They definitely cut corners. I agree this is probably not out of laziness, but rather because there was too much to do and they ran out of time. It's great that AoE3 was innovative but if that prevents you from making a well-balanced game and forces you to exclude classic RTS features like drop off points and defensive structures from your design then you overdid it.Dolan wrote: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.
Yeah but then they could've simply increased price. The problem of having cut stone remains though: If outposts cost only wood, they can be spammed all over the place.I agree. They probably thought outposts would become too OP, which would encourage passive play.
I like to bring up Knights and Merchants when people talk about clunky pathing. In that game, unit pathing is extremely clunky and I don't know if the effect was intended, but it made infrastructure very important to the extent that perhaps the primary way of making a difference on top levels of play is by having good infrastructure. If an important road became too busy, the congestion spread quickly and before you knew it you'd have a food crisis on your hands. The point being that "better" pathing is not always positive.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.
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.
So you may be right in that "bad" pathing (along with drop off points) is what causes problems in efficiency if your vills are too concentrated, but I think that this is actually an accurate representation of reality and the added mechanic of keeping your vills spread out for max efficiency is a positive result imo. I don't like that in AoE3 I can just put my vills on wood and forget about them, or put them on a mine, shift click the next couple of mines and forget about them. An age game imo should strike a balance between eco management and military tactitcs, and the balance is undeniably skewed towards the latter in AoE3.
Rushing is viable in AoE2. Like in AoE3, it depends on the map. If AoE3 was not made to balance early vs late game that's an understandable decision given how ambitious it was in other areas, but imo it's a major flaw. If advancing through the ages throws balance out of whack to such an extent that you basically have to be playing the right civ to have any chance of winning, then you are locked into keeping the meta early game focused. People complain about the "stale" meta of AoE3, and it's because of this. When there is no good balance between the game stages, the meta can never be allowed to freely evolve because it will make the game very unbalanced and unrewarding to play. We are locked into either redesigning the later ages, or actively fighting the natural changes in the meta by way of patch changes.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.
I think the faster pace is fine, and I think the addition of shipments and TPs was a great idea. But none of that stops you from making a well-balanced game design.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.
And we shouldn't forget that my argument is not that AoE3 is a bad game. I wouldn't have played 15000 games of it if I thought that. I take issue, though, with this seemingly common opinion that AoE2 is only popular due to nostalgia. Its player base is likely actually younger than AoE3's. It is an excellent RTS, imo one of the best video games ever made, and we should open our minds and learn from it. At least, those of us who are interested in game design and in fixing the many existing flaws in AoE3.
I'm confused by this
