made a post over on the official forums- my thoughts on why making civs more strategically diverse is paradoxically bad

[Squamiger]

https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/mexic ... ign/187345

tldr the new civ designs basically kill civ identity and strategic gameplay because their unique civ bonuses don't limit or constrain the civs in any way. Paradoxically, constraining the strategic options of individual civs is the way to make gameplay more strategically rich.

[Cometk]

momuuu's spirit presides over you, inshallah

[Mr_Bramboy]

Fully agreed. I had early access but couldn't find the motivation to play a single game because the civilization was so complicated.

[Garja]

ngl I totally agree on the no constraint concept. New civs have upgrades for most units, can do any type of strat, etc.
It's not only unfair to old civs but it is also meh design in itself.

[RefluxSemantic]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

[princeofcarthage]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

[RefluxSemantic]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

You're not making a point.

[princeofcarthage]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

You're not making a point.

You can only make strategic decision when there are multiple options or strategies viable to you. Say you are given 5 paths to your destination, choosing the best path based on whatever conditions is a strategic decision. If you have only 1 path and you follow only that where is any strategic decision in it?

[harcha]

Show hidden quotes

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

You're not making a point.

You can only make strategic decision when there are multiple options or strategies viable to you. Say you are given 5 paths to your destination, choosing the best path based on whatever conditions is a strategic decision. If you have only 1 path and you follow only that where is any strategic decision in it?

We have moved to a higher plane of complexity. Now it's all about that civ micro...

[AndiAOE]

I think the civ would be fine with no revolution mechanic, that really bloats it up. They do have weaknesses (without revolution). mediocre canons, no huss (only lancer), no melee inf (lategame) and you really cant have all cards, since 21 is not enough to fit in most cards (played in dm / ew mainly, so have no opinion about sup)

[princeofcarthage]

Show hidden quotes

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

You're not making a point.

You can only make strategic decision when there are multiple options or strategies viable to you. Say you are given 5 paths to your destination, choosing the best path based on whatever conditions is a strategic decision. If you have only 1 path and you follow only that where is any strategic decision in it?

We have moved to a higher plane of complexity. Now it's all about that civ micro...

If you have nothing valuable or interesting to say pls stop responding to me. Your cheap shots, satire takes, and constant sarcasm and sarcastic replies are pissing me off. At least don't quote or tag me.

[callentournies]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

Viability is a function of Other. Other is a function of what’s viable. They oscillate like evolutionary population diagrams.

A computer scientist hosts an AI prisoners dilemma tournament with a quarter million matches played. No one strategy wins. The winning strategy is winning after it’s losing, and once it’s winning, it’s back to losing.

The idea that “everything can be viable” doesn’t hold up in practice I think.

[a forum ghost]

Bro... did I just read a thread where princeofcarthage have the most reasonable take and callen made a actually insightful comment?

This place have really gone to shit after AoE4 release.

[princeofcarthage]

What do you mean? All my takes are always the most reasonable ones.

[Kaiserklein]

Honestly the first time I opened an aiz stream and closed it within a couple minutes was a few days ago. Every new civ is like a new game. Can't be assed to watch or play this, it just ruins the feel. And it's impossible to balance ofc

[Garja]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

What is viable is already plenty. Making everything viable makes for a non choice. He's right, and you're only saying the opposite for the sake of arguing with him.

[a forum ghost]

I think princeofcarthage is adding a argument to refluxsemantic's point, and not trying to refute it.

Edit: Nope, I actually misread Refluxsemantic post, they are disagreeing... and I'm actually on Prince side on this discussion.
There is not a lot of strategy or decision making when you have limited amount of choices.
For example, Lakota do cavalry on 80% of games due to their infantry being lackluster. This is not deep strategical thought process, is just resumes too: "Cetan bow is bad and have terrible animations, Wakina have bad range for a skirmisher and War Club can be good on age 2, but becomes obsolete as the games go on... so yeah, I guess I will cav spam every game."
If those units where attractive enough you would have think which is one is best suitable for the situation/map/matchup at hand, which involves much more strategical thinking then just spamming cavalry because everything else is bad.

