How do i make the game slower?

[Sunbro]

Hello. I am a new player and i am enjoying the game so far. I tried it with friends vs AI and vs real players and its great but my only problem is that the game goes way too fast. The enemies always rush their town center to Castle and build advanced troops. You almost never see early armies fighting. I even tried putting it on slow but the same thing happened. Is there a way to slow the game so each age dark- empire has its time to shine?

[KingKickAss]

Best you can do is lower the AI's difficulty but you're not going to get what you're looking for, like the AI isn't going to stick around in an age it doesn't have to be in.
If you fight with the AI in Feudal, it might slow its progression down because it will divert more resources to defending itself, but there's not really a reason to stay in feudal if you can click up to castle.

Also Dark Age combat isn't really a thing. At the most you can pester some villagers.

[Quintem]

This is how RTS games work. The goal is to win, winning is easier if you have access to better units. Castle age unlocks a lot of powerful units and options. While feudal age can turn into an extended affair. It's more about probing your opponent. If you defeat them in feudal they made mistakes or you made some great choices in when and where to attack.

You can't really slow down how fast people advance to the next age without playing some maps with wonky resource distribution.

[doinkson]

vs AI you can press F3 to pause but it will still let you do actions. might help with keeping up

[Maya-Neko]

If you're refering to AI, the lower difficulties AI speed actually depend on what you're doing. The easiest 2 difficulties i think for example only age up, when at least one player does so and the easiest will most likely not even attack you until very late into the game due to the hard limitations on their economy.

As for human players, there are pretty much 3 ways:

1) start a custom game and make the rule that players can't attack each other for a specific amount of time. That instantly makes rush strategies useless and you'll automatically get longer games with bigger battles, which aren't as one-sided as games, where some side seems to forget, that they might be vulnerable

2) for Ranked there might be Maps available, which already come with pallisades or even walls and you can mark them as your favourites to get them more often and cross the ones you don't like (or for custom games you can choose these in Custom games). That naturally stops players from rushing, since you would need to get into castle age at least before even being able to consistantly tear down walls. Pallisades can also be torn down with non-siege units in a reasonable amount of time, but it gives you enough time to react to it as the defender. In the current rotation you might like Arena for that kind of slowdown. If you're against lower ELO players, you could also try island maps, as that can also significantly slow down less experienced players, if they're not used to the specific build orders to make a fast crossing.

3) And if you want to play Ranked and you're still a beginner, it might be worth just accepting the first 10-20 losses. On 1k ELO you'll most likely find people with a deep understanding for specific strategies which can easily overwhelm you, but once you're approaching your ELO, things should get way more chill. Like at <600 ELO most people already tend to keep within their bases for longer and are less aggressive in their early game attacks, giving you more room to breathe. And the further down you go, the higher the chances to find people, who manage their eco less while often putting more and more ressources into defensive sturctures, maybe even building only 1-2 unit buildings and simply taking longer to attack due to them needing to wait longer for the ressources and building time.

As for team games, that is a whole different story and it mostly depends on how good your friend is. If they're way better than you, then getting some tips from them might help you catch up in terms of strategies (especially rush counter strategies). Especially the early game economics are your bread and butter in reaching castle age fast, so that you can place down defensive castles, if you want to slow down rush tactics.

[Ayün]

idk

[supersand]

Originally posted by Maya-Neko:

I1) start a custom game and make the rule that players can't attack each other for a specific amount of time. That instantly makes rush strategies useless and you'll automatically get longer games with bigger battles, which aren't as one-sided as games, where some side seems to forget, that they might be vulnerable

in my experience, the same people who would rush you in a treaty game will instead wall you off or build castles around your base, or just have an army waiting outside til the treaty end. It doesn't actually solve the problem.

Game has a rushing problem and the devs / community embraced it, which I guess is one of the best things to do but I really wish a balance patch would eventually change it. Obviously rushing shouldn't be obliterated but there should be more reason to use feudal / dark age units (outside of other niche rushes you can do with them), or just make castle age harder to get to or something.

