[Armag] diarouga wrote:I agree with your point, but what people fail to understand is that aoe3 civs are either good at agression or at defense, while in sc2 and aoe2, all civs can either rush or def.
As a result, you have to be predictable in aoe3 if you don't want to use a suboptimal strat: you have to rush as Russia, you have to boom as Dutch etc.
Furthermore, depending on the map, rush will be better or worse than defensive play. For instance, on maps with a lot of resources, defensive civs will beat agressive civs if you balance from low resource maps, and on low resource maps, agressive civs will be better if you balance on high resource maps, and you won't be able to hold the rush with defensive civs.
Thus, it's impossible to balance the game on both low and high resource maps.
The choice of the EP has been to balance the civs on high resource, TP maps. That way, defensive civs can hold rushes, but they can't turtle too much, because the agressive civs can take the TP line and match their economy.
It's not optimal, but I don't see a better way to get a balanced game.
This is definitely true, and personally oppose the extreme variety of maps. It's probably best, like you said, to focus balance on some specific type of maps.
That doesn't mean that you can make it so that the gameplay on the map that the balance was designed for is still really diverse. That aspect has failed a little bit. I think it could be good to try to compensate for the fact that the maps are really high resource (which they made be trying right now with for example the exiled prince). Although this is dangerous because it may turn out terribly, I think it's worthwhile. The other aspect is the balancing by EP. Many balancing decisions have moved civs into the defensive/age3 spectrum and that's sad because the balancing could definitely have been done differently too. I really hope the EP team/Zoi will at least present some sort of vision for the future of the game and act accordingly.