Yikes, that sounds dire. Can you say a little about what’s going on, in layman’s terms? Is it just a multiplayer balancing thing, or do you literally mean bugs?
-Tom
For some civilizations it is just a multiplayer balancing thing, the usual thing where something is a bit overtuned and dominant in PvP situations. Mongol Tower rushes? The risk-reward ratio is simply overtuned in the favour of too much reward for the risk invested. Sometimes something is overly powerful due to a possible bug, currently Rus Horse Archers attack faster than the tooltip indicates they should. Then in some cases it’s literally bugs throwing the whole game’s intended design out of whack.
The brace ability unintentionally being broken for HRE and Dehli spearmen skews the whole counter system since it means cavalry don’t enter a stunned state for about a second if attacked by Spearmen. Then to top it off Knights\Lancers also get their charge damage off, the later is important since Knights\Lancers deal extra damage on the charge and for a few seconds afterwards. And guess who relies on Spearmen for their army until Castle Age? Delhi, heh.
Thus, it’s probably about twice as hard\costly to counter Knights\Lancers as HRE and Dehli because you can’t pin down cavalry when you catch them. While also taking extra damage that you shouldn’t be taking during said combat encounters with cavalry.
The Dehli Sultanate get a particularly rough time of it though because they have a long list of issues. The research time of technologies in their Keeps is bugged and goes up instead of down as you garrison more Scholars in Mosques. Some of the benefits of their Landmarks are not working as intended and offer either none or little of the stated benefits. Spearmen aren’t working as effectively as a counter to cavalry as intended due to previous discussed bug.
Then Relic also rebalanced the base research times of their technologies for Dark Age, Feudal Age, Castle Age and Imperial Age in a November patch (IIRC) and vastly overtuned how long Imperial Age technologies take to research – even with Scholars garrisoned to speed up research times. So, while more an oversight than a bug, it just rubs salt into the wounds because Dehli effectively have little of a power spike in Imperial Age because all the technologies and unit upgrades that come with Imp Age often take far too much time to come into play. Free technology ain’t much of a unique Civ bonus if you are defeated long before the rewards have time to kick in.
The fact that Dehli carved out a niche within competitive multiplayer in spite of their issues is thanks to being really good on maps with rivers or lakes. Having fishing boats that have a ranged arrow attack helps with water control and impacting your opponent’s ability to fish. And with how high gather rates for fishing are in the game, he who can control and boom on water has a pretty powerful economic advantage over their opponent. Then you hope you can close out the game before you need the Imperial Age technologies to give you a power boost.
Entirely sensible for parts of the development staff to be taking some much deserved time off post-release and over the holiday season. However, it does mean the community has been dealing with issues like HRE and Dehli Spearmen being bugged for almost 2 months now. So, understandably the fanbase has been getting a bit tetchy about the pace of updates lately.
The new patch deploying as soon as tomorrow. Which will go some way to addressing some of the issues. Looks like the patch in February will be the one to watch out for though, since it will contain fixes for some animation cancelling exploits and other major issues.
Just in time to shake up the meta for the next major tournament though, the $20,000 Winter Championship happening this weekend.
Revealed today, AoE IV getting its own version of AoE2’s NAC tournament entitled N4C. Total prize pool of $100,000 makes it the largest tournament so far by quite a margin, with the winner taking home $30,000 of that.
New patch came out this week, ahead of the first qualifier event for the $100,000 N4C tournament. Solved a number of important issues, such as many animation cancelling exploits for increasing unit DPS. The major update bringing the official Ranked mode and such still to come.
Been experimenting with the small buffs to the Abbasids the past few days, with the faster Age-Up times and improved berry gather rates. Guess I am mainlining Abbasids in team games for a while since I went on a bit of a winstreak with them post-patch. Abbasids were already decent in team games due to the extra space the larger map sizes afford them but now the economic boom potential is just even greater.
Usually main the Holy Roman Empire but Abbasids with two Town Center builds has some great economy potential and military sustainability.
The major Spring Update launched earlier this month about three weeks ago. Has brought quite a few improvements to the game that have helped reinvigorate it. Nomad MegaRandom has been a popular fixture among modded community games that I have been participating in recently. People already creating some interesting new maps, gamemodes, tuning packs, and other kinds of mods.
All in all, I have been having quite an enjoyable time with the game recently. If Microsoft had launched with the game in this state I feel like they would have retained more of the initial release playerbase. That said, the game has still formed a healthy community, by modern RTS standards, despite some of its faults along the way.
I need to dig into the mod tools more at some point and get my hands dirty seeing how far I can push the boundaries.
Oh that all looks terrific. I’m primarily interested in single player and this stuff looks like it can expand that quite a bit.
So I snagged the game and thought I’d do the Art of War missions before diving into the campaign. It looks like you can’t save at all during these missions? WTF?!
Yeah, the online situation in this game is ass.
You can’t pause a custom game if you’re playing with a friend, as in the prior games, so god help you if you set up a fun match that may span hours.
If you need to leave during a fuckin campaign mission and load a save, the game technically lets you move on, but you don’t pop an achievement, and the progress screens won’t count the mission as completed.
There’s a lot of promise and fun in the game, but a ton of it was clearly built exclusively with online ranked/competitive play in mind only.
Sigh, this might make me refund the game. I only care about single-player. Thanks!
It’s still worth it; the campaign and masteries are a blast. It’s just got some frustrations.
K I’ll just dive into the campaign then.
I’m terrible at them.
I have the benefit of my wife being ahead of me in the game and being an old hat at AoE. I only started playing the series during lockdown, when she finally coerced me to play mp with her. She’s been playing II since it came out, so I built her a new PC for Christmas for IV.
Dumb question: what are masteries?
-Tom
There’s a little crown icon on the bottom of the main menu. Click it, and you’ll see masteries for each civ, that must be completed in order. Getting them forced me to really pay attention to how each civ played, and has made me a better player. It also made me appreciate some of the civs I’d kind of discarded when I was just trying them via random choice.
Edit I should add that I went through the first seven for each civ, then went back to start going through the remainder, one civ at a time. Not sure that’s the best way to do it, but it’s how I did it.
They’re like challenge/advanced tutorial scenarios. Prep for multiplayer.
Plus you get cosmetics, and who doesn’t love those
Ah, you’re talking about achievements, aren’t you? And like most achievements that do pretty much nothing, these just unlock cosmetics? I didn’t realize those were called masteries.
It sounded like you were talking about single-player content, so I wondered if you meant something new that I hadn’t seen!
-Tom
Can you save during these?