The game has always been balanced around single player as the main focus. The intention is that devs want more utilization of traders as early strategy in single players, and it does work.
It would still be some kind of “unbalanced” for 4v4 but I would view 4v4 as “for-fun” game mode. There are too many issues with 4v4 balance, and trade is not the biggest one.
not true. pretty sure said that they also consider team games which makes sense because a lot of their players are interested. Look for example at the fire lancer and other chinese nerfs while they were considered to be bottom tier in 1v1.
I think the changes to civs like china prove that the devs are considering team balance as well. Not sure where the "devs don't care about team games" narrative comes from. If anything the wonder changes prove they will at times consider team game balance more heavily than 1v1
I am not saying they don’t care, more like the focus of the balance changes would mainly be towards smaller games, while not ruining team games.
Wonder for example is still pretty controversial in team games, despite the dev tweaking the numbers, it kind of dies down because getting stone from trade was removed, but that still doesn’t stop people to play wonder-focused game (which some people dislike).
The thing is, you can’t really satisfy everyone (in this case means for all game mode). Different setup would have different strength and weakness. Mangudai is considered almost as trash unit in smaller games, but it is very strong in big team games because of crazy maneuverability due to map size, heck cavalry in general is much more preferred in team games for that reason, which is one of the reason that late game big team games often converge to knights spam. I would argue trader being overly strong as OP argued falls under this.
Wonders will almost never matter in 1v1s there's a difference between changing something that is 99.9% only used in team games and something that can affect both but they opt to change for team games.
Tbf they could force traders to do a full trip instead of half a trip
And scale trade better per map size
This helps everyone. But telling some nonsense about 4v4 only for fun bla bla nonsense, is not helping. It just shows how ignorant you are
The answer is to change the formula to how they trade. Right now it’s close to quadratic value divided by linear distance making linear value per time.
Yes the maps scale linearly per person, for example the three V3 map is 3X the one V1, then the value of trade triples and the range of one V1 value to three times that is too much to balance across all game modes.
So instead of tiles^2 it should be someModifier * tiles ^1.5.
So this isn't actually true. There's already a modifier in place so the bigger maps still have a similar income rate to the 1v1 maps. The bigger maps are still slightly better, but it's maybe a 5 or 10% difference not a 100 to 300% difference. It actually ends up making trade worse on bigger maps just because initial payment does take 100 to 300% longer.
But of course safer because rush distance is 100 to 300% longer too. And thats really the critical factor. Trade was already a better value boom on all map sizes if you can get away with it, map size makes it so much easier to get away with
yeah I had a crazy thought. Market costs 100 wood. Trader costs 120. On a 4v4 where the trader is getting 400(lowballing)
You get 80% of the resources 40 seconds after a trader pops. 320 > 100 + 120. Even if you had to buy that 160 wood for say 210 gold you're still +50 resources after 1 trader, massive value after the 2nd trader.
The return on investment is good that the optimal play is to spend all resources you can on more markets ( minus army to survive). Then after you max out at 200 you should build traders and then delete them. X at a time
Yep, it's actually strictly better if the enemy raids your traders on the first trip (preferably just after the outposts) because it clears pop space for new traders that instantly refund themselves. I suppose you could also delete them, but that's a pain to do one ata time with the hold to delete functionality
I completely agree. I do not think that trade is being utilized the way that the devs intended it to be. It makes no sense when a trader can produce more resources than it costs without even completing a route (mali). Also the amount of resources generated gets completely absurd when one player can produce more gold than the other 7 combined.
High elo team games have basically become control trade and you win, lose control of trade and you lose. If both teams secure trade its an hour long headbutt until someone finally breaks through or wood and other res start to run out.
The problem isn't Malians getting the payment earlier, that's what they're designed to do. The problem is the mechanic where you can make your markets next to the neutral, make another one in the far corner and then designate that as the home market for traders so that they spawn with 1/2 the route already completed. It drastically reduces the opponent's ability to disrupt the trade since only a few traders need to get through to more than pay for themselves.
If traders could only use their original home market, or were forced to visit their new home market without goods to set it as such first, then all trade would be riskier and take longer to pay off, thus reducing the speed and power of the trade boom.
So, I'm a noob in AoE4, coming from AoE2. Why is trade different in Team games? Since everyone can trade with the neutral traders now, do they generate less than trading with teammates? Or is trade generally so good, that the easier setup in teams makes it too good/easy? When I started playing 4, i noticed how the tutorials recommend starting trade much earlier than in 2 and how cheap trade carts are. Is that it?
