ZP: The Zoi Patch

[Cometk]

10s added to the fortress age up will indeed be gamechanging but this is exactly what people have been asking for

[Hazza54321]

dont know what the fuzz is about this is what people want

[n0el]

This is why having Zoi as the EP leader as opposed to Kaiser or Rouga or whoever is a good thing. There is clearly a different perspective on the game among top players. Having a top player in charge pursuing their vision seems more likely to alienate others than having a change leader like Zoi who is outside of the group yet very knowledgeable.

[Cometk]

1) exiled prince is nerfed, which nerfs semi-ff playstyles (nerfs france, ger, port)
2) xbow/pike is buffed, which buffs colonial playstyles (buffs france, ger, port)
3) ???
4) profit!

[Atomiswave]

10s added to the fortress age up will indeed be gamechanging but this is exactly what people have been asking for

Maybe we should go for middle solution, like 5 sec, but i doubt it will have any impact.

[n0el]

Good thing it is a beta, so people can test it!

[Kaiserklein]

Except 90f isn't 10sec.
It means that colonial musk/huss timings, which are already viable, will be too scary.

90f in age 1 is easily 5s earlier colonial. Even if you're fr with 14 cdbs and hunt dogs (so the best age 1 food gathering possible), you'll be getting roughly 16 food/s, which is 5.5s for 90f. Then it probably snowballs into roughly 10s earlier fortress, since it delays your vil shipment and steel traps by 5s. Plus all your colonial units are out 5s later, right? So at the end of the day it's more impactful than the exiled prince nerf...

Musk huss timings are not viable in most of these match ups. Like ger/fre/port/iro/sioux have an easy time holding them, dutch might be a bit harder but should still hold. With 10s more it might make these timings barely viable, while now they're not. And yeah that's exactly what people want, variety, and not just semi ff.

[Garja]

I can't tell if 10sec difference will be meta changing. However even if we assume so (in the end we want the change to be impactful) it's not necessarily worse. The only thing to adjust is perhaps to give every civ somewhat decent units to compete in colonial. I'm not saying on the same level but at least to the point that they don't have to completely skip colonial to keep up with other strong age2 civs.

[Kaiserklein]

I can't tell if 10sec difference will be meta changing. However even if we assume so (in the end we want the change to be impactful) it's not necessarily worse. The only thing to adjust is perhaps to give every civ somewhat decent units to compete in colonial. I'm not saying on the same level but at least to the point that they don't have to completely skip colonial to keep up with other strong age2 civs.

Civs that currently "have" to completely skip colonial are spain and china I guess? And these civs don't have the exiled prince so they're not affected by the change (or actually they're buffed vs semi ff civs but that's another topic). Or do you mean you expect a civ like fr/ger/iro/sioux/port/dutch to be forced into ffing every game now because of the extra 10s?

[Garja]

Fre/Ger also completely skip colonial to me. Even when you send 8bows and defend a bit to then age up, to me that's just a bit more delayed semi FF. It would be cool if those civs could just use the TP to have a tempo advantage in colonial and eventually only age up when it comes to unit upgrades for other civs.

[Hazza54321]

Fre/Ger also completely skip colonial to me. Even when you send 8bows and defend a bit to then age up, to me that's just a bit more delayed semi FF. It would be cool if those civs could just use the TP to have a tempo advantage in colonial and eventually only age up when it comes to unit upgrades for other civs.

agreed

[Kaiserklein]

Fre/Ger also completely skip colonial to me. Even when you send 8bows and defend a bit to then age up, to me that's just a bit more delayed semi FF. It would be cool if those civs could just use the TP to have a tempo advantage in colonial and eventually only age up when it comes to unit upgrades for other civs.

Lol to me skipping colonial means going straight ff, but ok.
Basically you're talking about quick semi, like classic cav semi stuff, maybe with bows. Sure that's what happens in some mus, but in a lot of other mus you got to actually stay colonial for a while, maybe hit a timing before aging. Biggest problem of that is usually the fact that you might be out of resources once you hit fortress when you delay your age up, so it depends on the map, but besides that it's totally fine and I personally do it quite a lot.
Regardless I agree that it's more interesting than bot semi, yes, and hopefully we'll see it more with the 10s change.

[SoldieR]

Make two wall segments if you need 10 seconds.
Evolve gameplay omgno!!!

[deleted_user0]

walling is lamme.

[deleted_user0]

Hahahaha, show me some records of "scary" musk-hus timings for example in fre mirror.
Probably meta won't even change but now instead the guy has who does a timed push has a small chance when trying something else but semi-ff vs semi-ff. If you somebody really thinks those 10 seconds will change the game: You are delusional.

