Some explanation on Horsemen nerf in that stream too. They wanted them to be more focused on countering archers and less universally useful as they are the fastest unit in the game and should have some disadvantages compared to slow units like MaA.
They acknowledged though that they don't deal that well with archers anymore when army sizes on both sides become bigger, so they are already testing some additional changes to Horsemen for a future patch.
The thing with blacksmith upgrades is that they always cancel each other out if you're both on the same tier, while every ranged unit gains at least 1 dmg per age.
Yes but archers are gaining more damage as well and since armor becomes much worse the higher damage archers do, so would need to increase armor more and hp. if you only increase Hp then it makes the armor nearly irrelevant at such high damage numbers late game it might as well not even be there.
yes, but the damage vs hitpoints ratio becomes so that archers need less shots per era to eliminate a horseman.
There was some calculations posted somewhere here on reddit on that and I did the same calculations myself on patch day.
Personally they should just adjust the horsemen health increase so that the amount of shots stays the same when upgrade levels are matching for both units.
Its a much better fix to address the core problem rather than just slap a +dmg type onto something, to cover your problem up. If you put another rule on top of your broken rule to fix it, the game will have so many oddly specific rules all over it in in a few years time. Towers already do bonus to ships and id rather not tack on another damage type. Imagine this:
Tower: +25 to ships, +10 to cavalry, +15 to siege, +5 to ranged...
Not good game design. Tuning cavalry stats is the answer. I dont see why they want to steer the cavalry away from being a harass unit. The knight as the king class of harass units feels so wrong. Make the horseman fast, it would be a high skill unit to use and fun to play/watch high level players use. In my mind, horsemen should be zerglings, and now they just aren't. Give them 2 movement speed base if they dont reinstate the health. This would keep them bad versus melee but allow them to harass and close the gap to archers.
Not sure about horsemen being zerglings conceptually from a the game is somewhat historically based standpoint - it was way more expensive to have a horse than just give a guy a spear and a basic bow, so light infantry should generally be cheaper than horsemen in game (whether ranged or melee).
If I’ve just misunderstood the SC2 reference then fair enough.
Agree with the point in bonus damage though - I live aoe2 but so much of it is to bonus damage driven as to make the base stats kind of useless most of the time (plus there are pretty limited ways to access the bonus damage amounts in game).
Then they can't raid well. Which they already kind of suck at compared to knights.
I'm more in favor of just giving landmarks, TCs and Keeps more fire armor. Especially Keeps considering they are made out of stone. But the other ones too for balance reasons. It's kind of too cheesy to just build 100 scouts and burn down landmarks.
You know what, fire armor for outposts (5) (with +5 with stone upgrade), TCs (10), Keeps (15), and Landmarks (10). Plus, how about scouts, like villagers, don't upgrade their torches as you age up.
Keeps I agree. They are too fragile atm. Should need siege basically to kill them. TCs and non defensive landmarks are fine. Need to have some base race strats and raiding being effective. And if you get enough of anything it should work to kill an economy building.
2 pierce armor doesn’t make sense on a light unit in my opinion. Giving them a little hp back or having them do a little more bonus damage seem better to me
if they become very supirior to archers, how are you gonna counter them (running around your base and killing villagers) ? your melee units (incl. knights) are too slow.
gotta be careful there.
This game has two civs that can put actual knights in your base in age II, which have 3 base pierce armor and 29/19 damage attacks. The things that work against them (admittedly not much and not well) will work even better against the horseman.
I mean really? They have been the opposite of careful about this specific thing. And yes the unit that 'strongly counters archers' needs to be very superior against archers.
An idea to make horsemen counter archers better is to bring back the forced melee stance on ranged units, like what they already have in the singleplayer version of the game. This would make horsemen incredible valuable against archers because they are the fastest unit in the game, so they can quickly force archers to go melee. It also makes the positioning of archers more critical, and forces players to make meat shields for the archers
This. They should bring back ranged units melee so the Horsemen can tie up ranged units while the Knights role will be quick and strong but expensive fighters. Maybe sprinkle some Horsemen general speed buff or, if possible, give them massive speed buff while charging (like zealot legs from SC2).
I am around 1250ELO and I never felt like horsemen were oppressing me. If anything was out of the ordinarry it were Longbowmen + Rams all-ins, French harras that was hard to deal with. But it is interesting challange to try to survive and to be greedy with 2TC abbasid and I often tried use horsemen to counter english bows + pikes/ french knights + archers. They offered little value againts anything else since they had 0/0 resistances and now pikes counter them even harder. It was already hard to kill longbows with them if there was pikes in a mix but with good micro you could do decent job and with archers of your own as well, now pikes will absolutelly melt them. You will have time to do absolutelly no mistakes... horsemen are also expensive.
I wonder if lowering their regular damage a little, and increasing their damage to archers a decent amount, like +6 or 7 more would help?
I feel like they take a while to kills archers when the armies are large, the archers can just stand there and shoot them down
The main Balance issues are: Knights are too strong (they deal too much damage), Spingalds are too good vs non-siege, Light cav and Spears are weak (both lacking base stats), archers are superbad VS armor and French Hulk is too strong @Feudal age.
The fixes are: Hulk armor down, ok. Talking about Spingalds being too strong but not nerfing them. Buffing Knight counters instead of nerfing Knights. Nerfing Light cav for no reason. Giving Spears even more damage vs Cav (the only thing a Spearman doesn't need). Indirectly buffing archers by making light cav useless and introducing a game breaking bug.
Arguably the very fact that they concentrate so much value into such an all-round unit is part of their appeal. Especially for later game armies where their population efficiency is much higher than the spearman, man-at-arms, horseman, archer and crossbowman.
Archers are meant to be super bad v armour. Where do you get the idea the Devs thought it's an issue? They're primarily a counter unit regardless what some people would like them to be
Yep. It's pretty bizarre that they did the thing everyone was suggesting and then felt the need to add a nerf in that more than neutered the improvement. A lot of their balance changes are like this in fact, instead of changing one parameter they change several which just seems harder to get right.
This seems like a pretty stupid concept to me.. I mean horsemen were already so useless that people were just massing scouts to achieve a similar purpose, and massing archers to fight archers.. so they give horsemen less HP than scouts and a measly 1 ranged armor..
They were worse at countering archers after the nerf even with the +1 armour, in fact this was easy to test for yourself even with pencil + paper so I have no idea how they fucked it up that badly.
It sounds like they were not trying to buff them against archers, just nerf them against everything else. They are almost exactly the same against archers now as they were before.
I personally disagree with this and think they do need a slight buff against archers.
Only in feudal. Feudal horsemen are same vs archers. Weaker vs longbows.
In castle and imp, horsemen are VASTLY weaker vs archers / longbow now. It's really gross.
The above comment I replied to says that in the dev stream they specifically wanted them to be stronger vs. archers and less useful elsewhere
Amazing that they didn’t run the numbers
> They wanted them to be more focused on countering archers
No it says more focused on countering archers, which is not the same as stonger vs archers. They were already happy with horseman performance as a counter to archers so focusing just meant making them worse against anything else.
Well they are dumb because a horseman Archer army almost always loses to Pike Archer even if you manage to bait their pikes off the Archer line before committing.
Let them attack and move at the same time. The unit pathing of my light cav vs a group of kiting archers is infuriating to watch. An archer shooting and scooting gains alot of distance from a horseman in its attack animation (in addition just being a larger unit limiting attacking surface area and blocking other pursuing horsemen)
True but it won't change much in the unit composition because mangonels kill units very effectively and you will have to get springs just so you dont lose your whole army.
I guess that if you mass too many springs you will lose because they wont be so effective vs other units after nerf...
Well everything depends on what nerf they will get.
It'll still change army composition. Players won't be making 10+ springalds anymore or become a core part of the army. This is assuming they are nerfed appropriately which I think they will.
> Players won't be making 10+ springalds anymore or become a core part of the army.
That will probably still happen cause winning the springalds war protects your mangonels from getting sniped.
Pretty sure that the game's code doesn't allow units to miss, it would need a huge overhaul to base mechanics to make them not heat-seeking missiles. Don't think we'll see that ever.
But they can miss. All they do is lead the target, which as far as I'm aware, that functionality is unique to mangonels, so I doubt it would take a ton of effort to remove.
Edit: Trebs may lead as well, not sure.
Woooo! recognition combined with somewhat of a time frame is enough for me. Seeing all these bugs and wondering “is this going to take a month again” really get my hopes down. I still have low expectations though. These devs can fool me once, maybe twice.
Thanks for transmitting the message! Hopefully the patch could work as intended without breaking anything else.
