EP 7.0.x Beta [RELEASED-LIVE]

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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

gamevideo113 wrote:At the very least put them back in the castle, so that if china wants a better army comp they have to go for 2 different production facilities like every other civ.
I'm not against changing the castle banner armies, but changing them like this is not very justifiable from both a design and balance point of view. Also, the meteor hammer nerf is undeserved. The iron flail buff might be alright, since we almost never see imperial army from china, but keep in mind that they already tank a lot with the double faced armor card. Maybe leave the meteor attack untouched and nerf the armor card to just 10%hp 35% armor.

Also, i'm not a fan of spanish gold being pushed at all costs. Spanish colonial is already stuffed with cards in every deck, and i think spain shouldn't even be too bad in colonial anyway. Just leave the card in the fortress age and find other ways to buff the civ. This change is too intrusive imo. Everybody is suggesting to increase the civ xp bonus and i think it is a good idea because you are just adjusting a simple value without trying to create new playstyles that the original civ didn't even think of using in the first place.
Boosting spain's xp bonus allows to consistently send two discovery age cards and i think it can be good for a potential xbow-pike rush which should be a viable strategy with spain by design. Also, since unction got buffed even more, i think long term play with spain in colonial could/should become a potentially decent strategy.
Spanish Gold isn't being pushed, at all costs. After discussing and pondering the change, I simply think it's worth testing.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by scarm »

zoom wrote:I cant understand how any of this is standardizing.

It is by definition standardizing since your aim, as you repeatedly said, is alleviating weaknesses (not eliminating them!) which by definition lessens the differences between civs, i.e. china has a very bad colonial now. By buffing their colonial units, that weakness will be less pronounced and China will have less deviation from other Civs Colonial, which in the end results in the Civs being closer together in terms of Colonial Strength. Same with buffing Coyote shipment for example. By buffing 5 Coyote you make Aztecs more like other Civs, in the regard that its weakness ("bad colonial cav shipment") is less pronounced and more in line with the standard 3 Hussar shipment.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-15]

Post by zoom »

Riotcoke wrote:
zoom wrote:
Riotcoke wrote:I doubt this needs to be changed in the beta, but when testing stuff yesterday I found that the 'new' Chinese armies can't be made in the fort from the Russian consulate
Thank you for pointing out this oversight!

Just to tag something onto this, it's the same for the summer palace.
Good point. We're already aware of that one, though:
EAGLEMUT wrote:It is planned to include them there, but so far wasn't possible due to technical reasons.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

helln00 wrote:I remember in the Napolean era mod, Chinese army shipments would unlock the army at the barracks/war academy. This might be the way to go for the new chinese armies, make it more of a build order choice and not a thing from the start.

There is already a kelisk and steepe rider army, the Beiyang army card. But its a fotress card that cost food and is pretty weak by then. So then move it to colonial, make it unlock the army at the barracks and possibly make it buff them instead of the current Dynasty reform arrangements. This way you don't have to put it into summer palace.
It makes more sense to ensure that the armies are available and balanced, rather than unavailable and unbalanced. I see no reason why the banner armies (especially not the Mongolian one) would be inherently unbalanced (I.E could not be balanced). If that should change, I would consider limiting their availability by technology. Speaking of inherently unbalanced, another reason for the banner-army revamps, that I don't know whether I've mentioned, already, is that artillery—non-artillery banner armies are inherently unbalanced. It also isn't helping that they happen to be featuring Arquebusiers and Keshiks, respectively.

On a related note, I did consider leaving the armies at the Castle (like ASFP did), but apart from limiting their viability, needlessly, it were inconsistent with the Castle training artillery units, which is undesirable, from a development perspective. Once again, I'd only consider such a change, if it proves inherently impossible to have them at the academy, in the first place. The more viable they are, the better (provided they don't cause any balance issues).
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

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Post by Garja »

Having a batch of cav+anticav is definetely unbalanced.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-15]

Post by deleted_user0 »

zoom wrote:
umeu wrote:
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it's not a bug. politicians are techs, wonders are buildings. politicians aren't affected by building discounts, so why would wonders be affected by tech discounts? this seems really unfair.
Because wonders are both buildings and technologies, being age-ups.


