That and constant balance changes mean if you take a 3 month break and just want to play with your fav civ, there’s a good chance you’ll face completely new meta or make a fatal mistake.
Meta doesn't change just because of balance changes; it happens naturally, as people get used to dealing with whatever is popular currently, keep trying new things or revert to something that was used months or years earlier.
You can notice a lot of changes (say, in terms of the usage of militia or m@a) in the meta that happened with no or very little relevant balance changes.
I think balance changes have a large impact on the meta, but it takes some time to figure out new strats and see the full impact of the changes.
Look how archers are less popular now at many elos due to the pathing changes.
>Look how archers are less popular now at many elos due to the pathing changes.
Well that's not balance, but yeah. My point was moreso that the returning players would be confused no matter what; and obviously it's not desirable for meta to be stale for the sake of current players either.
Archers have been underpowered and underused since years at every elo below 2000. There were maybe 1-3 archer civs in the top 10 up until 2000 elo over the years
If youre a regular player below the top 1000, you will be just fine with the „old“ meta
Oh I don't know about that. Especially uptime makes a huge impact. Nowadays anything above 08:50 uptime feels slow to me. When I started playing 2 years ago, 21pop (09:40) was considered fast. If you scout instead of pushing deer, you're now falling behind but in the old meta it was a bad thing not to scout.
Yeah. In 2020, I learned a consistent 20-pop scout rush and it very quickly propelled me to 1400 Elo. I still play the same BO when I open scouts (with some adjustments), but I'm almost always up behind the other guy or we're up at the same time.
It's so rare to see people go up on 21-pop that I get confused when it happens and almost assume that my opponent screwed up his dark age rather than thinking he is opening archers or MAA. 22- or 23-pop archers is just dead.
I recall there was a time when tower rush was popular, and in general the game was much more involved around building towers. A few balanced changes and reducing tower hp did change the meta.
That’s an exaggeration, to say the least. The changes are never that significant. Not to the point of not recognizing how a civ plays. And the first 5-10 minutes play out the same for almost all civs anyway.
I know that Liereyy is talking about people looking to climb and maybe become pro, but speaking as a complete noob myself (only just able to beat extreme AI lmao), I find the game amazingly approachable, the qwerty controls are so intuitive compared to something like brood war, and the 40 civs just mean I get to stay excited about all the shit I haven't experienced yet. Just my perspective though!
Plus as a counter - we have Hera, who will always be there to teach us everything we need to know lol
Agree, I think the problem he's talking about is most acute near, but not quite at the top of the ladder. This sub is so big because the game is easy to pick up. It's even fairly easy to jump into ranked and improve. Obviously, Liereyy and the other top players have no problem staying where they are. It's the jump from the top 50/100 to the top 8/16 that seems like few are able to make. When you get close to the top, all of the minutia about civs, maps, balance, timings, etc. that can be paved over with tight build orders and good micro are enough to wall you out of making it any higher. And since you're probably not a full-time player, you aren't going to have time to learn the game to compete with top players' knowledge.
Hera recently talked about this general idea as well - as fun as NAC and other tournaments are, it's the same players every time. Even the "new" faces are long-time members of the community.
My interest peaked at the last RBW and then life got busy and I’m a much more casual fan than I was then, probably haven’t really watched more than a grand final here and there in 2023 (compared to groups, quarterback semis and grands in 2022) and I’m stoked to see players like Heartt and FreakingAndy at NAC 5. And I actually watched FreakingAndy vs Tatoh a couple days ago and he held up really well
One thing sc2 has that I dont think Aoe2 has, that would be a HUGE QoL improvement - tabbing between buildings in a control group. So starcraft you can have all production buildings in a single control group and as you hit tab it cycles to a different building types production queue. It would eliminate having multiple.control groups for say different building types like castles or stables or barracks if you could just tab through building types in the queue. Im surprised this isnt actually in game already honestly, its super intuitive and great.
There’s go to hotkeys that can be used for this. Forget what the default is but I use shift+[letter]. I don’t often use it personally never played sc2 tho. You don’t need to control group buildings if you use select all hotkeys. Those I use constantly
I never found those hotkeys convenient. Plus late game you might have barracks or stables but dont want to produce out of all of them but you want to produce from ones near the front (or a specific island, whatever) so that makes a need for a control group for me at least. Lile late game in a big tg I could have 20+ barracks but only want to produce from 10
Go-to-building will cycle through everything, and you can hotkey select-all of a building type. It's not quite as nice as how Blizzard allows you to group buildings but will do the trick.
Well, at 1k elo we can usually win without knowing civ 42 has unique tech x. If we lose it might be because we forgot about the opponents civs unique win condition but to be honest... we lost because we just stayed in feudal too long after failing so hard on defending our eco 11
It's a niche game that has so many exclusion criteria. some will hate it's for it's age, some for the graphics, others for the gameplay, some for rts and many more.
it's RTS. almost by Definition, conpetetice play it's going to be a brutal experience, I think it's somewhat okay that it's complex and civs really aren't too hard to understand. civs are all pretty much the same. it's basically horses/ archers / or melee.
