Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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United States of America EagleRunner
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Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by EagleRunner »

Hi all, I'm a new ESOC member. Been playing AOE games for over 20 years. Currently getting back into AOE3 after 8-year hiatus. I absolutely love what ESOC is doing for the community, and I've never had more fun playing AOE. Well done!

As others have pointed out at various places on the forums, one of the biggest problems with AOE3 community is lack of clear, easy-to-find resources and guides for new players. Coming back to the game after a while, I had to search through years of ESOC/Heavengamesforum posts, Reddit posts, and Youtube videos to find good basic strategy guides. (@Goodspeed 's famous guide is helpful but required me to be familiar with a lot of jargon and basic game concepts to even be understandable.)

The most difficult part of this search was finding decklists used by great players. I often had to screenshot youtube videos when they flash onto the decks for several seconds. But even then, there's often no explanation of why certain cards were included or excluded. It seems like most casters and players just expect that their readers/viewers understand deckbuilding strategy. (One notable exception is @SamuraiRevolution 's recent video on Chinese deckbuilding, which was great.)

Prior to coming back to AOE3, I played Hearthstone for three years. The Hearthstone community has done a fantastic job of building tools for players to easily share strategies and decklists. I have tried in vain to find some equivalent for AOE3.

I think AOE3's best years could be ahead of us, and ESOC will be a big player in that. But (IMO) too much of the focus right now is on tournament/pro play, to the detriment of newer (or new-ish) players like me. I am not the first player to ask ESOC to have better organized, clearer material for newbies.

A practical place for this to start would be to create a section of the site where good players could post their decklists, with explanations about why they picked certain cards and how the deck supplements their strategy. A simple version of this idea would just use screenshots and text boxes.

I would be happy to help out with building this feature if needed. I have some background in basic HTML and web design.

Thoughts?
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France P i k i l i c
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by P i k i l i c »

Hi, welcome to ESOC :flowers:
A place where you can find all what new players need is the Strategy Wall: https://eso-community.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=9169
(still in progress)
you can find it manually on this site by going Forums :arrow: Age of Empires 3 :arrow: Strategy
There you find guides for new players and a decent amount of strategies, sometimes with screenshots of the deck and explanations of why you need this particular card
However if you want to know why a card is rejected you must ask for it in a new topic, but keep in mind your question has probably already been answered some time ago (use ≡ :arrow: Search, to find threads about your card)
hope this helps

I also like your idea, let's see what good players will have to say about it
Consider not the one who speaks the truth, but the truth that is said

:hmm: AoE logic :hmm:
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Turkey HUMMAN
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by HUMMAN »

You are right there is no great content for new players, about decks i would say it wouldnt matter if you copied a deck as long as you dont know which card to send when/how i dont think it would matter. Half of the fun is to figure it out by yourself! You can watch tournament plays to get a better grip in build orders and game itself.
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by musketeer925 »

We somewhat recently started a wiki to fulfill this goal of having more information for new players:

https://wiki.eso-community.net/Main_Page

It doesn't have lots of info on it yet, maybe you'd like to help with this project. :flowers:
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by tabben »

I think a key difference from hearthstone is that in aoe3 you can just look up a top player's profile in game and browse their up-to-date decks. At least when i played hearthstone a few years ago this wasn't possible.

Most of the time they'll also have reasonable names like "1v1 land", "1v1 vs bla bla civ" and so on which should help you understand their purpose.

Even better, you can watch recorded games from top players and see how a certain deck (the deck name is always shown in recs) is used for a specific map or matchup.

I think creating a site section with decks from top players would just mean a whole lot of work, when there's already pretty decent tools in-game for getting this information. Also it would be a hassle keeping the posted decks up-to-date since decks used by top players three years ago may not fit the current meta for example.
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by musketeer925 »

I definitely agree with tabben that the "up to date" problem is one that will plague any effort like this. Maybe the best way to start is a "meta-article" -- not necessarily compiling the information, but instead something that explains how and where to look for it.
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by Mr_Bramboy »

Why are all the eagles so helpful?
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by EagleRunner »

HUMMAN wrote:You are right there is no great content for new players, about decks i would say it wouldnt matter if you copied a deck as long as you dont know which card to send when/how i dont think it would matter. Half of the fun is to figure it out by yourself! You can watch tournament plays to get a better grip in build orders and game itself.


I agree that it's super important to understand how a deck is played, and to watch pro players. But I still think it's unreasonably difficult for new players to figure out how to build a deck and use it effectively. There are hundreds of cards/units/techs in the game. This is part of what makes AOE 3 a great game; there are so many different strategic options. But speaking as a relatively new player, it's completely overwhelming, and it sucks to have to spend so much time even getting to a basic understanding of the game.

tabben wrote: I think creating a site section with decks from top players would just mean a whole lot of work, when there's already pretty decent tools in-game for getting this information. Also it would be a hassle keeping the posted decks up-to-date since decks used by top players three years ago may not fit the current meta for example.