eh, no. you research technologies... you build buildings. you don't build politicians, you research them. you build wonders. they're buildings, not technologies. You can't just arbitrarily decide they're technologies because both advance you to the next age.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by princeofcarthage »

Not up to date on full discussion but I agree the tech shouldn't change cost of wonder buildings. Wonders already provide additional benefits than standard European techs and that is enough.
Fine line to something great is a strange change.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-15]

Post by zoom »

princeofcarthage wrote:
zoom wrote:
princeofcarthage wrote:- Cassador ranged attack "rate-of-fire" increased from 3.0 to 3.5. Attack increased from 17 to 20
Technically you have decreased rate of fire, not increased.
Actually, it's the other way around. This is because the game confusingly refers to cooldown (or time between shots) as "rate of fire". Therefore, it is technically correct to say that what is referred to as "rate of fire" has been increased. The problem is that it actually isn't the rate of fire, not the change or the terminology – note how the actual note reads "rate of fire" in quotation marks. In fact, doing it any other way would be technically incorrect.

We have had this discussion on twitch, a long one. I explained and you agreed, but again... Rate of fire indicates no. of projectiles fired per min or seconds i.e. basically in terms of aoe 3 is how many times a unit shoots per min, what you are saying as cooldown or time between shots or reload time is the time in between the 2 shots. Technically same data is used but terminology indicates 2 different things and as such are inversely proportional. So technically when you change 3.0 seconds to 3.5 seconds it is decreasing rate of fire and increasing reload time.
Oh, that's right!

You still seem to misunderstand my point. I don't have anything more to add, though: The game is technically incorrect – not the patch notes. The patch notes were technically incorrect if they didn't correctly apply to the game's technical framework.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

pecelot wrote:has the incendiary grenades improvement been moved to the colonial age with advanced arsenal?
It has not.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

Garja wrote:20% rr is not fine.
The xp thing is mostly a treaty argument. We all know Otto get 3x the number of shipments India get.
How come? Ottomans is hardly overpowered, and the Spahi is a poor unit, on top of which it's a unique unit available only from the home city!
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

Imperial Noob wrote:EP nerfed base wall HP by 50%. The Portuguese card in age 2 used to improve walls by 1500 HP. Now it does only by 750 HP, which changes it from situational to completely useless. A fix please?
Perhaps. I'm interested in learning what other players think, about it.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

juhjuh wrote:the esoc patch tryes to balance the patch at top Level. They dont really care About Otto being op at lower Levels. the same with russa and India or China, they all are whay stronger at lower Levels. so they wont nerf Otto becouse they have less potential
I do care about balance at lower levels, but it's impossible to expect it to be particularly good, unless you prioritize it, which is obviously not a sensible approach. I would say that balance at lower levels is vastly superior on EP, than on RE. Possibly, it's more improved than at competitive skill levels (primarily because of how strong rushes are, at lower levels of skill). The fact of the matter is that balance simply isn't very relevant, at less than competitive skill levels.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

Dsy wrote:On re vet jan mass + 5 mams is a very common strat.
I guess spahi buffs just aiming to replace mams...
Not at all – the aim is strictly to make it an option to "4 Mamelukes"!
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

Kawapasaka wrote:
gamevideo113 wrote:India isn't particularly easy


Relative to what? In all their agressive matchups they just make sepoys and z-move, and for their handful of defensive matchups their options for holding pressure are ridiculously good (3 sets of minutemen + Agra + taking forever to chew through in-base resources + trickles that can't be idled + age 2 skirm/goon).
I guess their macro is a bit harder than some civs but using so much wood is a blessing more than a curse.
I think Indians is strong, but not easy. In fact, it's one of the harder civilizations, to play well (Cease Fire notwithstanding). The House cost buff has offset that a little bit, though.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by gamevideo113 »

Garja wrote:Having a batch of cav+anticav is definetely unbalanced.