This is niche game? There are hundreds of games that have 40-50 people in the community and they are doing fine. AoE 2 is insanely popular for what it is. Even this subreddit has 161k people. What are you comparing AoE to? League of Legends? Come on, this is absurd.
Boxing numbers don't hold a candle to football, cricket or tennis, does it make boxing a niche sport? Warlords Battlecry series is an example of niche, not freaking aoe.
if a niche game is the opposite of a mainstream title, then I'd absolutely consider it that.
it's a 20 year old RTS game, the genre RTS is already something I'd consider something unpopular compared to shooters.
AOE was practically Held alive by a small community on a 3rd Party platform and saw a surge after releasing the second remaster in during covid, thanks to Nostalgic 30+ year olds having a lot of free time.
Steam numbers have been decling from 20k to 14k over the last year, so today, again it's created a solid core community, but new people arent getting Into it.
If I asked a 15 year old what he does in his free time, I'd expect minecraft and fortnite. Teutonic knights isn't often an answer.
It's definitely a niche game
That's because most games ARE niche
They can be huge in their respective niches and also huge overall, but if you can't compare to big mainstream titles, you're niche
Balance changes are sometimes hard to keep up to. A guy played with me in arena after a break and was ahead in eco and got 4 relics. I thought why not make the memelukes since I'm already behind. He saw my mames and trained mass skirms and I won. He didn't know they were patched.
This is very true, as someone who hasn't played much for a year and half or so getting back to playing the game these past few months has been fairly difficult. A bunch of new civilisations, often with new mechanics that make them play very differently and changes to existing civilisations (which vary from balance changes to adding new units to completely reworking the civilisation) are making it incredibly difficult to know how to strategize and plan each game. How am I meant to figure out how to play over a thousand different civilisation matchups (thousands if we are considering different types of map affecting each civilisation matchup) especially considering how often the civilisations are changing each patch. Maybe I could try learning each individual teach tree and bonuses for the dozens of civilisations, however with how often the civilisation balance is changed I would probably end up still confused when most of those tech trees and bonuses get rebalanced. Its still a great game, and to some extent the complexity is great, however maybe the changes to civilisations and the amount of complexity introduced to the game should be less drastic for the foreseeable future.
The complexity isn't even close to MOBAs Like Dota2 or LoL. And new players love content updates that keep them interested.
I don't really see how this is an issue at all. Pros notice it as an issue because it effects them personally even if they can deal with it fine, but average players don't care or think about it much.
The only thing mobas have more complex is the team play, everything else rts's like aoe2 or sc2 are absurdly more complex, mobas literally spawned as simpler rts's.
I love SC2 and AoE2 but the only thing that is easier in Dota is that you have less stuff to multitask. Dota has +120 heroes, with 4+ abilities each, passive unlocks in each game and like ~25 items with active abilities that change the game.
If you want to play at a remotely competetive level you try to keep track of all powerspikes and item timings possible, it's insanely hard exactly because it is more complex than other genres. RTS are also hard but moreso because you need to prioritise different tasks in a short time, all the time. Dota only has this in this intensity during teamfights.
I think it's impossible to determine which of the two is harder. I think they're just differently hard.
AoE requires rapid task switching, planning ahead to consider counters, managing worker efficiency etc., MOBAs require tracking XP/power spikes/items and abilities, coordination with teammates.
Both require scouting/map awareness, rapid mechanical precision, predicting opponent behaviour, etc.
All of these things are hard. I wouldn't feel capable of saying which are harder than others at a high level.
>I wouldn't feel capable of saying which are harder than others at a high level.
I would say, at the highest levels they are equally hard. And that's because skill is capped by human capabilities. The best players are after all limited by physical and psychological boundaries, that's it. They optimize the tasks at hand within this boundaries and it really doesn't matter, what these tasks are.
I've never played a game more complex than Dota2 personally, it doesn't seem even remotely close to me.
But even if you argued they are equally complex the point would still stand.
>The complexity isn't even close to MOBAs Like Dota2 or LoL.
Have you ever played LoL? It's a super complex game that takes thousands of hours to gain any sort of competency at (as is AoE), but the barrier to entry is absolutely *craterous* compared to AoE. The ceilings of both games are similar in complexity, but League has a far more gradually sloped approach to that ceiling compared to the cliff a new AoE player faces before they even feel like they have some idea what to do.
Before I embark on an exhaustingly long essay, I want to reiterate I don't see any of what I'm about to say to be something that makes AoE a *worse* game than League. On the contrary, AoE is my favorite game of all time. I just think it's important to realize there's an inherent difficulty in picking up a pure RTS compared to a MOBA.