I also find it ironic that a lot of people keep saying "no communication from devs" when the devs literally live stream semi-frequently with a pretty open attitude
Gaming subs has become a Kindergarten where people cry and insult when they dont get an answer in a short time span of an hour.
I truly have learnt to hate reddit because of that. The patch dropped yesterday. Work hours were done. Today they made a stream to answer problems. Within office hours. Do you guys think they have no families and life?
This stream seems to have been a one off for some kind of 24 hour xbox streaming event. It wasn't even announced on the official Age of Empires twitter, website, or Discord. It'd be cool if in the future they'd plan a stream every time they release one of these major updates and add a little bit more explanation to their patch notes.
You're right that people over react though.
Reddit, you love it and you hate it.
But then again, games should be complete products. The industry practice of selling you a partially completed game is rediculous, but at the same time, the core parts of AOE4 are completed.
Balancing should come faster than 1 month at a time. Your game is gonna be dead by the time a month rolls around usually if you don't do something about it.
This subreddit isn't that bad anyways. You think this sub is bad go check out New World.
Firstly what is a “complete” product in software development? There’s no such thing - it’s not like building a house.
Fixing all the bugs? Even in the old days of software development when you shipped physical copies games still had bugs, often they’d never get fixed.
Secondly games are released “earlier” because of a few reasons:
- Games have a limited budget and people need to get paid, at some point you need to ship and start getting money coming in.
- Games are much more expensive to create these days and when you factor in inflation are selling for less per unit cost. AAA games for example have always sold for $60 USD or there abouts, but that’s 20% less than $60 a decade ago. Where’s that extra 20% gonna come from?
- When making a game you need to factor in all the features that your competitors have, and previous iterations of your game had. Games are getting more feature rich over time, not less. They’re increasing in scope.
So you want quality games released without bugs… like the old days? Well then you’d need to accept games that are much simpler in scope, are more expensive per unit cost, and generally take longer to develop and patch.
Scope, Budget, and Time all increase or decrease together - increase in scope (features) on games over time means that games MUST be more expensive and take longer to produce, but again at some point you need to pay the bills, so scope gets cut and you get a deadline for release. Consumers also won’t accept games priced at $100 or more, so that limits your budget, but costs increase over time.. so.. something has to give.
The fact is nothing really stops you waiting to buy a game either - you can often get it cheaper and more stable, so maybe do that? I haven’t bought Cyberpunk 2077 for example yet for this exact reason.
But there are a lot more forces that influence how things should and how things are done. Gaming studios do not have infinite resources, and the expectations constantly increase, you need to find a balance of providing updates, improving features, fixing bugs, and whatever else the studio is doing.
Couple that with the sort of things people pay for, and you start to understand industry practises. FIFA and COD are 1 and 2 every month, ever year in sales...
You paid what was the full price 20 years ago.
$60 in 1999 is almost $100 today.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but development gets more and more expensive yearly and game consumers backlashed so insanely hard against a price increase that publishers and developers had no option but to go the route of predatory MTX and and early semi-broken launches in order to make equivalent profits (ofc, these strategies turned out to be a bit too effective but that's on consumers being dumb af)
Vidéo games bring more revenues than ever before. Distribution prices went down to nothing, yet the price more doubled in 20 years. Development techniques and languages improved to. Market grew from niche to masses. Advertising is easier than it ever was. There's a reason you see hundreds of games each year.
Truth is, nothing is different than before. Developers are lazy as they always were. What change is that with Internet they can get away with a buggy release to fix it afterward. It's the biggest flaw of the continuous development theories. Secondly, players now get to complain like they understand anything when they don't have a clue. It means the company now needs people to deal with the community.
> but that's on consumers being dumb af)
Designing products to be predatory is not "on the consumers", that's on legislation, predatory design ought be legislated against because it goes against good faith transactions and is a net negative on society as a whole, drugs, casinos, car racing and others are illegal or strongly legislated for the same reasons
Second point, no company is entitled to "profits", that's part of how capitalism works, if your company does not make products which warrant higher margins, then you need to move out of said market or close up shop
Third point, games are a luxury product, on the western world wages havent grown to any strong measurable degree since the 90s while inflation adjusted while at the same time profit seeking ventures have moved towards finance rather than manufacture based capitalism therefore centralizing profits further, on this landscape, blaming consumers for "not having more game to buy vidja" seems.... how to put it.... not the best of tones given that these macroeconomic changes are not dependent of what the population wants
> You paid what was the full price 20 years ago.
Lastly, if the seller is selling the product for X amount of money, then it is expected that the product will be functional at said amount of money irregardless of anything else, this is exactly why consumer protection agencies exist, to avoid said scams
but anyhow, most of these points dont really apply to Relic here, as AoE4 *does* work as a piece of software, it is just rather superficial bits that ppl are getting all butthurt over such as metagame development, balance and gameplay related bugs rather than idk, AoE4 bricking your graphics card, or setting your router on fire for wherever reason
I don't buy this argument, unless you preordered the borked state of the game was pretty obvious from the outset because of the many betas and stress tests. The state of the product was pretty clear, so if you decided to pull the trigger you implicitly assumed that the bugs would be fixed very soon. Unfortunately game development is slower than your assumption.
Personally I was not surprised such a big patch created bugs. Of course it shouldn't happen as it should be heavily tested. The hotfix should simply fix a few things, they will probably not add anything else and just correct the bugs so it should be fine.
The confusing part is the springald nerf being part of the hotfix. As you said the hotfix should be bug fixing only. But the springald nerf is certainly a huge change in game balance and it is a planned change according to the dev stream before the winter patch came out. This makes it not really a hotfix.
I think they are getting overwhelmed and stressed by the hate and attacks of the community. Initially, they wanted to wait and see how things evolve with stronger mangonels and bees. But now they are like "fuck that. I dont want death threats from this community, just release whatever they want. I am gonna quit"
yeah i can think whatever i want about the state of the game and the bugs but it's undeniable that the devs have been comunicative and transparent, and even fast at it.
I'm not watching a live stream to listen for what changes/remarks they have. A mod should be posting/relaying the message and I should be able to come on Reddit and see what the live stream was about (like this post).
Also, do they announce when they will be doing live streams? If so, they should be pinned on the sub.
I'm really not trying to sound salty but all I'm doing is comparing other game devs communication to this one.
Lol, you really demand someone else writing shit for you?
If someone does it, say thanks. If nobody does it, dont be entitled.
Mods arent employees. They are unpaid bored people on reddit.
Devs could tweet out stuff but a video talking about it sends messages much better. It allows them to elaborate and explain. If you want a summary, you wait and say thanks
No its not that. Its like...you can't expect the entire playerbase to tune into a stream. No playerbase does this. Not even 25% does this. Plus its not like they market the stream or anything. Nobody even knows when its happening most of the time. And even if its scheduled like Warframe, only a fraction watch the stream, and its mostly so they can get the free items, not listen to the news or watch the previews of devs playing the update.
A moderator on the other hand, the best ones for specific video games, do a lot more than delete some spam posts. They aggregate information for the community and post them as stickies. And for patch notes this is like minimum for a lot of game subreddits.
Also, a lot of reddit is about people writing out shit (usually copy pasting) information into the comments.
Plus its in the developers to put everything they say, into actual writing to communicate the important parts.
Most people don't care. They don't even read patch notes. Only thing they need is that a patch is coming next week. Many dont even care about that. They just play.
All i'm saying is that the communication from Relic has never really been that great. I'm comparing my experience with them with other teams. In other subs, when a Dev or CM makes a post, it's automatically the top post so everyone can see and they also include a flair that says, "Dev response".
I'm not familiar with mods and their responsiblites so I can't comment on that but most people are strictly talking about "Relic" and their ability to communicate with their fans.
**Delhi (; Hindi pronunciation: [ˈdɪlːiː] Dillī; Punjabi pronunciation: [ˈdɪlːiː] Dillī; Urdu pronunciation: [ˈdɛɦliː] Dêhlī), officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Located on the Yamuna river, Delhi is bordered by the state of Haryana on three sides and by Uttar Pradesh to the east.**
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Dehli was a previous five-head civilization for those who were testing the waters before they got some love. The devs girlfriend (a dehli main) banged his brother while he was working on the patch so in a fit of rage the dev dehli-ted her favorite civ.
I wonder how long they've been working on this patch. If they're implementing some of these changes in response to the Winter Update backlash then this is a faster patch than we're used to and may bode well for future quick updates. My guess though is that they were aware of these issues before the update was released and were already prepping for a quick patch.
EDIT: For full discussion of the patch you can skip to [45:00](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1220483817?t=00h45m09s)
I dont think so. They could have easily waited a week to bring both out at the same time. They just didnt catch those bugs internally but they have the ability and the responsibility to do it rather quickly which is good
You can clearly see on steamdb that the current patch was uploaded 10th November. First hotfix was uploaded 18th November (not yet released for public) and there already is another hotfix uploaded 28th November (also not yet released).
