Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Netherlands Goodspeed
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Goodspeed »

10? Yeah recently it has been better I guess. Games go late much more often now. In AoE2 siege weapons are an integral part of the game though and I'm kinda missing that in AoE3.
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Post by Dolan »

Goodspeed wrote:- AoE3 puts a lot of focus on military units. Defensive buildings are not really a thing, which I think is a shame because they should be a thing in any base-building RTS.
I have mixed feelings/thoughts about this. I'm inclined to agree with you to some degree. Stronger buildings in AOE2 did create some fun gameplay (I was a big fan of upgraded Teutonic towers with their bombard shot), but that's because overall the game was geared towards a slower pace. When you try to apply that to AOE3, the result is frustrated players, who don't want to play versus strong walls and outposts, who don't want to spend 5 minutes sieging a building. I mean you were part of the EP balance team and you know how much pressure there was to nerf walls and make defensive play less viable in AOE3. That's what the community of high-level players pushed for. That's what they wanted. And you're saying they're wrong, the game should have stronger defensive buildings and, by implication, playstyles like Kynesie's should be king. Or what else are you trying to imply with this emphasis on encouraging defensive styles?
- The extent of AoE3's economy management is herding. In late game, it is entirely non-existent.
I think that's an exaggerated statement. You still have to macro all your gathering points, you have to check mines, to shift-click vills on hunts, to herd, to make sure they gather in safe spots, to keep scouting or getting LOS to make sure you're covered against raids. The game makers also put some other kinds of gathering in the game that people typically don't use in standard games, like sheep fattening and pens, which also require a lot of macro, as treaty players already know. Maybe something should have been done to make this gathering mechanic more viable in standard play too. Pens could have been made cheaper. This would have added even more defensiveness potential for passive players who just want to sit in base, behind walls, spawn sheep and shoot arrows.

Late game doesn't need that much eco macro, because the idea was for late game to have lots of lame units that can do enough eco sabotage to bring the game to an end faster. Otherwise, games would just carry on for too long, which would be a pretty bad dynamic when you have infinite resources. So what would be the point of having micro-intensive macro during late game, when you would get so much less value from your apm, if the opponent can destroy so much eco so fast?
- There is infinite gold, removing the "scarcity" dynamic which created some interesting strategic choices in AoE2.
What I previously said applies here too. The emphasis, during late game, was placed on fighting and eco sabotage, so that games wouldn't last too long. Still having scarcity late game only makes sense if your entire game design is geared towards long-ass games that could take hours or a day.

- Water design is an absolute mess. War ships fire randomly, have a build limit instead of pop cost, and whales are infinite which promotes abusive, passive play.
I don't think warships fire randomly. In fact, it wouldn't even make any sense from a programming point of view, because it would consume way too many computing resources to generate enough pseudo-randomness for each warship. It's more likely that they have something like a cooldown and you need to wait before that gets cleared for the next shot. And this delay makes it seem as if you don't really control the moment they actually start shooting. This, combined with the warships' programming to first "seek and lock on target" before shooting, created an overall perception that warships shoot at random times. Maybe this was done on purpose, because a warship is basically a floating canon that can garrison like a TC. That's a pretty lame, hybrid unit that can do a lot of damage, can also move faster on water so it can escape pretty fast versus land units, and can also help units on land escape a surround. So maybe making them less capable of pinpoint precision and responsiveness to micro was part of keeping them somewhat more manageable for the opponent. Otherwise, if you could hit and run with warships like you can do with skirms, holy shit, that would be so broken.
- The imperial age, and to a lesser extent the industrial age, is/are completely irrelevant in 1v1s.
In high-level 1v1, sure. Though I think that depends on meta a lot more than just game design. I mean, I see lots of age IVs even in the current meta. They're not that frequent like FFs, but you still see one every, say, 7 games, And you still see one age V every once in a while even in competitive 1v1s. But then, again, is it really that interesting to see competitive 1v1s in late game? At that point, the game is basically designed for encouraging mutual eco sabotage, it's a battle of nerves and a war of attrition that is not made to last too long, unless the players are very equally matched and manage to keep each other in check.

