Why are the buildings so spread out?

That is true but that’s a separate thing. I’m talking about the amount of map that the current camera setting is encompassing.
Having to adjust the camera more frequently than it is needed is just pointless busy work and has nothing to do with strategy or skill- with building size, required spread forced by things like terrain (existing resources) and things like farms there is only so much you can do with squeezing building without making everything a giant mess.

It’s a step back to the days of 800x600 resolutions. Strategic placing of building, proper map analysis etc. is important but that’s the separate thing. There is a good thread somewhere on this forum with screenshots using TCs. AoE2 and 3 camera make it possible to fit like 7,5 TCs. IVs- 4,5 iirc.

It results in less smooth gameplay where you’re wasting time panning the camera instead of micromanaging vills and commanding troops and planning moves.
It’s an artificial and super lazy way to add ‘depth’ to gameplay.

Like the concept of forcing 50 FOV is making games more ‘scary’ because players have to constantly move it while searching for threats. It’s cheap and lazy. There were polls where like 70-80% of people voted for it to change.

In DEs camera is unlocked (in set range) and you can adjust is as you want.
Even in trailers they use higher value to present battles in an attractive way. It feels much better that way.

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I Loved to literaly build a castle whit my city and maze building.

I build my wall in ‘W’ formation, to srhink enemy mass in to a line and to force enemy units to circle the wall, when the wall is breached.

My buildings was used like last wall of defence and i used area siege weapon to just kill incoming force, at litle pace.

Like this, i could use litle units for defance and focus on invading the enemy base and building.

The enemy had the choice to come back late at his base and lose economy, or build a new base at the place of my capitol, if he did not forget to bring villager in his army or to replace the dead villager i killed whit my cavalery, at is close secondary military base.

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I totally agree with Andy here, I think the decision to remove the ability to block with buildings as a strategy is a bad design choice. Now buildings aren’t that important anymore, you’d just place most of them wherever, and your city also looks uglier spread around aimlessly like that. Buildings shouldn’t have had built in free space around them.
It’s a feature that worked so well in AoE2 and SC2, my favourite and most played RTS games. I was dissapointed to see it gone and was hoping it would be for a greater good, but I’m afraid it’s not.

I think they made this decision solely to force people use walls more and use them properly, but I don’t see how that translates as well into gameplay since it killed and entire strategic layer for the game.

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spread out buildings allows every map to be different

when you can turn buildings into walls, all the land maps became quite similar/repetitive and we had to resort to extreme measures to differentiate open maps from closed ones

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how it would be different?
U will place the same building every game. They just wont block anything.

And will do same walling with real walls. Until walls nerfed completely.

But i dont care about walling with building, it’s new game and it’s their design which can have place.

But dissapointed that quick wont be a thing. it was awesome to watch pros doing it.

Speaking with AOE2 in mind, I think it’s quite the opposite:
Now you can only wall with walls/palisades… what inevitably influences the map design negatively: The designer has to provide/avoid map features that suit wall building to allow/prevent walling playstyles (e.g. forest patches around the starting location or the amount and placement of cliffs). So it would lead to more similar maps overall.

What extreme measurements?
I can remember enough pro games on open maps where a player went for an open style base. It comes with it’s own benefits (less vil idle by walking around and stuffing palisades/buildings into every gap) and adds a risk/reward decision (with the walled player often ending up trapped inside and loosing out on map vision and control).

It’s sad to see such a feature removed without a new one added in exchange.

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There are some assumptions made here. For example, whats stopping you from building a wall next to a tree patch? You would think that walls are intended to close off choke points like cliffs as well, I don’t see them balancing the game away from walls as they’ve put a lot of focus on them.

As we saw in the trailers, buildings look like they can be easily torched and set on fire by enemies. So even if we would be able to wall with buildings close together, they’d ultimately be kinda bad at their job.

Whereas in Aoe2 walling with buildings is kind of viable as most units don’t do much damage to buildings except for siege. And most siege is only available at castle age.