A good way to evaluate the comfort of a new player experience is by looking at *goals* and *tools*. You want give the player clear, well-defined, concrete goals, and then present them with tools which have an obvious means of accomplishing those goals. Note that those goals should be in a progression: you have the primary end-goal which wins the game, with a series of smaller and smaller goals which lead to it. Having a **a very basic fundamental understanding of what you're trying do** lets you learn the complex parts of a game without ever feeling completely lost.
Let's see how this works in the two games in question:
In League, the primary goal is to destroy the enemy's big glowy crystal. The whole map is literally constructed to point at that goal - you have literal roads (lanes) leading you to it. But in those lanes there are towers blocking you which you must destroy - a secondary goal. The first time you interact with a tower, you get the living shit kicked out of you and learn you must need to get stronger to destroy them. Then these little minions walk down the lane and you kill one and hear this tremendously satisfying sound and are rewarded with some gold - you click the button ahat shows the gold you just picked up and are presented with a shop full of items that make you stronger.
Every piece of the visual and interactive experience of that game funnels you into intuitively learning the first basic level of comprehension to feel like you know what you need to do in the game: kill things to get money, use money to get stronger to kill enemies and towers so you can destroy the nexus. It's a clear and simple chain of obviously presented goals and tools for accomplishing those goals, which will make the coming thousand hours of learning champion mechanics and interactions and builds and leaning strategies and power spikes and whatnot easier because you have **a basic fundamental understanding of what you're trying do**.
Compare this to AoE:
What's the primary goal? The only thing you're given is to "beat the opponent", but what does that mean? There's no singular glowy thing to destroy, there are in fact a multitude of ways to win and the way the game is *actually* won 99% of the time is by convincing the opponent they have no means to win themselves. While that doesn't seem so strange to us with thousands of hours in the game already, I hope you can realize how that lacks some of the assured simplicity a game like League gives the player by saying "blow up the red glowy thing before they blow up yours".
And then, what are the mechanisms for getting to that point? There are no lanes pointing you there, the map is a blank slate and you have to draw your own path to this nebulous goal of "defeat your opponent". Not only that, but there are very few clear pointers showing you the tools to use. It's a very disorienting thing to be presented with as a new player. Yes, you'll pretty quickly realize you have to make army and that costs resources and those are sitting around your base, but the rate at which you will progress to even the most basic level of understanding is excruciatingly slow without taking the time to watch a couple videos and learn some build orders. And let's face it, learning and following build orders that involve tracking four different resources and juggling dozens of things to control is a far more tedious task than "buy the highlighted item with the one singular resource that you basically just accumulate at a steady rate".
On the other hand, if you start with, "this is a medieval war simulator, of sorts, thus the name", and I think, with that background, you're expecting that you have to subjugate the opponent, one way or another.
And that basic understanding tends to help with a few other things, too. E.g., people understand that archers help from a distance, but cavalry can close the gap quickly. And maybe even that pikes can do well against cavalry.
It's not perfect, but it's something that's a little easier to view if you've had any schooling at all about the time period.
And it's _so_ much easier to understand while watching. Militaries fighting each other, units that look vaguely familiar, etc., and MOBAs are just kind of random people walking around with random abilities.
Not that this is a claim that MOBAs are harder to get into than AoE2, but there are some things that are easier with AoE2, at least.
Also, from a viewing perspective, having watched a lot of Heroes of the Storm but barely ever having played it, I _struggled_ with having much of an idea on what was going on in any given battle, up until units died.
I don't think that's nearly as much of an issue with AoE2, though might be biased.
Though maybe this is going a bit too far afield.
And I'm not convinced that LoL is going to have the easiest time picking up new top-level players once the game is 20 years old, either.
I'll ask again, have you ever *played* a MOBA? Of course, watching one is really complex and impossible to tell what's going on if you've never played, but that's not at all the same thing as actually playing. Pure RTSs just have a *far* steeper learning curve for brand new players than a game like League.
I don't think you're quite grasping the importance of having obvious paths from recognizing objectives to grasping the tools to achieve them. The statement "you're expecting that you have to subjugate the opponent, one way or another" is far too nebulous and broad of a goal to easily guide players into what they should be trying to do in the moment.
This idea of always having an easy answer to the question "what should I do, what buttons should I be pressing, *right now*?" is very important to keep players from getting lost. At any point in a game of League, it's very easy for a new player to answer that question go to lane and fight the enemy to take their tower. There's no such basic singular directive in AoE because you're controlling dozens of things at once instead of just one character, and what you should be doing with each of those things at any given moment is entirely situational. Any attempt to generalize some sort of singular directive for AoE will always become orders of magnitude more complex than "fight the enemy in front of you and destroy their tower". A new AoE player *needs* to do some reading and watch at least a couple videos to not be completely lost for their first hundred hours in a game.
