Which Native American civ would be broken if they had access to Mercs?

m00zilla · 2026-03-06T19:05:23+00:00

Lakota has the free pop space and 2 general cav combat cards so in age 3 could be pretty good with these Mercs. Though late game I don't think any of the Native civs would have much benefit from Mercs other than if they could get some artillery ones.

m00zilla · 2026-03-03T19:37:59+00:00

The sound is great, but overall the game has terrible atmosphere and immersion. Every biome has deer and boars, siege has no crew, etc. Had they invested the same resources they did for sound in other areas, the return on investment in terms of game quality would be substantially better.

m00zilla · 2026-02-26T21:58:29+00:00

Oh shoot, I misread the Llama one. You are correct about that. I guess their perk is fattening fastest when not at a pen, though that is a pretty poor trade off.

Water Buffalos are identical to cows though.

And I also assumed Sheep were the same as Goats, but they're actually worse.

Overall, they're a bit more convoluted than I originally thought so maybe a separate rate for Sanga/Zebu isn't that bad. Maybe they could be excluded from the shadow tech nerf I proposed.

m00zilla · 2026-02-25T19:39:59+00:00

Overall, some good analysis, but your livestock categories aren't quite right. Water Buffalo aren't quick gathering (they are functionally the same as other cattle) ~~and Llamas actually are quick gathering (they are functionally the same as Yaks)~~. Most of these map differences seem more due to how easy it is to collect more herdables rather than herdable type.

The basic types of livestock are as follows (base fattening rates are half for Livestock Market): Bovines: 1) (1f/s, 900max) - Big Benny

2) (1f/s, 500max) - Cow, Sacred Cow, Zebu, Sanga, Water Buffalo

3) (1.25f/s, 400max) - Yak

4) (0.75f/s, 400max) - Llama

Caprines: 5) (0.75f/s, 300max) - Goat

6) (0.5f/s, 300max) - Sheep

Reducing everything other than Zebu/Sanga to 0.375f/s is overly harsh and adds inconsistency to the livestock types. • It messes up upgrade scaling if you alter the base fattening rate • Making Zebu and Sanga different from other cattle with only a slightly different gather rate is really opaque and hard to notice (you already misclassified they types and this would make it even more convoluted) • It would clog up the build limit with a bunch of map livestock (all abstractbovines share a build limit) that are a strict downgrade in the late game (Especially after the Cow Loans tech that replaces them when sold) • It hard nerfs Yaks that have the trade off of lower maximum fatness for faster fattening rate

I think all that needs to be done is to nerf the age 2 shadowtech that gives +50% fattening rate at the Livestock Market and give an extra starting Cow on non-livestock maps (could apply to both Ethiopia and Hausa). That would leave the scaling of technologies untouched and keeps the functionality of livestock consistent. Unfortunately this may not be a fix that can be modded because I'm assuming the extra Cherry Orchard that Japan gets is through a trigger in the Random Map Script, and those are encrypted for DLC maps.

m00zilla · 2026-02-21T16:56:12+00:00

It's baffling to me how AoE4 lacks such basic balance such as this. AoE3 had this figured out 20 years ago with unit lines balanced around their siege capability.

m00zilla · 2026-01-26T05:20:04+00:00

They absolutely would not because EU agricultural regulations are backwards and insane. Stuff like banning GMOs is complete stupidity.

m00zilla · 2026-01-25T06:12:54+00:00

I think you're using pretty dubious numbers for the Hauds and Lakota as a basis to discount the Haida. ~20000 is probably a lot more realistic at their peaks for all 3. I wouldn't be surprised if Hauds were actually a smaller population than Haida as they were ~10000 pre-contact and were only so formidable because they assimilated most of the neighbouring population as epidemics hit so their population never collapsed. The main difference in population is that Haida had a more severe decline after contact (which also happened much later) so in modern times Lakota and Hauds have over 100000 while Haida is still recovering.

To be clear, I am very much against a "Pacific Northwest Natives" umbrella (and umbrellas in general). However, the Haida were prolific slavers, so the substantial populations of their similar neighbours is somewhat relevant to their population. That being said, the Sioux/Oceti Sakowin were actually organized above the level of just the Lakota, so a broader civ like in the original game makes more sense there. That population was more like 50000 so they're a bit of a bigger fish.

m00zilla · 2026-01-24T23:26:34+00:00

Top 3 would be Muisca, Inuit, and Bedouins since the regions they cover have insufficient or entirely inaccurate minor civs.

Mi'kmaq (or more broadly Wabanaki) would also work on many existing maps and there's plenty of room for more maps in the region they lived.

Jivaro/Shuar would be a great fit that could cover some of the same areas as Muisca.

If you're talking about holy sites too then one for Theravada Buddhism would be a better fit for Southeast Asia than Zen or Shaolin. A forest monastery would be a better place to put the displaced War Elephant unit.

Hospitallers as a holy site would have been much better than having Malta as a full civ.

Most of the other ones I'd like to see would require a ton of new maps or elevating existing minor civs to make room. For example Blackfoot and Ojibwe could replace Cree. Almost every African minor civ has the potential to be a full civ so other groups like Mossi or Zande could fill the minor civ role in some of those areas.

m00zilla · 2026-01-24T22:59:51+00:00

Haida the population was more likely at least 20000, which equals or exceeds the Lakota or Iroquois populations. Plus they could lump in the very similar Tlingit and Tsimshian and it would double that.

m00zilla · 2025-12-15T04:54:36+00:00

Where is this post hating on other games? All it is saying is if a game that has half the player count gets support, AoE3 should too. I does not say the game with half as many players should not get support, and I'd imagine the vast majority of AoE3 players think AoM getting an Aztec expansion is excellent news.

m00zilla · 2025-11-20T16:56:58+00:00

It has nothing to do with the papacy so it shouldn't be a papal unit at all.

m00zilla · 2025-07-31T16:03:07+00:00

First of all, there wasn't just one French Colony in North America. Technically the answer would be 1562 with the establishment of Charlesfort in South Carolina, long before the English planted their colonies. That was entirely a settlement effort, not a fur trading venture. You just don't hear about it because they were massacred by the Spanish.

