So after the new fortification patch which changed a lot of things. What do you guys think of the pacing of the game?
I only play on team games and so far I like the new patch. But the villager train time reduction I feel like has turned the games a little bit slower. At first I was a fan of it because coming from AoE 4 with 20s villager train time I was having a hard time managing all these villagers in AoM. So train time reduction kind of helped managing my macro.
But I feel like there is no point in staying in Age 2 in AoM. You have to age up to at least age 3 in order to have an army with decent destruction power and stamina to hold on to TC fire.
What do you guys think? I would rather the games be a little bit faster tbh.
They ruined the game. If a teammate loses four villagers, they’ll leave the game because it’s very difficult to recover the economy. The patch only benefits Kronos, since he can rush and move buildings at the start of the game. In short, the patch was only created to benefit the Atlanteans, primarily Kronos. For that reason, Kronos is completely broken.
Overall the patches ended up rewarding rushes and aggressive play more, towers are now harder to upgrades, killing a villager hurts more since it takes longer to replace, TCs have been nerfed, fortresses take forever to build. So if you don’t plan on rushing you should get to age3 asap to have proper defensive buildings.
Overall i don’t like it, since in the late game defensive buildings don’t really make much difference due to siege weapons. I hardly find myself upgrading the fortresses.
The building upgrades in TC are now pretty mandatory to survive the buffed siege weapons.
They went the wrong direction in the 2nd patch.
First for 1 vs 1:
IMO, the initial fortification patch went a bit overboard with the buillding buffs. Defending was already convenient, the 4 starting towers protected by tc fire made the base very hard to push against in classical due to no siege. It shifted the balance a lot in favor of civ with decent meants of heroic siege (greek, eggy and china) and makde it worse for the civs that didnt (norse and specially atty). It allowed for some very strong timing attacks with naked age ups which we saw on the mythic wars tourney.
The second patch tried to fix many of the first ones shortcomings without going back on their (in my opinion) initial mistake), tc less range so it doesnt auto protect the towers. raiding is now again on the table which i did like, theres still issues regarding the siege difference but its been reduced. The villager change… personally i liked faster paced games but i get the desire other people had for a slower approaach, specially lower apm players that strugggle to fend off aggresion and woudl rather static defenses do the joib on their own for them. It doesnt feel very impactful, thou it did make 2 tc play a lot stronger.
Now for team games:
On open maps Odin stack and mobility comps are insane, raiding is free and anytime you join a 1600+ tg team is odin or another freya norse god + another high mobility god because how strong it is, the villager change is felt more here since loosing villagers is harsher and defending coordinated 2v1´s is hard and the uber towers that were initially placed kinda did help mitigate that and now its no the case.
On closed maps it feels better, more chances to feel rewarded for building a decent protected base. on the other hand, now if you get the building ball going its very hard for some civs to do anything about it. Theres some tower spam that is simpy unfair for some civs to deal with, the damage is insane and i wonder if any of the players that wanted the fortification buffs have reached the level to play against it.
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I don’t like the increase to villagers train time.
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I’m not sure about that… I feel like early classical age rushes are useless especially in team games. Age 2 armies are just so vulnerable to TC fire that you need to sacrifice a lot of army in order to take down a TC.
I tried many times after the patch to go full harass single TC. My subjective experience was that going one TC in team games is a massive mistake. You might get 4 or 5 villager kills but it is very difficult to harass 2 people especially if they have 2 or 3 spearmen. Now granted that Odin has better Raiding cavalry (I mainly play loki or freyr) but still I feel like if you go 1 TC in order to start raiding you will fall behind.
With that being said I just played a match in which an Odin player on our team carried the entire team with his raids. He was raiding the entire enemy team in a 4v4. Now I don’t know if he went 1 TC or not cause he was very far away from me but damn was he good.
But I think he either got lucky or he was a damn beast.
Anyways, Please also add your opinion about new villager train times. Also I want to add I think changing such a crucial thing (villager training time) without extensive public testing at first was not the right move to make. Specially considering that the game is in a very critical spot at the moment.
If you go solo maybe, and big maybe, because even then you simply move on to another player. Just idling economy while your teamates grow is big on itself, you are hurting your eco to do the same to 2-3-4 players. Its very strong when its more than 1 player coordinating raids. Its very apm taxing to defend 2 spots for asingle person and its bound to get pick offs. You can either get a tc after doing enough damage or better yet go heroic and push for the kill.
I dont mind much of it really, a bit of change in the BO and thats about it for 1vs1. I personally liked faster paced games but its fine either way, its simply worse in tgs due to the current meta and how stronger ti became.
You don’t need to take down the TC. The objective is to kill villagers because after the train time nerf it takes longer to recover. If you kill 2-3 villagers the player is essentially out of the game.