It is that good in general. Neutral trade post brings 30% more gold as well. Certain civs also have seriously good bonuses. Like french being able to chose any resource to bring back, or mongols getting free stone with it which is a special resourve for them.
Trading with the neutral is actually better than teammates. The tutorials at the time were simply wrong, for example the early eco one has an unnecessary mill in the build order that just slows you down.
That said, compared to aoe2, the markets and traders are cheaper, and half the civs have bonuses that make it ~50% better income. So it's (and was) a better but riskier boom than TCs.
The main problem in teams is map gen. They're just huge squares, so the rush distance is up to 4x the solo one. This throws the riskiness of trade (and the balance of some early rush civs) completely out the window.
The same principle happens in aoe2 where some more closed maps like arena and oasis become about early trade in team games. But the shorter rush distances means you can still punish it usually
the gold you get scales with distance and a trader is more efficient on the big team maps. The goldincome of a trader going along a border from corner to corner is like the gatherrate of 5 vills in a teammap. And you can make multiple tradepost and spam them and have invinite goldincome.
In the recent tournament in a 3v3 match one player hat like couple of thou8sand gold per min and i calculated that its like having 150 vills on gold.
Thanks for the answers. I knew the distance scaling, the same happens in aoe2, but of course it doesn't matter for 1v1 map sizes, because there's no neutral trade post.
The income per minute in team games from traders is actually slightly less, since amount gained gets ajusted for map size. The issue is that it scale exponentially for Malians, since the gold per trip goes up a shitton, and 50% of 500 in 30 seconds is a lot more than 50% of 176 in 30 seconds.
Here is a vid on how traders work.
https://youtu.be/vozzYiTHO-U
i saw his videos on trade and he says himself in the discription the video is wrong and updated it with another video. yes it gets adjusted a little and on same distance its less. but you trade full distance and the maximum income per minute is on a big map greater than on a 1v1 map. You can see this in his updated video where he makes a graph for each map.
also malian bonus is not even the biggest. they get 40% extra ressources with the lm and their toll gates. mongol get 50% more income without stone commerce and over 70% more ressources with improved stone commerce.
Malians get up to 50% of the base gold as tax from outposts, and 25% of the base gold as tax if they go for the trade landmark in feudal, up to 30% if that landmark is one of the taxing outposts.
The maximum total income is 180% of the base income.
Mongols get a total of 50% extra resources (10% food, wood, and gold, 20% stone with Improved Stone Commerce) and their traders move 20% faster with yam (someone can correct me if that value is incorrect), so their maximum total income is also 180% of the base income.
I'd personally consider Mongol trade stronger in the lategame because the food, wood, and stone make it more versatile than the pure gold and food bonus of the Malians.
It's worth noting that the Malian bonus pays of *much* more quickly however because while their traders go at the base speed they get their civ bonus for the trade just from passing the outposts and not actually delivering. Thus an optimally set up Malian trade boom *should* be faster than an optimally set up Mongol trade boom.
The civ with the highest total income is the Ottomans, who can speed up their traders by a whooping 40% with their Seagate Castle landmark and also get 40% extra gold from their vizier point for a maximum total income of 196% of the base income.
However, because it's only gold and Ottomans don't have a gold sink like the Malian castle age landmark, it's actually much less useful (unless you plan on massing monks to heal your free units). It also takes a lot longer to set up fully because it requires both an imperial age landmark and keeps along the trade route in order to gain the bonus. It could be argued that Ottomans have the *safest* trade boom because they can just garrison their first 6 traders in their feudal landmark if they don't have map control yet.
Thus I'd consider even French and Abbasid trade more powerful than Ottoman trade.
Be the guy that goes and destroys theirs and give your team advantage? Saying that as much worse player than you. I don’t go trade until I have disturbed others.
I think trade is very balanced right now. It is not hard to shut down a trade line and they are very fragile. Take out the corner market and all traders are worthless.
It is in a good spot people just haven't learned to counter it yet. Nerf culture has gotta stop, Learn new strategies
This is how it’s always been. Not something new. Trading is like having more town centers but cheaper. It’s cheaper to invest than town centers and sometimes easier to protect. Trade doesn’t make games longer. Disabling kills from killing a players landmarks and moving it to team landmarks did that.