This is a good point...I think you're right that it would be too hard to upkeep effectively. I also worry that the focus would be too much on minor differences between pro decks rather than basic deck strategies and concepts.

musketeer925 wrote:We somewhat recently started a wiki to fulfill this goal of having more information for new players:

https://wiki.eso-community.net/Main_Page

It doesn't have lots of info on it yet, maybe you'd like to help with this project. :flowers:


I think using the Wiki is a great idea. What does everyone think of the idea of creating pages for the main strategies for each civ (Sepoy rush, Manor boom, Aztec FF, etc. etc.), and then for each strategy, posting the essential cards, as well as sample decklists, tournament videos, etc? This would still be a good deal of work but it would be easier to maintain because the main strategies for each civ do not change a lot. Again, I'm willing to help if needed/wanted, although I am only an intermediate player so I will need help with accuracy. Thoughts @Pikilic @HUMMAN @musketeer925 @tabben @Mr_Bramboy ?
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by musketeer925 »

EagleRunner wrote:I think using the Wiki is a great idea. What does everyone think of the idea of creating pages for the main strategies for each civ (Sepoy rush, Manor boom, Aztec FF, etc. etc.), and then for each strategy, posting the essential cards, as well as sample decklists, tournament videos, etc? This would still be a good deal of work but it would be easier to maintain because the main strategies for each civ do not change a lot. Again, I'm willing to help if needed/wanted, although I am only an intermediate player so I will need help with accuracy. Thoughts @Pikilic @HUMMAN @musketeer925 @tabben @Mr_Bramboy ?

That sounds perfect to me. I'd say each civ should have a page about the civ itself, and then links to subpages for different strategies for that civ. I think it makes sense for intermediate players to do most of the writing on the wiki -- the target audience is newer players, so intermediate players are more than capable of getting the basics in there to start. There's too few expert players to expect them to spend a lot of time writing basic stuff in the wiki, but they might be willing to correct issues or offer direction.

Looks like there is already a "Strategy wall" page: https://wiki.eso-community.net/Strategy_Wall

Something like a basic "Supremacy deck strategy" page might be nice just to outline what kinds of cards are good/bad at a very high level without getting into specific civs or anything. I.e., comparing cards just by their pure resource values (e.g., a decent colonial age shipment should be worth somewhere around 700 resources), when to send crates or units vs. economic upgrades vs. unit upgrades, and some rough "ratio" of what types of cards go in a deck.

I believe @edeholland is mostly organizing work on the wiki. Maybe we can open a thread somewhere, or a Trello board, that kind of coordinates writing tasks/etc. Tbh I am not sure if it allows anyone to make edits right now or if special permissions are needed.

Also, is there a way to look at a list of all existing pages? (EDIT: here it is: https://wiki.eso-community.net/Special:AllPages)
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by [Armag] diarouga »

Tbh just check a top player's deck.
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by EagleRunner »

[Armag] diarouga wrote:Tbh just check a top player's deck.


Tbh I don't know how to do that. Do you have to add top players as friends first? Is it somewhere on ESOC?

(And if I don't know how to do this, how would other new players know how?)

P.S. @Diarouga I love your playstyle. I was rooting for you to beat Kaiser, but oh well...
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by [Armag] diarouga »

EagleRunner wrote:
[Armag] diarouga wrote:Tbh just check a top player's deck.


Tbh I don't know how to do that. Do you have to add top players as friends first? Is it somewhere on ESOC?

(And if I don't know how to do this, how would other new players know how?)

P.S. @Diarouga I love your playstyle. I was rooting for you to beat Kaiser, but oh well...

Yea, add them in your friendlist, then right click their name and something like show home city.
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

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Post by Mitoe »

You don't actually need to add them to your friends list. You can just look up any player in the homecities menu
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by rsy »

Mr_Bramboy wrote:Why are all the eagles so helpful?

@EAGLEMUT is a God just saying
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Re: Where are the deck lists? (New ESOC feature idea)

Post by EagleRunner »

musketeer925 wrote:
EagleRunner wrote:I think using the Wiki is a great idea. What does everyone think of the idea of creating pages for the main strategies for each civ (Sepoy rush, Manor boom, Aztec FF, etc. etc.), and then for each strategy, posting the essential cards, as well as sample decklists, tournament videos, etc? This would still be a good deal of work but it would be easier to maintain because the main strategies for each civ do not change a lot. Again, I'm willing to help if needed/wanted, although I am only an intermediate player so I will need help with accuracy. Thoughts @Pikilic @HUMMAN @musketeer925 @tabben @Mr_Bramboy ?

That sounds perfect to me. I'd say each civ should have a page about the civ itself, and then links to subpages for different strategies for that civ. I think it makes sense for intermediate players to do most of the writing on the wiki -- the target audience is newer players, so intermediate players are more than capable of getting the basics in there to start. There's too few expert players to expect them to spend a lot of time writing basic stuff in the wiki, but they might be willing to correct issues or offer direction.

Looks like there is already a "Strategy wall" page: https://wiki.eso-community.net/Strategy_Wall

Something like a basic "Supremacy deck strategy" page might be nice just to outline what kinds of cards are good/bad at a very high level without getting into specific civs or anything. I.e., comparing cards just by their pure resource values (e.g., a decent colonial age shipment should be worth somewhere around 700 resources), when to send crates or units vs. economic upgrades vs. unit upgrades, and some rough "ratio" of what types of cards go in a deck.

I believe @edeholland is mostly organizing work on the wiki. Maybe we can open a thread somewhere, or a Trello board, that kind of coordinates writing tasks/etc. Tbh I am not sure if it allows anyone to make edits right now or if special permissions are needed.

Also, is there a way to look at a list of all existing pages? (EDIT: here it is: https://wiki.eso-community.net/Special:AllPages)


Great ideas. I will follow up with @edeholland to see if we can get things rolling.

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