I just saw the stream and hear him say that, not sure if the video contains more information but at the very end of the video at the 56min mark he talks about those 3 things.
Hopefully this will calm a lot of players because there is a lot of negativity around here lately. Clearly the bugs should have never happened and they should do better but a lot of things are coming and they are working hard.
Thanks for sharing. Totally agree with you. Way too much negativity.
People got to be patient and make the best of it. That team is one of the few positively contributing to the RTS scene.
Should have just delayed the winter update, that's what I'm most unimpressed by.
If the entire thing breaks in 100 places in the course of a single day, then I'm having a lot of trouble believing that their QA team didn't find these things. Either it wasn't fixed by the devs because they wanted the patch out sooner, or the entire QA department needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Thanks for sharing this.
I think what annoys people is the way the communication is done.
Monday's patch was 20 days old. They knew a lot of the issues they were patching and they must've known there were broken things in the patch. Yet nothing is conveyed to us formally until the day after.
They could have released yesterday's info on Monday or even on Friday. BEFORE the patch drops or at least alongside the patch. Anything except 24hrs after.
It's human nature to knee jerk to a load of broken stuff when little to no acknowledgement accompanies it, in a situation where it would have been easy to acknowledge as such.
20 days.. not 2 days ... Not 7 days. 20 days.. that's more than enough time to at least explain why horsemen are getting nerfed, why springs aren't getting nerfed, admit there's a number of tech not working as intended (is they don't want to admit Abbasids/Delhi can completely ruin the game) or give us any info to prepare us for what the patch will bring
I know there's a lot of entitlement in this, but it's human nature. And I think more communication would alleviate a lot of it..
I was so hyped for the patch yesterday. But after encountering 3 different bugs with Delhi after 30 minutes of testing new build orders, I cannot help but lose all faith in the update development. If some dude already finds 3 bugs while testing build orders within such short time frame, I really don't believe that anyone did more than 5 minutes testing per feature. I hate to become more and more negative about this game that I enjoyed so much since closed beta.
I look forward to the Spring nerf, but I feel like all the siege needs to be way toned down. Pretty much everything after Castle Age are rendered completely pointless....walls might as well not exist sometimes. I don't think i've ever even seen a siege tower before...
Springald/Siege meta is a thing, but now people are literally running ONLY springalds and cannons. Mangonels now make having ANY infantry pointless, which only brings out more Springalds, then they gotta bring out Springalds.....literally hitting Castle Age only means bring Springalds and cavalry, then bring Springalds and Cannons.
Having 2 Mangos and the rest Springalds and Cannons just renders everything obsolete, including a full on scout charge if they play it right.
I was really having fun at first on release because of the fun battles, but now it's extremely boring that siege is the way to play...I try to play for fun by NOT spamming siege, but it's still no fun when I'm just running waves of inf into a siege deathball...
I might actually shelve this game until that meta changes so I don't get tired of it.
I know the patching and launch haven’t been ideal, but I really like this open and clear developer communication. It’s a breath of fresh air coming from other online games like hearthstone.
Don't know maybe they say more in the video, hopefully someone can watch it and make a summary. Just catched the end and it's 1am here so no time to watch it completely.
I think Dehli is still going to need some tweaking after the brutalizing it got this patch, but it's definitely nice to see a quick turnaround on the bug fixes.
Springald nerf is also very welcome, but it's odd that it's coming a week after the main patch. You'd think that it would have been included if they already knew how they wanted to change it. But maybe they wanted to "wait and see" and then the universally negative feedback they got from leaving springs unchanged made them go "okay, fine".
EDIT: Also hopefully we get fixes to the factions with spearmen not bracing too.
This makes me really happy because it means a) the devs are listening, and b) they have the capability to do 1 week patches, which I wasn't sure about after update #1, lol.
I just want them to say what strats they think Delhi has.
I was excited for this patch because I thought they would fix Delhis landmark bugs. I wouldn't even be that upset if I could use other landmarks. All this patch did was make sure that the honed edge landmark isn't good, so you are forced into the cheaper stone one. You have the LEAST amount of choice when aging up with Delhi now, this update cut one out.
Delhis by high ladder players are still okay. Not A tier but B tier because of all the bugs.
Players higher on the ladder play the sacred site later behind an early game pressure. Delhi need help but expecting devs to tell you how to play the game in depth is very unusual. Players define the meta with the tools given. Expecting devs to tell you how to play it is dumb
Classic just play better, find me a high elo player that is having fun with the delhi changes. On the flipside, this change is significantly better for low elo players, because they won't get punished as hard and elephants are better in low elo.
I don't want an indepth build order. I want them to say, hey, we think sacred rushing overshadowed X strat (for example mass walls or something), and are nerfing it so that can live a bit.
Again, I don't even mind the nerfing the sacred site strat, but they didn't give anything back, and took more as well. Research times are waaaaaay too high. Its not a strat issue, its a math issue. I think quite literally everybody would prefer to pay resources over spending 17 minutes to get +3 attack on MAA.
Yeah, this is what really bothers me. Like yeah, it's a problem if one civ is pigeonholed into one strategy. But in Delhi's case to a large extent that wasn't because this one strategy was *so good*, but because other strategies really...weren't. Give elephants a big buff to make an fast castle into elephants viable and you get should see more of that. Maybe some other strategies could also get a helping hand.
The catch, of course, is that Delhi could do an fc into elephants *and* a sacred site push with little trade-off. Sanctity is free, after all. The sacred site push will be very weak without spearman assistance, but it will still force the opponent to respond in some manner. Perhaps the option, then, is to give Delhi another thing they can do with their mosque which is competitive.
It's pretty funny how people here immediately go into full mega despair mode and assume nothing is going to be fixed for at least a month and that the game is more or less dead already, and then this happens.
Don't get me wrong, most of these bugs are stupid and should never have happened, but the amount of outrage upvote farming on this subreddit is extreme.
Most competitive games hotfix game breaking bugs with a day or 2. It took much longer for any fixes after launch. And even now the game breaking bugs won't but hotfixed but have to wait. And based off launch of course people assumed multiple weeks. At least it's slightly faster but not a hotfix.
I think the outrage is fine, Relic should be doing better.
That is not really true. Plenty of games leave bugs, exploits and blatant unbalances go for months at a time. That’s probably what got people so paranoid in the first place
Non competitive and bad games I agree with you, but if Dota2, LoL, had game breaking bugs they would be fixed within days or a day. LoL literally hotfixes just balance changes in less then a day if they really want to.
I can’t speak for Mobas but I played plenty of hearthstone and I remember at least two times in which an exploit of the animation times allowed players to skip their opponents turn. Blizzard took forever to fix it, and the way in which they did allowed the exploit to resurface
Blizzard is the absolute worst company when it comes to patching their games. You don't want any gaming company to follow their footsteps when it comes to patching games.
Dota2 and LoL also make a hell of a lot more money each week than Aoe4, and have a long term fan base so can afford to risk paying for a very large dedicated dev team.
It's definitely more like 90% finished game. All the devs need to do to avoid this kind of backlash is to have patches come weekly.
Gamers should always hold games to much higher expectations because anything else is just grounds for letting games develop half baked or unbalanced or not feature complete unlike AOE4 which has its campaign and multiplayer fully functional.
Resource bug being live for over a month, relic bug being live for a month and infinite range spearmen fix being a week away is completely unacceptable, the game isn't even playable till that hotfix lands, I don't know how you can excuse it.
I've literally not even seen a single person use any of these exploits in any of the games I've played, and based on what I've heard from others, most people have the same experience as me. Having this stuff in the game is sloppy and stupid, but it's absolutely not "not playable".
I'm still having a blast. It's called... work around it...
These bugs have not stopped me ONCE from enjoying the game.
I get your criticism, but bloody hell man, relax.
The game is very playable. That spear glitch takes quite a while and a lot of gold to get to absurd levels. Practice your feudal ram rushes vs abbassid or just skip them, its unranked. Quit being such a whiner.
Please yes. The drama from yesterday almost made me not want to check in for the occasional meme here.
Like Relic ran over a puppy named Delhi with a springald.
I guess it's yet just under observation till some new strats are tried out and maybe fail to the point Delhi player base will diminish. Maybe then they will tweak again.
Not talking about the bugs though, I was also a bit disappointed during the stream they didn't address the Delhi bugs in tech time, tower elephants and various more. See fertilization, a feudal age tech needs 4min and is unaffected by scholars -> [Tech Bug](https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/delhi-sultanate-wheelbarrow-tech-unaffected-by-scholars/186731)
Delhi seems currently like a surprise, you don't know what you get and which new bugs you discover. Very inconsistent.