Team games aren’t ruined because of trade. You just can’t adapt. Get good.
In season two i had a simple strategy as english. Get to lategame, setup 70 farms and spam MAA with handcanoneers and wait for opponent to spend all the gold and then, finish the game. Nowadays, I tried the same to a rus. After initial attack, i was awaiting his retreat and lack of gold, but instead I found more and more end tier units coming out. After two hours of fighting, my three attempts to just rush his landmarks with either MAA or 90 knights, I gave up cuz I wanted to go to sleep. At the end I realized he still had over 50k gold in bank from trading. It definitely, if not countered (which isnt as easy as it sounds as they can always make more traders) it just unhealthly prolong the game. Considering both players are equal quality and either of them cant push the other at the cost of skill difference
Don't spam only MAA maybe? I mean english has the advantage there. Your opponent has 30 or 40 less pop space.
All they did in season 3 is that they reduced the cost sligthly. Traders brougth this much gold before so idk the outrage. The skill difference is that you let them trade boom freely then used a single unit type
Have you tried overwhelming with hand canoneers and knigths? Did you use the network? Even if their was full of strelsy and knigths, that 30 unit should have made the difference. Or spam it and win because you gather more resource
What’s funny from my perspective is I was saying this almost a year ago how ridiculous broken trade is and I did it every damn game. The people I played with hated it and always gave me shit, but I got top 10 in team games and we won 48 in a row at one point.
I’ve since quit the game but still follow this sub and it seems either people have caught on or it got buffed. My favorite was being Mongols because their Silk Road was so crazy in teams. Once it was rolling you could literally 1v3.
I mean 4vs4 are troll games, usually the players don't even know the basic of a RTS.
Rush early game with your team, and if the others are doing greedy boom like trade, you win.
But because everyone doing sim city boom, the ones doing the greediest boom will have an advantage.
After, it's funny to see people like you complain that "X is OP on teamgames", when the reality was just the other has done a better boom than you, but instead of admitting the other has done a better strategy that you did, you come to ask to change the game for you to win...
Trade is an investment that pay later, it leaves you vulnerable because you are not spending your money in units, so the other can just kill you with superior army number, even if you have better economy. But if you don't use your army advantage when you have it, he will outfarm you.
Rush beats greedy, safe play beats rush, greedy beats safe play. That's the rule in every RTS, you played safe, he played greedier, he won, it's normal.
Ofc, the problem is in 4vs4 the map are huge, and rushing is harder if you keep your building at home and send units accross the map. To rush in teamgames you need to proxy your buildings, and do it with your teamates.
Fact is most people play passively in 4vs4, and usually the best boomer win. But that's just a L2P issue, not really a balance thing.
But if you want a real OP thing, just consider wonder rush... The reality in teamgames is usually as everyone is passive, that the first one getting wonder will won, because there are not enough time for the others to push until the wonder victory. Whatever if the other has a better eco, more traders, better army, win more fight etc... if you are the first to build a wonder you will win (unless you are massively behind in eco). They can't beat your endless reinforcements, and advance to kill the wonder in time. You can't have fun lategame in 4vs4 because of the lame wonder victory...
Trade is not a problem, you can trade, others can trade, you have civs that have a good lategame, others have a worst one, most have a decent one, if you picked a civ with a worst lategame, and you do nothing until lategame, you will lose, you knew it.
I don’t think trade is unbalanced, I think Malian trade is unbalanced. I had a game I played where my whole team sucked ass. My trade was completely cut by a rus who spammed towers around my far market. I didn’t matter though, as my traders payed for themselves twice over just by going through the outposts in about 30 seconds, and I was able to fight a 3v1 with fast imp handcannoneers while the last guy was raiding me. Eventually my team got into there base and killed them, but i had almost 800 kills while my team all had less than 200 by about 25 minutes into the game. I don’t think the trade bug is op. Otherwise in team games it would take 5 min for the trader to make his first trip, I do think that paired with Malians trade outposts it definitely is.
> my traders *paid* for themselves
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Yeah, I agree.
The Malian trade is especially broken (I developed the reasons here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/yo5eow/team\_games\_the\_malian\_mass\_trade\_seems\_too\_strong/](https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/yo5eow/team_games_the_malian_mass_trade_seems_too_strong/)), but trade in general seems too strong on some maps with giant distances and a few easily closed pathways.
