I used to love playing aoe3 nilla. Despite owning TAD and war chiefs I choose not to play these because I felt the simplicy and with it balance of the game got worse.
When de released ijimped over my shadow and played. While still playing mostly European civs, I was shocked by swedens insane military stats. 950 hp landknechts or the carroleans with mortar support will, it just felt op unfair to me.
In aoe 3 nilla, If I went skirms with Spanish I knew its not top tier like French, but it’s a skirm it is still good and does it job.
But then African dlc released. Again insane units stats. The neftenya ethopan skirms had like 330 hp with siege resists.
The African merc recked everything.
And the voice on the form kept growing, which asked to rework my old simple vsnilla civs to match the new civs with funky mechanics that In my opinion only serve to make games snowball and unfun. It’s power creep endstage, everyone us op in their own way.
I got the same feeling with aoe 3 de now, that I got with kesge of legends in 2014, when it just wasn’t the 2009-2010 league that I loved so much. Or with wold of wacraft when when the wrsth of the lich King released and I felt there was nothing left of vanilla.
Today I play wow classic and if I play aoe 3, it the version from 2004.
TLDR, old original civs designs I liked feel UP now, and new overcomplicated+op civ designs (like Asian civs and onwards) I rly dislike.
Because my game was performing bad after African Royals and couldn’t get achievements from XBLive either. I will reinstall after Italian launch to play the new historical battles
I agree that the simplest and most direct civilizations are usually better than the hyper-complex ones, but I don’t understand what’s wrong with the AOE: 3 WarChiefs, all in all, they were quite simple civilizations with a few additions that made them unique.
Oh I agree with you, warchef civs used to be OK. ( I also said that in my TLDR by saying Asian civs and onwards were too overloaded with gimmicks, while wsrchiefs civs came before TAD)
The relatively recent aztec rework for example is also slowly moving these civs in the “wrong” direction.
I don’t want more special cards that I can’t fit in a deck anyway. Those cards are often top or flop, either work out for an insane snowball game or fail and be useless.
Original aoe 3 Europe civs cards Ehre stuff like, +10% HP for muskets.
Japan cards already severely broke this with ashigsru cards thaz have +25% hp and bonus damage against cav in one.
And all the new civs just followed the “bad” example of TAD, overloading civ with gimmicks.
Allow me to summarize what I wanted to express earlier without deviating too much from the main topic.
The civilizations from TDA onwards maintain the basic characteristics of the franchise, but I think they have an overidentity problem, too different compared to the previous civilizations.
I stopped playing because I mainly play campaigns, but I’ve been stuck in both the Shadow campaign and in historical battles. I don’t even want to retry.
Good post the balance is pretty good for such a complex game, with some exceptions. However, unless you spend alot of time learning how to counter strats and units it could easily be overwhelming.
I’ve tried to pick up new games but I just can’t leave AoE3 for too long. They all feel shallow in comparison, though part of that may be because I understand this game much better than whatever game I’m picking up. The exception is Anno 1800 but it’s just such a time sink.
because the info about cards is not numeric, there is not a glosary inside game to see numeric info about cards.
this makes us clueless
also counter units makes a lot of people clueless too
there should b e a counter glosary inside game too.
i keep playing but there is many noob player and noob players wont improve because of bad info on cards and confusing tags on units.
So for good players is hard to withhold noob players and noob players stop playing because experienced players can offend them
I play all kinds of genres of games. RTS is my favourite genre but nowadays there aren’t many of them so I spend more time playing other games.
I also gave up on time sink games like Anno, Factorio or the Paradox games. Just don’t have the time and motivation to sink into a game like that.
Yes that’s stupid. Especially because some descriptions are just misleading.
“Greatly Increases” can mean 5% while there are other cards that improve the same stat by 20%.
I hate that in games in general. Anything less then 10% should never ever be called greatly increases.
I don’t want to have to use a Wiki to play the game.
It’s pretty simple once you get it but the game makes an awful job at explaining it.
You really only need to learn 5 core units.
Basically all other units that don’t fit into those 5 categories only have limited use in special circumstances.
But the game has bad icons for the unit types and often confusing naming. And they even left out some tags sometimes.
I liked how Starcraft 2 did it. You could get to a ingame Wiki like page that showed you which units counter that unit and what that unit counters with just one click.
AoM also has something similar.
I stopped because I didn’t like how old civs have remained almost untouched while new civs have tons of new stuff. Also new DLC civs werent attractive for me.
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