Maybe there should have been a different concept for age V. Because in terms of gameplay it doesn't really bring much of anything new, except "more" of the same stuff (upgrades, mostly). Maybe it should give you access to some new kind of unit or mechanic that would make late game more interesting. On this point, you're probably right, at least for age V, it seems like they didn't invest that much thought into having something game-changing in the last age. The game just basically accelerates in imperial, purely because you get such powerful upgrades, that everything just becomes faster (you do damage faster, you get capitol upgrades which make you gather a lot faster, etc).
- Almost all military units fit into predefined roles. Unique ones like "ruyters" are not really unique.
This could open a very long debate on the merits of having standardised classes of units that don't differ too much between civs compared to having civs with much more unique units. I'm sure you've seen and had this debate countless of times until now and you know that the more uniqueness you build into units, the more difficult balance gets to achieve, and the harder it gets to have a counter system. So AOE3 "solved" this problem by having mostly standardised units (classes of units) that counter each other and adding some slight differences to them in terms of stats. But isn't AOE2 even worse on this account?
- And a lot of small things like the snare effect, minutemen, etc promote passive play styles and make it so that most games just come down to a single clash of 2 large armies, as opposed to the war of attrition (where buildings actually play a role) that is common in AoE2.
I think that MM are a good counter to AOE3's general bias towards fast pace gameplay. They give you yet another ace up your sleeve that you can pull in case you're not yet ready to respond to an attack that comes too early for you. Whenever the pace of the game is going too fast for you and you're getting under attack much earlier than planned, you can hit the breaks and call MM to slow things down for a while, which gives you some time to prepare (or get a shipment). It's a counter mechanic to rushes and to shipments, that can turn a game on its head too fast. I don't think MM promote passive gameplay, since they're not trainable more than once (per button). They're nothing more than a temporary airbag that is deployed once to cushion against an attack.
The snare effect rewards micro and skill development, so I don't see why that would be a bad game feature. A lot of things can be said on this subject, but this reply is already getting too long.
Some games can come down to just one fight, others can go on at least until industrial. It depends on civs and what potential they have to recover from losing a fight. Again, though, this is consistent with the general bias of AOE3 towards faster pace and making sure the game doesn't last for hours or days.
And ignoring design for a second, balance is a real mess in AoE3. The artillery foundry, more generally siege weapons, are not a thing. Some cards are clearly much stronger than others. Many units are OP, even more are never used, in late game a pr26 French can beat any other civ played by a top player, etc.
Are we watching the same streams? Because I'm seeing foundries almost every game that gets to age 3. Again, though, I'm assuming you're talking about competitive gameplay, which is not exactly what makes a game have mass appeal. Sure, now, in the age of streams, having a solid audience for streamers does imply having a good competitive scene too, but that's not the primary reason why people start playing a game or why they buy it.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Kaiserklein »

I didn't bother to read that wall of text but lol, no, you don't see a foundry in almost every age 3 game... Maybe 10% of them and that's generous. Btw note how almost no civ has artillery upgrade cards, let alone good ones, which shows it's not an important part of this game.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Dolan »

Artillery is a high-cost, high-reward, high-risk unit. That's why.
It's costly to have a foundry, costly to train canons and it's difficult to control and protect them. But holy shit, they can do so much damage.
Only civs which had some specific emphasis on artillery, like Ottos or Iros, or whose trainable artillery was too weak (like China's), have them.
The rest don't really need artillery cards, because artillery already does a lot of damage, if you manage to control it and not lose it.

And the reply wasn't addressed to you, so you don't really have to read it.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Kaiserklein »

I know it wasn't addressed to me and that's why I didn't read it lol.
Anyway, first you say you see cannons in almost every age 3 game, then you agree with me it's rare. That's confusing. And then you try to explain why we don't see them often (which, as you can imagine, I already know), which is really not the point; the point is that we don't see them often, like GS mentioned, while in aoe2 we do.

Btw competitive gameplay is important. Streams with lots of viewers (for both aoe2 and 3) are streams involving high level players. Usually, the more balanced the game, the more competition there can be, and that results in big tourneys (or just big high level streams) and lots of people watching.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Dolan »

Well, there's no specific pattern for which civs people who stream play. If there's someone playing France a lot, it's likely they will also FF many times and they will ship canons.
If they play India and Sioux a lot, sure, you won't see much if any artillery.
So I don't think there's any specific regularity either way, since it depends on what kind of civs people who stream play. If they play a lot of France and Brits, the probability of seeing more artillery increases.

I think the best indicator on how much people use artillery would be to see those stats from the ESO site on how many times people train artillery. They used to compile some stats on the number of units and what kind of units people train in a given period of time.

Also, AOE3 is not only supremacy, people don't buy a game to only play one single game mode. We often forget that the number of people who go online to play multiplayer games is a minority, at least for AOE3. This game was bought by at least 2 million people, but over the years only a few thousands got online and played the game in multiplayer. The massive majority of people just played campaigns and single player games. So, it's hard to make such blanket statements like "only X number of games have canons in them". The game wasn't made to be sold only to a few thousands of players who joined ESO. The bulk of the profits was made from selling the game to single-player/campaign players.

