ESOCommunity

Small thread to check up on reasons for not playing treaty for sup players.

I used to play exclusively treaty in the past, but quit as soon as I got out of high school and had to organize my daily life on my own. The time investment with around 1h+ per game is too much. You need to schedule your games and can rarely ever just jump into queue when you feel like it. Additionally, all sorts of fun hazards need to be accounted for. You need to arrange even match-ups and make as sure as possible that nobody's connection drops midway. Those are just the hurdles I can think of off the top of my head

if i was to play it would at a low elo level, sometimes it feels like even if have great trades micro doesnt have the same reward as it does in sup.

jesus3 wrote: ↑

27 Nov 2022, 11:17

I used to play exclusively treaty in the past, but quit as soon as I got out of high school and had to organize my daily life on my own. The time investment with around 1h+ per game is too much. You need to schedule your games and can rarely ever just jump into queue when you feel like it. Additionally, all sorts of fun hazards need to be accounted for. You need to arrange even match-ups and make as sure as possible that nobody's connection drops midway. Those are just the hurdles I can think of off the top of my head

Actually the time aspect aside I think most of that is outdated, but yea time passed quickly after all

I_HaRRiiSoN_I wrote: ↑

27 Nov 2022, 14:33

if i was to play it would at a low elo level, sometimes it feels like even if have great trades micro doesnt have the same reward as it does in sup.

mm yes and no I'd say. Good micro in a single engagement won't end the game like it can in sup, it's more about keeping up a certain level of good micro consistently. Winning one engagement and losing the next 5 is a loss.

More of a time issue. Takes far too long setting up a lobby, waiting for people to join then you've still got 40 minutes before any action. Not to mention the random disconnections or game crashes.

The disconnecting and crashing is not as big of an issue as it used to be. Now you can savegame, although it does still force trade civs to trade again, it's usually still a playable game. So instead of wasting 40 mins due to a disconnect you waste 10, for people to join the lobby and download the save file. It is annoying that they do server maintenance during peak hours though. The biggest issue with treaty has always been and always will be the time investment, 20 minutes which involve just executing a boom (there is skill involved but it's not very fun), and 20 minutes which involve building a base, some scouting, and just alt-tabbing/afking waiting for the timer to expire. You also need a decent number of treaty games (and a high IQ) before you can appreciate the good things about treaty, which increases the time investment even more. Another thing is that while other players can't force you to lag anymore, you do need a very decent modern PC to not have extreme start fight lag.

I feel like treaty is a lot more mechanic based with less variance in terms of what can happen strategically, which is unappealing.

gibson wrote: ↑

27 Nov 2022, 18:46

I feel like treaty is a lot more mechanic based with less variance in terms of what can happen strategically, which is unappealing.

More like treaty is a subgame inside AOE3.

I just don't enjoy it, whatsoever. whenever a game goes late in a team game and it's just spamming units i wanna quit. a team game occasionally gets to that state so I accept it but purposely deciding to play that state seems like the last thing I wanna do. I really rather stare at the ceiling than play treaty

gibson wrote: ↑

27 Nov 2022, 18:46

I feel like treaty is a lot more mechanic based with less variance in terms of what can happen strategically, which is unappealing.

This

Time investment is not the (main) problem imho. Dota 2 games take about as long as treaty games and millions of people play that. The problem is that people play and enjoy AoE because it's a strategy game and treaty moves away from that. It's just a different game with different reward systems that doesn't necessarily attract the same people who are attracted to AoE.

Out of the options in the OP though, the time investment would be the biggest hurdle for me personally

It feels like if you're playing a given MU in treaty, it's just gonna be kinda the same game everytime, at least if both players play it right. Most of the time there's one optimal unit composition on each side, one guy being aggressive and draining resources while the other tries to survive and push back eventually, possibly one "gimmick" like one player trying to run the other around. And usually no adapting to the map as it's just Andes.
In sup, in most MUs you have several viable strats on each side, especially if you take into account the variety of maps. There are some MUs where it isn't the case but that's often just imba MUs (and balance is another issue) where you know X strat basically wins. So overall it feels like each game is (more or less) unique. Especially since e.g one raid, one overcommit, one basetrade can totally change the game, and then it looks just different from the previous game.

So yeah it's a matter of strategic variety. I guess one could say sup is like playing regular chess, while treaty is like playing chess with always the same exact first 10-15 moves or something.
It is somewhat more mechanically demanding during fights, but that's vastly mitigated by the fact your macro is already setup for the most part + multitasking isn't as important.


So now if you add a 40 mins wait at start, inevitable extra lag / higher probability of someone disconnecting and whatnot, smaller playerbase which means fewer good players and just playing with always the same people overall, and the repetitive aspect of spamming (I know it's not just "spamming" but still it's more repetitive than sup) units in the same location... It doesn't seem very attractive to me

@Kaiserklein when is the grand return Monsieur?