Well, it might be the case for these specific banner armies, but that can't be a dogma.
Afaik china cannot rely on a 2 unit composition anyway, therefore they have to produce different banner armies to grow a decently sized deathball to just headbutt into the enemy army at some point. I don't really see changdao and meteors being viable as a mono-banner army composition, similarly to what rods+lancers could be for spain.
The only instance where i see brooken flag army being potentially problematic is when you take a fight, you lose changdaos and cav while saving skirms, and then you can replenish just the units that you lost without having to make more skirms, although usually adding skirms is not undesirable.

I might be wrong and changdaos+meteors might be completely broken, but nobody has given proof of it yet. Most people are losing their minds over these changes but actual evidence of balance issues is still lacking. It surely wouldn't take too long to play a few games and post the recs here for Zoom to see, to prove a point. Playing something slightly different can't hurt either, for a change.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by ListlessSalmon »

zoom wrote:Please let me know in what way you think they are misguided. It were especially helpful if you have a logical argument. Please first see this post, though.

Crazy Chinese changes!? Please see my above post, then elaborate.

Crazy was perhaps not the best word there (honestly I just liked the alliteration).

I think it is mostly just a difference of opinion over design and the desirability of patch changes. A fair amount of your interaction with people about these things tend to be
Zoi: Proposed change that redesigns something
Responder: I don't like how this redesigns it
Zoi: The original design is a problem (usually stated as a fact rather than an opinion), why don't you have a logical argument or playtest it to show its not a good change!

So I don't have much faith in a response being useful but nonetheless lets have a go.

In general I don't like changes from RE that either don't seem particularly useful or actively make things worse. The nerf to coyote combats speed increase feels like it is quite unnecessary I don't think that it is the case that coyote speed with the card is a problem- and I don't think that the card being strong relative to other civs upgrade cards is any more a problem than say boyars being really strong is.

Assuming the mace shipment nerfs remain an attempt to make 5 coyotes viable as compared to the mace shipments, if it were the case that the mace shipments were too strong in some way for inter-civ balance- which I do not believe to be the case- then that would be another thing, then I basically think this is an unworthy goal, essentially akin to complaining that 9 maces is not viable compared to 10 maces. Or perhaps, for a slightly fairer comparison, complaining that 700f is (generally) not viable compared to wood shipments. Indeed you could say "it should be possibly to gather and ship both resources!" which is essentially something you said about the shipments just with a few words changed.

But more than that, I feel like relatively trashy unit shipments have an interesting impact on the game that gives a benefit that exceeds any benefit from a purported benefit of 5 coyo vs 9/10 maces being an interesting question more often. That is, the immediate impact of even really quite poor unit shipments can be very helpful in scrappy situations. So where you have situationally viable but still relatively weak unit shipments you have the question of "this might help me a bit in the short term but its value is not great beyond that- is the benefit enough to be worth it?". Making all (major) unit shipments closer together in value eats away at this kind of dynamic. This is also the case with 4 iron flails and in that case you also have the interesting question of do I want this in deck or is something else better? Cards that you could make a reasonable argument for including in a deck in some (or a lot) of cases feel more interesting to me than cards that will always be in a deck.

(tl:dr on coyo/mace) I don't generally like changes that make situationally viable (assuming the viability is not a remote edge case- and as 5 coyote is a staple of aztec decks 5 coyo is not an edge case) things more viable, the situational nature of them is more interesting to me. Possibly those paragraphs were more relevant when 5 ->6 coyos was in the beta (though the original comment was describing the initial beta changes as having been misguided so I guess thats fair).

re: China, some of the above also applies to that, but otherwise I just feel like being compositionally awkward is a feature not a bug, and so changes designed to reduce that feel like (bad) standardisation. I guess that awkwardness being a feature is just my opinion, but it seems a reasonable one given that China is the civ whose units don't come individually. The last posts by Mitoe and Diarouga in the Chinese thread in beta forum make this point better than I could.

I don't have a problem with reforms being redesigned though (obviously the precise values/effect would need to be worked out over the beta for inter-civ balance which I don't have much insight on). The RE version felt quite dumb design-wise and we did away with that so long ago now that a revert feels like it has less benefits, and the card doesn't really work too well in its current "RE version- but shitty" design. I feel like ideally it would end up being somewhat niche or only viable situationally though, as EP-only stuff being the dominant style (when a game reaches that point) feels undesirable to me.