[Garja]

The problem with messenger change is that it nerfs aztec fast age to colonial, that's not necessary really.

[deleted_user0]

The problem with messenger change is that it nerfs aztec fast age to colonial, that's not necessary really.

"– "The Exiled Prince” & Fortress Age "The Messenger" councils train-points increased from 40 to 50"

R u sure?

[Garja]

Well if it is possible to separate the two then nvm.

[momuuu]

Good thing it is a beta, so people can test it!

In practise, beta has never really been a thing for EP. It's just the new release of the patch..
The testing of the beta has been bad enough to the point where I, of all people, discovered that in one version of EP gates were literally broken (as in, units could walk right through them) in the one test game that was played on that version of EP. Of course there's nobody to blame for this, but simply calling a full release a beta doesn't make it a beta. Unless ESOC was inspired by Bethesda of course, then anything can be called a beta.

[oxaloacetate]

If the changes are not necessarily going to be permanent, but rather subject to scrutiny and change; then it makes sense calling it a beta despite being available to everyone, I guess.

[momuuu]

From reading this thread I think there are three to four visions on how EP balancing should be done. Maybe it's productive to try to summarize these (Disclaimer, I will be rephrasing some people and they will probably feel misrepresented, I'm sorry for that):

1) Diarouga's point of view: This is the one that I have the hardest time grasping personally, but I think ultimately Diarouga thinks we should perfectionize balance with as few changes as possible. That means that risky changes (such as nerfing exiled prince or buffing xbows) serve little purpose since ultimately those will creates ripples in the balance somewhere. Ideally the game is played on standard maps and to some degree it doesn't really matter what the meta is like. The downside of this is that great balance with a boring meta could be considered worse than mediocre meta with a good balance.

2) Mitoe's point of view: Civs themselves should be made much more diverse; Any civ should have comparable capabilities in any stage of the game, so that strategy moves away from figuring out how to deal with a match up to adapting to what sort of strateg your opponent chose. Balancing would then not be nearly as important as trying to make sure civs have buffs in areas they are weak.
While in theory this sounds fun to me (sc2 does this really well for example, but also aoe2), I think in practise it's undoable for aoe3. Ultimately, this vision on RTS design and RTS balancing isn't wrong (it can work for sure), but is almost the opposite of what aoe3's entire design is. Aoe3 went for the other big way to design an interesting RTS: making a bunch of diverse civs with different strengths and weaknesses, where the strategy is in figuring out the different match ups. Of course to keep it interesting, they needed to add a lot of civs which made it harder to balance. I think I personally slightly prefer the design approach of sc2, but I dont think that can be applied to aoe3. For an RTS game to work with little variety between civs, the base strategy needs to be extremely interesting, like what is the case with aoe2 and sc2. I have very strong doubts however that aoe3 can provide a structure for cool base strategy. Right now, all of the interesting strategy is focused on specific match up strategies, as the core build orders are generally a bit dull and straight forward and the way units and players interact is also a bit straight forward. To achieve what Mitoe envisions, I almost feel like you'd have to abandon everything that RE and EP is, and redesign the game from the ground up.

3) My point of view: While balancing the game is important, it is also important to do so without destroying the meta. I believe, and I think there are many others that believe the same, that RE's meta is pretty great and diverse. In an earlier post I made a small summary of the diversity between civs, which outlined how RE seems to almost be evenly split in aggressive and defensive civs, and also evenly split between colonial and fortress civs. This diversity, I argued, is the main thing that creates interesting and engaging gameplay. Some match ups are very aggressive, where both players need to get going right away, some match ups have an aggressor versus a defender, and some match ups are defensive, where both players sit back and try to maximize their eco/army at the 10-15 minute mark. In that previous post, I also showed how the choices of EP have definitely disrupted the meta. I think ultimately the goal should be that the effects of balancing on the meta should be counteracted. So for example, nerfing exiled prince could be a good change that makes the meta slightly more aggressive again and reverting the sepoy hp nerf (which could be compensated with an attack nerf or something) would restore one of the pillars of aggression (the slow sepoy rush) in the meta, or how reversing the changes to Sioux would bring back the aggressive sioux civ to the meta. The downside of this is that you're actively compromising balancing decisions to maintain a more diverse and fun meta.