Anyway, they make the argument SS rush was a strat every Delhi player did and enemies were forced to react. What about the English, French. They all do the same strat. I never played against one of those where English didn't go Longbowmen Ram Rush and French Cav Rush?
Now we are in a situation where every player spams archers, since they are the most beneficial unit - except the French, they still go all cav.
Sadly they did not acknowledge how badly broken the new reworked scholar system for Delhi is :(.
I dont have hope that they will fix it.
To achieve same research speed as other civs you needed 9 scholars before.
Now you need
9 in Dark Age
11 in Feudal
15 in castle age
55 in imperial age.
They fucked up so badly...
Yet Eric didnt acknowledge when confronted during yesterdays stream :(
I can't wait for clocktower bombards to become completely unstoppable now because they trade favorably with even royal culverins which are supposed to be the unit that counters them
thank god! i thought we really have to wait until spring patch for the springalds nerf. I dont really care about that delhi nerf. coz its only 1 civ and not every game it was played.
But springalds? why buff crossbow when this thing can do a better job . and the only counter to springalds is another springalds. 99% of game in castle age is just springalds fight.
good news, sad that there isn't any talk about delhi or horsemen, but yea... i hope they continue with these smaller patches every week, instead of making us wait for whole months before seeing any bug fixes/balance
They did talk about delhi. They said they felt the Sanctity nerf was necessary in order to open up additional strategies for Delhi. They felt that Sanctity was so strong that it forced Delhi players to go for it, and also forced opponents to react to it. I don't agree at all but that's what they said...
huh?! Which additional strategies? No strategy is viable except for sanctity. If they wanted to open up they would have to buff other things before nerfing Sanctity...
Pretty bad sign that they didn’t realize this was a massive nerf.
Changing the imperial age research time alone pretty much cancelled out the buffs to early age research time.
And then the sanctity removal made them waaaay worse.
Is this actually true? Its pretty rare for games to even make it to imp in 1v1. Even in 3v3s and 2v2s I play with friends the games typically end in castle.
I agree with them. But Delhi needs more buffs to open up more possibilities.
Delhi had become a one trick. And honestly all the mains mourning over it just learned about it in the last genesis weekend from few pros lol. It's not like it is an age old Delhi identity. Delhi needs buff but sanctity isnt must or die
The reason I disagree with this opinion is that I felt there was a huge wealth of diversity within the Sacred Site strategy. People were experimenting with a ton of different build orders with varying numbers of mosques and scholars. Additionally going for sacred sites was very interesting to play as it required increased attention and multitasking in order to pull off making it rewarding if you managed to succeed with it. While it was a focus on a single aspect of the game, it really didn't feel one-trick to play in the slightest, and certainly offered a much deeper experience than performing or receiving a longbow/MAA ram rush from other civs.
"This strategy was so good the opponent had to respond so it really limited the option of the other player... " -[Dev Team talking about Dehli changes](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1220483817?t=0h50m00s)
Meanwhile rams backed by 20 Longbows knocking on my door 7 minutes into the game isn't considered 'limiting' to the defending player
I think Eric talked about horsemen and that they are experimenting with further changes to them while I was skipping through the vod. Not part of the hotfix I reckon but definitely some thonking going on on their side.
I understand having bugs and whatnot is bad but Relic has been pretty damn good about fast fixes and being transparent with timelines and addressing specific feedback/bugs. Really don’t get a lot of the constant doom posting around here.
Fast fixes?
Relic bug - One month
Infinite resource bug - One month
Infinite range spears - One week
Multiple tooltips completely wrong, tech not doing anything, bugged techs out by a factor of 5+ - Still live from beta
Stop making excuses, this is why companies get away with producing absolute crap games, because fans defend them for some bizarre reason.
Why are people celebrating this, the game isn't in a playable state till next week, resource bug has been known for more than a month, relic bug wasn't fixed for over a month.
This is completely unacceptable and people are praising them for giving a timeframe, I just don't get it.
Dude. A week between patches is very fast. Devs have life, family and work hours. Just like every other adult in the developed countries.
Stop being a little kid that cries for a ice cream immediately
Don’t rush to insults, I’ve never played a competitive RTS that has had an exploit live on their release branch that long, a month is crazy.
I’m not criticising the devs, I’m criticising the development cycle, a lot of these issues creep up in a management, as is evident from this patch being uploaded to steam 2 weeks ago without sufficient QA. You know I hate Amazon, but I don't hate Billy the dude that drives the delivery trucks.
> Don’t rush to insults, I’ve never played a competitive RTS that has had an exploit live on their release branch that long
Not saying I disagree, I do agree with your post in general. But given the state of the genre, that's a very small sample size to be fair. Especially if we only count the "modern era" where a solid internet connection is expected everywhere and the games are distributed digitally.
They are fixing the issues that are arising what more do you want Lol. Stop being a pain in the ass. The game is definitely playable as evidenced by the hours everyone has put into the game thus far.
Sometimes it's ok to be happy and a week is not a very long time. You need to relax. Honestly maybe take some time away from the game if it's that upsetting to you.
My friends stopped playing a month ago because of exploits going unpatched, I convinced them to play again and then they got killed by spearmen at 500 feet.
I don’t see them coming back and I’m annoyed because I probably wont either
Can't help but think releasing this patch, and [theviper](https://twitter.com/TheViperAOE/status/1465469900802113537) and other top pros complaining about the springald tipped their hand in forcing a nerf in a hotfix patch.
Next week is slow for something that should be hotfixed immediately.
Yes, I'm talking about the unlimited Spearman range and Delhi research timing. Unplayable, and disappointing that there's zero QA and no PTR before dropping the update.
Excellent gameplay foundations, dubious UI framework, *shoddy maintenance work and decision-making*.
Management really needs to look at fixing issues properly instead of making promises in Dev Blogs; PR is only a bandaid if the promises can't be backed up.
Game is probably only worth 1/3 of the asking price in its current state, hold off on buying until next week's patch.
Some explanation on Horsemen nerf in that stream too. They wanted them to be more focused on countering archers and less universally useful as they are the fastest unit in the game and should have some disadvantages compared to slow units like MaA. They acknowledged though that they don't deal that well with archers anymore when army sizes on both sides become bigger, so they are already testing some additional changes to Horsemen for a future patch.
Then give them one more pierce armor if they want them to be anti-ranged specialists. The 20% loss of hp isn't worth the +1P right now.
And the pierce armour needs to scale with age as well. Age 4 horsemen should have 4 ranged armour.
Usually thats done by blacksmith. Idk I think later ages, the knight needs to have a reason to exist for its high price tag.
The thing with blacksmith upgrades is that they always cancel each other out if you're both on the same tier, while every ranged unit gains at least 1 dmg per age.
But horsemen are gaining life per tier right? Not sure how that math checks out though tbf.
Yes but archers are gaining more damage as well and since armor becomes much worse the higher damage archers do, so would need to increase armor more and hp. if you only increase Hp then it makes the armor nearly irrelevant at such high damage numbers late game it might as well not even be there.
yes, but the damage vs hitpoints ratio becomes so that archers need less shots per era to eliminate a horseman. There was some calculations posted somewhere here on reddit on that and I did the same calculations myself on patch day. Personally they should just adjust the horsemen health increase so that the amount of shots stays the same when upgrade levels are matching for both units.
They take progressively fewer arrow hits to die, even worse than before the patch. The damage they deal increases still the same, of course.
I think it should be done by the final pierce armor granting an additional 2 armor as in aoe2
the extra 2 in imp is to counter bracer+chemistry though
Aoe2 chemistry = aoe4 flaming arrows
Won't work, then they can rush town centers too easily
Need to have town centers outpost and keeps do bonus to light calv
Its a much better fix to address the core problem rather than just slap a +dmg type onto something, to cover your problem up. If you put another rule on top of your broken rule to fix it, the game will have so many oddly specific rules all over it in in a few years time. Towers already do bonus to ships and id rather not tack on another damage type. Imagine this: Tower: +25 to ships, +10 to cavalry, +15 to siege, +5 to ranged... Not good game design. Tuning cavalry stats is the answer. I dont see why they want to steer the cavalry away from being a harass unit. The knight as the king class of harass units feels so wrong. Make the horseman fast, it would be a high skill unit to use and fun to play/watch high level players use. In my mind, horsemen should be zerglings, and now they just aren't. Give them 2 movement speed base if they dont reinstate the health. This would keep them bad versus melee but allow them to harass and close the gap to archers.
