BreakfastBurrito_007

Sparta has no eco bonus and the buildings they use to train those champions are expensive. If you find a way to attack early with other civs that can boom faster such as gauls or germans or ptolemies then you might have a chance of not needing to fight the hoplites.

They get armor but not dmg from the forge. Also the splash buff and unit preference behavior change they received in a28 is quite significant. In my opinion they can be very strong in this alpha.

@ittihat_ve_terakkiBro you claim to be someone "actually playing the game" as if no one else here does, and yet what makes you come onto the forum is an issue like this? Have you not heard about sniping, champcav, booming/turling issues, fanas, and all sorts of other gameplay issues that we discuss. Definitely it seems that theres something extra bothersome to you about this change that you haven't mentioned.

TGs on the Pokeball will go crazy

"Bad developers you made a civ too fast, it should at least take a decade!"

As for gameplay appeal, mercs that cost more metal and less food (mercs not in the gaul embassy) can be accessed with faster build orders which use fewer farms. Costing more food and less metal doesn't make the unit universally better than standard mercs, especially if that cost change requires a tech first.

This an interesting take. I really like how melee units play in a27, but I'm fairly sure that melee actually die faster in a27 than they do in a26 due to the armor nerfs. The main feature has been their much increased damage that makes them contribute more to a fight besides their "meat shield" characteristic. I suppose faster rank ups due to increased damage might actually make them die slower in some situations. Definitely I notice the increased damage most.

Unit specific techs are an untapped treasure trove of gameplay value. I don't think we should get rid of the blacksmith techs of course, but I think unit specific techs could have more creativity in addition to rewarding focus on unit compositions.

Honestly in the current game a27, if there was a unit stance where buildings were completely ignored unless directly tasked I would use it.

I absolutely agree, we can be balanced without being symmetrical (as in aoe4). We have been through reduction eras in 0ad such as a24. We have come a long way in introducing varied gameplay mechanics and we need to continue doing that even if there are situations where things are imbalanced. For example fanas can be powerful at times, perhaps even op and perhaps in need of a nerf, but we should not revert their cost back to include metal as that is what differentiates the fana so much from other champs.

I think listening to competitive players/esports players results in improved gameplay. High level players like a game where they can continue to improve and as a result of their level continue to beat players who are worse than them, this is why aoe2 is still alive. Good gameplay mechanics are ones that are easy to learn and very hard to master. Aoe4 was seen by some as a sequel to aoe2 but the developers dumbed down mechanics as much as possible and the result was twofold: civs looking different but actually playing mutually equivalent having no baseline to stand out from, and there being no skill expression. The strategy of the game was basically boiled down to the series of decisions made while aging up. A key example of this is that you can't walk thru an enemies raised gate, its an infallible passive filter. Aoe4 as a result has been vastly less successful than aoe2 has despite aoe2 being old as the hills. Maybe this seems elitist but I promise you its not. A game which features skill development is fun for all ranks. So having features which could be seen as "competitive" is actually just good game design.

Its not the techs themselves but this^ that is the core of the discussion. Recent gameplay innovations like mercenaries having a primarily metal cost in p2 has made the most extensive impact on skipping some techs, but of course most of the time the booming=turtling approach makes the most sense. I definitely don't think that adding tech pairs back into the game is a good idea except for some civ specific situations like the mauryans berry upgrade choice.

I agree, I just want to make sure that we don't go from it being something that's almost never built to being something that's always built and at a set time in an optimal build order. I think having situation dependent gameplay choices is essential, so if its too much of a gimme then it has less gameplay enrichment value.

I like the idea with ptol library in p2, but I feel like maybe a slight cost addition and significant build time addition is necessary. Ideally it can be buildable in p2 but not something that can always be built immediately upon reaching p2. It should be a challenge to time its construction between eco or military techs in order to maximize value.

Adding a metal cost would be lame. A small adjustment to armor values or hp or speed or a combination would be all that’s needed if anything at all.