4) This might be a bit of a fringe point, but has been expressed by umeu and boneng at least: Change the bare minimum. Changes alienate players and any balancing just creates endless new balance problems. I think most people agree with this to some extend, but not to the full extreme extend as it has been stated. I would agree that changes can alienate players, however with aoe3DE on the horizon I think that that would just be colateral damage that isn't that significant. Obviously adding a huge list of irrelevant changes (trample change, anyone?) isn't going to be productive at all and should probably not be done. The idea that balancing just creates endless new balance problems is something I only partially agree with too. Of course you can endlessly balance aoe3 by constantly adding new changes, after which there will be new top and bottom civs which then need to be nerfed and buffed respectively with more changes. That is probably not the way to go. However, I think RE can definitely be improved upon balance wise. The balancing 'team' just needs to be aware that at some point you'll just be making changes for the sake of making changes. If you were to be part of Diarouga's view, I think around EP3 we reached a point where the balance was so good that it would need only small tweaks here and there. Additional changes (to india and of course our problemchild Sioux) only created more ripples in balance that required even more changes (zamb range, Teepee hp nerf) which probably also will require even more changes. Meanwhile, you're adding the Exiled prince nerf and xbow buffs, which will also create imbalances which will require more and more changes. Especially in the (1) view the patch contains to many notes. In Mitoe's view I don't think anything would be satisfactory because I doubt that his goals are possible at all. In the (3) view I think this patch contains some excessive notes but also some needed meta changes.

Anyhow, I think ultimately it's wise if the EP team (unfortunately, the future is basically managed by one individual), tried to at least pick a stance and design according to a real philosophy. Otherwise, the patches will just be a mess that ultimately nobody will agree with.

[deleted_user]

From reading this thread I think there are three to four visions on how EP balancing should be done. Maybe it's productive to try to summarize these (Disclaimer, I will be rephrasing some people and they will probably feel misrepresented, I'm sorry for that):

1) Diarouga's point of view: This is the one that I have the hardest time grasping personally, but I think ultimately Diarouga thinks we should perfectionize balance with as few changes as possible. That means that risky changes (such as nerfing exiled prince or buffing xbows) serve little purpose since ultimately those will creates ripples in the balance somewhere. Ideally the game is played on standard maps and to some degree it doesn't really matter what the meta is like. The downside of this is that great balance with a boring meta could be considered worse than mediocre meta with a good balance.

2) Mitoe's point of view: Civs themselves should be made much more diverse; Any civ should have comparable capabilities in any stage of the game, so that strategy moves away from figuring out how to deal with a match up to adapting to what sort of strateg your opponent chose. Balancing would then not be nearly as important as trying to make sure civs have buffs in areas they are weak.
While in theory this sounds fun to me (sc2 does this really well for example, but also aoe2), I think in practise it's undoable for aoe3. Ultimately, this vision on RTS design and RTS balancing isn't wrong (it can work for sure), but is almost the opposite of what aoe3's entire design is. Aoe3 went for the other big way to design an interesting RTS: making a bunch of diverse civs with different strengths and weaknesses, where the strategy is in figuring out the different match ups. Of course to keep it interesting, they needed to add a lot of civs which made it harder to balance. I think I personally slightly prefer the design approach of sc2, but I dont think that can be applied to aoe3. For an RTS game to work with little variety between civs, the base strategy needs to be extremely interesting, like what is the case with aoe2 and sc2. I have very strong doubts however that aoe3 can provide a structure for cool base strategy. Right now, all of the interesting strategy is focused on specific match up strategies, as the core build orders are generally a bit dull and straight forward and the way units and players interact is also a bit straight forward. To achieve what Mitoe envisions, I almost feel like you'd have to abandon everything that RE and EP is, and redesign the game from the ground up.

3) My point of view: While balancing the game is important, it is also important to do so without destroying the meta. I believe, and I think there are many others that believe the same, that RE's meta is pretty great and diverse. In an earlier post I made a small summary of the diversity between civs, which outlined how RE seems to almost be evenly split in aggressive and defensive civs, and also evenly split between colonial and fortress civs. This diversity, I argued, is the main thing that creates interesting and engaging gameplay. Some match ups are very aggressive, where both players need to get going right away, some match ups have an aggressor versus a defender, and some match ups are defensive, where both players sit back and try to maximize their eco/army at the 10-15 minute mark. In that previous post, I also showed how the choices of EP have definitely disrupted the meta. I think ultimately the goal should be that the effects of balancing on the meta should be counteracted. So for example, nerfing exiled prince could be a good change that makes the meta slightly more aggressive again and reverting the sepoy hp nerf (which could be compensated with an attack nerf or something) would restore one of the pillars of aggression (the slow sepoy rush) in the meta, or how reversing the changes to Sioux would bring back the aggressive sioux civ to the meta. The downside of this is that you're actively compromising balancing decisions to maintain a more diverse and fun meta.