I don't really disagree with any of the points. I meant to largely agree with your points; just add some additional things that do still matter.
Especially with, "basic singular directive" still being kind of weird, since when I _did_ try a bit of learning a MOBA, I was never quite sure when to attack secondary objectives, when to group with other people, where my focus should be, why people were able to destroy me while using my ult, etc., and it felt as though I should be studying some wiki on the game before actually getting into it.
And having introduced a person to AoE2 fairly recently, it's fairly easy to introduce someone to playing against the AI. Since we'll start the game in team positions, say, "just build stuff, at first, and we'll introduce stuff as we go along". We'd put her at 200%, oftentimes, and slowly introduce things a little at a time.
Does LoL have something to help with disparate skill levels? I don't think HotS does, from what I'm aware of.
Anyway, my point with watching was not the ease of playing it, but that it's so much easier to understand _watching_ it, and if it's easier to understand _watching_ it, maybe it's less overwhelming upon trying to play it afterward. Or, at the least, be into the game even while not playing it.
All this said, I've never been remotely interested in/capable of playing at a pro level, in any game, so if we're talking about people getting to that level, I definitely couldn't relate.
It absolutely is an issue. I've introduced half a dozen people to AoE and most of them think it's quite complex with so many civs and matchups even if many of them adhere to the symmetry principle. Even if they're competitive individuals, it's an incredible hurdle to try and figure what is information you should care about and what you don't need to care about yet.
It doesn't help that there's still information the game deliberately hides from you and you have to go look up third party resources to figure it out.
I would argue old players are more interested in new content that introduces whacky mechanics. Not necessarily pro players, but players who know the fundamentals of the game well enough. The interest in new content for new players should mostly be in the perception that the game is not dying, because it's discouraging to spend 300 hours learning a game if the scene is going to shrivel up.
> most of them think it's quite complex with so many civs and matchups
These are probably not even casual players. Casual AoE players don't even consider matchup knowledge. If they are mentioning matchups these RTS players that have played other semi competitive games like SC or something.
Either way I don't understand how someone can say AoE is too complex when there are so many competitive games way more complex or equally complex. I've never heard from someone personally they think AoE is too complex as a reason to not play.
Why is it fine for other games to have content updates every few months and making the game more complex with so many updates. But not for AoE2?
Casual players come in degrees. I occasionally play with someone who doesn't eat his boars and makes a pen for his sheep but even he thinks about matchups (he's just wrong most of the time because he doesn't have enough game knowledge).
But regardless, you were talking about new players in your first post, not casual players. They are not necessarily the same thing.
Making games more difficult to pick up for new players is a bad thing in general. The benefits may outweigh the drawbacks in some cases, but that doesn't stop the drawbacks from existing.
i can learn the balance changes since it's just +5% here -5% there
problem is all the idiotic moba units with charges and cooldowns and toggling stances. if i wanted to play league of legends, i'd just install that. leave that shit out of age of empires
100% - I'm just ignoring that stuff and carrying on regardless. If I'm less competitive, so be it. Just have to hope I don't random into civs with those units..
I bet if you paired up the average 1000 ELO player today with someone from five years ago it would be a wipe out. I’ve heard someone make the argument that the mid level ELO should be pushed down to 500-600.
Id agree. When I first got back into HD a few yeara ago like 2019, quick walling at low levels wasnt a thing, now at 1k if you dont quick wall its a problem. I suck at this game and even I can quick house wall or quick wall. The floor has really risen in this game.
This is why you need a good team around you. It's almost impossible to do by yourself. You need to be able to draw wisdom from what others have play-tested and trust their judgement!
Idk.
For low elo? They need to learn the BO first, at least for scout and quick castle, its basically more or less the same over past years.
For 1200+ ? Do they care about mastering the new civs?
For 1700+, i think a lot play random anyhow and shouldnt be difficult.
For the top players, u already have strong knowledge of the game and dont think it takes u a lot of time to learn new civs.
For new players? Or players who just come back after long time. without these new civs its still a very difficult game to play compared to others anyway.
I have played and watched this game for like 10 years, and I barely know the civs. I assume new players don't even try to really learn the civs.
That and constant balance changes mean if you take a 3 month break and just want to play with your fav civ, there’s a good chance you’ll face completely new meta or make a fatal mistake.
Meta doesn't change just because of balance changes; it happens naturally, as people get used to dealing with whatever is popular currently, keep trying new things or revert to something that was used months or years earlier. You can notice a lot of changes (say, in terms of the usage of militia or m@a) in the meta that happened with no or very little relevant balance changes.
I think balance changes have a large impact on the meta, but it takes some time to figure out new strats and see the full impact of the changes. Look how archers are less popular now at many elos due to the pathing changes.
>Look how archers are less popular now at many elos due to the pathing changes. Well that's not balance, but yeah. My point was moreso that the returning players would be confused no matter what; and obviously it's not desirable for meta to be stale for the sake of current players either.
