oh yeah,
house / town center shall support 5 pop
The 5 pop/house could be a Bronze Age Technology.
This way the early game balance isnât touched.
This tech could also make town centres 10 pop.
Town centres are to cheap anyway. The game was designed around 50 population and at the point you can build additional town centres you are already at the cap so they donât help as much but with 250 population they become very helpful.
I think workers should be limited to 100 like in AoE3 and AoM, same with AoE2. That reduces trash wars because you canât build as much trash.
My suggestions are sharing one single target: Improve the versatile and entertaining without changing the aoe1-unique-style
The 5 pop/house could be a Bronze Age Technology.
This way the early game balance isnât touched.
This tech could also make town centres 10 pop.
Disagree, this change is not aoe1-like but aoe3.
think workers should be limited to 100 like in AoE3 and AoM, same with AoE2.
Disagree, same reason
Town centres are too cheap anyway.
yes. maybe +100 wood to add the cost of booming
Since you guys are talking about making the games last much longer and favouring more turtle focused strategies with less importance on map control, Iâd like to know what kind of games do you usually play and what level are you?
I play RM at the top level on all kinds of maps, both team(top 20) and 1v1(top 50). To me games where the map actually runs out of resources are anomalies. They happen very rarely. Games where one side runs out of resources and loses because of it are much more common. I donât remember a single game where all resources were gone. Games with all gold running out on a land map(95% highland btw.), maybe a thirty or so. All wood running out on island maps, less than ten games. Were talking miniscule amount of games here. And they all lasted well over one hour.
Compare this to the hundreds if games where the other side manages to wrestle map control and hoard all the gold for themselves because they played better. To diminish this kind of advantage from map control in order to alleviate a problem that occurs much more rarely seems counterintuitive to me. Not to mention you prolong the games that would already take forever because of this.
So to a player of my level and habits your proposals seem to undermine the gameplay and I would like to know what kind of games and at what level this would benefit to make it worth it.
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Increase resource per tile to a balanced level does none of the business for âfavouring more turtle focused strategiesâ, as it is not changing the ratio if you have the map control. If your opponents have more resources to defend, you have waaaaaaay more resources to offend
In your words aoe2 will be a disaster and no top players will like it, as it has more resources, garrison and much better defense.
To be honest my suggestions are somehow benefiting top players as they outperform normal players for controlling units in large numbers.
Better defense structures will encourage more siege weapons usage. How often do you build towers? siege weapons?
âprolong the gamesâ? Are aoe2 matches longer?
But in one way, if you have to use siege weapons to end the game, the game is longer as they are slow and costly, I will feel completely ok because it should be like that, as currently it is quite unfair for siege civs
But one thing you mentioned is quite valuable:
games where the map actually runs out of resources are anomalies
it supports my ideas by 2 ways:
- as we have shxt defense, the game can be ended easily by main eco area invaded in a few seconds, of course in those cases you will never exhaust resources
- rush is way too easy as vil is totally helpless before iron age. Does an average <15min per match sound good to you? As I see some streams even top players suffer and hard to comeback.
But of course my proposal wonât change it a lot, as I mentioned it just buff gold civs a bit in late game, but no help if lose map control completely
As mentioned by Skadidesu, many features are designed for 50 pops, we just want it to match the current scenario, in aoe1-style
If you want to criticize turtle and want to fight until the end of game, why not stop building walls or block ways, from next game? I am pretty sure the game will be much faster
Now tower is almost useless compared to 50popâs time; pops times 5 but resources are not; not saying resources shall also times 5, but need to be balanced
My guess is there wonât be one.
More resources at home means you can live off them longer. Because AoE resources are not really limited in the amount of income you can generate from them(technically you can only fit so many villagers on a gold mine or a berry bush but itâs almost never the limiting factor before they start running out.) In practice you send more and more villagers until the resources run out. The faster this happens, the earlier map control starts to play a crucial role. Currently you can open cavalry with just one gold mine pile, without fear of running out. But you need to capture more gold mine piles to keep doing it. If the gold mine were to hold double the current amount, you would be able to play without ever moving out of your base before reaching iron age. This strengthens turtle type play significantly.
