For AoE2 this is an understatement. One Castle can hold an entire army by itself and normal units take ages to kill a stone wall.
I think AoE2 have the strongest defences in RTS. (and ironically the basic tower is weak).
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If you donāt need siege to siege, there is no siegeā¦ haha 
But yes, if some dudes throwing axes melt the majestic tile table walls of atlantis in seconds thereās something wrong i guess
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I think you have to start asking yourself some questions:
Is it true that all players should be listened to from the lowest level to the highest level?
- I say yes.
That means that anyone who says, for example, āWalls weakā āNorse opā āPoseidon OPā should be right?
- Not necessarily.
Who should be listened to the most?
- The one who gives the best arguments with solid evidence.
Who are the ones who give the best arguments with the strongest evidence?
- A part of the high level players (some make content and give visibility to the game), technical players and sometime low level players who are being oppressed by some particular strategy.
Iām no longer talking about design (which is another topic), but that the balance must go from top to bottom, taking into account the biases of the players.
When a player says āThis is OP/weakā he/she has to ask him/herself 3 questions:
- Is it really fair?
- By changing things in my game and improving my skill can I win against āOPā strategy or play with a seemingly weak strategy?
- If it is unfair, what needs to be changed?
I see that gods like Freyr or Gaia at medium/low levels donāt have bad WR, then there are defensive civilizations that donāt do their job badly.
Even outside of balance itself, why would AoM Retold have to follow a metagame like AoE2 or AoE4?
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An issue with Retold is that thereās not enough QoL for new players getting into multiplayer. There are no build order guides or tutorials that teach players how to get started. Many people vastly overestimate how difficult RTS games are to learn, in many ways Retold is easier than others. There needs to be way more resources for players to learn the multiplayer mode within the game, so that itās not a requirement to look at external sources for information.
Another huge issue is how inefficient the matchmaker is at placing players at the proper rating. Players are often matched unevenly for too many consecutive games. This is an issue in AoE 2 and AoE 4 as well.
I have played many RTS games and MOBAs; I can assure you that DOTA 2 is far more complex than AoM in terms of strategy and game mechanics. Guess what? DOTA 2 has 100x the playerbase of Retold. Itās just that Retold multiplayer feels less approachable than DOTA 2.
Thousands of players who purchased Retold are missing out on one of the best parts of the game. Multiplayer has endless replayability essentially, but unfortunately many players are confused and misunderstand it.
With regard to balance. Itās fine to prefer a certain way to play, such as turtling with walls and towers, but balancing the game towards those playstyles has ramifications. People who understand and play Retold at a high level know that walls, towers, and buildings really arenāt too weak at all, and that buffing them would actually limit a lot of the potential gameplay options. Ultimately, you have to balance a game with everyone in mind, but there are other ways to castaway the stigma that keeps people from jumping into multiplayer in Retold. So many people donāt realize what they are missing.
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Defensive fortifications being weak is an aoe3 problem also. If you donāt need siege to take down fortifications then siege is functionally useless.
What I propose is only those units and myth units that are large like the giants and colossus have bonus damage against fortifications, the rest of the units should get heavily nerfed dealing damage to buildings.
Fire arrows should allow archers to do bonus damage to regular wood buildings though.
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I remember walls and towers and fortress-type buildings to be stronger in the original AoM and EE, but that may just be mandela effect. But thatās not why I originally suggested a buff.
I suggested it to go along a pop-increase, specifically for armies, so a maxed out army doesnāt have to be 45 individual units or less. This pop increase is frequently suggested by several people on this forum, and while they see it as more important than I do, I canāt say that I disagree with the idea itself.
If you can put together an army of 100 - 150 individual units, and attack a base with current defenses, even when fully upgraded and built up to the build limit, those buildings might just as well be tissue paper, even if the units are all hoplites/berserkir/murmillos/spearmen.
This is good, but if there is a āstone resourceā to limit how many castles you can make, and long-range siege options. Fortress spams in ranked EE werenāt that fun to deal with 
.
I would also tone down God Powers a bit. People can feel demoralized when they feel the game was won by extreme power spikes (Ancestors+Eclipse, Earthquake, etc), instead of prolonged high-quality RTS gameplay (raiding, good macro/micro, etc.).
