Thoughts on the strategic stagnation

[HeymlicH]

I disagree with most of the above posts.

1. Ages are not too short. An entire game takes a few hours. This is enough. I don't want to spend several days on one single "quick battle".

2. Yes, defensive is strong in the beginning. I like it. In most cases you have to build a little bit before you start fighting. This build up is something about 10 minutes in-game-time, that's not too much. In AoE it was always the problem that you need an army early because someone else raids you otherwise. Defense was too weak there.

3. If you really want to raid early play turks. They are great at this. Go to classic quickly, get military 2 tech (lower military tech costs and lower food costs are helpful here), build a small army (10 slingers/archers + 4 cavalry units are sufficient), build a siege workshop and take the 2 free catapults and start raiding. Don't waste time building up the economy - you don't need a granary or university for this and the player next to you has already built all this stuff. Take his structures. The only thing you might want to build yourself early is the colossus - it is very useful.

[Out4Blood]

1. Ages are not too short. An entire game takes a few hours. This is enough. I don't want to spend several days on one single "quick battle".

RFOL! An entire game usually takes LESS than an hour. I'm almost always in INFO AGE in 30 minutes. Gunpowder age comes really fast. What game are you playing?!

[HeymlicH]

I'm always playing conquest on huge maps. Since I'm more the Civilization player I always set game speed to "very slow". A conquest victory takes about 50 min ingame time (which is 3.5 hours real time).

[Out4Blood]

Great googly moogly!

[Jaybe]

Naw, games take longer than that. 50-90 minutes for a 4-5 AI game on a large map. 6-8 hours of "my" time. Because that is how I LIKE it!

Very Slow & Expensive tech and I am a TBS gamer (not an RTSer), so battles go very slow and I use the pause feature (without which I would not have gotten the game).

[HeymlicH]

Yep, I use the "pause" feature, too. I think online matches are a different game

@Jaybe: I startet with slow and expensive tech, too. But by the time I found out it is more fun to play with normal tech. The AI is working better with normal tech. I mean, they have a better balance between expansion, tech, wonders and armies. You should at least try this

[Hermann the Lombard]

O4B: With each game I play, I find that I burn out and lose interest, sometimes surprisingly quickly. I finished a CtW campaign on Tougher last night, and I think I'm teetering on the edge of burnout. This seems awfully fast, but I think the reason is just what you said. The "been there, done that" factor is already very strong. Thanks to you (and to others), Tougher (against the AI) is now too easy. I was almost stunned by how easy it was to conquer the AI civs, especially if we started separated by water (thus leaving my boom undisturbed as I grabbed total sea control).

There have been a few games where I burned out and came back later, like Civ2, and found whole new levels of strategy and challenge, like the OCC (One City Challenge) and even the Size One OCC (I never pulled that one off). It doesn't seem that RoN will have that sort of replay value.

Can This Game Be Saved? Is there anything they could do in the next patch/expansion to remedy this? THAT could be a strategy discussion in its own right.

Based on this thread, one option would be to change the default cost and speed of research. Another might be to change the ramping algorithm (I agree with the idea of "economies of scale" up to a point...meaning that for a while the cost would go down, but at some point it would start up again). Yet another: make UUs more U to give an incentive for different army compositions. How would you change it, if you could?

[Madine]

One thing I would like to see is change the way unit upgrades work. Instead of being able to skip upgrades, I would like to see every upgrade needed. So instead of upgrading slingers to arqubusiers, you would need to up grade them to javelineers, then to elite javelineers first.

The main problem I have noticed is that unless you have your opponent crippled before enlightment, the game is essentially a tech race.

Because of this, there is little incentive to fight in ages 5 and 6, unless you have a significant advantage.

Why? The obvious reason is nukes. Their destructive power is unmatched. My experience is that someone wins the race to nuke by a large margin wins. There is a powerful incentive to be the person who wins that race or to not be the person that loses it badly.

