Skirm/goon is suppossed to be better than musk/huss. If it wasn't, than why would you ever age up? Advancing in age is supposed to, by design, not only give you upgrades to make units from earlier ages stronger, but also unlock new units that have some sort of technological advantage. In a mirror, the player who is an age ahead should have the advantage, as they just spent 2200 resources on aging up. Those 2200 resources mean something: they are an investment that pays off in the form of more efficient military and stronger economic potential, as well as more powerful shipments. Arguing that musk/huss is too weak and that skirm/goon is too strong is a silly argument to be having when you are comparing them against each other, as by design musk/huss is supposed to lose to and be weaker than skirm/goon. The real question should be: does aging up give too much of an advantage for how long it takes and how many resources it takes to invest? I.e, are the rewards from aging up proportional to the risk to age up.
In my mind, this is where the problem really lies. Currently, aging up with euro civs is too quick or too cheap, or just in general not enough of a risk compared to what the rewards are. If this is the case, then in my mind it is more pertinent to increase the risk to aging up then nerfing the rewards, as to me they seem fair when compared to age 2. One way to change this would be to institute the changes that mitoe proposed: changing politicians and wonders. I personally think increasing exiled prince research time from 40 seconds to 60 seconds would be a great change. I would also reduce the research time of all other fortress politicians to 100 seconds, bringing them in-line with normal age up times, and lowering the number of units some of them give (from around 700-800 resources to more like 600 resources, i.e 4 huss is now 3, 6 skirms is now 5, etc...). I might also reduce wonder build time for all asian civs as well, or increase the effect each settler has to reducing build time.
Changes such as these would do something that I think a lot of people have been indirectly talking about: making the amount of risk in aging to age 3 more proportional to the rewards that age 3 gives.
Considering what Harry was saying, relative to the stats Mitoe brought up, is that we are seeing very few colonial games between euro civs, besides russia, brits, and maybe ottoman. When 5 of the 8 most played civilizations (the euro ones) are pretty much always going to at least want to do a semi-ff or age 3 play, it skews players' interpretations of the overall-meta more towards those playstyles. What I think Harry was really complaining about is that we don't see very many games nowadays where france is doing samwise or xbow/pike stuff, germany is doing dopp/uhlan or tower rushes, spain is going musk/huss or xbow/pike, or where ports or dutch are making units other than hussars in age 2. Now, I know I don't have the data, but I think that I can say with a decent amount of certainty that playstyles such as the ones that I just listed, which used to be far more common, have grown less and less common due to influence from new maps as well as the ESOC patch.
Now, one could look at all of those compositions and see something in common, almost all of them are at least soft-countered by skirm/goon, leading a player to possibly pointing that out as the culprit. But, one can also look at the aforementioned compositions and see something else in common: high siege damage. All colonial compositions, with the exceptions of Gurkha/Zamb, xbow/huss, and axe rider/bow rider, have quite high siege damage compared to most fortress compositions. One of the things that aging up does is that it leaves you vulnerable, as you likely have fewer units than your opponent. The beauty of this is that if the colonial player can win a fight while their opponent is still aging, they now have a lot of siege potential that can be used to get an advantage over their opponent. In my mind, the current problem in the meta is that aging up is too easy, and the timing window where the colonial player can use their mass and siege advantage is wicked small. This means that some of the main advantages of staying colonial instead of aging are nullified, and thus there is often times a greater risk in staying age 2 than aging up to age 3. This disparity, at least in my mind, has been the driving force in creating the current quasi-nr10 meta in a lot of european and non-euro matchups, and is why we see less and less colonial play from european civs, as it is just too easy to get to age 3. The high-resource EP maps and some of the EP changes to aggressive colonial play have only exasperated this, as players are now almost always able to not leave their base until the eleven to twelve-minute mark.
So, in conclusion, I think that somehow the risk involved in advancing to age 3 needs to be increased, whether that is through increasing the research time of exiled prince, increasing the actual cost of aging up, or some other change.
somppukunkku wrote:This is not a fucking discogame.
Aging up gives you stronger better cards. Unlocks more tech. And gives you a more well rounded composition. Thats more than enough. Goons and skirs have shadow tech as well. Honestly, this wouldnt even be an issue if cav pathing wasnt so bad, and auto siege didnt exist.
