Everything Age of Empires - The Home City Card System
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- Опубліковано 12 жов 2017
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Hey folks,
Today's a retrospective on the Home City Card System in Age of Empires III. Hope you enjoy!
If you enjoyed this series, I'd love it if you followed me here and on Twitter and Facebook to receive regular content updates. The relevant links are above. Thank you and see you next time!
Thanks,
brownbear
Additional Discussion of Home City's Effect on Strategy:
-- I've heard the argument that different strategies generate different amounts of experience, meaning the effect of shipments is not always zero-sum in-aggregate. I get where this is coming from, and I think it could theoretically work if it was explicitly implemented to achieve that. However, in my view it didn't work out this way because of the way experience collection was balanced. The stuff you do when you are "winning" (killing more units, building more buildings, getting more tech) generates more experience than the stuff you do when you are "losing", so shipments act as a force multipler on already-strong playstyles rather than an equalizer. If shipments had instead been applied and balanced to explicitly make weaker styles like rushing stronger, then I think they could have worked better. In particular, I think the choice to grant experience for building structures bit the balancing team on more than one occasion.
-- I've gone back and forth as to whether certain overpowered playstyles - especially Ashi Musketeers in TAD - were simply just the result of bad balancing and not necessarily a design flaw within the shipments system. I think it's a bit of both. The problem from a design perspective was that achieving balance meant softening the "cool factor" of races to such an extent that they ceased to be unique or interesting - as I noted in the video, either ridiculously overpowered or comically underpowered.
References:
-- aoe3.heavengames.com/interview... (Greg Street and David Pottinger interview) (archive: archive.is/a5JVK)
-- pc.gamespy.com/pc/age-of-empir... (interview with lead designer Greg Street) (archives: archive.is/e58HN + archive.is/v5rXf + archive.is/moLME)
-- www.ensemblestudios.com/archiv... (home city starting levels adjusted in Oct. 2007) (archive: archive.is/gQYbJ)
-- pc.gamespy.com/pc/age-of-empir... (interview with Bruce Shelly + Dave Pottinger) (archives: archive.is/yhuja + archive.is/nx87S + archive.is/ZZ8JU + archive.is/02NKB + archive.is/15sLi + archive.is/Exsnk + archive.is/sLsbl + archive.is/Fz7n1 + archive.is/5drNn + archive.is/h16Z3 + archive.is/i4L0K + archive.is/j7q1r)
-- steamcommunity.com/id/CaptainM... (top Age3 review on Steam) (archive: archive.is/2DSAD)
-- • Age of Mythology exhib... (Gx_Iron televised Age of Mythology match)
-- www.metacritic.com/game/pc/age... (Age of Empires 3 credits) (archive: archive.is/T1NkL)
-- us.battle.net/shop/en/product... (World of Warcraft character boost) (archive: archive.is/Q3Wsz) - Ігри
I love that you read your resume at the start of every series like this. Well I would certainly hire you! :D
I know the home cities where hated because you had to level them up first, but I LOVED them. I liked hot the city got bigger etc.
Me too. I loved it as well, although I was a very casual player.
Wish there were mods to polish the HC a bit more! Some of the sound effects are weird, some building customisations can't be seen, expansionpack cities don't get customisation... But I do like being able to put a splash of colour on things.
I personally hated them, because I had it upgraded fast and then with the upgraded cities (I played solo against AI) it became far too easy.
Well put! "Balancing whackamole" is definitely a phrase that can be applied to a lot of games
Good stuff, loved the video ! I personally like the Homecity System, even if it is indeed flawed. The flavor it brought to AoE is just amazing. I really wish they would've just added system instead of removing them (the way height difference works ins AoE 2 for example) the game would've been truly great i think. As is, it is still good, but man what could have been!
Looking forward to watch it!
Great job with this video! Can feel a lot of passion went into it, you deserve every new subscriber you get. Keep up the good work.
>calls himself brown bear
>profile picture is some kind of green pig?
>smh.png
The way the home city leveling works atm is perfect. All basic meta cards u need can be added to your deck at level 60 and once u reach level 60 with a TAD expansion civilization, u can create a level 60 homecity with any other civilization. Also reaching level 60 is maybe max 10 hours of grinding which really isn't a lot of time
@@thisguyhere1 there is a mod which everyone uses for a long time now called xp mod. Where you play for more than 2min+ and get one of your asian hc level 100 also making all civ level 100.
It is really fun in single player but even tho I never played the multiplayer, I agree that it doesn't work.
The only way I see it work it is with a new gamemode where the admin of the room can choose the level for everyone so everyone is at the same level and can choose whatever they want.