Another reason is oil. Building wells takes precious metal that could be used to build units. Also most industrial units require oil, which makes it hard (impossible) to build up a military without getting left in the dust in the tech race.

Bombers, tanks, and helicopters also drive the tech race.

The design of the game was for it to start out defensive, and get more offensive as the game went on. I think this is a good decision, and it works out well for most ages.

However I think that there is a problem with ages 5 and 6. Major fighting is supposed to start in 4, so you would think that 5 and 6 would be the "meat" of the action. Instead they seem like a hoop you have to jump through to get the the destructive power of the last 2 ages.

[Grond]

Sure it can be saved but BHG would have to remove ramping or provide an option for disabling it and more importantly decrease the counters bonuses. As long as everybody is making very similar armies its going to be the same old same old.

[Out4Blood]

The design of the game was for it to start out defensive, and get more offensive as the game went on. I think this is a good decision, and it works out well for most ages.

No, I think this is the fundamental flaw. Too strong of a defense eliminates the rush and thus forces a boom approach. The most efficient economy wins, which is the way it is now - for the most part.

[solo]

I think a more fundamental problem is that most current games (including RoN) emphasize appearances over detail and strategic depth. So many of the designer's and platform's resources are devoted to things like 3-D and special effects, that there is hardly anything left to build a more detailed or challenging game.

Perhaps the solution is to turn to a simpler, but deeper game. I have discovered Go, and like it a lot so far because it makes me think.

Getting back to RoN, I've played a few games on very slow and expensive, and my experience is that the rush and a military approach is quite viable when using this option. Since there is such a long wait in between ages AND in between commerce level changes, more reources can be devoted to building a military, even one that is heavy on a particular unit or units. Miilitary research is relatively cheap and each level of it decreases unit costs by 5% (this overcomes ramping costs to some degree) and allows more units to be built earlier.

A small change that might help the standard game might be to halve the costs of unique units, so that their differences mean something more than just unique artwork.

[Rusty Nail]

I have begun experimenting with very low population ceilings (say 75), increased unit costs and disabling Collossus (becomes too powerful) to increase the strategic aspect. It is too early too say yet, but you really have to think about which precious units to build and when, and when to kill off citizens and scholars to create room for miitary. I may have to increase attack strengths to balance offense versus defense (forts and towers become more important obviously). In any case, the usual one big diversified army can be eliminated this way.

[HalfLotus]

Notice I said strategic stagnation. I'm not that there is NO strategy, just no new strategy DEVELOPMENT. And you said it yourself: "strategies are already well documented." And for a published book: Sybex strategy guide (written months before the game even goes gold; I know, I've written some) to be the tome for strategy means there is no hope!

RoN has a very small community right now, especially online community, including forum-goers and those who play online. How many people play multiplayer at an expert level? A few dozen at _most_. I wouldnt expect a game with a tiny online population and an even smaller forum population to explode with original ideas right away. As the community grows and time passes there will be a great deal of strategic evolution. Considering how small RoN's comunity is, and that the game has only been out for a few months, Im impressed with the number of articles written at MFO and Infidels.

I agree with what you're saying about defensive play, and short ages...it detracts somewhat, though Very Expensive/Slow can cure that. I'd like for "age-jumping" and defensive play to be somewhat blunted in future patches.

As far as booming being the dominant strategy, I can say that I've won a great deal of online games by attacking in classical/medieval age, against good competition. In theory defensive booming is the best way, but in multiplayer anything goes really.

[Solver]

Well, would anyone say exactly why is the online community so small? Everyone has been expecting RoN a lot, and there was a TON of posts about it in summer. And where are all the players from Apolyton gone now?

[Jaybe]

And where are all the players from Apolyton gone now?

RoN Heaven, I presume.

Civ3 has much more depth than RoN. While I enjoy playing RoN (my SP games on Very Exp & Slow tech last 6-8 hours including pauses (90 minutes gametime)), I sort'a feel empty/unfulfilled when the game is over. I am just about to switch back to playing Civ,

... in anticipation of Conquests!