I think @Darwin_ and @Mitoe made the most important point. It is actually a discussion about ageing up and the costs/risks involved with ageing up. In an equal match-up the stakes should be high, but the risk as well. How to balance that is the more important question. The fact that Skirm/Goon is a hard counter to Musk/Huss is fine and definitely an original design choice.
@deleted_user2 and @momuuu I miss a) constructiveness and b) you ignore the role the maps play. The maps have a bigger impact than a 10 HP nerf for Sepoys. Even on RE the balance would be massiviely shifted with the first, high-resource maps from EP. It is not the fault of the DevTeam if the low-resource maps get vetoed all the time.
Actually I've argued from time to time that I'd like to see TPs nerfed to make up for the fact that maps are higher on resources so that the style of RE is maintained. I've also argued a few times that a bunch of maps spawn with too many hunts from time to time and I've recently expressed feedback that there are very few medium resource maps (I think Baja California would be the perfect medium resource map); There are only weird medium-low resource maps, very few standard ones. If they're low resource they're often extremely low resource (Tassili for example), or no TP (Pampas, Cascade Range) or very non standard (Klondike with 5 TPs). Where is the 3 TP line (either arkansas or kamchatke style) standard medium resource map where you will almsot never have 3 safe large hunts and for sure never 4 safe hunts? Only a few maps approximate these conditions, while there are tons of unstandard maps or "standard" maps with no resources at all.
@momuuu I think you do have a good point. Personally I would love to see around 3 new or updated maps to be like that, maybe through rebalancing existing RE maps (New England, Mongolia, and Silk road come to mind as good templates for standard, medium-resource maps).
However, regardless of new maps, I still think that the points Mitoe and I have made are still valid when it comes to aging up. Maps are great a tool for balancing, but can be inexact and severe sometimes, while actual changes to numbers and other game elements is much more precise in my mind. Partly I think this because most of the issues I see with the strength of fortress play is that exiled prince is just too fast, a problem that you can never really fix with maps.
somppukunkku wrote:This is not a fucking discogame.
I dont mind semi FF stuff much at all, I mind passiveness. You boom up to 80 army or sth without actually really interacting much and then you have one big fight that determines all. That's all caused by the maps. Just now I played a game against a manor booming british player and the guy have hunts till the 13th minute that I couldn't safely pressure. It's boring, and EP doesn't try to fix that. On the contrary, the rushes that could actually interact before 10 minutes have just been nuked this patch.
Jerom wrote:Actually I've argued from time to time that I'd like to see TPs nerfed to make up for the fact that maps are higher on resources so that the style of RE is maintained. I've also argued a few times that a bunch of maps spawn with too many hunts from time to time and I've recently expressed feedback that there are very few medium resource maps (I think Baja California would be the perfect medium resource map); There are only weird medium-low resource maps, very few standard ones. If they're low resource they're often extremely low resource (Tassili for example), or no TP (Pampas, Cascade Range) or very non standard (Klondike with 5 TPs). Where is the 3 TP line (either arkansas or kamchatke style) standard medium resource map where you will almsot never have 3 safe large hunts and for sure never 4 safe hunts? Only a few maps approximate these conditions, while there are tons of unstandard maps or "standard" maps with no resources at all.
I appreciate your critical spirit but this is exactly why not everyone can balance the game. You simply lack the knowledge to put things in perspective. Tassili and Pampas Sierras are not low hunt maps, let alone extremely. After several fixes CR has in fact more hunts (and berries) than Baja California. And like you many others I believe. And if experience isn't enough to draw conclusions there is even a spreadsheet with actual map stats to make comparisons
HorseWalker wrote:> tfw garja claims someone else lacks the knowledge to put things in perspective
you deleted your old acccount and made a new one ?
breeze wrote:
they cant even guess how much f***ing piece of stupid retarded they look they are trying to give lesson to people who are over pr35 and know the best mu. im pretty sure that we need a page that only pr30+ post and then we could have a nice discussins.
To see a world in a grain of saind, A heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of you hand, And eternity in an hour
- William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Peshmerga12 
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