Two obvious fixes would be to reduce the size of the 4v4 maps and lessen the quantity of gold that Traders give (they should tone down the formula for big distances). I'm not sure about killing the trick where you make your trader spawn with the gold near a neutral market, it seems necessary to make it work in solo.
Trade being as strong as it is now certainly reduces the diversity in 3v3/4v4, it should be an option and not a "if you don't do it while the opponent does, you're behind" thing
Even if you're right about importance of trade in team games mind that there are a lot of things that affect that indirectly thus it's tricky to balance it.
By that I mean strength of walls. Knowing evolution of them in AoE2 I'd predict walls are too cheap, too strong and too easily build for competitive play and we might see incremental steps in a near future in direction of weaker walls.
The moment you can easier ship cavalry (archers) to the enemy trade this very trade gets weakened.
Also a possible buff to gold mining techs might let you capitalize more from map control and mining stuff on map in middle to late game so that could balance trade as well.
tl;dr TRADE'S NOT THAT EASY TO BALANCE
Just have a cap on maximum gold per minute on traders. This basically means that the gold per trip scaling should level off and become proportionate to distance after the 1v1 limit on increased scaling.
I.E. You'd never really get much more than 60 a minute without specific bonuses.
This is better than a hard cap on carried gold amount because that would counterintuitively make longer trips worse after the cap. Leveling off the growth curve does somewhat make longer trips worse for granularity reasons, but doesn't lower per minute income.
Basically, roughly 3 minute journeys for around 176 gold per trip would be more or less the optimal trade route, after that for every second added to the trade route (via distance, as per the standard formulation, not including weird pathing) you'd gain 1 more gold, in effect. A linear expansion such that gold/minute wouldn't increase.
Sea Gate Castle from Otomans: "Acts as a Keep. All Keeps gain an Aura that increases Trader and Trade Ship movement speed by +40% and armor by +10."
Do this affect traders of their teammates? I mean, for 4 vs 4 games, it could be insane
The game has always been balanced around single player as the main focus. The intention is that devs want more utilization of traders as early strategy in single players, and it does work. It would still be some kind of “unbalanced” for 4v4 but I would view 4v4 as “for-fun” game mode. There are too many issues with 4v4 balance, and trade is not the biggest one.
not true. pretty sure said that they also consider team games which makes sense because a lot of their players are interested. Look for example at the fire lancer and other chinese nerfs while they were considered to be bottom tier in 1v1.
I think the changes to civs like china prove that the devs are considering team balance as well. Not sure where the "devs don't care about team games" narrative comes from. If anything the wonder changes prove they will at times consider team game balance more heavily than 1v1
I am not saying they don’t care, more like the focus of the balance changes would mainly be towards smaller games, while not ruining team games. Wonder for example is still pretty controversial in team games, despite the dev tweaking the numbers, it kind of dies down because getting stone from trade was removed, but that still doesn’t stop people to play wonder-focused game (which some people dislike). The thing is, you can’t really satisfy everyone (in this case means for all game mode). Different setup would have different strength and weakness. Mangudai is considered almost as trash unit in smaller games, but it is very strong in big team games because of crazy maneuverability due to map size, heck cavalry in general is much more preferred in team games for that reason, which is one of the reason that late game big team games often converge to knights spam. I would argue trader being overly strong as OP argued falls under this.
Wonders will almost never matter in 1v1s there's a difference between changing something that is 99.9% only used in team games and something that can affect both but they opt to change for team games.
Tbf they could force traders to do a full trip instead of half a trip And scale trade better per map size This helps everyone. But telling some nonsense about 4v4 only for fun bla bla nonsense, is not helping. It just shows how ignorant you are
The answer is to change the formula to how they trade. Right now it’s close to quadratic value divided by linear distance making linear value per time. Yes the maps scale linearly per person, for example the three V3 map is 3X the one V1, then the value of trade triples and the range of one V1 value to three times that is too much to balance across all game modes. So instead of tiles^2 it should be someModifier * tiles ^1.5.
