Wonder bonus for Conquest

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Wonders are designed to brake a stalemate in a very long running game, especially a team game.
But winning with wonders doesn’t feel rewarding for many people and loosing because of one feels frustrating.
In a 1v1, especially on an open map, you will basically never have to chance to build one anyway but in a team game on a closed map it is often relatively easy to just turtle and build one wonder together.

What if there was an option (if that is enabled for ranked team games is a different discussion) for a wonder to give a bonus that can help you turn around a match instead of just directly winning it.

The game Empire Earth (which was made by some of the original AoE1 developers) had a few different wonders that everyone could build and each of them had a unique effect:

  • revealing all buildings
  • all units slowly heal passively
  • redistribute population (you get 20% more population and the enemy gets 20% less)
  • reveal a large area of water
  • double HP for towers and walls
  • Priest can convert groups of people

In team games without wonder victory it was often very advantageous to build some wonders to get the bonuses for your team.

There is 4 options for AoE2.

  • All wonders have the same bonus(es)
  • Every civilisation has a unique bonus(es)
  • Regional bonuses (multiple civilisations share the same bonus)
  • Some bonus(es) are shared between all civilisations and some are unique

The advantage of all having the same bonus is simply balance. Also coming up with unique bonuses for all civilisations is not easy, we are running out of possible bonuses already anyway.
But having unique bonuses is obviously a cool thing. And we like cool things, don’t we.

Possible Generic bonus

  • x% higher population limit
  • x% higher attack for all units
  • reveal all enemy buildings
  • all units regenerate x HP/second
  • automatically produces your unique unit for free (speed depends on cost)
  • Aura around the wonder that gives some buff

The bonus should give you an offensive bonus that can help you win a game and push though a stalemate

Bad bonuses

  • x% more HP for Buildings/Walls/Towers/Castles
  • x Gold/minute (or even worse Stone)
  • x% higher resource collection

We don’t want the game to become even more of a stalemate by making defences stronger. Better economy is also a bad bonus for the super late game since you will likely already have a stable trade line going on with your allies.

Civilisation specific bonuses

This one is hard because half of the wonders are religious buildings (Churches, Mosques, Temples, etc.).

Regional bonuses

This would be the easier solution. Franks, Teutons and Britons could all have the same bonus because they all have a Church as Wonder.
But it some cases it would be hard to find similar civilisations, for example the Mongols are the only ones with a tent as a wonder.

AoE4 Landmark bonuses

A lot of AoE4 landmarks have bonuses that can’t really be applied here.
Getting a discount on technologies, letting you train Longbows faster or something like that doesn’t make sense for a very late game building.
A lot of landmarks are simply just better Castles, Town Centres or Monasteries.
Some of them give you new unique units but that doesn’t really fit into AoE2 either.

tl;dr:
This is not for ranked 1v1.
Mostly for team games.
Probably not for ranked team games.

3 Likes
2

Wonders should simply function the same as king of the hill wonders and grant you that little trickle of 1 gold/wood/stone/food per second, then they would be worth under conquest conditions in some very drawn out games, maybe like a few in thousand games. Still will remain mostly useless due to the vast investment in terms of time and resources, but they will have their tiny niche.

Dont worry too much about the small gold or stone trickle, afterall they cost 1k gold and stone, you gotta need some 2 hour no rush games so they become a problematic. Still way more conservative than gaining 20% pop

3

I don’t like a simple resource trickle for 2 reasons:

  • 1 Gold per second is almost worthless in a team game
  • Food and Wood trickle is indirectly just a population bonus because you need less villagers
  • Giving people more Stone just more the game draw out even longer
  • It would have almost 17 minutes return of investment time that doesn’t help ending log games

Giving players +10% population (20% is a little much) would allow them to have a slightly bigger army and therefor potentially overpowering the enemy team and forcing a long game to end.
The bonus could stack, allowing you to get +10% for each wonder you build (calculated from the base value) which would mean +20 population for each wonder in a normal game.
That is the same population as a Feitoria costs.

4

I already implemented something similar in my mod. Each civ has a different wonder bonus that gives them a super buff to their units or eco to help close out the game. In addition I also made it so that there was only 1 small location on the scenario maps I made where you could build a wonder which was typically in the middle so that it forced a significant amount of map control to execute. I also turned on wonder victory. The main flaw with wonders in the design of AOE2 is that it rewards turtling players due to the high amount of value defensive structures provide vs the cost and timing of their counters. I feel like this solution I devised is the best option since it combines the wonder victory with the shrine idea they attempted in AOE4, but has more emphasis on economy macro and map control.

5

they gotta first reduce wonder build time for it to be any worth. taking 50 vills and still taking something like 10+ mins in game time to build would render all pointless.

personally i wouldnt give them any bonus but jsut reduce the build time and reduce the countdown win time condition (they can keep the build time and coundown the same in existing scenarios with triggers of course).

6

That’s the point, they are a big investment in resources and villager time.

But wonders are already too good in team games on closed maps.
It’s easy to just park the villagers of on of 4 players on a wonder for 5 minutes and it’s basically a free win. In most cases the enemy can’t kill it in time. Delaying the destruction of a wonder isn’t that hard.

Yes obviously no one will win a 1v1 on Arabia with a wonder but that’s ok.

1 Like
7

I think another option is allowing wonders to break stalemates but make them only be available to be built in the middle od tge map

8

they should put the huns increase wonder wintime back int othe tech. been missing it

9

I think that would be an interesting new gamemode.

They never removed that effect from Atheism, or what tech are you talking about?

10

ops it was the spie discount that was removed then, my mistake