As I said, I don't think this is a "logical argument" for my position in the sense that you seem to want. But hopefully it is an understandable elaboration of my views here. Apologies for it being overly long.

Also would just like to say I'm genuinely grateful for you spending your time on EP stuff and trying to improve things :flowers: (though I am still of the view that someone else doing it would likely be better).
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

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Post by zoom »

Kawapasaka wrote:It's kinda sad in recent weekend tournaments how Brit has been absent just because they can be hard counter-picked by India or Russia doing the same shit every single game.
The Grenadier might come to have a role to play in that – to a desirable extent, that is.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

Garja wrote:Having a batch of cav+anticav is definetely unbalanced.
It would be helpful if you cared to support your opinion with logical reasoning or recorded games.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by Kawapasaka »

zoom wrote:
Kawapasaka wrote:It's kinda sad in recent weekend tournaments how Brit has been absent just because they can be hard counter-picked by India or Russia doing the same shit every single game.
The Grenadier might come to have a role to play in that – to a desirable extent, that is.


Cannot wait to start nuking blockhouses with them :devil:
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-15]

Post by zoom »

umeu wrote:
zoom wrote:
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Because wonders are both buildings and technologies, being age-ups.


eh, no. you research technologies... you build buildings. you don't build politicians, you research them. you build wonders. they're buildings, not technologies. You can't just arbitrarily decide they're technologies because both advance you to the next age.
I cannot decide that, and I do not. AoE3's developers did! In addition to being buildings, wonders – like councils and politicians – are technologies. Disagreeing with that may or may not be reasonable, but a bug-fix it remains, without significant impact on balance.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by zoom »

Dsy wrote:I would suggest balancing mercenary shipments with their price adjustments.
For example You get 6 hackapelles which worth 1800 gold then it should cost 800 gold.
With this its much easier to balance mercenary shipments. All you need to do modifie the base unit cost and update shipments accordingly.
Mercenaries and their shipments may be looked at, in the future, but is without the scope of EP7, with the limited exceptions of the Arsonist and the Jäger.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-15]

Post by deleted_user0 »

zoom wrote:
umeu wrote:
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eh, no. you research technologies... you build buildings. you don't build politicians, you research them. you build wonders. they're buildings, not technologies. You can't just arbitrarily decide they're technologies because both advance you to the next age.
I cannot decide that, and I do not. AoE3's developers did! In addition to being buildings, wonders – like councils and politicians – are technologies. Disagreeing with that may or may not be reasonable, but a bug-fix it remains, without significant impact on balance.
:flowers:


what is this based on? does it say in the files that they are techs?
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by dansil92 »

zoom wrote:
Kawapasaka wrote:It's kinda sad in recent weekend tournaments how Brit has been absent just because they can be hard counter-picked by India or Russia doing the same shit every single game.
The Grenadier might come to have a role to play in that – to a desirable extent, that is.


This is an exciting change, and honestly could very well make a viable counter to russia, aztec and heavy infantry spams. I almost worry grens might be too good vs aztec, but brits already stomps azzy 90% of the time anyways so i don't know how impactful it will actually be

Happy to help with the chakrams :) hopefilly they could see some use now, as they are quite ridiculous with the range buff tech now
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

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Post by Garja »

zoom wrote:
Garja wrote:Having a batch of cav+anticav is definetely unbalanced.
It would be helpful if you cared to support your opinion with logical reasoning or recorded games.

Well, it's inherently hard to provide rec games to directly point out a a flawed game design.
You should rather reflect on the fact that the only 2 other civs with a goon type unit in age2 do rise balance problems in regards to unit strenght/army composition. But more importantly you seems to completely ignore the underlying logic of banner armies: getting more but not what you exactly need. With the suggested new banner armies you're still retaining the mass advantage but also providing the ideal combo and removing any loophole in China army composition.
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Re: EP 7.0.x Beta [2019-08-26]

Post by [Armag] diarouga »

I agree with Garja here.

"I don't like that design" is a totally valid criticism to a design change.

After all, if a change doesn't improve the balance and isn't popular, why would we keep it?
I'd just poll all these chinese changes and see how it goes.
Same with the 10->9 mace nerf and half of the EP7 changes.

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