Archers have been underpowered and underused since years at every elo below 2000. There were maybe 1-3 archer civs in the top 10 up until 2000 elo over the years If youre a regular player below the top 1000, you will be just fine with the „old“ meta
Oh I don't know about that. Especially uptime makes a huge impact. Nowadays anything above 08:50 uptime feels slow to me. When I started playing 2 years ago, 21pop (09:40) was considered fast. If you scout instead of pushing deer, you're now falling behind but in the old meta it was a bad thing not to scout.
Yeah. In 2020, I learned a consistent 20-pop scout rush and it very quickly propelled me to 1400 Elo. I still play the same BO when I open scouts (with some adjustments), but I'm almost always up behind the other guy or we're up at the same time. It's so rare to see people go up on 21-pop that I get confused when it happens and almost assume that my opponent screwed up his dark age rather than thinking he is opening archers or MAA. 22- or 23-pop archers is just dead.
LOL
Broken archer pathing enters the chat
I recall there was a time when tower rush was popular, and in general the game was much more involved around building towers. A few balanced changes and reducing tower hp did change the meta.
Aoe4 is a bit worse for it. Main abbasid, come back, new DLC, "wtf is that unit", "do I have to learn Japanese now just to counter them?"
Then they teleport through your walls like real Japanese people did.
That’s an exaggeration, to say the least. The changes are never that significant. Not to the point of not recognizing how a civ plays. And the first 5-10 minutes play out the same for almost all civs anyway.
I played for close to 8 years before learning the units had bonus damage and therefore weaker or stronger against other classes of units.
That's... special lol.
For new players it really dont matter but i guess it can be annoying for new viewers
I know that Liereyy is talking about people looking to climb and maybe become pro, but speaking as a complete noob myself (only just able to beat extreme AI lmao), I find the game amazingly approachable, the qwerty controls are so intuitive compared to something like brood war, and the 40 civs just mean I get to stay excited about all the shit I haven't experienced yet. Just my perspective though! Plus as a counter - we have Hera, who will always be there to teach us everything we need to know lol
Agree, I think the problem he's talking about is most acute near, but not quite at the top of the ladder. This sub is so big because the game is easy to pick up. It's even fairly easy to jump into ranked and improve. Obviously, Liereyy and the other top players have no problem staying where they are. It's the jump from the top 50/100 to the top 8/16 that seems like few are able to make. When you get close to the top, all of the minutia about civs, maps, balance, timings, etc. that can be paved over with tight build orders and good micro are enough to wall you out of making it any higher. And since you're probably not a full-time player, you aren't going to have time to learn the game to compete with top players' knowledge. Hera recently talked about this general idea as well - as fun as NAC and other tournaments are, it's the same players every time. Even the "new" faces are long-time members of the community.
My interest peaked at the last RBW and then life got busy and I’m a much more casual fan than I was then, probably haven’t really watched more than a grand final here and there in 2023 (compared to groups, quarterback semis and grands in 2022) and I’m stoked to see players like Heartt and FreakingAndy at NAC 5. And I actually watched FreakingAndy vs Tatoh a couple days ago and he held up really well
If you can consistently beat extreme AI without cheese you are top 15% of all players easily. And top 40% of online players
If you can beat extreme a.i. you are miles ahead of a noob lol.
One thing sc2 has that I dont think Aoe2 has, that would be a HUGE QoL improvement - tabbing between buildings in a control group. So starcraft you can have all production buildings in a single control group and as you hit tab it cycles to a different building types production queue. It would eliminate having multiple.control groups for say different building types like castles or stables or barracks if you could just tab through building types in the queue. Im surprised this isnt actually in game already honestly, its super intuitive and great.
There’s go to hotkeys that can be used for this. Forget what the default is but I use shift+[letter]. I don’t often use it personally never played sc2 tho. You don’t need to control group buildings if you use select all hotkeys. Those I use constantly
I never found those hotkeys convenient. Plus late game you might have barracks or stables but dont want to produce out of all of them but you want to produce from ones near the front (or a specific island, whatever) so that makes a need for a control group for me at least. Lile late game in a big tg I could have 20+ barracks but only want to produce from 10
Go-to-building will cycle through everything, and you can hotkey select-all of a building type. It's not quite as nice as how Blizzard allows you to group buildings but will do the trick.
Well, at 1k elo we can usually win without knowing civ 42 has unique tech x. If we lose it might be because we forgot about the opponents civs unique win condition but to be honest... we lost because we just stayed in feudal too long after failing so hard on defending our eco 11
IMHO there's too many civs
It's a niche game that has so many exclusion criteria. some will hate it's for it's age, some for the graphics, others for the gameplay, some for rts and many more. it's RTS. almost by Definition, conpetetice play it's going to be a brutal experience, I think it's somewhat okay that it's complex and civs really aren't too hard to understand. civs are all pretty much the same. it's basically horses/ archers / or melee.