And callen comment is actually quite interesting, at least for the virgin chess player in me.

Our perception on what is "viable" or not is quite susceptible to change.

A AoE3 example would be that people actually used to do forts in the early years of the game, and today forts are pretty much gone from every single game. (I mean, the Europeans one's, not that cancer with 10k+ HP, stealth and a ludicrous amount of damage that Inca have it)

I even remember a stream where Don_Artie and someone else is joking about playing against the AI, and Don jokingly said something along the lines of: "Yeah, playing against Queen Isabella is rough... You try to do a ff, and when you look it, there is a fort mid map!".

Is interesting that people unironically thought that forts where viable and used it on the early years of the game, and 10-15 years latter we see others cracking jokes at those very same forts.
Forts didn't change it, just our perceptions on them.

And Callen's comment is interesting, because in chess, the engines are considerably accelerating this process. A good example is Leela's d3 on the Caro-Kann.
If someone played "1-e4,c6. 2-Cc3,d5. 3-d3!?" on 1990s-2000s you would thought that it was some sort of joke. But here you have a engine that played millions of games against itself to find out that this is actually viable way to play it.

Or I am a complete moron and misread the whole room... which is also possible.
I sincerely hope is the latter, because prince being reasonable and callen being insightful is a sign that ESOC soul is slowly and painfully dying.

[BrookG]

The amount of new information is huge, there are so many new things to process and evaluate. So many new civs that double the possible matchups (from 105 to 210; mirrors included) and so many new features. This doesn't cater towards the more competitive players. Instead, it favours the casual and those who just wanna have fun with weird features. Having to learn a lot of new stuff about how the game was played was impactful at not wanting me to invest on it, anymore. For me the DE philosophy resembles a lot the Wars of Liberty mod.

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

And yes, on a more philosophical approach, if everything is viable, then nothing is. Endless possibilities are too many for a regular player to explore.

[Pedrownage]

Very interesting argument Squamiger, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I've mostly skipped playing the African civs, and USA, because they did look overwhelmingly complicated to me.

For some reason however I feel more motivated to play a few games with Mexican civ to understand what is going on. Maybe just to not fall behind too much in my game knowledge. The Mexican civ seems to be a bit more straightforward, than the other new DE civs. For example the gathering is relatively normal (what was that cow exchange stuff for African civs, and influence?!). The military units are also quite similar to what we're used to from European civs. Most importantly, I realized there might only be 2 or 3 strategies that will become meta for this civ, and it's doable to learn those. Perhaps it is the same for the other new civs and we just need to look past the initial chaos/plethora of options. The federal card system seems like quite a task to master, although at some point there will only be a limited number of meta options.

Regarding your point of playstyle suited to a civ, Brits being boomy, Spain being agressive, etc., wouldn't you agree that we're already past this point? With most civs there is option for age II play, or (semi)FF, boom, or FI. Wouldn't it be likely that play styles for Mexico will settle down to similar age II, age III/revolt, boomy or FI play? I guess my question is if Mexico is really that different from most other civs in that they can all "overcome" their civ weaknesses and go for different play styles. It just looks like Mexico doesn't really have weaknesses yet but that perhaps due to balancing.

On the other hand I would also like a less complex civ to be honest, I'm just trying to figure out for myself why and if I'm not just becoming an old man resistant to change...

[princeofcarthage]

When everything is viable, there are no strategic decisions to be made.

When everything is not viable there are no strategic decisions to be made cuz then you only do what's viable. *not an argument on topic but just to your point.

What is viable is already plenty. Making everything viable makes for a non choice. He's right, and you're only saying the opposite for the sake of arguing with him.

You are reading it wrong and possibly I phrased it wrong in the first post. I am not saying everything should be viable, I am saying there should be enough things viable to actually make a decision. There should be no single dominant strategy*

[Squamiger]

Very interesting argument Squamiger, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I've mostly skipped playing the African civs, and USA, because they did look overwhelmingly complicated to me.