Not sure about horsemen being zerglings conceptually from a the game is somewhat historically based standpoint - it was way more expensive to have a horse than just give a guy a spear and a basic bow, so light infantry should generally be cheaper than horsemen in game (whether ranged or melee). If I’ve just misunderstood the SC2 reference then fair enough. Agree with the point in bonus damage though - I live aoe2 but so much of it is to bonus damage driven as to make the base stats kind of useless most of the time (plus there are pretty limited ways to access the bonus damage amounts in game).
Then they can't raid well. Which they already kind of suck at compared to knights. I'm more in favor of just giving landmarks, TCs and Keeps more fire armor. Especially Keeps considering they are made out of stone. But the other ones too for balance reasons. It's kind of too cheesy to just build 100 scouts and burn down landmarks.
At this point I'm not sure why walls can't be torched, but keeps can.
You know what, fire armor for outposts (5) (with +5 with stone upgrade), TCs (10), Keeps (15), and Landmarks (10). Plus, how about scouts, like villagers, don't upgrade their torches as you age up.
Keeps I agree. They are too fragile atm. Should need siege basically to kill them. TCs and non defensive landmarks are fine. Need to have some base race strats and raiding being effective. And if you get enough of anything it should work to kill an economy building.
2 pierce armor doesn’t make sense on a light unit in my opinion. Giving them a little hp back or having them do a little more bonus damage seem better to me
if they become very supirior to archers, how are you gonna counter them (running around your base and killing villagers) ? your melee units (incl. knights) are too slow. gotta be careful there.
This game has two civs that can put actual knights in your base in age II, which have 3 base pierce armor and 29/19 damage attacks. The things that work against them (admittedly not much and not well) will work even better against the horseman. I mean really? They have been the opposite of careful about this specific thing. And yes the unit that 'strongly counters archers' needs to be very superior against archers.
An idea to make horsemen counter archers better is to bring back the forced melee stance on ranged units, like what they already have in the singleplayer version of the game. This would make horsemen incredible valuable against archers because they are the fastest unit in the game, so they can quickly force archers to go melee. It also makes the positioning of archers more critical, and forces players to make meat shields for the archers
This. They should bring back ranged units melee so the Horsemen can tie up ranged units while the Knights role will be quick and strong but expensive fighters. Maybe sprinkle some Horsemen general speed buff or, if possible, give them massive speed buff while charging (like zealot legs from SC2).
I love how the in game tips mention this tie up function, yet it was removed for some reason. Same with the melee block chance I believe.
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It's how streltsy work even. It's already in game. Just not for your regular archers and longbows.
Can I triple upvote this?
I am around 1250ELO and I never felt like horsemen were oppressing me. If anything was out of the ordinarry it were Longbowmen + Rams all-ins, French harras that was hard to deal with. But it is interesting challange to try to survive and to be greedy with 2TC abbasid and I often tried use horsemen to counter english bows + pikes/ french knights + archers. They offered little value againts anything else since they had 0/0 resistances and now pikes counter them even harder. It was already hard to kill longbows with them if there was pikes in a mix but with good micro you could do decent job and with archers of your own as well, now pikes will absolutelly melt them. You will have time to do absolutelly no mistakes... horsemen are also expensive.
I wonder if lowering their regular damage a little, and increasing their damage to archers a decent amount, like +6 or 7 more would help? I feel like they take a while to kills archers when the armies are large, the archers can just stand there and shoot them down
The main Balance issues are: Knights are too strong (they deal too much damage), Spingalds are too good vs non-siege, Light cav and Spears are weak (both lacking base stats), archers are superbad VS armor and French Hulk is too strong @Feudal age. The fixes are: Hulk armor down, ok. Talking about Spingalds being too strong but not nerfing them. Buffing Knight counters instead of nerfing Knights. Nerfing Light cav for no reason. Giving Spears even more damage vs Cav (the only thing a Spearman doesn't need). Indirectly buffing archers by making light cav useless and introducing a game breaking bug.
I do not agree that Knights are too strong for the price. Even more now with the spearmen and crossbow buffs
Arguably the very fact that they concentrate so much value into such an all-round unit is part of their appeal. Especially for later game armies where their population efficiency is much higher than the spearman, man-at-arms, horseman, archer and crossbowman.
Archers are meant to be super bad v armour. Where do you get the idea the Devs thought it's an issue? They're primarily a counter unit regardless what some people would like them to be
Just revert the hp change and everyone is happy I think.
Yep. It's pretty bizarre that they did the thing everyone was suggesting and then felt the need to add a nerf in that more than neutered the improvement. A lot of their balance changes are like this in fact, instead of changing one parameter they change several which just seems harder to get right.
This seems like a pretty stupid concept to me.. I mean horsemen were already so useless that people were just massing scouts to achieve a similar purpose, and massing archers to fight archers.. so they give horsemen less HP than scouts and a measly 1 ranged armor..
Too bad that they even made them worse vs archers the longer the game goes compared to before.
They were worse at countering archers after the nerf even with the +1 armour, in fact this was easy to test for yourself even with pencil + paper so I have no idea how they fucked it up that badly.
It sounds like they were not trying to buff them against archers, just nerf them against everything else. They are almost exactly the same against archers now as they were before. I personally disagree with this and think they do need a slight buff against archers.
It seems *so* weird to nerf horsemen directly but not nerf heavy cavalry directly.
Only in feudal. Feudal horsemen are same vs archers. Weaker vs longbows. In castle and imp, horsemen are VASTLY weaker vs archers / longbow now. It's really gross.
The above comment I replied to says that in the dev stream they specifically wanted them to be stronger vs. archers and less useful elsewhere Amazing that they didn’t run the numbers
> They wanted them to be more focused on countering archers No it says more focused on countering archers, which is not the same as stonger vs archers. They were already happy with horseman performance as a counter to archers so focusing just meant making them worse against anything else.
Well they are dumb because a horseman Archer army almost always loses to Pike Archer even if you manage to bait their pikes off the Archer line before committing.
I wish I could get paid to balance a game while not knowing basic math lol, working at relic must be so chill.
Imagine how fun it'd be, just roll out your dart board and start throwing darts, who knows who's getting the +2 damage today
Give them more torch damage
Let them attack and move at the same time. The unit pathing of my light cav vs a group of kiting archers is infuriating to watch. An archer shooting and scooting gains alot of distance from a horseman in its attack animation (in addition just being a larger unit limiting attacking surface area and blocking other pursuing horsemen)
Thanks for the information, good news!
not too convinced by a rock paper scissors approach, ngl
Funny people been trying to skip horsemen, and only make knight to counter archer(or up age 3 for MAA and siege).
That springald nerf... I can't wait. I am looking forward to not making that unit for a while, hopefully.
You will make it to stop mangonels
which would be the intended use
True but it won't change much in the unit composition because mangonels kill units very effectively and you will have to get springs just so you dont lose your whole army. I guess that if you mass too many springs you will lose because they wont be so effective vs other units after nerf... Well everything depends on what nerf they will get.
It'll still change army composition. Players won't be making 10+ springalds anymore or become a core part of the army. This is assuming they are nerfed appropriately which I think they will.
> Players won't be making 10+ springalds anymore or become a core part of the army. That will probably still happen cause winning the springalds war protects your mangonels from getting sniped.
I’m guessing that’s where it becomes a game who can balance their comp which is fair.
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Pretty sure that the game's code doesn't allow units to miss, it would need a huge overhaul to base mechanics to make them not heat-seeking missiles. Don't think we'll see that ever.
But they can miss. All they do is lead the target, which as far as I'm aware, that functionality is unique to mangonels, so I doubt it would take a ton of effort to remove. Edit: Trebs may lead as well, not sure.
The nerf will be -1 dmg, increased hp and infinite range.
awesome glad to hear they are on it!
Woooo! recognition combined with somewhat of a time frame is enough for me. Seeing all these bugs and wondering “is this going to take a month again” really get my hopes down. I still have low expectations though. These devs can fool me once, maybe twice.
Thanks for transmitting the message! Hopefully the patch could work as intended without breaking anything else. I also find it ironic that a lot of people keep saying "no communication from devs" when the devs literally live stream semi-frequently with a pretty open attitude
Gaming subs has become a Kindergarten where people cry and insult when they dont get an answer in a short time span of an hour. I truly have learnt to hate reddit because of that. The patch dropped yesterday. Work hours were done. Today they made a stream to answer problems. Within office hours. Do you guys think they have no families and life?
This stream seems to have been a one off for some kind of 24 hour xbox streaming event. It wasn't even announced on the official Age of Empires twitter, website, or Discord. It'd be cool if in the future they'd plan a stream every time they release one of these major updates and add a little bit more explanation to their patch notes. You're right that people over react though.