As to what comes to defense structures, I see walls every game. EVERY GAME, 100%. They are amazing. The best unit in the game, right after the villager who can build them. You should build them. Everyone should build more walls. At all levels. Itâs basically a cheat where if you donât like the map, you can reshape it according to your will. Amazing. Make more of them.
Towers I see in 90% of the games. The rest are short 1v1s. Ballista towers are very good units. They have great damage and great survivability. Spam them on enemy farms, use them to secure gold and stone mine piles out on the map, control woodlines and unit production areas, slow down enemies and deter raiders. Very, very good units. Guard towers perform similar roles, just not as good, they are solid and you should make them too. Sentry towers are a lot less potent but still perform decentish in mass and they hold a special role in telling enemy archers to go somewhere else or waste the rest of the game killing them. Watch towers are just bad. The buildtime(no architecthure yet) in combination with the stone cost is a killer at that phase in the game. Only really useful to harass enemy eco if they have just one woodline or something of the like. In my opinion, watch, sentry and guard towers should all get +1 attack so they would work as area denial tools also.
Siege weapons are great, I see them in 70% of my games and the ones I donât see them, end before they become viable(they are expensive to invest into early so you usually prefer to eco first, siege later, exceptions exist.) Helepolis are the only semi viable counter against macedonian centurions(which need a nerf btw.) and catapults are amazing against archers and masses of units that you often see in the lategame. The stone thrower nerf from original to definitive edition was a bit too harsh on the area of effect in my opinion because it is not easy to hit both wall and the tiles adjacent to it anymore, while also indirectly buffing composite bowmen. But aside from that, siege is great and one of the best counters to units like centurion and elephants.
AoE2 matches are significantly longer than AoE matches but there are other reasons than the resources and strength of defenses in play. Most significantly itâs the offset of defense being only countered by technology of one age higher. So counter to towers/walls is the ram, counter to castle is the trebuchet. Then there is the garrison mechanic. These are not relevant to AoE so itâs hard to tell how much of the effect is from these alone and what is from other factors like more resources and stronger defenses.
What are these siege civs you speak of? Hittite? Sumerian? Macedonian? These are the ones with bonus to siege and they are also some of the absolute top tier lategame civs. The other siege civs include Roman, Assyrian, Minoan, Greek. Roman being one of the absolute best civs in the game with Minoan and Greek again being some of the best lategame powerhouses. Assyrian are held back by other reasons(like no slinger for Assyrian) and while it is true that I would rate them as one of the worst lategame civs, they have their place in the sun too with the best Horse Archers in the game before Heavy Horse Archers start filling the field. The low lategame value is because they lack a solid frontline unit(no fully upgraded legion, for example) for their siege, not because siege is somehow underpowered in current meta.
I can not speak for other top players besides myself, neither can you for anyone else than yourself. Still, our opinions are shaped by the games that we play and see, which is why I would like to know what kind of games you see and play that would benefit from more dense resources as the ones I see wouldnât. Are they 1 player vs 7 computer? Are they 7 players vs 1 computer? Are they 8 player FFAs? Are they Death Match? Iron age starts with high resources? Random maps at lower levels? Scenarios? Campaigns? Nomad starts? All of those I have very little insight on and donât know how they tend to play out.
Do usually micro small amounts of units? Attack move massive armies from the minimap? Do you usually focus on optimising your economy? Or do you favour just rallying your TC to wood and forgetting about it in favour of something else? Etc. Etc.
I have one kind of perspective on high level random map games as a high level random map player with my own play style and the play styles of others I play with and against. You can have a completely different one, doesnât mean itâs any less valuable, just that it is applicable to different set of games than the ones I play and see.
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For me I just started playing pvp around 1month right now rank 166 1v1, being a bot killer vs 7 AI since original game. For a standard 8v8 highland, per player, we have <=7 * 4 * 450=12600 gold, <=7 * 4 * 300=8400 stone, wood >= 200k.