For some reason however I feel more motivated to play a few games with Mexican civ to understand what is going on. Maybe just to not fall behind too much in my game knowledge. The Mexican civ seems to be a bit more straightforward, than the other new DE civs. For example the gathering is relatively normal (what was that cow exchange stuff for African civs, and influence?!). The military units are also quite similar to what we're used to from European civs. Most importantly, I realized there might only be 2 or 3 strategies that will become meta for this civ, and it's doable to learn those. Perhaps it is the same for the other new civs and we just need to look past the initial chaos/plethora of options. The federal card system seems like quite a task to master, although at some point there will only be a limited number of meta options.

Regarding your point of playstyle suited to a civ, Brits being boomy, Spain being agressive, etc., wouldn't you agree that we're already past this point? With most civs there is option for age II play, or (semi)FF, boom, or FI. Wouldn't it be likely that play styles for Mexico will settle down to similar age II, age III/revolt, boomy or FI play? I guess my question is if Mexico is really that different from most other civs in that they can all "overcome" their civ weaknesses and go for different play styles. It just looks like Mexico doesn't really have weaknesses yet but that perhaps due to balancing.

On the other hand I would also like a less complex civ to be honest, I'm just trying to figure out for myself why and if I'm not just becoming an old man resistant to change...

I agree that Mexico, so far, does feel a little easier to grasp than African civs, and I think that mostly comes down to the units. I still don't know what half the Africa units do.

As for your point that we are already past the point of a rock-paper-scissors civ design, I direct you to what I wrote in my post:

boomy civs countered turtle civs, turtle civs countered rush civs, rush civs countered boomy civs. Well, sort of. The play and adaptation in between these categories was what actually made for really interesting strategic decision making, and made games exciting to watch.

My point was that what was always interesting about gameplay in AoE3 was the way that players adapted to, and bent the rules within the constraints of the civ types. It was the interplay between 1. what the civ permits and 2. what the players can come up with, that was really cool. So for instance, someone rushing hard and fast with Brits, shipping 6 musk 7lbow with a forward tower. Or someone getting the Cree settlers and sending spanish gold +1k wood with spain, and getting full market ups. 2 bank Dutch gameplay. Russian kalmuck FF or FI. India water boom with advanced wonders and 8 minutes to age 2. French water boom turtle. Lakota adoption boom. Haud trade monopoly FI with town dance. Port 10/10 rush. These strats were cool explicitly BECAUSE they were played against the grain; they were strats that pushed the limits of what a civ was supposed to be able to do. It's only because of the civ constraints that these strats were interesting to see pulled off. If these civs could just do everything easily, none of these strats would be particularly impressive or strategically interesting.

[Squamiger]

i think it probably boils down to this: the devs have seen the way the wind is blowing. aoe3 is not going to make money by being a competitive multiplayer game. it's going to make money by launching new civ DLCs that appeal to single player gamers who like history and want to roleplay as their own country for a couple hours. So the gameplan is to launch new civ after new civ for 5 bucks a pop. Balance or strategic dynamics don't really matter, what matters is that new players can have "fun" with a bunch of weird gimmicks

it makes sense monetarily. why should devs prioritize what we want? we have already bought the game and invested hundreds if not thousands of hours into it. it's the untapped markets of new players who like history that will help keep the lights on at microsoft

[BrookG]

i think it probably boils down to this: the devs have seen the way the wind is blowing. aoe3 is not going to make money by being a competitive multiplayer game. it's going to make money by launching new civ DLCs that appeal to single player gamers who like history and want to roleplay as their own country for a couple hours. So the gameplan is to launch new civ after new civ for 5 bucks a pop. Balance or strategic dynamics don't really matter, what matters is that new players can have "fun" with a bunch of weird gimmicks

it makes sense monetarily. why should devs prioritize what we want? we have already bought the game and invested hundreds if not thousands of hours into it. it's the untapped markets of new players who like history that will help keep the lights on at microsoft

This can be seen at the new civs being in the Americas. Most players are from that continent.

[Hazza54321]

looks like its time for another legacy civ tournament @Kaiserklein

[Squamiger]

looks like its time for another legacy civ tournament @Kaiserklein

you better play in it this time