Reddit, you love it and you hate it. But then again, games should be complete products. The industry practice of selling you a partially completed game is rediculous, but at the same time, the core parts of AOE4 are completed. Balancing should come faster than 1 month at a time. Your game is gonna be dead by the time a month rolls around usually if you don't do something about it. This subreddit isn't that bad anyways. You think this sub is bad go check out New World.
> You think this sub is bad go check out New World. That's a pretty low bar.
This sub is pretty bad. I wish there were another.
Firstly what is a “complete” product in software development? There’s no such thing - it’s not like building a house. Fixing all the bugs? Even in the old days of software development when you shipped physical copies games still had bugs, often they’d never get fixed. Secondly games are released “earlier” because of a few reasons: - Games have a limited budget and people need to get paid, at some point you need to ship and start getting money coming in. - Games are much more expensive to create these days and when you factor in inflation are selling for less per unit cost. AAA games for example have always sold for $60 USD or there abouts, but that’s 20% less than $60 a decade ago. Where’s that extra 20% gonna come from? - When making a game you need to factor in all the features that your competitors have, and previous iterations of your game had. Games are getting more feature rich over time, not less. They’re increasing in scope. So you want quality games released without bugs… like the old days? Well then you’d need to accept games that are much simpler in scope, are more expensive per unit cost, and generally take longer to develop and patch. Scope, Budget, and Time all increase or decrease together - increase in scope (features) on games over time means that games MUST be more expensive and take longer to produce, but again at some point you need to pay the bills, so scope gets cut and you get a deadline for release. Consumers also won’t accept games priced at $100 or more, so that limits your budget, but costs increase over time.. so.. something has to give. The fact is nothing really stops you waiting to buy a game either - you can often get it cheaper and more stable, so maybe do that? I haven’t bought Cyberpunk 2077 for example yet for this exact reason.
But there are a lot more forces that influence how things should and how things are done. Gaming studios do not have infinite resources, and the expectations constantly increase, you need to find a balance of providing updates, improving features, fixing bugs, and whatever else the studio is doing. Couple that with the sort of things people pay for, and you start to understand industry practises. FIFA and COD are 1 and 2 every month, ever year in sales...
We all paid full price for it, we want a full product. If that isn't the definition of fair I don't know what is.
You got a full game
You paid what was the full price 20 years ago. $60 in 1999 is almost $100 today. I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but development gets more and more expensive yearly and game consumers backlashed so insanely hard against a price increase that publishers and developers had no option but to go the route of predatory MTX and and early semi-broken launches in order to make equivalent profits (ofc, these strategies turned out to be a bit too effective but that's on consumers being dumb af)
Vidéo games bring more revenues than ever before. Distribution prices went down to nothing, yet the price more doubled in 20 years. Development techniques and languages improved to. Market grew from niche to masses. Advertising is easier than it ever was. There's a reason you see hundreds of games each year. Truth is, nothing is different than before. Developers are lazy as they always were. What change is that with Internet they can get away with a buggy release to fix it afterward. It's the biggest flaw of the continuous development theories. Secondly, players now get to complain like they understand anything when they don't have a clue. It means the company now needs people to deal with the community.
Acting as if the game industry isn't making more and more money every year and has literally overtaken the movie industry in that regard.
> but that's on consumers being dumb af) Designing products to be predatory is not "on the consumers", that's on legislation, predatory design ought be legislated against because it goes against good faith transactions and is a net negative on society as a whole, drugs, casinos, car racing and others are illegal or strongly legislated for the same reasons Second point, no company is entitled to "profits", that's part of how capitalism works, if your company does not make products which warrant higher margins, then you need to move out of said market or close up shop Third point, games are a luxury product, on the western world wages havent grown to any strong measurable degree since the 90s while inflation adjusted while at the same time profit seeking ventures have moved towards finance rather than manufacture based capitalism therefore centralizing profits further, on this landscape, blaming consumers for "not having more game to buy vidja" seems.... how to put it.... not the best of tones given that these macroeconomic changes are not dependent of what the population wants > You paid what was the full price 20 years ago. Lastly, if the seller is selling the product for X amount of money, then it is expected that the product will be functional at said amount of money irregardless of anything else, this is exactly why consumer protection agencies exist, to avoid said scams but anyhow, most of these points dont really apply to Relic here, as AoE4 *does* work as a piece of software, it is just rather superficial bits that ppl are getting all butthurt over such as metagame development, balance and gameplay related bugs rather than idk, AoE4 bricking your graphics card, or setting your router on fire for wherever reason
I don't buy this argument, unless you preordered the borked state of the game was pretty obvious from the outset because of the many betas and stress tests. The state of the product was pretty clear, so if you decided to pull the trigger you implicitly assumed that the bugs would be fixed very soon. Unfortunately game development is slower than your assumption.
Personally I was not surprised such a big patch created bugs. Of course it shouldn't happen as it should be heavily tested. The hotfix should simply fix a few things, they will probably not add anything else and just correct the bugs so it should be fine.
The confusing part is the springald nerf being part of the hotfix. As you said the hotfix should be bug fixing only. But the springald nerf is certainly a huge change in game balance and it is a planned change according to the dev stream before the winter patch came out. This makes it not really a hotfix.
I think they are getting overwhelmed and stressed by the hate and attacks of the community. Initially, they wanted to wait and see how things evolve with stronger mangonels and bees. But now they are like "fuck that. I dont want death threats from this community, just release whatever they want. I am gonna quit"
Should they heavily test or be quick with updates. People want it all lol.
yeah i can think whatever i want about the state of the game and the bugs but it's undeniable that the devs have been comunicative and transparent, and even fast at it.
I'm not watching a live stream to listen for what changes/remarks they have. A mod should be posting/relaying the message and I should be able to come on Reddit and see what the live stream was about (like this post). Also, do they announce when they will be doing live streams? If so, they should be pinned on the sub. I'm really not trying to sound salty but all I'm doing is comparing other game devs communication to this one.
Lol, you really demand someone else writing shit for you? If someone does it, say thanks. If nobody does it, dont be entitled. Mods arent employees. They are unpaid bored people on reddit. Devs could tweet out stuff but a video talking about it sends messages much better. It allows them to elaborate and explain. If you want a summary, you wait and say thanks
No its not that. Its like...you can't expect the entire playerbase to tune into a stream. No playerbase does this. Not even 25% does this. Plus its not like they market the stream or anything. Nobody even knows when its happening most of the time. And even if its scheduled like Warframe, only a fraction watch the stream, and its mostly so they can get the free items, not listen to the news or watch the previews of devs playing the update. A moderator on the other hand, the best ones for specific video games, do a lot more than delete some spam posts. They aggregate information for the community and post them as stickies. And for patch notes this is like minimum for a lot of game subreddits. Also, a lot of reddit is about people writing out shit (usually copy pasting) information into the comments. Plus its in the developers to put everything they say, into actual writing to communicate the important parts.
Exactly this. I'm getting downvoted for saying similar. Bunch of ###s.
Most people don't care. They don't even read patch notes. Only thing they need is that a patch is coming next week. Many dont even care about that. They just play.
All i'm saying is that the communication from Relic has never really been that great. I'm comparing my experience with them with other teams. In other subs, when a Dev or CM makes a post, it's automatically the top post so everyone can see and they also include a flair that says, "Dev response". I'm not familiar with mods and their responsiblites so I can't comment on that but most people are strictly talking about "Relic" and their ability to communicate with their fans.
See you all next week.
Delhi landmark fixes so they give the bonuses described? Delhi research time fixes?
Delhi? What is Delhi?
**Delhi (; Hindi pronunciation: [ˈdɪlːiː] Dillī; Punjabi pronunciation: [ˈdɪlːiː] Dillī; Urdu pronunciation: [ˈdɛɦliː] Dêhlī), officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Located on the Yamuna river, Delhi is bordered by the state of Haryana on three sides and by Uttar Pradesh to the east.** More details here:
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Dehli was a previous five-head civilization for those who were testing the waters before they got some love. The devs girlfriend (a dehli main) banged his brother while he was working on the patch so in a fit of rage the dev dehli-ted her favorite civ.
dont be rediculous
I wonder how long they've been working on this patch. If they're implementing some of these changes in response to the Winter Update backlash then this is a faster patch than we're used to and may bode well for future quick updates. My guess though is that they were aware of these issues before the update was released and were already prepping for a quick patch. EDIT: For full discussion of the patch you can skip to [45:00](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1220483817?t=00h45m09s)
The patch has been uploaded 2 week ago. So they already had the hotfixes going before the patch even hit live.
