ESOCommunity

Garja wrote:

umeu wrote:if u do it properly ur up by 3.45. 3.35 if you have luck with tres. obviously you don't need to send 2-3 unit shipments in a row. even 4 kanya 5v/600w variation, though stronger, is still beatable on good maps. also, if you play vs water and walls, even if its a tp map, youre 100% gonna lose by opening 4kanya BB. so that im just no sure why youre claiming that it was super dominant and OP when its just pretty clear that the dominance was a side effect from another factor, namely maps predominantly, and poor adaptation by players. even just dropping a tower in base is very effective to midgitating the 4 kanya 5 toma rush. as well as just placing a few well placed walls to block off chokes. sioux and aztecs can also kill the warhut with explorer + converts

you an open 4 kanya BB and go indus even. I used to do that vs ports. 4 kanya 5v 4v. Can always play fortress if needed but goes to show that iro really can do anything because of the early advantage.

Mitoe wrote:

ovi12 wrote:Well all of those colonial games on Alaska were india mirrors so they might as well all be F games . I guess one way to look at it is the number of games played; another is to look at what's standard to do in all the (105?) matchups. Let's see, which civs give you mostly fortress matchups? Honestly the only ones I can think of are India, Aztec, Orto, maybe Brit

I don't really understand. You mean India/Aztec/Otto/Brit are more likely to create games in which 1 or more players age? I'm not sure I would agree with that, except maybe in the case of India.

There's another thread somewhere on this forum where I did a similar analysis for ESOC Spring 2017, I think? It was mostly the same conclusion as well, I believe.

Gendarme wrote:How about just reducing the cost of crossbowmen (and perhaps pikemen)? The crossbowman is the basic unit but is despite that almost never used. Clearly, this is wrong. I honestly think this will solve many issues.

Amsel_ wrote:I honestly love RE's walls/water. I understand that water laming was OP, but I don't really like the way the ESOC patch handles it. It seems like an attempt to sterilize gameplay. Water, rushing, and booms of all kinds should be encouraged in order to get away from this semi-FF meta. I think part of the problem is that ESOC tries to balance around top-level competition, instead of just working out the kinks and making the game more fun, but still competitive. Currently it seems like anything that's strong and that isn't a semi-FF gets nerfed.

Instead of reworking water for the 20th time, why not reexamine the strength of rushes? Why not do something with the church, saloon, or livestock pen? It's disappointing how the patch has sterilized gameplay so heavily instead of adding spice and more variety.

Mitoe wrote:Another thing I've also suggested in the past to tackle this issue is to adjust Fortress politician research times.

Fast age is too difficult to punish and gives you access to Fortress age shipments and units too quickly. It takes 40 seconds to research.

On the other hand, slow age is far too slow and is very difficult to get away with in many situations. You get access to your Fortress shipments and units significantly later, and in return you receive a handful of units (sometimes very undesirable units). You clearly need to think about investing into more Colonial units while you're aging if you want to survive. Slow age takes 110 seconds to research, a whole 70 seconds longer than fast age.


I think that increasing the fast age to 50 seconds and decreasing the slow age to 100 seconds would go a long time to making the game easier to balance and also making people think twice about how they approach each situation. This gives more room for civs to punish Fortress age ups, and because slow age is more appealing than before by a factor of 20 seconds, a lot of players will inevitably pick it in situations where they shouldn't and get punished for it. Slow age also gives more options to a lot of civs who like to stay Colonial; civs like Iro and Aztec who like to use fast age to Colonial, or British, who don't have fast age, or even civs like Russia who don't really have any shadow-teching units and would continue training units in transition to Fortress anyway would like a slower politician so that they have more units overall once they are Fortress.

All of these civs would have more follow ups after initially applying Colonial pressure if they so desire. At the moment part of the reason Colonial isn't preferable is because it just doesn't have a good follow up, and this helps address that issue a little bit.

Amsel_ wrote:I honestly love RE's walls/water. I understand that water laming was OP, but I don't really like the way the ESOC patch handles it. It seems like an attempt to sterilize gameplay. Water, rushing, and booms of all kinds should be encouraged in order to get away from this semi-FF meta. I think part of the problem is that ESOC tries to balance around top-level competition, instead of just working out the kinks and making the game more fun, but still competitive. Currently it seems like anything that's strong and that isn't a semi-FF gets nerfed.

Instead of reworking water for the 20th time, why not reexamine the strength of rushes? Why not do something with the church, saloon, or livestock pen? It's disappointing how the patch has sterilized gameplay so heavily instead of adding spice and more variety.

umeu wrote:

deleted_user wrote: what made the advanced dock card viable is as @Kynesie also said that the size of the water is really small. and the faster fishingboat training thing kinda changed the meta. while you would just have 2-3 fishing boats at 5 min. now you have 8-9 fishboats to put into dock and kill caravels.

actually this is the most important part to take into consideration for the next balance change.

A) if there's more water, and the fish patches are further away from the docks, then adv dock is less problematic.
B) if you can pass docks without being in range of them (for example rapha had to hug the edge of the map, and then he was still almost in range) adv dock is also less problematic.
C) the 40% faster training on schooners needs to be tweaked.

Imo it should be something like this:

Schooners > -30 wood. (I don't think 40w fishing boats was any problem). That's it.
TAD schooners > +1 dock and +25%-40% faster training of fishing boats (numbers need to be looked at)

Possibly: docks cost 250w instead of 200.

zoom wrote:

umeu wrote:

deleted_user wrote: what made the advanced dock card viable is as @Kynesie also said that the size of the water is really small. and the faster fishingboat training thing kinda changed the meta. while you would just have 2-3 fishing boats at 5 min. now you have 8-9 fishboats to put into dock and kill caravels.

actually this is the most important part to take into consideration for the next balance change.

A) if there's more water, and the fish patches are further away from the docks, then adv dock is less problematic.
B) if you can pass docks without being in range of them (for example rapha had to hug the edge of the map, and then he was still almost in range) adv dock is also less problematic.
C) the 40% faster training on schooners needs to be tweaked.

Imo it should be something like this:

Schooners > -30 wood. (I don't think 40w fishing boats was any problem). That's it.
TAD schooners > +1 dock and +25%-40% faster training of fishing boats (numbers need to be looked at)

Possibly: docks cost 250w instead of 200.

What's wrong with Schooners? Also, do you realize EP Schooners is also a nerf to Advanced Dock?

iwillspankyou wrote:while I do think Kynesie played the games really smart, I would not like this to become the new "meta" of playing the tournament. Its kind of boring, and very time consuming.
I do think Kynesie has improved a lot since the last tournaments - and he is deserving to be in the final.

If there are to be changes to the docs, and how much the boats will cost, I hope that will also be a thing TWC civs can benefit from??
Think the suggestion by Goodspeed, that TWC could choose a card that make a doc + improve the traintime for fishing boats, sounds good?

Amsel_ wrote:I honestly love RE's walls/water. I understand that water laming was OP, but I don't really like the way the ESOC patch handles it. It seems like an attempt to sterilize gameplay. Water, rushing, and booms of all kinds should be encouraged in order to get away from this semi-FF meta. I think part of the problem is that ESOC tries to balance around top-level competition, instead of just working out the kinks and making the game more fun, but still competitive. Currently it seems like anything that's strong and that isn't a semi-FF gets nerfed.

Instead of reworking water for the 20th time, why not reexamine the strength of rushes? Why not do something with the church, saloon, or livestock pen? It's disappointing how the patch has sterilized gameplay so heavily instead of adding spice and more variety.