Letâs calc how many fully upgraded heavy horse archer (70G) you can have (assuming u research all bronze tech before iron, and all iron tech after coinage)
cost before coinage: 50 + 800 + 100 + 120 = 1070 G
so after coinage you will have 1.25*(12600-1070) = 14412 G
fully upgraded cost after coinage 1150G
you can then have a total of
189 = (14412-1150)/70
HHA
I believe there will be a lot of gold âwastedâ in other ways before coinage and death before fully upgrade, so your HHA maximum (per player resource) numbers will be ~100, while yamato can have ~120
HHA is considered the most gold-effective units, following by legions and centurions, elephant archers, and it will be pretty much worse for cataphract & sieges
See why siege / cataphract / priest cannot act a good role?
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Ofc walls are the best. Then why you dislike turtle? If you also wall, there is no point to criticize a pro-turtle strategy, though my proposal is not fully pro-turtle.
Towers I see in 90% of the games
Not for streams (>2500 teams) I have seen, only 1/20
Greek, as they have nothing except centurion
Minoans as their siege is the only answer after compos & centurion
Assyrian
Hittlte (cata only)
Sumerian (cata only)
Roman
Babylon (cata only)
Cart (ballista only)
these 6 do have access to better choices unless they need seige to hard counter
No Mecd because theirs suck
Ironically, in most cases these civs donât mass siege or siege never
plays as important as their aoe2 counterparts
Siege are once the only answer to mass towers & walls & archers, but now even mass ballista towers can be taken down by mass melees
Siege is less important because they are too pop-effective, and easily overwhelmed by huge pops nowadays.
So they either need some buff or cost-effective. I think the easiest is to increase the gold
Tower the same, the easiest way to bring them back is more stone / less cost
not saying resources shall also times 5, but need to be balanced
p.s. at least x2.5
Houses and Town Centers may need a buff in how much population they support. One extra point would be nice, I think. Right now, 4 houses only support 16 units, while 4 houses with 5 population capacity would allow for having 20 units, reducing the amount of house spam in the map, both for the AI and other players.
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Thank you for the information on the type of games you play. This also help me too see where you are coming from.
If you think there is too little gold on highlands(I think the current values are fine, 600 legion per player is more than enough) the response here that would not change the amount of gold in a mine or even in a pile of mines. The response would be to add more gold mine piles on the map. So this would instead be a map balance change than a game wide change to gold mine values. This way it will not impact the need to venture out into the map.
Horse archers are one of the most gold ineffective units. The most effective units are war elephants, swordsmen and improved bowmen. The most ineffective are cavalry, horse archer and ballista. Hoplites, elephant archers and stone throwers are somewhere in the middle.
Priests are special as they can be great value(convert a single cav is 160 gold value gained) or no value at all(lose said priest without converting a gold unit.) The biggest problem for priest is the hard micro in any game of scale. They are great in small skirmishes, island fights, early bronze but very hard to micro in wide large games where they need you to be present at all sides of the map. The second is a tie between them dying to archers who have 9 range vs their 10 in bronze and macedonian resistance. Both make them very hard to use for many situations where you would otherwise want to use them. Hopefully we get rid of the macedonian resistance at some point.
Catapract/Siege are both really good and do have a role in the game at the moment. I use both regularly and I see many players use them regularly. Catapracts are used instead of Heavy Horse Archers as Yamato and instead of Scythe Chariots with Shang. Siege is commonplace in pretty much all lategame armies. The first thing most top players do when they get to iron is get catapults if they are against an archer army. The best lategame army is still a hittite elephant archer/ heavy catapult army as well. To me it seems like catapults are exactly where they should be and hold an important role in iron age armies.
Ballista are in a bad place at the moment because helepolis are really good and ballista themselves are pretty bad for iron units, so you donât really want to make ballista unless you can afford helepolis. Which means itâs a super lategame unit and rarely seen. Iâd actually rather want to see ballista as a little bit weaker bronze age unit. That has a civ balance problem as it buffs romans but thatâs another discussion.