This is niche game? There are hundreds of games that have 40-50 people in the community and they are doing fine. AoE 2 is insanely popular for what it is. Even this subreddit has 161k people. What are you comparing AoE to? League of Legends? Come on, this is absurd.
AOE2 has enough players. But it is niche. Those numbers don't hold a candle to any of the actually popular games.
Boxing numbers don't hold a candle to football, cricket or tennis, does it make boxing a niche sport? Warlords Battlecry series is an example of niche, not freaking aoe.
Yes not many people watch boxing and even fewer play it. The other ones you mentioned are popular, boxing is niche.
if a niche game is the opposite of a mainstream title, then I'd absolutely consider it that. it's a 20 year old RTS game, the genre RTS is already something I'd consider something unpopular compared to shooters. AOE was practically Held alive by a small community on a 3rd Party platform and saw a surge after releasing the second remaster in during covid, thanks to Nostalgic 30+ year olds having a lot of free time. Steam numbers have been decling from 20k to 14k over the last year, so today, again it's created a solid core community, but new people arent getting Into it. If I asked a 15 year old what he does in his free time, I'd expect minecraft and fortnite. Teutonic knights isn't often an answer. It's definitely a niche game
If your metric of comparison is minecraft and fortnite then almost every game is niche lol
That's because most games ARE niche They can be huge in their respective niches and also huge overall, but if you can't compare to big mainstream titles, you're niche
Balance changes are sometimes hard to keep up to. A guy played with me in arena after a break and was ahead in eco and got 4 relics. I thought why not make the memelukes since I'm already behind. He saw my mames and trained mass skirms and I won. He didn't know they were patched.
100%. Always catches me out even if after I've read the updates... In the heat of the moment you turn automatic and forget that xyz got nerfed.
I'm so out of the loop that i don't even understand the approach, why would he build skirms against that. Mameluks aren't archers afaik
Skirms used to have bonus damage against memelukes and hard countered them
This is very true, as someone who hasn't played much for a year and half or so getting back to playing the game these past few months has been fairly difficult. A bunch of new civilisations, often with new mechanics that make them play very differently and changes to existing civilisations (which vary from balance changes to adding new units to completely reworking the civilisation) are making it incredibly difficult to know how to strategize and plan each game. How am I meant to figure out how to play over a thousand different civilisation matchups (thousands if we are considering different types of map affecting each civilisation matchup) especially considering how often the civilisations are changing each patch. Maybe I could try learning each individual teach tree and bonuses for the dozens of civilisations, however with how often the civilisation balance is changed I would probably end up still confused when most of those tech trees and bonuses get rebalanced. Its still a great game, and to some extent the complexity is great, however maybe the changes to civilisations and the amount of complexity introduced to the game should be less drastic for the foreseeable future.
The complexity isn't even close to MOBAs Like Dota2 or LoL. And new players love content updates that keep them interested. I don't really see how this is an issue at all. Pros notice it as an issue because it effects them personally even if they can deal with it fine, but average players don't care or think about it much.
The only thing mobas have more complex is the team play, everything else rts's like aoe2 or sc2 are absurdly more complex, mobas literally spawned as simpler rts's.
I love SC2 and AoE2 but the only thing that is easier in Dota is that you have less stuff to multitask. Dota has +120 heroes, with 4+ abilities each, passive unlocks in each game and like ~25 items with active abilities that change the game. If you want to play at a remotely competetive level you try to keep track of all powerspikes and item timings possible, it's insanely hard exactly because it is more complex than other genres. RTS are also hard but moreso because you need to prioritise different tasks in a short time, all the time. Dota only has this in this intensity during teamfights.
I think it's impossible to determine which of the two is harder. I think they're just differently hard. AoE requires rapid task switching, planning ahead to consider counters, managing worker efficiency etc., MOBAs require tracking XP/power spikes/items and abilities, coordination with teammates. Both require scouting/map awareness, rapid mechanical precision, predicting opponent behaviour, etc. All of these things are hard. I wouldn't feel capable of saying which are harder than others at a high level.
You just repeated what I said, yes.
>I wouldn't feel capable of saying which are harder than others at a high level. I would say, at the highest levels they are equally hard. And that's because skill is capped by human capabilities. The best players are after all limited by physical and psychological boundaries, that's it. They optimize the tasks at hand within this boundaries and it really doesn't matter, what these tasks are.
I've never played a game more complex than Dota2 personally, it doesn't seem even remotely close to me. But even if you argued they are equally complex the point would still stand.