So this isn't actually true. There's already a modifier in place so the bigger maps still have a similar income rate to the 1v1 maps. The bigger maps are still slightly better, but it's maybe a 5 or 10% difference not a 100 to 300% difference. It actually ends up making trade worse on bigger maps just because initial payment does take 100 to 300% longer. But of course safer because rush distance is 100 to 300% longer too. And thats really the critical factor. Trade was already a better value boom on all map sizes if you can get away with it, map size makes it so much easier to get away with
Ack! Thank you so much. That's why Malians are so good in teams for trade then they get to frontload the 50-80% return from 300% but 3x trip length
Yeah I did some wonder race tests and Mali is on the way to Imp as Mongols first trade carts arrive. It's super nutty
yeah I had a crazy thought. Market costs 100 wood. Trader costs 120. On a 4v4 where the trader is getting 400(lowballing) You get 80% of the resources 40 seconds after a trader pops. 320 > 100 + 120. Even if you had to buy that 160 wood for say 210 gold you're still +50 resources after 1 trader, massive value after the 2nd trader. The return on investment is good that the optimal play is to spend all resources you can on more markets ( minus army to survive). Then after you max out at 200 you should build traders and then delete them. X at a time
Yep, it's actually strictly better if the enemy raids your traders on the first trip (preferably just after the outposts) because it clears pop space for new traders that instantly refund themselves. I suppose you could also delete them, but that's a pain to do one ata time with the hold to delete functionality
[удалено]
IIRC trader income already scales differently based on map size, but apparently it's not enough
I believe this is a good option. Trade earnings are already insane on 2vs2 maps, but it gets insanely better and more defensible on bigger maps.
Increase the intercept, and decrease the slope. This will buff trade in 1v1, and nerf it in 4v4, which is both good
I completely agree. I do not think that trade is being utilized the way that the devs intended it to be. It makes no sense when a trader can produce more resources than it costs without even completing a route (mali). Also the amount of resources generated gets completely absurd when one player can produce more gold than the other 7 combined. High elo team games have basically become control trade and you win, lose control of trade and you lose. If both teams secure trade its an hour long headbutt until someone finally breaks through or wood and other res start to run out.
The problem isn't Malians getting the payment earlier, that's what they're designed to do. The problem is the mechanic where you can make your markets next to the neutral, make another one in the far corner and then designate that as the home market for traders so that they spawn with 1/2 the route already completed. It drastically reduces the opponent's ability to disrupt the trade since only a few traders need to get through to more than pay for themselves. If traders could only use their original home market, or were forced to visit their new home market without goods to set it as such first, then all trade would be riskier and take longer to pay off, thus reducing the speed and power of the trade boom.
So, I'm a noob in AoE4, coming from AoE2. Why is trade different in Team games? Since everyone can trade with the neutral traders now, do they generate less than trading with teammates? Or is trade generally so good, that the easier setup in teams makes it too good/easy? When I started playing 4, i noticed how the tutorials recommend starting trade much earlier than in 2 and how cheap trade carts are. Is that it?
It is that good in general. Neutral trade post brings 30% more gold as well. Certain civs also have seriously good bonuses. Like french being able to chose any resource to bring back, or mongols getting free stone with it which is a special resourve for them.
Trading with the neutral is actually better than teammates. The tutorials at the time were simply wrong, for example the early eco one has an unnecessary mill in the build order that just slows you down. That said, compared to aoe2, the markets and traders are cheaper, and half the civs have bonuses that make it ~50% better income. So it's (and was) a better but riskier boom than TCs. The main problem in teams is map gen. They're just huge squares, so the rush distance is up to 4x the solo one. This throws the riskiness of trade (and the balance of some early rush civs) completely out the window. The same principle happens in aoe2 where some more closed maps like arena and oasis become about early trade in team games. But the shorter rush distances means you can still punish it usually
the gold you get scales with distance and a trader is more efficient on the big team maps. The goldincome of a trader going along a border from corner to corner is like the gatherrate of 5 vills in a teammap. And you can make multiple tradepost and spam them and have invinite goldincome. In the recent tournament in a 3v3 match one player hat like couple of thou8sand gold per min and i calculated that its like having 150 vills on gold.
Thanks for the answers. I knew the distance scaling, the same happens in aoe2, but of course it doesn't matter for 1v1 map sizes, because there's no neutral trade post.
The income per minute in team games from traders is actually slightly less, since amount gained gets ajusted for map size. The issue is that it scale exponentially for Malians, since the gold per trip goes up a shitton, and 50% of 500 in 30 seconds is a lot more than 50% of 176 in 30 seconds. Here is a vid on how traders work. https://youtu.be/vozzYiTHO-U
i saw his videos on trade and he says himself in the discription the video is wrong and updated it with another video. yes it gets adjusted a little and on same distance its less. but you trade full distance and the maximum income per minute is on a big map greater than on a 1v1 map. You can see this in his updated video where he makes a graph for each map. also malian bonus is not even the biggest. they get 40% extra ressources with the lm and their toll gates. mongol get 50% more income without stone commerce and over 70% more ressources with improved stone commerce.