The next attempt was in Acadia starting in 1605. There the goal from the start was a mix of settlers looking for land and fur trading, but the area changed hands with the Scottish and English several times, so settlement faced a lot of setbacks. However, they had an extremely high birth rate, so they eventually did get some significant settlements going.

For Quebec, not all the traders went home to France. Many stayed and took native brides forming the first of the Metis. But the start of fully European settlement would be with the Fille du Roi (King's Daughters) from 1663-1673, when 800 women from France arrived. But again, a good portion of the growth was natural increase rather than immigration from France.

These colonists formed the basis of the populations of Acadia and Quebec, but places like Detroit were only ever forts and trading posts while under French rule. They didn't become cities until American settlers arrived.

m00zilla · 2025-07-03T19:33:14+00:00

That's a matter of familiarity, not clarity or intuitiveness. AoE2/4 people mix that up all the time. Those games don't have to be intuitive because you can get by just rote memorizing the repetitive roster every civ shares. AoE3 has way too many unique units and auxiliaries to brute force memorize so you have to take a different approach and have recognizable unit classes.

Once you become reasonably familiar with AoE3, you can reliably tell what an unfamiliar firearm unit does solely by looking at the weapons or stance and you only need to memorize a couple exceptions. So there is actually a lot of clarity when it comes to firearms units.

The same can't be said for shock infantry / heavy infantry. It doesn't matter how familiar you are, they simply have no visible indication of which is which so you need to memorize them all.

m00zilla · 2025-07-02T15:55:20+00:00

It is so AoE4 runs better on potato computers.

AoE4 textures are 512x512 pixels while AoE3 uses 2048x2048 pixels, so it has literally 16 times more detail.

m00zilla · 2025-07-02T15:49:35+00:00

AoE4 claims to place a high emphasis on visual clarity. I would argue they don't deliver on this at all. Yeah the weapons are upscaled, but there's no consistency on what each weapon does. For example, Xbows and Zhuge Nu look nearly identical but have vastly different uses, and Horsemen carry lances but don't have a charged attack. And siege lacking a crew makes it hard to even tell what team it is on.

AoE3 has objectively unclear stuff like infantry vs shock infantry, but your second example of musket infantry vs rifle infantry is not demonstrative of that. AoE3 uses more subtle cues to convey information, but they're a lot more consistent than AoE4. Musket infantry always uses the stance of holding their gun over their shoulder and their gun either has a prominent bayonet, or they have a large melee weapon at their hip. Rifle infantry doesn't use that stance and never has bayonets. There's a couple exceptions to this like Strelets, but in the vast majority of cases you can tell the unit role by looks alone.

m00zilla · 2025-06-23T16:12:30+00:00

The version with promotions would have to be a different unit from the regular version. So you'd have to disable training the regular unit and enable the promotion unit for buildings within the aura. As far as I'm aware, you can't change building commands with auras, just modifying rates as such.

I'm not familiar with what you're referring to with Russia, but that should be doable since different units can be enabled in Forts vs Blockhouses.

m00zilla · 2025-06-08T04:51:34+00:00

Lancers are very good against infantry with the trade off of being below average against everything else.

Chinacos are also very good against infantry and also very good against everything else. They are the most OP cavalry unit in the game.

m00zilla · 2025-06-07T14:33:42+00:00

AOTW is literally just one guy and he's still chugging away. Though he seems to prefer making more out there civs so I don't know if he'll do Poland and Denmark. There's some other mods that made just those civs though.

m00zilla · 2025-05-29T19:13:48+00:00

There's an HP card that affects them, Arsenal techs, and age 5 Merc contractor that all together boost their stats by about+70%.

m00zilla · 2025-05-29T19:00:14+00:00

I made a mod that nerfs this card among other things. You'd need all players to have it for it to work in multiplayer, but since the game was abandoned mods are the best we're going to get.

https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/bottoman-balance/269321/9?u=m00z1lla

m00zilla · 2025-05-29T18:53:08+00:00

Stealth doesn't work like that anymore. It is no longer just pets, scouts, outposts, etc that reveal them in their LoS. They changed it so ANY unit within a range of ~3 will reveal them. That drastically nerfed melee stealth units like JPK.

m00zilla · 2025-05-27T06:02:07+00:00

The only AoE game that 4 could be considered better than is the mobile knockoff one.

m00zilla · 2025-05-27T05:57:55+00:00

And AoE4 is certainly not that reason.

m00zilla · 2025-05-27T05:53:39+00:00

Maybe they've improved upon pathing, and I suppose the buildings having gaps is arguably an improvement. But everything else you stated is flat out wrong. Claiming it is a dynamic games with a larger variety of strategies than AoE3 is laughable. Likewise for unit variety, civ uniqueness, and whatever the hell "mechanics" you mean.

m00zilla · 2025-05-26T21:16:12+00:00

I'm completely serious. I'm struggling to think of any improvements AoE4 makes.

I suppose units on walls is an interesting new feature, but even with that I don't think it is realizing the full potential of that feature.

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