower apm gets weaker overall. But if you have the apm to keep your towers focused then they actually get stronger! But that takes higher skill.

I guess the main question is how MUCH skill, but that kinda depends on how many towers you have! But basically you get diminishing returns on spamming towers, that much, I think, is certain.

6

i think it’s the other way around. For lower elo players it’s very difficult to react properly to aggression and your proposal only makes it harder for them

I think it would be more helpful if all towers would become “teuton towers” cause that’s actually way better for defending (ofc it helps in offense, but it’s even more powerful for the defender). I only am not sure what Teutons should get in compensation.

7

Well, the main response at low elos to a tower is a tower of your own. In a tower vs tower scenario, that puts the advantage on the defender, because they’re gonna be seeing their eco and their defense simultaneously. Meanwhile, the attacker has to move around more, their towers are gonna be further apart, and so on, so keeping everything under control becomes more difficult.

That’s why making it be something like this, where it spreads your attention around, is so important. A teuton bonus keeps all that power focused on one building, right? So that’s easy to focus on and makes tower rushing stronger.

The main goal of this change is to raise the apm ceiling of tower usage, so you can accordingly increase their maximum power relative to other aspects of the game. Towers vs towers though, will always remain balanced because it’s the same on either side, see?

8

I could imagine it having more negative impact on the attacker if only the auto attack on buildings wouil be rmoved. However I still see 2 issues. First is, that it still is a technical speciality to learn, so a real noob won’t know it whilst the tower rusher should know it and therefore have an advantage there against “true noobs” though. Second it changes an established interaction with a lot of secondery content shared on multiple platforms. So all that content would become obsolete and misleading, especially for people who don’t follow the scene as much at all times this might become an issue.

I would prefer if these kind of technical interactions would remain. Because it would only make the game content unnecessary convoluted fo in my opinions at best a minor improvement that could also be achieved by different tweaks that don’t change these kind of interactions.

EG I would actually reverse the changes to tower costs and instead make (as said before) all towers to teuton towers. Both changes would make it easier to defend against towers with towers for lower elo players without changing anything of the technical stuff.

9

There is no need to nerf the baseline tower for this. Just exclude this from Watch towers but give it to Guard Towers and Keeps.