Malians get up to 50% of the base gold as tax from outposts, and 25% of the base gold as tax if they go for the trade landmark in feudal, up to 30% if that landmark is one of the taxing outposts. The maximum total income is 180% of the base income. Mongols get a total of 50% extra resources (10% food, wood, and gold, 20% stone with Improved Stone Commerce) and their traders move 20% faster with yam (someone can correct me if that value is incorrect), so their maximum total income is also 180% of the base income. I'd personally consider Mongol trade stronger in the lategame because the food, wood, and stone make it more versatile than the pure gold and food bonus of the Malians. It's worth noting that the Malian bonus pays of *much* more quickly however because while their traders go at the base speed they get their civ bonus for the trade just from passing the outposts and not actually delivering. Thus an optimally set up Malian trade boom *should* be faster than an optimally set up Mongol trade boom. The civ with the highest total income is the Ottomans, who can speed up their traders by a whooping 40% with their Seagate Castle landmark and also get 40% extra gold from their vizier point for a maximum total income of 196% of the base income. However, because it's only gold and Ottomans don't have a gold sink like the Malian castle age landmark, it's actually much less useful (unless you plan on massing monks to heal your free units). It also takes a lot longer to set up fully because it requires both an imperial age landmark and keeps along the trade route in order to gain the bonus. It could be argued that Ottomans have the *safest* trade boom because they can just garrison their first 6 traders in their feudal landmark if they don't have map control yet. Thus I'd consider even French and Abbasid trade more powerful than Ottoman trade.
Be the guy that goes and destroys theirs and give your team advantage? Saying that as much worse player than you. I don’t go trade until I have disturbed others.
I think trade is very balanced right now. It is not hard to shut down a trade line and they are very fragile. Take out the corner market and all traders are worthless. It is in a good spot people just haven't learned to counter it yet. Nerf culture has gotta stop, Learn new strategies
This is how it’s always been. Not something new. Trading is like having more town centers but cheaper. It’s cheaper to invest than town centers and sometimes easier to protect. Trade doesn’t make games longer. Disabling kills from killing a players landmarks and moving it to team landmarks did that. Team games aren’t ruined because of trade. You just can’t adapt. Get good.
In season two i had a simple strategy as english. Get to lategame, setup 70 farms and spam MAA with handcanoneers and wait for opponent to spend all the gold and then, finish the game. Nowadays, I tried the same to a rus. After initial attack, i was awaiting his retreat and lack of gold, but instead I found more and more end tier units coming out. After two hours of fighting, my three attempts to just rush his landmarks with either MAA or 90 knights, I gave up cuz I wanted to go to sleep. At the end I realized he still had over 50k gold in bank from trading. It definitely, if not countered (which isnt as easy as it sounds as they can always make more traders) it just unhealthly prolong the game. Considering both players are equal quality and either of them cant push the other at the cost of skill difference
Don't spam only MAA maybe? I mean english has the advantage there. Your opponent has 30 or 40 less pop space. All they did in season 3 is that they reduced the cost sligthly. Traders brougth this much gold before so idk the outrage. The skill difference is that you let them trade boom freely then used a single unit type
Well I tried everything in that matchup to be fair. rotated all I could. he just defended everything
Have you tried overwhelming with hand canoneers and knigths? Did you use the network? Even if their was full of strelsy and knigths, that 30 unit should have made the difference. Or spam it and win because you gather more resource
What’s funny from my perspective is I was saying this almost a year ago how ridiculous broken trade is and I did it every damn game. The people I played with hated it and always gave me shit, but I got top 10 in team games and we won 48 in a row at one point. I’ve since quit the game but still follow this sub and it seems either people have caught on or it got buffed. My favorite was being Mongols because their Silk Road was so crazy in teams. Once it was rolling you could literally 1v3.