This!
The game has siege units but they are currently rarely needed.
In AoE3 I think that is less of an issue because of the setting.
I think it should be done the other way round.
Make Walls and Towers (but not Fortresses and TCs) stronger but buff siege units equally. This way they are becoming more needed to brake fortifications.
Towers got their damage halved but their HP increased by 50%.
Fortresses also do less damage but itās less dramatic.
I wish AoM had stone. That is one of the things I suggested for AoMR long before release.
I think Fortresses should not be buffed, they are good enough. Training powerful units, having high HP and being able to attack are 3 very good thing in one.
I would do 4 things:
- Increase Tower attack by 50%
- Allow Wall Connectors to be converted into Towers
- Increase Wall HP by 50%
- Give Siege weapons a bonus of +100% vs. walls before Engineers on top of the Engineers bonus
Now Siege weapons deal +33% more damage vs. walls before Engineers and exactly the same after.
Walls are only buffed against none Siege units but are a little weaker against Siege units.
Siege units are also practically unchanged against Towers because they take little to no damage from them anyway.
Getting though late game defences would not get any harder but it will prevent based from just being overrun by a hand full of Infantry in the early game.
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I really believe that many new players in the first place didnt know that AoM is in fact a RTS game until they realized āThis is not the game I was expecting to playā
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Making it safer to assault the wall in front of the tower, and running past the tower the preferable option over tearing it down.
1-FIRST of all, that change is not worth it. Towers are damage-dealing buildings; you want them to deal damage. If you reduce their damage by 50% and increase their health by 50%, itās a BIG nerf.
2-SECOND, they reduced the damage by more than half. In Tier 2, towers deal only 44% of the damage compared to AoM Classic (and in the next tiers, this difference increases even more).
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You see tons of walls, towers, fortresses, and siege weapons all the time at high level play. The reason they are so commonly used is because they are effective. A lot of players just donāt understand how or when to use them apparently. It seems like many people just want to place a bunch of walls and towers without any planning and just turtle. Thatās just not what AoM is about.
Apparently, this is liked by the community (at least in Age 2). They like that stone walls are nearly indestructible in Feudal Age, and then Castles in Castle Age, etc. Maps like Arena are very popular, and agressive-play changes not so much (like weaker buildings).
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Besides, unlike in AOE 2, in age of mythology, these walls do have counters that allows one to deal with them in the second age. Forest fire, undermine, shifting sandsā¦ the problem for alot of people is that games are just a little too fast, which is then coupled with the fact that the game currently HEAVILY favors rushing, which means that aside from Poseidon (who is himself good at rushing) and Gaia, all the top 5 gods are Norse.
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Why does Rush benefit more than Turtle or Boom, because of the defensive buildings or because of the Gods? Maybe we are not raising the possibility that Norse is somewhat oppressive at medium/low levels (just like Poseidon and the Centaur) and thatās why the metagame is like that.
There are many powers, updatesā¦ giving by gods that would boost turtling.
But without defensive buildings, turtling doesnāt exist. Turtling is based on the advantage that defensive buildings offer compared to units in terms of (cost-effectiveness) to gain an significant advantage by fighting within the base.
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La pregunta es: ĀæExiste la ventaja del defensor en este juego cuando nadie boomea?
El debate de los edificios defensivos da para mucho. Hay gente que no quiere que esto sea un AoE2-AoE4 donde se beneficia mƔs al defensor de lo que se debe.
La ligera ventaja que te da el centro urbano y ya. Pero anda que no hay Angeltrillis de la vida metiĆ©ndose con los arqueros por mitad de la base enemiga sin que les importe nada, apenas hay disuasiĆ³n.
Yo no veo debate, el juego ha de estar balanceado y quizƔs AoE4 peca de lo contrario, de ser demasiado defensivo. Pero los edificios en AoM ya eran bastante fƔciles de destruir antes.
Players will be back. Im not worried. They did a good job with this one
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They will come back only to leave again. AoM is going to be another AoE3 2.0, or even smaller, if things donāt change