I do agree but that only is true If your pocket knows how to boom properly and knows how to play. 90% of the games the pocket just resigns at the sign of slightest inconvinience. I tried going heroic with 1 TC I felt like I just don’t have the economy to finish the guy off. Also it should be noted that raiding in AoM is just very difficult for me. I could easily raid 2-3 people in AoEIV but I don’t know why I just can’t raid anything in AoM it requires way too much APM for me.
Also of point, by the time you raid the first guy and reach the second guy, usually the second guy has his second TC up, which essentially puts you on a timer (Which is a feeling I hate so much).
but also if you lose 2 units you fall so much behind specially if some one on the enemy team has a second TC.
Fair enough, i guess we are coming from different experiences. I do see how uncoordinated allies would waste your efforts. Guess me coming from not playing much with random people on my teams and mostly facing also coordinated groups gives a different perspective.
You can def all in some1 and finish him off in a TG, specially if he has similar allies to yours, the only downside is when their allies are actually helpul and yours arent.
You are looking at it from a 1v1 perspective. “You” are on a timer if it was just the 2 of you. When you have allies (again, useful ones). He cant keep being naked tc or even 3 tc, he will have to either wall, tower uograde, make units and that is gonna set him behind your ally. Thats why i said traiding your eco to weaken 2-3-4 enemies. Theres more to getting an edge than village kills, simply iddling his economy, have him spend his resources elsewhere will help a lot.
AOM is big on timings and when some civs get the ball going they carry hard and thats where the strategy comes into play.
It is kinda true, 4 free towers in aom + a more closed up based most of the time is quite the barain compare to how open your base is in AOE games, at least at the early stages of the game. Which is why it was wild to me such a big buff in fortifications to begin with.
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Yea I see your point. you are right. But I still think the increase in villager train time just increased the game lengths needlessly.
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Not really, units training time remains largely the same, but the vilager time got a serious nerf, and really the only way to recover is to get a 2nd TC but TCs also got nerfed so while they take more time to destroy their range nerf makes them less important at zone control (which i think it’s a mistake from the dev perspective) and you can idle more vilagers.
A 2nd TC is almost always a good attack target.
The range nerf allows some raiding, previously the tc covered the towers, meaning theres no safe spot to take them out without being under tc fire. Now its not the case.
The game is awful and indefensible. The patch completely ruined the game. Those who defend it are only players who play 3 vs 1 with pre-made teams. These types of players always ask to be carried and are incapable of seeing the current state of the game. They only defend the patch because otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to win a single match.
Wouldnt going 3 vs 1 work better when there was no buff to defensive builldings? What you say contradicts itself.
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This wasn’t necessary when the same patch nerfed the cost of upgrading towers.
What wasent necessary?
The villager creation time is incredibly slow; it’s so slow that it makes the game boring to play. I don’t even want to play anymore. I want to uninstall the game and forget it ever existed. The current gameplay experience is completely horrendous, or rather, horrible and frustrating, because the opponents, “premade teams,” agree to attack you 3 against 1, they eliminate a few of your villagers, and you lose in 6 minutes. I only play this game because I’m fond of the Extended Edition since it was the first game I ever played. But if it were up to me, I would never play AOM Retold again because the game experience is too frustrating. Villagers are created so slowly that you need more than 6 or 7 TCs to play normally.
nerfing the TC range.
Literally nobody asked for it.
It is just shabby balancing on the devs part, doing too many big changes at the same time.
The towers got a massive buff, alongside buildings in general (hack armor buff across the board for all buildings was a huge change that wasn’t properly tested).
Then the next patch they were all surprised pikachu that buildings were too hard to deal with, and made one of the worst decisions ever by nerfing TC and buffing fortresses even more.
What they should have done is either buff towers in isolation or buff the hack armor of buildings in isolation. But not both at the same time.
But then again this game has had the same bugs since beta days and nobody in the dev team seems to care.
Then the completely uncalled for nerf to villager time was added on top of all those game breaking changes.
Ohh i see. I agree with most of what you say. Its weird they swing too hard of buffs and nerfs and then surpirse something is either insane or useless.
Expect it was proposed on the balance server, and it was fairly well supported. And it also makes sense, at least in my opinion. Calv units aside that just sprint past anything. You couldnt realy slow push a base without siege or outnumbering by a lot. Towers where protected by tc fire on most map spawns, meaning you could no longer wack them with a couple of infantry units to take them down and slowly reduce your opponents
defenses unless you could either do it quickly or heal your way through it or simply take the unit losses in the process.
Even if this is true they are still releasing balance patches frequently, and are getting feedback. I myself have posted issues on th serve which have gotten adresssed so they def do listen. Its hard to please everyone and balancing is not as easy as it seems but i do get how it can feel like the half ass it to some people.
This one i do not know where it came from but well, we adapted around it i guess.