You're probably thinking of high-level games played on ESO, when you say you rarely see artillery being trained. That might have more to do with competitive players thinking artillery is rarely viable at that level, pretty much how lifestock pen is also rarely viable at a competitive level, but it's used more at different levels and in different game modes. Competitive players have much faster reactions than regular players and they know how to shoot precisely to annihilate artillery, which makes it very difficult to keep your artillery alive. And since it's so expensive to have a foundry and canons cost so much, they're so immobile and harder to control properly, they probably get trained a lot less in competitive 1v1s. Losing your cannons is just too big a deal at that level.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Post by Mitoe »

I have to agree with GS that AoE2 is popular for more than nostalgia/timing. It's simply a very solid RTS game.

That being said GS--and as you've already acknowledged--the game design stuff can be very subjective, and I'm definitely biased but want to give my thoughts anyway:

Goodspeed wrote:- AoE3 puts a lot of focus on military units. Defensive buildings are not really a thing, which I think is a shame because they should be a thing in any base-building RTS.
Maybe, yeah, but at the same time you already admitted that there's already a lot of things promoting passive play in AoE3:
- And a lot of small things like the snare effect, minutemen, etc promote passive play styles and make it so that most games just come down to a single clash of 2 large armies, as opposed to the war of attrition (where buildings actually play a role) that is common in AoE2.
And... well Idk. Personally I've never found defensive structures to be much fun in other RTS games, but maybe I just haven't invested enough time into them. And to be fair, defensive structures are much more relevant in water games than in land games, we just don't see water games as frequently.

- The extent of AoE3's economy management is herding. In late game, it is entirely non-existent.
To be fair, it seems that most people end up thinking this is boring anyway. It also seems that it's really not that different in other RTS games either, to be honest. Like in AoE2 you've got what? The early sheep/boar stuff, and then building farms & reseeding later. Other than that all you really have to do is build new dropsites occasionally and it doesn't really seem all that different? Correct me if I'm wrong here, I've played AoE2 but really not all that much. Even SC2 doesn't really have much subtlety in terms of economy management either, just build new CC/Nexus/Hatchery and right click workers one time onto the resources, then use Mules/Chrono/Inject (maybe creep spread counts for zerg as well). Overall is it really even much more complex than AoE3 in either game?

I suppose you could argue that because AoE3 often sticks to 1 Town Center in most games, and it's almost always better to be training vills than not training vills, there is more economic management in that sense, but it also means you have to be a lot more careful with your villagers because they're much more difficult to replace if you only have one TC. This is a positive and a negative, I suppose.
- There is infinite gold, removing the "scarcity" dynamic which created some interesting strategic choices in AoE2.

True... but most games end before you can acquire infinite sources of resources anyway.
- Water design is an absolute mess. War ships fire randomly, have a build limit instead of pop cost, and whales are infinite which promotes abusive, passive play.
RNG rate of fire is indeed the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Build limit is also dumb. Whales, eh... it's whatever. The number of whales on the map seems like the more important thing here.

Other than that water (on EP) is O-K...ish--at least in the sense that there is a reason to go for it, but you don't have to go for it, and there's a reasonable amount of counterplay available, though game knowledge it really important here. I do think water needs more work in the future, but I doubt many of the changes that need to be made will go through.

I also think it's dumb that warships get much more impactful upgrades than other units (20 - 30% compared to 15%), which just makes it even more imbalanced that certain civs have warship upgrade cards and others do not.

So yeah for the most part I guess I agree with you about water (you're definitely right on official patches, which I guess is what you were talking about anyway), but I do think that it has a bit more merit than you let on here.
Dolan wrote:I don't think warships fire randomly.
They absolutely do. For example, I just tested in the scenario editor: I took 3 caravels, and began shooting at 3 different building all at the exact same time and let them shoot for 20 seconds before pausing. One did 600 damage, one did 750 damage, and one did 825. It's really game-breaking when you can take 1 caravel from each player, have them shoot at each other at the exact same time with no micro, and one of the caravels just gets 3 more shots in than the other for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You can test it yourself if you like.

Pretty sure only warships that use cannons have RNG ROF though--canoes do not IIRC.
- The imperial age, and to a lesser extent the industrial age, is/are completely irrelevant in 1v1s.
Is this a con really? Imperial seems to me to be more of a tiebreaker than anything else. Industrial has been pretty viable lately, I think, and is in a good spot.
- Almost all military units fit into predefined roles. Unique ones like "ruyters" are not really unique.
There's truth to this, but I think the ruyter comparison is a bit unfair. Most unique units are actually unique (unless they're a musketeer), with the ruyter kind of being the exception. Just look at the Nilla civs:

Heavy Ranged Infantry: Musketeer/Janissary (musketeer is a dumb unit class anyway, but jans are actually reasonably different from normal muskets in terms of function)
Light Ranged Infantry: Skirmisher/Abus Gun/Cassador/Longbow
Ranged Cavalry: Dragoon/Ruyter/War Wagon/Cavalry Archer
Hand Cavalry: Hussar/Uhlan/Cuirassier/Lancer
Heavy Hand Infantry: Pikeman/Halberdier/Doppelsoldner/Rodelero

I probably missed some units, but for the most part each of these units are pretty different from others in their class, with the exception of the Ruyter and maybe the Halberdier.