Yeah, but now you will know it is walls or nothing. Reducing a lot of variables.
In AOE2, a player could be fully walled but could optimize it: Including a lot of buildings which he needs anyway and avoid palisades.
Or have an inner ring or flow-controlling building-walls that lead to TCs/Towers/Castles/Quickwall-Chokepoints.
it’s just a heap of strategy and tactics that get cut out with no real alternative. Makes the way cities grow much more arbitrary.

Not that the palisades seem to resist any better, but yeah. Overall looks more like in AOE3 where buildings fall really fast to torching.

There are other points but NDA says no :[

yeah exactly, this is a bit of an NDA locked topic unfortunately.

we had to paint map scripts with literal unbuildable terrain just to be able to have truly open maps in aoe2

or we had to play on the dumbed down ladder version of that where they put so little wood on the map or put it so far away or put it on water. the balance becomes ridiculous on those versions

all the building-walling turned maps that were supposed to be open (eg. arabia) into the same turtling gameplay that other maps offered. instead if you get a wide range of wallability, then it lets each map actually feel different/special

theoretically, you would think there is some strategy with building-walling. but when it was happening in 95% of open maps and even more often in more closed maps, it got ridiculous

anyways, the reason they are doing the building-spacing thing is probably to get rid of foundation-blocking / quick-walling. it’s dumb to have hordes of units just get blocked because a lone villager placed a foundation and then got the resources back when they deleted it

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Are you talking about personal games with buddies here? Ranked? Skirmish against AI? In pro matches walling really isn’t that big a deal and comes with mentioned drawbacks for the walled-in person.
As soon as trebs show up, counter measures are needed and force the passive player to act. So turtling really shouldn’t be an issue in AOE2.

I totally get that. I like the skill involved in quickwalling (especially when watching it in pro matches), but also understand that it’s kinda cheesy.
The easy solution though would be to just make a foundation not block units until its built (100%). So that alone does not justify removing the whole walling system.

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i’m talking about high-level PvP

even pro matches on the smallest map size got ruined because the maps that were supposed to be on the faster side also turned into full-population imperial age games. and this was after they had already nerfed walls like 5 different times

starcraft wallability works because there are flying units to circumvent that. aoe can’t have that for obvious reasons, so building-blocking will kill map diversity if they put it in

not having building-blocking allows there to be both fast maps AND slow maps instead of just different types of slow maps. i’m not saying fast games or slow games are better, but i prefer the full range instead of a limited range

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First of all:
house walling is a big problem for aoe2.
removing house walling at least controversial decision.

Are u pro urself, or referring to pro words? I remember no one Pro who would not agree with the statement “house walling is too strong”. (could referer to Nili or Vinch they mentioned their positions.)

walling killing not imp, but feodal age. ppl can put a market behind walls and go FC. always 3-4 layers of houses in feudal age.

but there were other solutions: for example do less HP for houses etc.
U wont to build forward buildings if they could be destroyed easily.

Or implement “fire option” → houses would ignight if neighbour house on fire.

The real “problem”(at least in my opinion), that we cant control the game, the cant build building where we want. We have to live with grid layout. And if feels like “mobile farm game” there are 30x30 field and u building farms.

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as a player of the later age games, I am continually heartbroken when I see weird quirks about aoe2 getting addressed in hamfisted ways in 2021. there’s a million ways to solve quick-walling without this nonsense. I thought we were getting a sequel that built from the entire corpus of the franchise. maybe one day.

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Oh it surely is. You basically can’t get in in feudal. I’m just arguing that it comes with drawbacks (loss in map control til the turtler has enough army) and it has become a strategy in that game. Seeing it completely removed without offering something new is what I have a problem with. It’s reducing depth.

Wanting to reduce the viability of that strategy is a different discussion. As you say, they could reduce the building HP or extend the fire element into something more relevant:

I meant that even in the worst case (some multi-layer-wall noob post-imp match) the treb (or cannon) is the ultimate equalizer that forces an engagement in AOE2. You can never loose to pure passive defenses since you outrange them.
It was just an argument against the idea that walling itself was an unsolvable problem in AOE2. It just shifts the time of engagement (in this case out of feudal and into castle age).

Agreed. I also don’t understand the combination of free-angle wall placement and fixed-grid building placement. Either one or the other, so why not like in AOM/AOE3?