As to what comes to your point on mass towers, they have always been counterable by mass swords/war elephants and to a point with centurions. If anything the last patch buffing towers made them more effective against all of the above. So I donât agree that siege was needed more against towers before. To be honest I am quite unsure about what this before is so if you could elaborate on that, it would be nice.
Siege is still pop-effective and cost-effective and itâs still a selling point. 250 pop cap can only fit so many units. This is a major buff in the late game to towers, siege, legion and elephants while being a massive nerf to scythe chariots.
Also good for me
Here is the tricky part, I know someone will spot this as they only measure âpureâ gold-effective, ignoring mass difficulty & counter difficulty & killing eco other than dogfight.
HHA is the most effective unit to raiding enemiesâ eco and nothing but themselves can stop them doing that, which significantly compensate their gold cost. Thatâs why I highlight they are real gold-effective
I donât mention war elephants before cuz I thought if your opponents have time and eco to mass elephants, it is probably a free win to them.
But due to one of my match (Hittlte vs Hittlte) I think your are right, they are top gold-effective as no one use their real and only counter - frontline (wall / centurion / legion / trashes) + mass priests, as mass priests is way too risky. Yea again IMBA Mecd
Only Minoans composite is considered effective, others outraged by siege are not as a few catas can hit&run all of them. So I ignore
The stage for Catapract is still limited â for battle it does counter non-horse archers and sieges, but is countered by all other strategies. for raiding it is still less effective than HA. I might be wrong and letâs see later.
As to what comes to your point on mass towers, they have always been counterable by mass swords/war elephants and to a point with centurions.
not in pop50 time 
Because we donât have enough stone, or our mass towers will be 5x and will not be overwhelmed
Anyway, increasing gold & stone will give us more exciting and versatile late game fights.
Better defense will grant the lowerhand more buffer to switch strategies, instead of hopelessness and surrender in a few seconds
I support this. I also think trees should have more wood, I donât mind if the patches are a bit smaller to compensate for this and keep the overall wood the same.
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Catapracts do counter Horse Archers now. You can still try to run forever with Heavy Horse Archers since they are faster but it isnât doable in practice as no map is large enough and open enough to do so. In small numbers it works, when you have a massive army, it doesnât anymore. The big thing here is that you already have an army of cavalry from bronze age that transforms into heavy cavalry while the horse archer mass has to build up from nothing.
Raiding is also an interesting case as horse archers(not heavy) die to towers if you use them to raid while heavy cavalry donât. It is true that horse archer(after ballistics) is a better raiding unit than the heavy cavalry they also die faster and take significantly longer to break through walls to get in in the first place. Itâs a tradeoff.
Composite bowmen are the best unit in bronze and still best in early iron after ballistics. Once swords get shield upgrades rolling they fall off. But ballistics composite bowmen beat horse archers, phalanx, ballista and trade decently vs swords and heavy cav if microed well. Catapults are the big game changer because they simply flatten ten with one shot. So is +3 armour for swords and with alchemy for academy units as well, they just fall off a cliff, even minoan ones.
Yeah melee units counter towers in pop 50 games too. The thing here is that letâs say you assume 6 villagers to build towers and 12 to gather stone for them. Thatâs 18 villagers, or in other words, 5 barracks making swords. Five swords beat two towers. Or two stables making war elephants. Those beat the towers even harder. And before the last patch towers had even less HP.
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As long as HHA clan kills 1 cav per 2 volley, it is viable, nonetheless we can have blockers as frontline to reduce cavâs damage further, and HHA is cheaper and outnumber cav.
Again HHA is not effective in dogfight as mentioned, and cav cannot stop vils building wall behind wall. I do admit they are more vulnerable.
I do fully agree compos now are great as I sometimes prefer it than CA even as Egyptian. Countered by Cata is not a shame 
towers in 50 pop calc wrongly. the 6 vils are not always building towers, you cannot count their time fully. Considering we both have ~25 pop army, u cannot assume mine did nothing
armored elephant vs tower is dirty , it is a ram rather than melee
HHA donât kill 1 cataphract per one volley. They do 8+1-3 and catapract has 276 hitpoints so you need 46 to one shot a cataphract. Thatâs not viable. The cost is nearly the same and easily ofset by the cataphract player having a bunch of cav to begin with so you are unlikely to have an advantage in numbers either.