The artillery foundry, more generally siege weapons, are not a thing. Some cards are clearly much stronger than others. Many units are OP, even more are never used, in late game a pr26 French can beat any other civ played by a top player, etc.

Artillery has its place. It's not used in every game, sure, but I don't really feel that it should be. We've been starting to see it more and more recently as well.

Cards... I'm kind of ok with some being stronger than others. There are definitely some that are too strong (5 mamelukes lul) and some that are too weak, though.

Late-game is definitely a bit of a mess.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Post by Hazza54321 »

Garja wrote:On the pathfinding: aoe3 doesn't even have bad pathfinding.

50 pages of your autobiography says otherwise
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Post by t3rror1sta »

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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Hazza54321 wrote:
Garja wrote:On the pathfinding: aoe3 doesn't even have bad pathfinding.

50 pages of your autobiography says otherwise

hmm no?
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Mitoe wrote:
Dolan wrote:I don't think warships fire randomly.
They absolutely do. For example, I just tested in the scenario editor: I took 3 caravels, and began shooting at 3 different building all at the exact same time and let them shoot for 20 seconds before pausing. One did 600 damage, one did 750 damage, and one did 825. It's really game-breaking when you can take 1 caravel from each player, have them shoot at each other at the exact same time with no micro, and one of the caravels just gets 3 more shots in than the other for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You can test it yourself if you like.

Pretty sure only warships that use cannons have RNG ROF though--canoes do not IIRC.
Are you sure they had a different rate of fire even if they all started shooting at the exact same time? The differences in dealt damage might be due to something else. Ballistics in AOE3 are a bit weird, they don't always output the same damage in the same way. For example, land canons sometimes damage one single unit from a group heavily and deal a bit of area damage to the rest, while other times they do a lot more damage to several units in the area, even killing a few.

Could someone make a demo of this? I don't have the game right now installed and it would take some time to get my Steam account back, reinstall the game, etc etc.

From a programming point of view, having an RNG algorithm control ROF just makes no sense, it adds extra computation for no great value in terms of gameplay. Does this perceived RNG have an effect on when the first shot is initiated too or do all warships start shooting first at the same time?
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Mitoe wrote:I have to agree with GS that AoE2 is popular for more than nostalgia/timing. It's simply a very solid RTS game.

For what reasons?
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Mitoe »

Dolan wrote:
Mitoe wrote:
Dolan wrote:I don't think warships fire randomly.
They absolutely do. For example, I just tested in the scenario editor: I took 3 caravels, and began shooting at 3 different building all at the exact same time and let them shoot for 20 seconds before pausing. One did 600 damage, one did 750 damage, and one did 825. It's really game-breaking when you can take 1 caravel from each player, have them shoot at each other at the exact same time with no micro, and one of the caravels just gets 3 more shots in than the other for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You can test it yourself if you like.

Pretty sure only warships that use cannons have RNG ROF though--canoes do not IIRC.
Are you sure they had a different rate of fire even if they all started shooting at the exact same time? The differences in dealt damage might be due to something else. Ballistics in AOE3 are a bit weird, they don't always output the same damage in the same way. For example, land canons sometimes damage one single unit from a group heavily and deal a bit of area damage to the rest, while other times they do a lot more damage to several units in the area, even killing a few.

Could someone make a demo of this? I don't have the game right now installed and it would take some time to get my Steam account back, reinstall the game, etc etc.

From a programming point of view, having an RNG algorithm control ROF just makes no sense, it adds extra computation for no great value in terms of gameplay. Does this perceived RNG have an effect on when the first shot is initiated too or do all warships start shooting first at the same time?

It happens when the first shot is initiated too, yes. Sometimes they take up to 2 or 3 seconds to fire the first shot, even if they haven't moved at all. It's very clear that it's not consistent. Sometimes two shots go off within 0.5 seconds of each other, other times you have 3 or almost 4 seconds in-between shots, despite the fact that the supposed ROF in the proto file is 2 seconds.

And trust me, they did 75 damage each shot. I watched. The numbers I listed earlier are also multiples of 75. The damage didn't come from area or anything weird like that.

I would make a video, but honestly I CBA with the internet bandwidth limits I have right now, someone else should do this.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Dsy »

It seems more like a personality test than game developing.
I mean why do you enjoy gaming: Family, friend, succes etc.
And you can know these are not serious just see if its include AOE parts together. If a developers ask your opinion ask specifically on 1-2 or 3 since they so different works probably only 1 project.