I always liked the system
Really baffled that in the story mode of the definitive edition, choosing new cards don't tell you where the cards can be sent. You have to blindly pick new cards while not knowing if you can even us it because you're maxed out/
My brother and I both got AoE 3 and he always had more time to play or would dedicate more time to the game. Starting a match with an 'under-levelled' city always sucked and so I didn't play. I feel like I must be in the minority, but a progression system is likely to convince me to avoid a game instead of invest time in it. I just want to play matches and learn how to play and have my play limited to those matches. I do not want to have trawl through menus and work out which cards are best and how am I going to set up my deck so I can then play the actual game. This was the same issue I had with Command and Conquer 4.
I had the exact same problem. Every time I think about reinstalling AoE 3 I think about how I will have to grind all the civs if I want to play with the cards. That's a massive no no to me.
just use XP mod
I've only ever played aoe3 and i love the homecity sustem. Btw you just use xp mod which everyone is using for a while now and unlock all cards and make your deck.
when i creat home cities than say creat a home cities to play or u cant is that a fucking glitch or whta???
AoE:DE just got delayed :(
I've actually been working on a piece to criticise the game and explain my loathing for AoE3's systems.
I have about 30-40 hours of playtime over the last 20 years in Aoe3, with thousands in aoe2 in the same timespan. I had to force myself to do 30 of those hours in the last couple months and it was emotionally exhausting.
I feel like the game got basically got everything wrong, and the biggest part of that was the home city system and progression mechanics.
I didn't criticise the 3d graphics. I criticised the developers not properly adapting the presentation of the game for the leap into 3d graphics. Not properly adapting RTS for 3d graphics, and games in general was a huge issue in the early 2000's and still somewhat remains an issue today when it comes to visual clarity. I could have made that point more clear.
30 hours is plenty of time to formulate an opinion on a game - maybe not the same sort of opinion on the professional meta etc. But its damn enough time to get a feel for what I like and don't like about the game and to be able to talk about that opinion. You may disagree with that opinion and value the opinion of someone who put a lot more time in and thats fine - but 30 hours is a lot more than most reviewers put into a game and I'm only really giving how I feel about the game and not even reviewing it.
The HC system is only the biggest flaw, not the only flaw. All the greatness that those players achieved means nothing if almost everyone is driven away from the game by a system that is in my opinion poorly designed in my opinion. To be presented with a grindwall in order to play an RTS game sucked every single ounce of fun out of the game. From my perspective, all you've really said is there was a sort of stockholm syndrome of learning to love something shitty that you're stuck with and can't get away from.
Similarly, I'm sure the Napoleonic project is great - but its meaningless from my perspective if the core design of the game is awful and actively drives me away - I would argue that I'm representative of the core audience for Age of Empires here and that you're representative of the people who loved AoE3 - which is totally fine.
I have how I feel about the game, and you have how you feel about the game. The world still spins.
Just to reiterate, I dislike the game so much that I had to force myself to play it to be able to analyze that opinion. I feel that justifies my opinion way more than someone who just played it for a few hours, called it a bad game and walked away.
Its not a bad game - I just hate it.
Rinc Tec. Haha wow, you actually lose games? You must be garbage at this kiddie rts - my nephew is 7 and he still loses games. I haven't lost a game in 17 years! LOL how bad can you be rofl. You should just uninstall the game noob
I do not know which is the best strategy and best way to beat the hardest AI.
What game is the horrible looking one at the start? Is that the beta of the new one?
Do you mean AoE2?
And if AoE3, it is over a decade old...
I have enjoyed Age3 but always thought it never lived up to the Age name. I would say I never played multiplayer matches only skirmish/campaign because I didn’t really engage with the HC system much and knew that I’d match to a much higher level HC, whereas I have enjoyed Age2 lan several times. I personally have a lot of issues with this game, many of them carried over from AoM which I won’t get into, but with regards to the HC, I just found it too confusing and incremental on top of an already confusing and complex game (Age2 has the ‘cleanest‘ design and not so many different rules and subsystems compared to the ones after). It also required too much grinding, and I knew somewhere it was obviously broken when people talked about the meta on the forums. I do like the idea of it but the implentation was poor for these reasons. And yes, you can find a way to gain access to everything fast, but that just means that a) the developers got the whole pacing totally wrong in the first place, b) basically you’re skipping the levelling which you can’t do in WoW, and c) it breaks the balance of the game as you get higher levels, so for me, an xp boost is not a good enough excuse - they messed up because too many variables. Then tried to go ALL IN in AoEO, and it didn’t work there either. Relic also has some progression systems that are disliked in their recent games, but progression systems in RTS are hard to do multiplayer it seems.
Is not the best system for a RTS, it is good for a Total War campaign but for RTS no
All i remember from that home card system is that the turks could deploy masses of soldiers and overrun every enemy with their musketeers which additionally could build barracks. Holy cow, just massed that shit and a few riders from cards and nobody ever stood a chance. Of course, that was early and i doubt most players were good back then, but i crushed all their faces.
Edit: If i had watched mroe than a minute of this video, this comment would not be needed and i would have an answer as to why i was crushing so much. Good old days :D