If you include frontline units youâre talking about unit compositions when the cataphract player might as well have rearline of heavy catapults behind his units to murder all the HHA so that isnât really the point here.
As to what comes to the villagers not constantly making towers against someone who is making army, you are dead. You have to make something to fight, either army, or towers. If you are making army, you need villagers to collect resources to make army. These villagers cannot be the ones gathering stone and building towers. You canât just magically wish a tower into existence with 0 stone and 0 villagers building it. You have to collect the stone first and then build the tower. You have to pick on what you are using your villagers for.
We also cannot just assume that the enemy will sit at home with his army and do nothing. Make army -> Attack. So if you make army and they make army, you both trade army(or towers) constantly and you never reach 25 pop army(at least for long.) Thus in the case that you are building army, they are building army, you never have time for villagers to dedicate to that. Neither can you just assign them to stone and then start making towers as they attack, they donât build instantly. Even if you used all your villagers to build them, that just means you are going to miss out on the next round of production from your military buildings to reinforce because you donât have villagers collecting the necessary resources because they are building the towers. So you will have to be building towers constantly if you wish to deter their attack. Now in a real game towers canât move, so this doesnât work because they just go around but theoretically speaking.
To constantly make towers with 5 villagers, you need to collect with 12 villagers(stone mining upgrad done). The 6th one is needed because walking time is included. You can make do with 4 if you have architechture but that is still 16 villagers that could be used to fuel 4 barracks production. Which still demolishes towers.
So to conclude, 50 pop situation and towers doesnât really differ from 200 or 250 pop situation in regards to towers vs melee. The real thing that differentiates games is how the games play out. If itâs an incompetent player(AI) who will make army and then sit on it, then yes, you can make towers and that will effectively increase your force limit above the population maximum in the area the towers are placed in. Regardless of it being 50 or 250 pop cap game. If itâs someone who is going to attack with the army they made then no, you canât just assign your villagers to stone and building towers and expect to have an equal size army to defend.
Iâm not saying donât build towers. Definitely do(just not watch towers, they suck) once youâve walled off enough layers and got proper tech. But whether itâs 50 or 250 pop game, be aware that they can and will be walked over by enemy army of melee units with similar cost(unless you wall them but then again, you can just wall in any ranged unit and thatâs another discussion.)
PS. I donât mean to say cataphpracts are better than HHA. Just that in a head-to-head engagement the player with cataphracts has the advantage. Obviously Horse archer are preferred against any melee unit and cavalry are preferred vs archer units and building.
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I said per 2 volleyâŠ
I include frontline because HHA side can do it cost-effectively and time-effectively
if offensive, HHAs does have an open map to run but yes it is micro-intensive as downside; if defensive, their vils have better chance to build blockers, without saying existing blockers/buildings; as cataph is already gold heavy and melee, cata is not a good choice (unless you have heavy, but that means a huge advantage) and may hurt yourself more than foes if they know even a bit micro.
However I am not saying HHA is countering cataph, like 52/48, even though it is not cost-effective, but they may be the only choice for archer civs without good meeles
while stone is the rarest, itâs a vil time-saving resource compared to food (you need both lumberjack and farmer) which all military units require except siege and priest. In old days towers only tremble before sieges (armored ele is siege too, and Mecd centurions smash almost everything) in my memory. For multiplayer, you can wall / building before towers to render melee foes suffering path finding or cleaning blockers, and still enjoy bonus pop for either vil or military. For singleplayer, AIs always have a better eco and most time, better army.
but then again, you can just wall in any ranged unit and thatâs another discussion
Thatâs the real problem we are talking about, towers are less effective unless they got some buff or easier to access. In old days they are both cost and pop effective defense and save a lot micro as you cannot overwhelm them easily
right now towers are only effective to defend archers as pop limit is never a concern, so sad and make stone pure wall resources