Plus AO3-DE only will happen if AOE4 publishing date is too far away.
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Post by Goodspeed »

@Dolan my examples were just that, there are many more and I don't think we'll get anywhere by digging into each of them. Regardless:
Dolan wrote:I have mixed feelings/thoughts about this. I'm inclined to agree with you to some degree. Stronger buildings in AOE2 did create some fun gameplay (I was a big fan of upgraded Teutonic towers with their bombard shot), but that's because overall the game was geared towards a slower pace. When you try to apply that to AOE3, the result is frustrated players, who don't want to play versus strong walls and outposts, who don't want to spend 5 minutes sieging a building. I mean you were part of the EP balance team and you know how much pressure there was to nerf walls and make defensive play less viable in AOE3. That's what the community of high-level players pushed for. That's what they wanted. And you're saying they're wrong, the game should have stronger defensive buildings and, by implication, playstyles like Kynesie's should be king. Or what else are you trying to imply with this emphasis on encouraging defensive styles?
Yeah, I think the way AoE3 is designed there is no place for defensive buildings really, unless you remove culverins from the game. A balance needs to be found between buildings and siege weapons, which are currently too expensive and too easily countered by culverins. This balance, between siege weapons and defensive structures, is so far off the mark that it's impossible to fix with some simple EP changes. And we didn't want to affect the meta too much, either.
But other than that:
- They removed stone, which makes defensive structures too easy to afford. In AoE2 the scarcity of stone is a great way to increase the significance of each defensive structure, and makes it impossible to just spam them all over the place. AoE3's build limits on defensive structures are a lazy way to deal with this issue. More generally, the prevalence of build limits in AoE3 shows the game designers got lazy.
- Forts are only buildable by wagon (why??) and they don't do nearly enough damage.
- Outposts should do more damage when vills are garrisoned. I can't for the life of me understand why they got rid of this feature for outposts, but then not for town centers. Just lazy balancing in the alpha version, probably.
- There should not be a build limit on town centers.

Something that should be mentioned in this discussion about defensive structures is how much more important map control is in the middle game in AoE3. In AoE2, when you give up map control you give up mid game access to gold and stone. This is bad but playable, because as long as your eco is better you can fight gold units with wood+food units. In AoE3, every unit worth a damn costs gold so it's not an option to play without it. Another thing is that hunting is so much better than farming that you really can't afford to transition to mills before your opponent unless you are doubling his eco. "Turtle" styles, then, are unviable unless there is water or wall abuse involved. Defensive structures with an attack, if we were to make them relevant, would still rarely be used because of this.

What should also be mentioned is how we can't really blame the AoE3 devs for choosing this route. The game is simply not at its best in late game, which explains the pressure you speak of to nerf defensive playstyles. If you make them viable, you have a lot of work to do balancing (and, frankly, redesigning) the later ages to make them more fun to play and to introduce more strategic choices in them.
I think that's an exaggerated statement. You still have to macro all your gathering points, you have to check mines, to shift-click vills on hunts, to herd, to make sure they gather in safe spots, to keep scouting or getting LOS to make sure you're covered against raids. The game makers also put some other kinds of gathering in the game that people typically don't use in standard games, like sheep fattening and pens, which also require a lot of macro, as treaty players already know. Maybe something should have been done to make this gathering mechanic more viable in standard play too. Pens could have been made cheaper. This would have added even more defensiveness potential for passive players who just want to sit in base, behind walls, spawn sheep and shoot arrows.
It is exaggerated. There is also shift clicking mines. I wouldn't count defending vills as eco management. Shift clicking vills on hunts is not a thing past discovery age. Even herding is barely relevant once you start gathering outside of your base. I think livestock has a lot of potential, but it's just not good enough to be viable as is. It's another one of those things that as a patch creator you would want to buff but has the potential to throw the meta out of whack, and people do not want such changes.

@Mitoe, who made the point eco management is not a particularly big deal in AoE2 either, I think you underestimate it but also we should note that the difference between the games is mainly that in AoE2 it stays relevant. Where, in AoE3, the longer the game goes the less attention you are paying to your vills, in AoE2 the more vills you have the more work it is. And this makes intuitive sense. A bigger economy should be harder to manage. This makes it rewarding if you can manage it. Both games have their ways of making eco management in the first age interesting and challenging (AoE2 with its boar mechanic, deer hunting, AoE3 with herding as efficiently as possible) but in the later ages there is a clear difference.