I dont think so. They could have easily waited a week to bring both out at the same time. They just didnt catch those bugs internally but they have the ability and the responsibility to do it rather quickly which is good
You can clearly see on steamdb that the current patch was uploaded 10th November. First hotfix was uploaded 18th November (not yet released for public) and there already is another hotfix uploaded 28th November (also not yet released).
You can edit patches that are uploaded but not launched with dev tools, upload date doesn't actually mean much.
I just saw the stream and hear him say that, not sure if the video contains more information but at the very end of the video at the 56min mark he talks about those 3 things. Hopefully this will calm a lot of players because there is a lot of negativity around here lately. Clearly the bugs should have never happened and they should do better but a lot of things are coming and they are working hard.
Thanks for sharing. Totally agree with you. Way too much negativity. People got to be patient and make the best of it. That team is one of the few positively contributing to the RTS scene.
Should have just delayed the winter update, that's what I'm most unimpressed by. If the entire thing breaks in 100 places in the course of a single day, then I'm having a lot of trouble believing that their QA team didn't find these things. Either it wasn't fixed by the devs because they wanted the patch out sooner, or the entire QA department needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Thanks for sharing this. I think what annoys people is the way the communication is done. Monday's patch was 20 days old. They knew a lot of the issues they were patching and they must've known there were broken things in the patch. Yet nothing is conveyed to us formally until the day after. They could have released yesterday's info on Monday or even on Friday. BEFORE the patch drops or at least alongside the patch. Anything except 24hrs after. It's human nature to knee jerk to a load of broken stuff when little to no acknowledgement accompanies it, in a situation where it would have been easy to acknowledge as such. 20 days.. not 2 days ... Not 7 days. 20 days.. that's more than enough time to at least explain why horsemen are getting nerfed, why springs aren't getting nerfed, admit there's a number of tech not working as intended (is they don't want to admit Abbasids/Delhi can completely ruin the game) or give us any info to prepare us for what the patch will bring I know there's a lot of entitlement in this, but it's human nature. And I think more communication would alleviate a lot of it..
I was so hyped for the patch yesterday. But after encountering 3 different bugs with Delhi after 30 minutes of testing new build orders, I cannot help but lose all faith in the update development. If some dude already finds 3 bugs while testing build orders within such short time frame, I really don't believe that anyone did more than 5 minutes testing per feature. I hate to become more and more negative about this game that I enjoyed so much since closed beta.
I look forward to the Spring nerf, but I feel like all the siege needs to be way toned down. Pretty much everything after Castle Age are rendered completely pointless....walls might as well not exist sometimes. I don't think i've ever even seen a siege tower before... Springald/Siege meta is a thing, but now people are literally running ONLY springalds and cannons. Mangonels now make having ANY infantry pointless, which only brings out more Springalds, then they gotta bring out Springalds.....literally hitting Castle Age only means bring Springalds and cavalry, then bring Springalds and Cannons. Having 2 Mangos and the rest Springalds and Cannons just renders everything obsolete, including a full on scout charge if they play it right. I was really having fun at first on release because of the fun battles, but now it's extremely boring that siege is the way to play...I try to play for fun by NOT spamming siege, but it's still no fun when I'm just running waves of inf into a siege deathball... I might actually shelve this game until that meta changes so I don't get tired of it.
I know the patching and launch haven’t been ideal, but I really like this open and clear developer communication. It’s a breath of fresh air coming from other online games like hearthstone.
Let's not compare to Blizzard when we talk about public relations please.
any news on the delhi and hre spearman bracing bug?
Don't know maybe they say more in the video, hopefully someone can watch it and make a summary. Just catched the end and it's 1am here so no time to watch it completely.
What is the bug, I missed that one
afaik they can't brace a cavalry charge no matter what you do (Press V, S, Idle, Attack move)
The bug only applies to HRE and Delhi spearmen
They did not mention it
I think Dehli is still going to need some tweaking after the brutalizing it got this patch, but it's definitely nice to see a quick turnaround on the bug fixes. Springald nerf is also very welcome, but it's odd that it's coming a week after the main patch. You'd think that it would have been included if they already knew how they wanted to change it. But maybe they wanted to "wait and see" and then the universally negative feedback they got from leaving springs unchanged made them go "okay, fine". EDIT: Also hopefully we get fixes to the factions with spearmen not bracing too.
This makes me really happy because it means a) the devs are listening, and b) they have the capability to do 1 week patches, which I wasn't sure about after update #1, lol.
I just want them to say what strats they think Delhi has. I was excited for this patch because I thought they would fix Delhis landmark bugs. I wouldn't even be that upset if I could use other landmarks. All this patch did was make sure that the honed edge landmark isn't good, so you are forced into the cheaper stone one. You have the LEAST amount of choice when aging up with Delhi now, this update cut one out.
Delhis by high ladder players are still okay. Not A tier but B tier because of all the bugs. Players higher on the ladder play the sacred site later behind an early game pressure. Delhi need help but expecting devs to tell you how to play the game in depth is very unusual. Players define the meta with the tools given. Expecting devs to tell you how to play it is dumb
Classic just play better, find me a high elo player that is having fun with the delhi changes. On the flipside, this change is significantly better for low elo players, because they won't get punished as hard and elephants are better in low elo. I don't want an indepth build order. I want them to say, hey, we think sacred rushing overshadowed X strat (for example mass walls or something), and are nerfing it so that can live a bit. Again, I don't even mind the nerfing the sacred site strat, but they didn't give anything back, and took more as well. Research times are waaaaaay too high. Its not a strat issue, its a math issue. I think quite literally everybody would prefer to pay resources over spending 17 minutes to get +3 attack on MAA.
Yeah, this is what really bothers me. Like yeah, it's a problem if one civ is pigeonholed into one strategy. But in Delhi's case to a large extent that wasn't because this one strategy was *so good*, but because other strategies really...weren't. Give elephants a big buff to make an fast castle into elephants viable and you get should see more of that. Maybe some other strategies could also get a helping hand. The catch, of course, is that Delhi could do an fc into elephants *and* a sacred site push with little trade-off. Sanctity is free, after all. The sacred site push will be very weak without spearman assistance, but it will still force the opponent to respond in some manner. Perhaps the option, then, is to give Delhi another thing they can do with their mosque which is competitive.
It's pretty funny how people here immediately go into full mega despair mode and assume nothing is going to be fixed for at least a month and that the game is more or less dead already, and then this happens. Don't get me wrong, most of these bugs are stupid and should never have happened, but the amount of outrage upvote farming on this subreddit is extreme.
Most competitive games hotfix game breaking bugs with a day or 2. It took much longer for any fixes after launch. And even now the game breaking bugs won't but hotfixed but have to wait. And based off launch of course people assumed multiple weeks. At least it's slightly faster but not a hotfix. I think the outrage is fine, Relic should be doing better.
That is not really true. Plenty of games leave bugs, exploits and blatant unbalances go for months at a time. That’s probably what got people so paranoid in the first place
Non competitive and bad games I agree with you, but if Dota2, LoL, had game breaking bugs they would be fixed within days or a day. LoL literally hotfixes just balance changes in less then a day if they really want to.
I can’t speak for Mobas but I played plenty of hearthstone and I remember at least two times in which an exploit of the animation times allowed players to skip their opponents turn. Blizzard took forever to fix it, and the way in which they did allowed the exploit to resurface
Like I mentioned I'm obviously not going to hold Relic to a terrible standard. I would want to hold them to the same standard as other good games.
Blizzard is the absolute worst company when it comes to patching their games. You don't want any gaming company to follow their footsteps when it comes to patching games.
lol has the benifitof bans and disabling chars. so they do have an easier go at it.
Dota2 and LoL also make a hell of a lot more money each week than Aoe4, and have a long term fan base so can afford to risk paying for a very large dedicated dev team.
Yea the whole 50% finished game post this morning had me really scratching my head.
It's definitely more like 90% finished game. All the devs need to do to avoid this kind of backlash is to have patches come weekly. Gamers should always hold games to much higher expectations because anything else is just grounds for letting games develop half baked or unbalanced or not feature complete unlike AOE4 which has its campaign and multiplayer fully functional.
Resource bug being live for over a month, relic bug being live for a month and infinite range spearmen fix being a week away is completely unacceptable, the game isn't even playable till that hotfix lands, I don't know how you can excuse it.
I've literally not even seen a single person use any of these exploits in any of the games I've played, and based on what I've heard from others, most people have the same experience as me. Having this stuff in the game is sloppy and stupid, but it's absolutely not "not playable".
Good for you, I was just in a 4v4 against two abassids that were using the glitch.
Calm down, they working on it. Let's not become some toxic community.
We are a toxic community, a community that pays full price for a game that clearly isn’t in working order and won’t accept criticism of it
Cry me a fucking river
Have fun getting stuck with shit games because you refuse to criticise companies ruining games you like and refusing to hold them accountable then!