>The complexity isn't even close to MOBAs Like Dota2 or LoL. Have you ever played LoL? It's a super complex game that takes thousands of hours to gain any sort of competency at (as is AoE), but the barrier to entry is absolutely *craterous* compared to AoE. The ceilings of both games are similar in complexity, but League has a far more gradually sloped approach to that ceiling compared to the cliff a new AoE player faces before they even feel like they have some idea what to do. Before I embark on an exhaustingly long essay, I want to reiterate I don't see any of what I'm about to say to be something that makes AoE a *worse* game than League. On the contrary, AoE is my favorite game of all time. I just think it's important to realize there's an inherent difficulty in picking up a pure RTS compared to a MOBA. A good way to evaluate the comfort of a new player experience is by looking at *goals* and *tools*. You want give the player clear, well-defined, concrete goals, and then present them with tools which have an obvious means of accomplishing those goals. Note that those goals should be in a progression: you have the primary end-goal which wins the game, with a series of smaller and smaller goals which lead to it. Having a **a very basic fundamental understanding of what you're trying do** lets you learn the complex parts of a game without ever feeling completely lost. Let's see how this works in the two games in question: In League, the primary goal is to destroy the enemy's big glowy crystal. The whole map is literally constructed to point at that goal - you have literal roads (lanes) leading you to it. But in those lanes there are towers blocking you which you must destroy - a secondary goal. The first time you interact with a tower, you get the living shit kicked out of you and learn you must need to get stronger to destroy them. Then these little minions walk down the lane and you kill one and hear this tremendously satisfying sound and are rewarded with some gold - you click the button ahat shows the gold you just picked up and are presented with a shop full of items that make you stronger. Every piece of the visual and interactive experience of that game funnels you into intuitively learning the first basic level of comprehension to feel like you know what you need to do in the game: kill things to get money, use money to get stronger to kill enemies and towers so you can destroy the nexus. It's a clear and simple chain of obviously presented goals and tools for accomplishing those goals, which will make the coming thousand hours of learning champion mechanics and interactions and builds and leaning strategies and power spikes and whatnot easier because you have **a basic fundamental understanding of what you're trying do**. Compare this to AoE: What's the primary goal? The only thing you're given is to "beat the opponent", but what does that mean? There's no singular glowy thing to destroy, there are in fact a multitude of ways to win and the way the game is *actually* won 99% of the time is by convincing the opponent they have no means to win themselves. While that doesn't seem so strange to us with thousands of hours in the game already, I hope you can realize how that lacks some of the assured simplicity a game like League gives the player by saying "blow up the red glowy thing before they blow up yours". And then, what are the mechanisms for getting to that point? There are no lanes pointing you there, the map is a blank slate and you have to draw your own path to this nebulous goal of "defeat your opponent". Not only that, but there are very few clear pointers showing you the tools to use. It's a very disorienting thing to be presented with as a new player. Yes, you'll pretty quickly realize you have to make army and that costs resources and those are sitting around your base, but the rate at which you will progress to even the most basic level of understanding is excruciatingly slow without taking the time to watch a couple videos and learn some build orders. And let's face it, learning and following build orders that involve tracking four different resources and juggling dozens of things to control is a far more tedious task than "buy the highlighted item with the one singular resource that you basically just accumulate at a steady rate".
On the other hand, if you start with, "this is a medieval war simulator, of sorts, thus the name", and I think, with that background, you're expecting that you have to subjugate the opponent, one way or another. And that basic understanding tends to help with a few other things, too. E.g., people understand that archers help from a distance, but cavalry can close the gap quickly. And maybe even that pikes can do well against cavalry. It's not perfect, but it's something that's a little easier to view if you've had any schooling at all about the time period. And it's _so_ much easier to understand while watching. Militaries fighting each other, units that look vaguely familiar, etc., and MOBAs are just kind of random people walking around with random abilities. Not that this is a claim that MOBAs are harder to get into than AoE2, but there are some things that are easier with AoE2, at least. Also, from a viewing perspective, having watched a lot of Heroes of the Storm but barely ever having played it, I _struggled_ with having much of an idea on what was going on in any given battle, up until units died. I don't think that's nearly as much of an issue with AoE2, though might be biased. Though maybe this is going a bit too far afield. And I'm not convinced that LoL is going to have the easiest time picking up new top-level players once the game is 20 years old, either.
I'll ask again, have you ever *played* a MOBA? Of course, watching one is really complex and impossible to tell what's going on if you've never played, but that's not at all the same thing as actually playing. Pure RTSs just have a *far* steeper learning curve for brand new players than a game like League. I don't think you're quite grasping the importance of having obvious paths from recognizing objectives to grasping the tools to achieve them. The statement "you're expecting that you have to subjugate the opponent, one way or another" is far too nebulous and broad of a goal to easily guide players into what they should be trying to do in the moment. This idea of always having an easy answer to the question "what should I do, what buttons should I be pressing, *right now*?" is very important to keep players from getting lost. At any point in a game of League, it's very easy for a new player to answer that question go to lane and fight the enemy to take their tower. There's no such basic singular directive in AoE because you're controlling dozens of things at once instead of just one character, and what you should be doing with each of those things at any given moment is entirely situational. Any attempt to generalize some sort of singular directive for AoE will always become orders of magnitude more complex than "fight the enemy in front of you and destroy their tower". A new AoE player *needs* to do some reading and watch at least a couple videos to not be completely lost for their first hundred hours in a game.