I think it was a mistake to get rid of drop off points. In AoE2, having a lot of vills gathering from the same place is inefficient because they need space to walk to and from drop off poitns. That dynamic is lost in AoE3. There are also many small ways in which you can improve efficiency by building drop off points in the right places and placing your villagers on the right tree/mine/berry bush. And yes, there is reseeding farms but also efficient farm placement to worry about. In short, there are many ways to make a difference as the better player, to end up with a better eco simply because you gather more efficiently. In AoE3, the only real way to make a difference here is by herding better.
Late game doesn't need that much eco macro, because the idea was for late game to have lots of lame units that can do enough eco sabotage to bring the game to an end faster. Otherwise, games would just carry on for too long, which would be a pretty bad dynamic when you have infinite resources. So what would be the point of having micro-intensive macro during late game, when you would get so much less value from your apm, if the opponent can destroy so much eco so fast?
Yeah.. I guess I just don't agree with AoE3's attitude towards the late game. If the idea was really to have it be a time of laming and abuse in order to get the game to finish faster, that is another sign of lazy design. I can't imagine that was really the idea though, it's just what we ended up with.
What I previously said applies here too. The emphasis, during late game, was placed on fighting and eco sabotage, so that games wouldn't last too long. Still having scarcity late game only makes sense if your entire game design is geared towards long-ass games that could take hours or a day.
Why? Why can't there be a healthy balance between early and late game? It doesn't have to be "geared towards" anything. Look at AoE2. Most games are decided in castle age, and a good amount is decided in feudal age. That clearly doesn't mean it's impossible to have the game be balanced and rewarding to play in late game.
In high-level 1v1, sure. Though I think that depends on meta a lot more than just game design. I mean, I see lots of age IVs even in the current meta. They're not that frequent like FFs, but you still see one every, say, 7 games, And you still see one age V every once in a while even in competitive 1v1s. But then, again, is it really that interesting to see competitive 1v1s in late game? At that point, the game is basically designed for encouraging mutual eco sabotage, it's a battle of nerves and a war of attrition that is not made to last too long, unless the players are very equally matched and manage to keep each other in check.
It's true that this is becoming much more common. I remember back in 2010 on ASFP I had some games that reached industrial and I remember all of them because it was so rare, and the fact that you reached this age must mean it was a great and close game. This has changed a lot recently, but what you say is true. The game is just not that interesting in later ages. As a spectator, when both players reach industrial and have large economies, I kind of zone out a little. In AoE2 when games reach imperial I'm on the edge of my seat.
This could open a very long debate on the merits of having standardised classes of units that don't differ too much between civs compared to having civs with much more unique units. I'm sure you've seen and had this debate countless of times until now and you know that the more uniqueness you build into units, the more difficult balance gets to achieve, and the harder it gets to have a counter system. So AOE3 "solved" this problem by having mostly standardised units (classes of units) that counter each other and adding some slight differences to them in terms of stats. But isn't AOE2 even worse on this account?
There was a discussion about this in another thread. https://eso-community.net/viewtopic.php ... t&start=25
(Also in reply to @Mitoe)
I think that MM are a good counter to AOE3's general bias towards fast pace gameplay. They give you yet another ace up your sleeve that you can pull in case you're not yet ready to respond to an attack that comes too early for you. Whenever the pace of the game is going too fast for you and you're getting under attack much earlier than planned, you can hit the breaks and call MM to slow things down for a while, which gives you some time to prepare (or get a shipment). It's a counter mechanic to rushes and to shipments, that can turn a game on its head too fast. I don't think MM promote passive gameplay, since they're not trainable more than once (per button). They're nothing more than a temporary airbag that is deployed once to cushion against an attack.
Yeah but I don't think that's good design. The core problem with it, I think, is that it's often not MM themselves but the threat of MM that discourages early aggression. This means, in many cases, that the defender doesn't actually have to invest in defense at all. He just needs to have MM available, which he does at no cost. Both players are then discouraged from being aggressive and end up going for later timings. It is of course possible to balance your way around this, but MM make this difficult.
The snare effect rewards micro and skill development, so I don't see why that would be a bad game feature.
It discourages engagement in general, and it discourages tactically splitting one's army, multi-pronged attacks etc. What you often see is players take the safe route, keep their army together and don't engage until they plan to commit fully. You miss out on a lot of smaller skirmishes in which good players can make a difference.