Or just finally nerf mounted units, they are superior to every other unit and barely get countered by spearmen anyway when movement speed is actually utilized. Every muiltiplayer game devolves into hussar / paladin spam at some point unless you are playing meso-america or goths.

[KingKickAss]

Originally posted by supersand:

Originally posted by Maya-Neko:

I1) start a custom game and make the rule that players can't attack each other for a specific amount of time. That instantly makes rush strategies useless and you'll automatically get longer games with bigger battles, which aren't as one-sided as games, where some side seems to forget, that they might be vulnerable

Obviously rushing shouldn't be obliterated but there should be more reason to use feudal / dark age units (outside of other niche rushes you can do with them), or just make castle age harder to get to or something.

Or just finally nerf mounted units, they are superior to every other unit and barely get countered by spearmen anyway when movement speed is actually utilized. Every muiltiplayer game devolves into hussar / paladin spam at some point unless you are playing meso-america or goths.

You're pretty wrong about this. The only feudal age unit that doesn't really get used is the swordsman line, but its also a thing that the devs have recently been tackling. Plenty of combat can occur in feudal age, but if your match doesn't give a reason for it, then it doesn't really have to happen. Throwing cavalry into spears is a really bad idea and definitely isn't what the cavalry player wants to do if they can help it. If the cavalry are running away from the spears, then the spears have "won" because the cavalry isn't doing anything and you're safe.

The term "rush" is pretty loose because in the context of AoE2, its just typical gameplay. Both players get into feudal and they build their feudal age armies and fight. In my opinion, an actual rush in AoE2 would be to adapt your strategy to specifically race ahead of the other player to go for something he cant access yet. Like turtling up and mining stone in feudal so you can get a castle up very early into castle age(which presumably would be achieved before your opponent as well) and sending in Mangudai or something. If everybody is "rushing" then its not really rushing anymore, is it?

[Moist Butt]

Originally posted by supersand:

Originally posted by Maya-Neko:

I1) start a custom game and make the rule that players can't attack each other for a specific amount of time. That instantly makes rush strategies useless and you'll automatically get longer games with bigger battles, which aren't as one-sided as games, where some side seems to forget, that they might be vulnerable

in my experience, the same people who would rush you in a treaty game will instead wall you off or build castles around your base, or just have an army waiting outside til the treaty end. It doesn't actually solve the problem.

Game has a rushing problem and the devs / community embraced it, which I guess is one of the best things to do but I really wish a balance patch would eventually change it. Obviously rushing shouldn't be obliterated but there should be more reason to use feudal / dark age units (outside of other niche rushes you can do with them), or just make castle age harder to get to or something.

Or just finally nerf mounted units, they are superior to every other unit and barely get countered by spearmen anyway when movement speed is actually utilized. Every muiltiplayer game devolves into hussar / paladin spam at some point unless you are playing meso-america or goths.

You literally made a post complaining about Ai difficulty like a week ago. U should probably learn the game first for MP as well instead of making these hugely false claims.

[Quintem]

Originally posted by supersand:

Originally posted by Maya-Neko:

I1) start a custom game and make the rule that players can't attack each other for a specific amount of time. That instantly makes rush strategies useless and you'll automatically get longer games with bigger battles, which aren't as one-sided as games, where some side seems to forget, that they might be vulnerable

in my experience, the same people who would rush you in a treaty game will instead wall you off or build castles around your base, or just have an army waiting outside til the treaty end. It doesn't actually solve the problem.

Game has a rushing problem and the devs / community embraced it, which I guess is one of the best things to do but I really wish a balance patch would eventually change it. Obviously rushing shouldn't be obliterated but there should be more reason to use feudal / dark age units (outside of other niche rushes you can do with them), or just make castle age harder to get to or something.