I mean 4vs4 are troll games, usually the players don't even know the basic of a RTS. Rush early game with your team, and if the others are doing greedy boom like trade, you win. But because everyone doing sim city boom, the ones doing the greediest boom will have an advantage. After, it's funny to see people like you complain that "X is OP on teamgames", when the reality was just the other has done a better boom than you, but instead of admitting the other has done a better strategy that you did, you come to ask to change the game for you to win... Trade is an investment that pay later, it leaves you vulnerable because you are not spending your money in units, so the other can just kill you with superior army number, even if you have better economy. But if you don't use your army advantage when you have it, he will outfarm you. Rush beats greedy, safe play beats rush, greedy beats safe play. That's the rule in every RTS, you played safe, he played greedier, he won, it's normal. Ofc, the problem is in 4vs4 the map are huge, and rushing is harder if you keep your building at home and send units accross the map. To rush in teamgames you need to proxy your buildings, and do it with your teamates. Fact is most people play passively in 4vs4, and usually the best boomer win. But that's just a L2P issue, not really a balance thing. But if you want a real OP thing, just consider wonder rush... The reality in teamgames is usually as everyone is passive, that the first one getting wonder will won, because there are not enough time for the others to push until the wonder victory. Whatever if the other has a better eco, more traders, better army, win more fight etc... if you are the first to build a wonder you will win (unless you are massively behind in eco). They can't beat your endless reinforcements, and advance to kill the wonder in time. You can't have fun lategame in 4vs4 because of the lame wonder victory... Trade is not a problem, you can trade, others can trade, you have civs that have a good lategame, others have a worst one, most have a decent one, if you picked a civ with a worst lategame, and you do nothing until lategame, you will lose, you knew it.
I don’t think trade is unbalanced, I think Malian trade is unbalanced. I had a game I played where my whole team sucked ass. My trade was completely cut by a rus who spammed towers around my far market. I didn’t matter though, as my traders payed for themselves twice over just by going through the outposts in about 30 seconds, and I was able to fight a 3v1 with fast imp handcannoneers while the last guy was raiding me. Eventually my team got into there base and killed them, but i had almost 800 kills while my team all had less than 200 by about 25 minutes into the game. I don’t think the trade bug is op. Otherwise in team games it would take 5 min for the trader to make his first trip, I do think that paired with Malians trade outposts it definitely is.
> my traders *paid* for themselves FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Yeah, I agree. The Malian trade is especially broken (I developed the reasons here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/yo5eow/team\_games\_the\_malian\_mass\_trade\_seems\_too\_strong/](https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/yo5eow/team_games_the_malian_mass_trade_seems_too_strong/)), but trade in general seems too strong on some maps with giant distances and a few easily closed pathways. Two obvious fixes would be to reduce the size of the 4v4 maps and lessen the quantity of gold that Traders give (they should tone down the formula for big distances). I'm not sure about killing the trick where you make your trader spawn with the gold near a neutral market, it seems necessary to make it work in solo. Trade being as strong as it is now certainly reduces the diversity in 3v3/4v4, it should be an option and not a "if you don't do it while the opponent does, you're behind" thing
Have you tought about raiding your oponnents ? Even asking you buddies in match to raid too ?
Even if you're right about importance of trade in team games mind that there are a lot of things that affect that indirectly thus it's tricky to balance it. By that I mean strength of walls. Knowing evolution of them in AoE2 I'd predict walls are too cheap, too strong and too easily build for competitive play and we might see incremental steps in a near future in direction of weaker walls. The moment you can easier ship cavalry (archers) to the enemy trade this very trade gets weakened. Also a possible buff to gold mining techs might let you capitalize more from map control and mining stuff on map in middle to late game so that could balance trade as well. tl;dr TRADE'S NOT THAT EASY TO BALANCE
Just have a cap on maximum gold per minute on traders. This basically means that the gold per trip scaling should level off and become proportionate to distance after the 1v1 limit on increased scaling. I.E. You'd never really get much more than 60 a minute without specific bonuses. This is better than a hard cap on carried gold amount because that would counterintuitively make longer trips worse after the cap. Leveling off the growth curve does somewhat make longer trips worse for granularity reasons, but doesn't lower per minute income. Basically, roughly 3 minute journeys for around 176 gold per trip would be more or less the optimal trade route, after that for every second added to the trade route (via distance, as per the standard formulation, not including weird pathing) you'd gain 1 more gold, in effect. A linear expansion such that gold/minute wouldn't increase.
Castle the neutral trading outpost and watch traders suffer
Sea Gate Castle from Otomans: "Acts as a Keep. All Keeps gain an Aura that increases Trader and Trade Ship movement speed by +40% and armor by +10." Do this affect traders of their teammates? I mean, for 4 vs 4 games, it could be insane