AoE3 was very ambitious. The devs needed more time to balance it. What probably happened is that they ran out of time and made a lot of lazy design choices to nudge balance towards something that would be acceptable to players. Tragically, I think now we can pinpoint a lot of the bad choices they made back then and have the potential to fix them, but the community is so entrenched in the current meta that this will never be popular. I think that is mostly why I personally lost interest in fixing the game. And maybe it's still unrealistic because there is just too much to do.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Goodspeed »

I really didn't mean to make this thread AoE2 vs AoE3, maybe we should move the discussion elsewhere... It's just a shame when people claim AoE2 is only popular because of nostalgia and timing, because that kind of attitude prevents us from learning from it. It did so many things right, and there is still so much to fix in AoE3. AoE3 had such great ideas but it also still has major design flaws and if we are unwilling to see these flaws then they will never be fixed. I think now, with the meta moving more and more towards it, is the time to take a critical look at AoE3's late game.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Post by lordraphael »

i think all those points have been mentioned already at various points. Aoe2 is the better game, aoe 3 just took the simplification to far. An rts game should always follow the rule " easy to learn, hard to master" and while aoe 3 does a good job at the "easy to learn "part its just not "hard to master".
That being said aoe 3 had great visions for rts gaming, that if properly implemented could have really had a big impact on rts. I just hope aoe 4 doesnt dismiss those things and try to implement them in the game.
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.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by [Armag] diarouga »

@Goodspeed While I agree with you on most points, some seem unfair to me.

- Forts are only buildable by wagon (why??) and they don't do nearly enough damage.

It would indeed be better if vills could build forts (though it would need to cost something like 800w/500c and be very slow to build so that you can't spam it) because map control and siege (petards and mortars in particular) would be more interesting, and the games would go to late game more often (because you would need mortars to end the game), but the fort damage output is totally fine.
It has huge damage, great range and even area damage.
Forts are great. The only issue is that you need to send a shipment, move the wagon and wait ages to build it.

- Outposts should do more damage when vills are garrisoned. I can't for the life of me understand why they got rid of this feature for outposts, but then not for town centers. Just lazy balancing in the alpha version, probably.

Yea same, that would be better. You would need to rework the whole game though, because the high eco civs would become way too strong.

- There should not be a build limit on town centers.

This is irrelevant. You wouldn't ever want to build more than 3 TCs.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Frost Bite »

Goodspeed wrote:That page asking "why do you play" was an interesting bit of self-reflection. I'm kinda wondering how you guys filled that out

By flaming aoe2, ofc.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by MrRewindThat »

I'm not going to read this thread, and get consumed by weird and wonderful thoughts... but i will complete the survey and have a think about it :) too much open discussion on this topic for me :)
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Mitoe »

Something I like about AoE3 is how versatile the map design is. I’ve always found that other RTS games—especially Age games—are always just filled with choke points, largely because they have these giant impassable clusters of trees because of the necessity of drop sites. So AoE3 can have very open maps where other games not so much.
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Post by Dolan »

Goodspeed wrote:- They removed stone, which makes defensive structures too easy to afford. In AoE2 the scarcity of stone is a great way to increase the significance of each defensive structure, and makes it impossible to just spam them all over the place. AoE3's build limits on defensive structures are a lazy way to deal with this issue. More generally, the prevalence of build limits in AoE3 shows the game designers got lazy.
It's possible they removed stone mines as well as drop-off points simply because AOE3 maps are smaller than AOE2 maps and there just wasn't enough space to place so many types of resources. And since AOE3 introduced a new resource (XP) and trading routes, the smaller AOE3 maps had to make room for the trade route path and TPs, which push the surrounding objects away significantly. If you also add the native villages which can take a huge amount of space on a map (in GP, there were 6 of them, which took almost 1/4 of the map space), then you get why having both stone and gold in smaller maps just wasn't viable anymore.

