Balance suggestions by a Pro Player

[Senator_LEVi]

1 hour ago, Classic-Burger said:

Not a long one. I don't know how long an archer rush would take in practice. Many matches last 30-40 minutes.

With Mauryas you could do it almost the entire game, dancing around nearby woodlines. Of course you need to really work it to the point where the enemy pocket comes to help. Thereby giving your ally all the time advantage to roll them at minute 12-13. 

 

In 1v1s you can do both. Slowly adding melee when you're ready to capture. But it needs to be quick wherein enemy does not get eco time to tower all sides of the base. You could also do a small 3-4 minute rush and possibly take a barrack, retreat back and ecobot.

 

I've also tried doing Mercenary archers with Athens, Seleuids, Ptolemies and Macedonians and have had relative success and failure. Latter being due to my own mistakes. But all are fun strategies.

[Classic-Burger]

I think it can be done with a good number of archers. I don't think it would be effective; I remember using Kushite archers behind a line of spears and pikes.

But making a "Rush" without riders and without melee infantry to hunt lumberjacks seems difficult to me. And expecting the enemy to have no cavalry.

Unlike AoE, cavalry is more prevalent in this game. Skirmish cavalry is quickly available.

This is where you have to do some work to differentiate all the missile CS units. In the current game, cavalry is the best option to rush/raid farms and lumberjacks (warehouses).

It would also help to nerf the LoS and introduce technologies to improve it again. This would make the enemy feel claustrophobic from not seeing anything and having more blind spots.

It would be interesting to be able to hide archers and skimishers as it happened in Praetorians.

[Senator_LEVi]

@Classic-Burger I use 25-30. Atleast at my level, (1400, whatever that might mean) it works against enemies. You can snipe away cavalry, and a few spearmen close by is easy counter to melee cav civs. 

You can camp around the enemy with archers and elephant. But the sight and vision that you mentioned would be fun, but I think it's not completely fair since you can't tilt the camera to ground level to look at the forest floor. Hiding watch towers is interesting too, but easier to spot. Is Praetorians a different game?

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

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.

 

[Classic-Burger]

9 hours ago, Senator_LEVi said:

Is Praetorians a different game?

Yes.They hide units with a command in the forest and grasslands and can be ambushed or simply to hide.

 

 LoS thing is influenced by AoE II where the game is more difficult due to a slow start. And at the beginning it is slow and the low LoS makes you blind in the map, since you only depend on scout, because civilians have very low LoS ( line of sight).

Nomad starts are better in AoE II.

 

 

[Classic-Burger]

Colonization tech. in the first phase and put a more coherent price on it for the first phase.

Elephants. I am against elephants in phase 2 except Maurya.

Siege Tech, Reducing the metal cost is not that expensive to reduce the rest of the cost, unless the goal is to keep the cost low to speed up gameplay.I'm more into long games than short ones. There should be a mode for short games of 15-20 minutes.

CC is very weak in P3, it would need to be significantly improved with civic technologies.It would also be nice if the Ram had slow development and upgrades like in AoE. I enjoy the technical improvements and the arms race( evolutive/adaptation) in strategy games.

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

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.

 

It's not very useful in p3. By the time you build it you've already researched all the eco techs and basically all the military techs. If you delay doing techs then your eco is way too slow and you're also vulnerable to early pushes from your enemy. So, right now, the library is basically only useful for (1) getting a cheaper wtf, which is a clunky and annoying way to make a less commonly researched tech cheaper, (2) getting a cheaper glorious expansion cheaper, which is, again, a clunky and annoying way to make a tech that is almost never researched cheaper, and (3) make techs affordable on ultra low resource maps.

I'm not sure how the library should be priced. Right now it usually doesn't make sense to build. There should be some tradeoff calculation where it sometimes makes sense and it sometimes doesn't Right now, that calculation is almost entirely absent. 

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

1 hour ago, chrstgtr said:

It's not very useful in p3. By the time you build it you've already researched all the eco techs and basically all the military techs. If you delay doing techs then your eco is way too slow and you're also vulnerable to early pushes from your enemy. So, right now, the library is basically only useful for (1) getting a cheaper wtf, which is a clunky and annoying way to make a less commonly researched tech cheaper, (2) getting a cheaper glorious expansion cheaper, which is, again, a clunky and annoying way to make a tech that is almost never researched cheaper, and (3) make techs affordable on ultra low resource maps.

I'm not sure how the library should be priced. Right now it usually doesn't make sense to build. There should be some tradeoff calculation where it sometimes makes sense and it sometimes doesn't Right now, that calculation is almost entirely absent. 

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.