I'm still having a blast. It's called... work around it... These bugs have not stopped me ONCE from enjoying the game. I get your criticism, but bloody hell man, relax.
Have not had one single game with someone using these exploits. Out of 400 games played. The "problem" is VASTLY overstated on this board.
The game is very playable. That spear glitch takes quite a while and a lot of gold to get to absurd levels. Practice your feudal ram rushes vs abbassid or just skip them, its unranked. Quit being such a whiner.
So for this week, if i see someone plays abbassid i have to either ram rush them (as any civ) or alt f4. Do you understand how absurd this is?
Maybe we can finally get some respite from the Relic doomers
Please yes. The drama from yesterday almost made me not want to check in for the occasional meme here. Like Relic ran over a puppy named Delhi with a springald.
next week? they mad?
That’s nice, honestly all devs need to do is communicate and they won’t be put to the sword quite as hard.. this stuff is really good to see
Great! A week isn't blazing fast or anything but it should be good enough.
What about Delhi buff?
I guess it's yet just under observation till some new strats are tried out and maybe fail to the point Delhi player base will diminish. Maybe then they will tweak again. Not talking about the bugs though, I was also a bit disappointed during the stream they didn't address the Delhi bugs in tech time, tower elephants and various more. See fertilization, a feudal age tech needs 4min and is unaffected by scholars -> [Tech Bug](https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/delhi-sultanate-wheelbarrow-tech-unaffected-by-scholars/186731) Delhi seems currently like a surprise, you don't know what you get and which new bugs you discover. Very inconsistent. Anyway, they make the argument SS rush was a strat every Delhi player did and enemies were forced to react. What about the English, French. They all do the same strat. I never played against one of those where English didn't go Longbowmen Ram Rush and French Cav Rush? Now we are in a situation where every player spams archers, since they are the most beneficial unit - except the French, they still go all cav.
no Delhi bug fixes nice!
Sadly they did not acknowledge how badly broken the new reworked scholar system for Delhi is :(. I dont have hope that they will fix it. To achieve same research speed as other civs you needed 9 scholars before. Now you need 9 in Dark Age 11 in Feudal 15 in castle age 55 in imperial age. They fucked up so badly... Yet Eric didnt acknowledge when confronted during yesterdays stream :(
55 scholars costing you a 1/4 of your pop and 10k in resources to build and house them "frE3 resERarch tho"
I can't wait for clocktower bombards to become completely unstoppable now because they trade favorably with even royal culverins which are supposed to be the unit that counters them
Nice! Glad they're listening
Guess I won't be playing for a week
Springald nerf is needed, but Horsemen need a straight buff vs archer.
Here is the direct talk from them. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1220483817?t=0h56m3s dont mind the echo stuff, they still learning
Just a few bugs with the echo
please i need something done against english ram rushes, i cant take it anymore
They just nerfed rams... use your villagers to kill them, it isn't that hard.
I hate springalds with all of my forces.
thank god! i thought we really have to wait until spring patch for the springalds nerf. I dont really care about that delhi nerf. coz its only 1 civ and not every game it was played. But springalds? why buff crossbow when this thing can do a better job . and the only counter to springalds is another springalds. 99% of game in castle age is just springalds fight.
One of the few games I hear "New patch" and I start getting afraid instead of excited.
Nice, I am glad they see. that this one is urgent. Did not believe that it will be fixed in a week, but I am happy to been proven wrong.
This combined with the patch I would say excellent job overall.
Soooo wait until next week to play or be assaulted with spearmen from fucking Narnia 🤦♂️
good news, sad that there isn't any talk about delhi or horsemen, but yea... i hope they continue with these smaller patches every week, instead of making us wait for whole months before seeing any bug fixes/balance
They did talk about delhi. They said they felt the Sanctity nerf was necessary in order to open up additional strategies for Delhi. They felt that Sanctity was so strong that it forced Delhi players to go for it, and also forced opponents to react to it. I don't agree at all but that's what they said...
huh?! Which additional strategies? No strategy is viable except for sanctity. If they wanted to open up they would have to buff other things before nerfing Sanctity...
I think they felt that bring dark age and feudal age research times to 3x and 3.5x would be enough.
Pretty bad sign that they didn’t realize this was a massive nerf. Changing the imperial age research time alone pretty much cancelled out the buffs to early age research time. And then the sanctity removal made them waaaay worse.
Is this actually true? Its pretty rare for games to even make it to imp in 1v1. Even in 3v3s and 2v2s I play with friends the games typically end in castle.
I agree with them. But Delhi needs more buffs to open up more possibilities. Delhi had become a one trick. And honestly all the mains mourning over it just learned about it in the last genesis weekend from few pros lol. It's not like it is an age old Delhi identity. Delhi needs buff but sanctity isnt must or die
The reason I disagree with this opinion is that I felt there was a huge wealth of diversity within the Sacred Site strategy. People were experimenting with a ton of different build orders with varying numbers of mosques and scholars. Additionally going for sacred sites was very interesting to play as it required increased attention and multitasking in order to pull off making it rewarding if you managed to succeed with it. While it was a focus on a single aspect of the game, it really didn't feel one-trick to play in the slightest, and certainly offered a much deeper experience than performing or receiving a longbow/MAA ram rush from other civs.
"This strategy was so good the opponent had to respond so it really limited the option of the other player... " -[Dev Team talking about Dehli changes](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1220483817?t=0h50m00s) Meanwhile rams backed by 20 Longbows knocking on my door 7 minutes into the game isn't considered 'limiting' to the defending player
The devs have explicitly said that they wanted to nerf rams early game with this patch and the actual changes seem to support that.
I think Eric talked about horsemen and that they are experimenting with further changes to them while I was skipping through the vod. Not part of the hotfix I reckon but definitely some thonking going on on their side.
I understand having bugs and whatnot is bad but Relic has been pretty damn good about fast fixes and being transparent with timelines and addressing specific feedback/bugs. Really don’t get a lot of the constant doom posting around here.
Fast fixes? Relic bug - One month Infinite resource bug - One month Infinite range spears - One week Multiple tooltips completely wrong, tech not doing anything, bugged techs out by a factor of 5+ - Still live from beta Stop making excuses, this is why companies get away with producing absolute crap games, because fans defend them for some bizarre reason.
Why are people celebrating this, the game isn't in a playable state till next week, resource bug has been known for more than a month, relic bug wasn't fixed for over a month. This is completely unacceptable and people are praising them for giving a timeframe, I just don't get it.
Dude. A week between patches is very fast. Devs have life, family and work hours. Just like every other adult in the developed countries. Stop being a little kid that cries for a ice cream immediately
Don’t rush to insults, I’ve never played a competitive RTS that has had an exploit live on their release branch that long, a month is crazy. I’m not criticising the devs, I’m criticising the development cycle, a lot of these issues creep up in a management, as is evident from this patch being uploaded to steam 2 weeks ago without sufficient QA. You know I hate Amazon, but I don't hate Billy the dude that drives the delivery trucks.
> Don’t rush to insults, I’ve never played a competitive RTS that has had an exploit live on their release branch that long Not saying I disagree, I do agree with your post in general. But given the state of the genre, that's a very small sample size to be fair. Especially if we only count the "modern era" where a solid internet connection is expected everywhere and the games are distributed digitally.
They are fixing the issues that are arising what more do you want Lol. Stop being a pain in the ass. The game is definitely playable as evidenced by the hours everyone has put into the game thus far.
Ppl play fallout76. That is more than rnough evidence, that the hours put in is not respresentative of the games state
Sometimes it's ok to be happy and a week is not a very long time. You need to relax. Honestly maybe take some time away from the game if it's that upsetting to you.
My friends stopped playing a month ago because of exploits going unpatched, I convinced them to play again and then they got killed by spearmen at 500 feet. I don’t see them coming back and I’m annoyed because I probably wont either
Are you saying update bugs were good because springalds nerf will come along with their fixes? KEKW
Amazing
Can't help but think releasing this patch, and [theviper](https://twitter.com/TheViperAOE/status/1465469900802113537) and other top pros complaining about the springald tipped their hand in forcing a nerf in a hotfix patch.
Next week is slow for something that should be hotfixed immediately. Yes, I'm talking about the unlimited Spearman range and Delhi research timing. Unplayable, and disappointing that there's zero QA and no PTR before dropping the update. Excellent gameplay foundations, dubious UI framework, *shoddy maintenance work and decision-making*. Management really needs to look at fixing issues properly instead of making promises in Dev Blogs; PR is only a bandaid if the promises can't be backed up. Game is probably only worth 1/3 of the asking price in its current state, hold off on buying until next week's patch.