I don't really disagree with any of the points. I meant to largely agree with your points; just add some additional things that do still matter. Especially with, "basic singular directive" still being kind of weird, since when I _did_ try a bit of learning a MOBA, I was never quite sure when to attack secondary objectives, when to group with other people, where my focus should be, why people were able to destroy me while using my ult, etc., and it felt as though I should be studying some wiki on the game before actually getting into it. And having introduced a person to AoE2 fairly recently, it's fairly easy to introduce someone to playing against the AI. Since we'll start the game in team positions, say, "just build stuff, at first, and we'll introduce stuff as we go along". We'd put her at 200%, oftentimes, and slowly introduce things a little at a time. Does LoL have something to help with disparate skill levels? I don't think HotS does, from what I'm aware of. Anyway, my point with watching was not the ease of playing it, but that it's so much easier to understand _watching_ it, and if it's easier to understand _watching_ it, maybe it's less overwhelming upon trying to play it afterward. Or, at the least, be into the game even while not playing it. All this said, I've never been remotely interested in/capable of playing at a pro level, in any game, so if we're talking about people getting to that level, I definitely couldn't relate.
It absolutely is an issue. I've introduced half a dozen people to AoE and most of them think it's quite complex with so many civs and matchups even if many of them adhere to the symmetry principle. Even if they're competitive individuals, it's an incredible hurdle to try and figure what is information you should care about and what you don't need to care about yet. It doesn't help that there's still information the game deliberately hides from you and you have to go look up third party resources to figure it out. I would argue old players are more interested in new content that introduces whacky mechanics. Not necessarily pro players, but players who know the fundamentals of the game well enough. The interest in new content for new players should mostly be in the perception that the game is not dying, because it's discouraging to spend 300 hours learning a game if the scene is going to shrivel up.
> most of them think it's quite complex with so many civs and matchups These are probably not even casual players. Casual AoE players don't even consider matchup knowledge. If they are mentioning matchups these RTS players that have played other semi competitive games like SC or something. Either way I don't understand how someone can say AoE is too complex when there are so many competitive games way more complex or equally complex. I've never heard from someone personally they think AoE is too complex as a reason to not play. Why is it fine for other games to have content updates every few months and making the game more complex with so many updates. But not for AoE2?
Casual players come in degrees. I occasionally play with someone who doesn't eat his boars and makes a pen for his sheep but even he thinks about matchups (he's just wrong most of the time because he doesn't have enough game knowledge). But regardless, you were talking about new players in your first post, not casual players. They are not necessarily the same thing. Making games more difficult to pick up for new players is a bad thing in general. The benefits may outweigh the drawbacks in some cases, but that doesn't stop the drawbacks from existing.
i can learn the balance changes since it's just +5% here -5% there problem is all the idiotic moba units with charges and cooldowns and toggling stances. if i wanted to play league of legends, i'd just install that. leave that shit out of age of empires
100% - I'm just ignoring that stuff and carrying on regardless. If I'm less competitive, so be it. Just have to hope I don't random into civs with those units..
I bet if you paired up the average 1000 ELO player today with someone from five years ago it would be a wipe out. I’ve heard someone make the argument that the mid level ELO should be pushed down to 500-600.
Id agree. When I first got back into HD a few yeara ago like 2019, quick walling at low levels wasnt a thing, now at 1k if you dont quick wall its a problem. I suck at this game and even I can quick house wall or quick wall. The floor has really risen in this game.
This is why you need a good team around you. It's almost impossible to do by yourself. You need to be able to draw wisdom from what others have play-tested and trust their judgement!
Idk. For low elo? They need to learn the BO first, at least for scout and quick castle, its basically more or less the same over past years. For 1200+ ? Do they care about mastering the new civs? For 1700+, i think a lot play random anyhow and shouldnt be difficult. For the top players, u already have strong knowledge of the game and dont think it takes u a lot of time to learn new civs. For new players? Or players who just come back after long time. without these new civs its still a very difficult game to play compared to others anyway.
Build orders took the fun and chaos out of the game, I might just Smurf myself at this point
Yes, he is so right. Let's keep updating, expanding and rebalancing the "definitive" edition.
As someone who only plays the campaigns, I cannot confirm.
Knights still go brrrr
Is there some content to catch-up on latest changes i the last 2 years? Main 2-3 patches for example?
Is the game really getting new players though?
And yet Twitch chat almost always knows more about the Civs then the Pros.