4) This might be a bit of a fringe point, but has been expressed by umeu and boneng at least: Change the bare minimum. Changes alienate players and any balancing just creates endless new balance problems. I think most people agree with this to some extend, but not to the full extreme extend as it has been stated. I would agree that changes can alienate players, however with aoe3DE on the horizon I think that that would just be colateral damage that isn't that significant. Obviously adding a huge list of irrelevant changes (trample change, anyone?) isn't going to be productive at all and should probably not be done. The idea that balancing just creates endless new balance problems is something I only partially agree with too. Of course you can endlessly balance aoe3 by constantly adding new changes, after which there will be new top and bottom civs which then need to be nerfed and buffed respectively with more changes. That is probably not the way to go. However, I think RE can definitely be improved upon balance wise. The balancing 'team' just needs to be aware that at some point you'll just be making changes for the sake of making changes. If you were to be part of Diarouga's view, I think around EP3 we reached a point where the balance was so good that it would need only small tweaks here and there. Additional changes (to india and of course our problemchild Sioux) only created more ripples in balance that required even more changes (zamb range, Teepee hp nerf) which probably also will require even more changes. Meanwhile, you're adding the Exiled prince nerf and xbow buffs, which will also create imbalances which will require more and more changes. Especially in the (1) view the patch contains to many notes. In Mitoe's view I don't think anything would be satisfactory because I doubt that his goals are possible at all. In the (3) view I think this patch contains some excessive notes but also some needed meta changes.

Anyhow, I think ultimately it's wise if the EP team (unfortunately, the future is basically managed by one individual), tried to at least pick a stance and design according to a real philosophy. Otherwise, the patches will just be a mess that ultimately nobody will agree with.

Nice write up Jerom. when the first ep was out most people were happy because you would able to play at balanced maps and bad civs were buffed like porto dutch. But now what I see is. the patch is not doing any better than the old ep. You might notice a lot of random changes are otw.. or already done before. At this point i dont think its possible to fix ep at all. (Like random schooner change results adv dock thing and they plan to nerf advanced docks now lol) My suggestion is just rollback from ep 1.0 or ep 2.0 because the patch is too far from real game now.

[deleted_user0]

The problem with messenger change is that it nerfs aztec fast age to colonial, that's not necessary really.

"– "The Exiled Prince” & Fortress Age "The Messenger" councils train-points increased from 40 to 50"

R u sure?

fortress age the messenger was never 40 sec iirc. I thought the messenger was always 30 sec. in any case, it was always faster than the euro fast age.

[edeholland]

The problem with messenger change is that it nerfs aztec fast age to colonial, that's not necessary really.

"– "The Exiled Prince” & Fortress Age "The Messenger" councils train-points increased from 40 to 50"

R u sure?

fortress age the messenger was never 40 sec iirc. I thought the messenger was always 30 sec. in any case, it was always faster than the euro fast age.

Best source I could find says the Messenger to the fortress age decreased the time from 110 to 40 seconds.

Aztecs Tribal Council (Age up politicians)

Politician	Age 2	Age 3	Age 4	Age 5
The Messenger	90 -> 30	RE: 110 -> 40 EP: 110 -> 50	90 -> 30	90 -> 30
The Wise Woman	10% bonus to farm and plantation gather rates	10% bonus to farm and plantation gather rates + 1 farm travois	10% bonus to farm and plantation gather rates + 2 farm travois	20% bonus to farm and plantation gather rates + 2 farm travois
The Warrior	2 skull knights	3 skull knights	5 skull knights	8 skull knights
The Shaman	10% bonus to war hut and noble hut attack/hitpoints + 1 war hut travois	10% bonus to war hut and noble hut attack/hitpoints + 1 noble hut travois	10% bonus to war hut and noble hut attack/hitpoints + 2 noble hut travois	20% bonus to war hut and noble hut attack/hitpoints + 2 noble hut travois
The Chief	Swashbuckler attack unlocked	Swashbuckler attack unlocked	Swashbuckler attack unlocked	Swashbuckler attack unlocked

Note: I have yet to find the specific stats for the Chief.

[[Armag] diarouga]

I don't see how my opinion is different from boneng 's or Umeu' s.
I want a decent balance with minimal changes, thus EP 1.0, 3.0 and current EP are all fine for me.

Also I like how you sum it up. I'd like to add that although the meta is stale, we only see about 30 MUs, our of something like 150.
There is a lot of room for creativity, even on the current patch, the issue is that top players don't want to go out of their comfort zone, and a new patch won't change that.
People will find new strats, and go for it again and again, and the meta will be stale again.

Tbh we need creative players if we don't want a stale meta, not a crazy patch.