Small Power Creep suggestions

Hey all. Here to suggest 2 things that would both result in a small amount of power creep as well as additional build variety.

First thing I would like to suggest I'm calling "Golden Milestones". Upon hitting lvl 40 with a Civ, you can select one of their milestones to affect EVERY other of your civs. Kind of inverse of what we have now, instead of selecting milestones from other civs to benefit your current civ, you select a milestone from the current civ to benefit your other civs. While this would result in a bit of power creep given that you'll get 5, soon to be 6 extra milestones for your civs, it would also help with build diversity somewhat since the "Always take this" milestones, such as Celtic Crit, Nordic Armor, or Egyptian Build Speed milestones could be chosen as the "Golden" Milestone and then you can select the second-best milestone for each specific Civ (Such as Infantry Bonus for Celts, Range Bonuses for Greek, or even just good economic milestones that just don't outpreform the BiS Milestones).

Second bit of Power Creep I would like to suggest is a "Free Advisor" Slot - Basically a 5th Advisor Card slot that you can put ANY Age Advisor in. The Advisor would still only activate in his given age, but you could have 2 Age 1, or 2 Age 4 advisors, or whatever.

 

Keep in mind that advisor builds like synergy or strong economic advisors. The only case of synergy with leg advisor is babylon with Sargon and Neb. Norse has Beorixx as strong eco legendary so he may be used in addition to the others.

Chances are though that most ppl would just use Slave Driver or Mason since they are both very strong by themselves.

 

Another idea that I had for additional power (Not really a small one though) is causing Wonder's to give a large boost of some form or another upon being built in PvE missions. As it stands, outside of the small handful of missions in which the goal itself is to build a Wonder, building Wonders do nothing in PvE. What if Wonders provided an in-game boost for as long as it was up?

Examples would be...

Celtic Tree of Life - All units regen 10 health per second.
Greek Statue of Zeus - All units bonus damage is applied to all unit types.
Norse Dragonship - All units Attack and Move 50% faster.

Ect. Essentially each Civ gets a powerful bonus to their army for a solid final push upon creating a Wonder.

 

On the topic of balance, yes, game balance is quite important, but it should never prevent the consideration nor the implementation of cool mechanics!

And Wonders, those are a cool mechanic! Throughout almost entirety of the AoE series, Wonders have always been BIG - In PvP, when a player starts a Wonder, it puts an immediate countdown to the end of the game - Either the player is crushed within 10 minutes, OR he wins. It's just that absolute. And it's not something you can do sneakily, since building a Wonder not only reveals the location on the map, but it has it's own unique sound! Not to mention the fact that each Wonder is based, however loosely, on important historical structures. And in PvE, campaign missions that involve defending, building, or attacking a Wonder can be amongst the hardest available in the previous AoE games.

AoEO, however, has a difference focus then previous AoE games, with that focus mainly being on PvE. Sure, Sparta 1v1/2v2, as well as lesser used Arena are all based on PvP, but in my experience those games in which Wonders lead to victory are extremely rare. And on the pure PvE side of things, there are only a handful of missions which require you to build a Wonder, and the repeateables aren't worth much.

Now, I'm not too sure of the current team's balancing goalposts. I've heard that they've been making progressively harder missions, with Valley of Kings (In which one of the optionals is to crush the nearby wonder within 5 minutes of the start of the game, very nice!) being known as the hardest current legendary quest to solo.

But from my understanding, there has also been plenty of minor buffs since the Celeste team picked up AoEO, ranging from Faction Rebalancing (As a Celts main during 2012, I greatly enjoy how Augur Buffs now affects ALL units rather then just Infantry), New, powerful items (Divine Hammer of Construction and Nebbuchanectar say waaaat), rebalanced, powerful Advisors (Hey there Zephrys), and even Legendary Advisors! (I really need Brann!). Of course, there have also been a few nerfs (The one that comes to the forefront of my mind is the removal of the Alliance Factions, especially since their buffs could go up to 12% for the die-hard fanatics of the game), but I can see how these changes, all small on their own, results in eventual power creep (And I have seen MANY games over the years get exposed to absolutely massive, ridiculous amounts of power creep).

But at the same time, while legendary quests are difficult (Once you learn the strats all of them just become a matter of practice), they aren't exactly impossible or out of reach for even fresher players (Co-op allows even newer players to get in for harder missions, even if all they do is just support and feed their carry their resources via tribute).

In addition, it's not exactly cut-and-dry. There are ways to balance a powerful buff via Wonder WITHOUT it really affecting the top-end players much. For instance, the buff could come from an expensive OR time consuming research from the Wonder - If it costed, say, 5k food, wood, gold, and stone, experienced players would essentially only use it as a "win-more" research since, by the time you could afford that cost, you are already pop capped with the game almost finished, whereas newer players who could defend themselves from the waves that long BUT lack the needed micro skills to finish the game in a timely manner would have ass-loads of extra resources which they could dump into that research to then close out the game.

Or you could just give the AI the same buff if they have a Wonder up on legendary quests. Make ignoring that bonus objective nearly impossible on Valley of Kings amirite?

Still, as long as the Celeste team works on AoEO, Power Creep IS inevitable. And personally, rather then a few more BiS items that give you a 3% overall power boost, something as awesome and potentially meta-changing as WONDER BUFF would, imo, be a much more desired form of power creep.

 

Also, on the topics of power creep and small buffs, what are your thoughts on the buffs mentioned in the first post? I feel that the Golden Milestone would open up a bit more build diversity without making all current legendary quests trivial, though a 5th "free advisor" slot might have more complications, since there are so many different strong-but-not-best advisors out there, and so many of them synergize with others that it's hard to tell what could happen there. Heck, the ramp-up from just having I.E. Village Elder AND Chieftain Caravan would likely trivialize many a game from just having your economy up and running roughly 2 minutes sooner.

 

Eh. TBH, the most likely nerf to Dumnorix would just be removing the movement speed bonus, and perhaps adding that to the Age 4 Caravan advisor that increases gold trade by 20%. At 50% cost reduction on Caravans, that would bring Dumnorix in line with Agape, Penny Pincher, Village Elder, and other Age 2 Eco Advisors.

Honestly, I feel that Dumnorix is a bit overhyped. Sure, he IS stronger then other age 2 advisors, but he does not completely blow them out of the water. It's only 10% bonus gold production that pushes him to the BiS, and that bonus gold production is really only felt in the mid-game, is neglible in the late game, and has no effect on the end-game. (The resource cost reduction is huge in the early game though, but so is a bunch of other Age 2 advisors with similar bonuses)