I wouldn't rush into assuming game designers "were lazy". From what I could gather by watching that documentary on how AOE3 was made, they actually tried and tested a lot of ideas before settling on the current form of the game. It doesn't sound like they just cobbled together stuff and called it a day. I'm sure there are a few bits here and there where they had to improvise because time was running out, but I doubt that's the case for the core game design. Based on the info I have, it's the UI which was slapped on in the latest stages of development in a hurried way, which is why some parts of the UI look so haphazardly put together. Unit and civ design, though, took place much earlier and were playtested extensively until they reached a satisfactory form. It's possible, though, that opinions were split among game designers and devs on the direction in which AOE3 should go, which is why AOE3 is such an unusual mixture of traditional Age of Empires gameplay and lots of new innovative avenues. They were also under pressure to come out with a new Age game that wasn't much of the same stuff people have seen before (same old medieval melee, bow-and-arrow stuff), so they felt they had to go in a bolder direction.
- Forts are only buildable by wagon (why??) and they don't do nearly enough damage.
Also buildable by Russia with ruskets. Maybe that card should have been available to other civs too. I wonder if it can be modded into the game in a future patch. (Afaik, there was a problem with ruskets, the unit per se doesn't exist as a unique and separate unit in the proto tree.)
- Outposts should do more damage when vills are garrisoned. I can't for the life of me understand why they got rid of this feature for outposts, but then not for town centers. Just lazy balancing in the alpha version, probably.
I agree. They probably thought outposts would become too OP, which would encourage passive play.
Something that should be mentioned in this discussion about defensive structures is how much more important map control is in the middle game in AoE3. In AoE2, when you give up map control you give up mid game access to gold and stone. This is bad but playable, because as long as your eco is better you can fight gold units with wood+food units. In AoE3, every unit worth a damn costs gold so it's not an option to play without it.
Aiz and Soldier would probably disagree with you, since sometimes they stubbornly fight someone's age3 with age 2 bow/pike and they actually manage to win. Also, yumis, strels and other Iro units aren't really crap units by any means, imo. But yeah, in general, food/gold units tend to do better (ie, a musk/huss usually does better than a bow/pike combo).
in AoE2 the more vills you have the more work it is. And this makes intuitive sense. A bigger economy should be harder to manage. This makes it rewarding if you can manage it.
AOE2 might have a harder to manage eco simply because the game engine is much older and rudimentary. They simply hadn't developed all the new bells and whistles that we see in AOE3. I mean, just look at the difference between nilla and TAD. If they managed to bring so many improvements from nilla to TAD, then the leap from AOE2's engine to AOE3's was even larger.
I think it was a mistake to get rid of drop off points. In AoE2, having a lot of vills gathering from the same place is inefficient because they need space to walk to and from drop off poitns. That dynamic is lost in AoE3. There are also many small ways in which you can improve efficiency by building drop off points in the right places and placing your villagers on the right tree/mine/berry bush.
Drop-off points may have been removed because AOE3 maps got smaller and there simply wasn't enough room for keeping stone mines, having resource buildings and adding trade routes too, while also scaling the maps down to reduce distance between players and make the game faster paced and rushing more viable. On another note, it's possible that AOE2 maps were bigger also because their algorithm for pathing was just so abysmally bad, that units could only walk next to each other in very clearly separated lanes. AOE3 solved this issue by allowing units to move next to each other without bumping into each other or colliding. For all its faults and occasional bugs, AOE3 pathing is far superior to that from AOE2. And that has a lot to do with why macro tends to be more difficult in AOE2 and why it just takes so much time for vills to find the optimal path to a resource in that game.
Why? Why can't there be a healthy balance between early and late game? It doesn't have to be "geared towards" anything. Look at AoE2. Most games are decided in castle age, and a good amount is decided in feudal age. That clearly doesn't mean it's impossible to have the game be balanced and rewarding to play in late game.
Because AOE3 was probably not made to balance early vs later game. It's more like a tiered, layered, evolutionary approach. They made rushing more viable than in AOE2, which means lots of games can be ended in colonial. IF you manage to survive unscathed to fortress, then you get access to even more powerful units and upgrades to outscale your opponent and finish the game. And if you still manage to survive up to industrial, then they made units do even more brutal damage, so that the game can be ended faster if you win a fight or get a good raid. And if you still somehow miraculously make it to imperial, well then just make everything insanely powerful and make gathering superfast, so that only the most skillful and quick on one's feet player is able to clinch victory.

It's almost as if they wanted to create a Starcraft-style Age of Empires game, in which a game could be won by a sudden and paroxysmal turn of events. So instead of having that rustic, peaceful atmosphere of AOE2, in which you can see an opponent's plan from miles away because it takes forever for them to siege your defenses, in AOE3 the fate of a game can be turned in just a split of a second by a powerful shipment in the right spot, given the right entrapment and surround tactics. It made the game oscillate more and faster between "infernal" and "ecstatic". It also fits the historical period, since the closer we come to modern times, the progression of events tends to accelerate.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Mitoe »

GoodSpeed wrote:I think it was a mistake to get rid of drop off points. In AoE2, having a lot of vills gathering from the same place is inefficient because they need space to walk to and from drop off poitns. That dynamic is lost in AoE3. There are also many small ways in which you can improve efficiency by building drop off points in the right places and placing your villagers on the right tree/mine/berry bush. And yes, there is reseeding farms but also efficient farm placement to worry about. In short, there are many ways to make a difference as the better player, to end up with a better eco simply because you gather more efficiently. In AoE3, the only real way to make a difference here is by herding better.

I actually disagree that the dynamic is lost here in AoE3. Spreading your villagers out is actually much more efficient in AoE3 than keeping them all in one place, as it can drastically decrease your total walking time long-term. In the short-term keeping them in one place is good, but moving 20 villagers from mine to mine instead of splitting 10 to two mines is definitely worse in terms of villager seconds. The main thing to consider here in AoE3 is villager safety: spreading your vills out results in a more efficient long-term economy, but it also increases the amount of space you need to defend.

The farm placement thing is true though. That is definitely something that is lost.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Garja »

drop off points are such a key element of classic rts games
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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