Or just finally nerf mounted units, they are superior to every other unit and barely get countered by spearmen anyway when movement speed is actually utilized. Every muiltiplayer game devolves into hussar / paladin spam at some point unless you are playing meso-america or goths.

You know there is a great deal of satisfaction in deflecting rushes. You can often see the frustration mount in the enemy as they get more desperate the defeat you early.

[i c wiener]

Game has a rushing problem and the devs / community embraced it, which I guess is one of the best things to do but I really wish a balance patch would eventually change it. Obviously rushing shouldn't be obliterated but there should be more reason to use feudal / dark age units (outside of other niche rushes you can do with them), or just make castle age harder to get to or something.

Rushing is a reason to use Dark and Feudal Age units. One might even call it the main reason considering that's usually the first 2 ages in any game. Also, it's laughably unreasonable to ask for the fundamental structure of the game - which has been around for over 20 years - to be changed just to suit your personal play style.

Too many people in this community think that attacking early is in some way dishonourable and games should only end with 200 v 200 post-imperial age units meeting on the field in glorious battle.

Well, it isn't, it's part of the game and has been for over two decades. It will continue to be. If you don't like it go play another game.

[Maya-Neko]

Originally posted by supersand:

in my experience, the same people who would rush you in a treaty game will instead wall you off or build castles around your base, or just have an army waiting outside til the treaty end. It doesn't actually solve the problem.

At that point it's probably best to just search for some like minded people and do some private games. Like if you want to fight randoms, then you should always expect them trying to win.

Originally posted by supersand:

Game has a rushing problem and the devs / community embraced it, which I guess is one of the best things to do but I really wish a balance patch would eventually change it. Obviously rushing shouldn't be obliterated but there should be more reason to use feudal / dark age units (outside of other niche rushes you can do with them), or just make castle age harder to get to or something.

The rushing problem (if it even can be called a problem) is mostly fueled by the other side not investing into units or walls to defend themselves and that is especially a problem in low ELO to mid ELO, where people do one strategy and doesn't even think about what could happen before castle age. Instead of expecting the devs to solve this problem for you it is usually better to adapt your building orders to include proper defenses. And sure, if the opponent doesn't rush, then you're in a disadvantage, but if you start to build your army early enough, then you can get your feudal age units into the opponents base and force them to deal with it with feudal units (though i guess this is considered rushing, so feel free to wait until castle age to make it more about big battles).

Also having castle/imperial age being reached slower can be fun for games against the AI where you don't really care about efficiency anyway, but if we look at online play, then that would probably just slow down the game by a lot without really that much benefit for most people. Just imagine someone building pallisades and now you're forced to wait 20 minutes, just to get your hands on some siege units. And now you're in castle age and suddenly the opponent builds stone walls guarded by castles. I guess another 20 minutes of waiting, until you can beef up you siege attack with trebuchets to do something, that takes 2 minutes to pull off.

As fun as such a game sounds on paper for some people, as boring it can get, if you're forced into a passive position or when you loose, then it hurts just so much more, when the minimum game time is bloated up to like 2 real time hours.

Though as i've said, if you can't deal with rushing, then you're usually dropping very fast into Low ELO land, where people usually doesn't really rush that much anymore. So it's not like you're forced into rushing, if you don't care about your ELO, but you're pretty much robbing you of the experience of defending against an early rush and of the possible counter attacks afterwards.

And overall, rushing can be found in every RTS and even 4X games. It's simply part of this genre and can't simply be changed. Even if things are slower, there will always be someone who is so greedy, that they're focusing more on economics than on defence, which is why there will always be people who sacrifice economics to build an offense.

[Banzai]

Set AI to easiest, use CD AI, and it will basically hold back waiting for you to advance. It will upgrade to the next age only after you've done so, and won't attack you very much.

Great for experimenting with early build strategies etc, but I wouldn't recommend doing it for too long or you'll be screwed when you go back to fighting actual enemies that want to kill you.