Most of historical battles - huge armies reaching tens of thousands fighting other huge armies of equal size

Umm

Maybe because

Hun

It's an abstraction? oWo

Realismfags have truly ruined fun.

It is just one footman but time moves by really quickly in Age of Empires. One footman can bring down a castle if he stands there hacking away at the stone for 100 years.

Better stop playing video games user, you might be one of those mass murderers Jack Thompson warned us about

Most battles were actually sit outside their castle and wait for them to starve to death or surrender and then get the fuck out of there if they get reinforcements before then.
Sending hundreds of thousands of men potentially to their deaths is not a very effective war strategy compared to cutting off supply lines with a force so big they can't do shit to stop it without massive losses. The defending army must weigh up the cost of waiting for reinforces and a sortie. Any battle will result in deaths of your own men while waiting for reinforcements could potentially scare off the enemy without deaths or be so long your men die of starvation. Or in other words: die now and lose position or maybe die later and maybe keep position. The choice is obvious.

So then if the castle is an abstraction as well, then it has to have guards, otherwise the abstraction of the footman army would be able to just take it rather than hack it.
Thus the castle abstraction should fight back against the footman.

Castles do fight back in AoE2.
Are you retarded?

Yet they cannot shoot downward. Thus a single footman can truly destroy a castle.
What does that abstraction signify ?

Something's amiss…
Also,
What are you, some kind of casual?

there are three types of strategy games, grand strategies, real time strategies and real time tactics. they play differently because they require different skills to master

the meta in aoe is that murder holes are a waste of time if you build a tower behind your tower so that it covers it and once you get to castles trebuchet don't go under them now do they

I think a lot can be done with this.

Are you implying that the archer couldn't lean over the castle wall and shoot at the single footman ?
Are you implying that the archer needed a fucking hole next to his legs so he could shoot downward ? If it's for cover, then what if he got shot in the dick ?
Did castles really even need that shit ? Why not just build proeprly geometrical towers. Why the enlarged top part of the tower ?

Castles sure as fuck don't automatically come with muder holes. But the archers should be able to shoot downward anyway ?

Is this an abstraction for the guard archers being retarded ?
Or an abstraction for the guards lacking arrows and preferring to throw rocks at the enemy ?
Were the archers really archers ? Or slingshot fags ?
How many rocks can a slingshot fag even carry ?

But does this abstract castle only have archers in it ?
Did they lack abstract spears or swords ?

Play Cossacks

I don't think a bow archer can lean 90 degrees to shoot downwards. He would lose all of his power and stability, right?

He gets a helping hand by shooting into gravity's pull. You can also just drop rocks down on top of them too.

Thanks for knowledge. Never been one for archery myself.

I've always used military buildings and palisade to protect it from infantry and other melee units but I guess that works too, even if this strat is expensive as hell.

that's absolute bullshit, armies in the middle ages wore small. Huge armies are part of ancient history

On a vertical wall it should be a non-issue.
Only on these top-wide towers can it become an issue to shoot at the base of the wall/castle/tower. Why were they so wide at the top anyway ? To make them harder to climb ?
The way I see it, archers were pussies and really feared other archers. So they hid really hard. Makes sense if they needed to defend a castle they must have been fewer than the enemy.
But I still don't understand it as a design choice.

well obviously it depends on afew things, if you'd be cutting off his starting resource from him and if you actually need another tower

What about towers behind towers and also walls?

Still seems like a waste of resources to me though, you shouldn't need two towers right next to each other to cut off his gold/stone/wood income, at this stage of the game you would probably have quite a few archers to defend it and/or harass his eco even more, I've never seen something like it tbh, maybe only when someone fucked up the positioning.

Yes.

See the notches at the top of the wall? Archers would be firing from those, not while standing over the wall. Also climbing soldiers would be much more likely to enter through those, reducing attack surface. Making towers top-wide made a bit more room at the top of the tower, and it made it impossible to reach for hiding archers from the ladder because it's offset from the wall.

I thought murder holes were small ? Such that a man couldn't pass through them ?

You could pass your sword into it and fuck it about violently, if you catch archer by surprise you'll kill him.

what can any civ do to a tower at the dark age/feudal age?

How would you catch an archer by suprise from his promary shooting position having climbed a 10 meter long ladder ?
Were there cases of this ?
Or are is that an ABSTRACT scenario ?

Yes it is an abstract scenario, all sorts of shit tend to happen in battle and having one less way to die like a retard is a good thing.

Villagers can take it down pretty easily tbh but I see where this is going, I concede.

Also top wide towers could be just an architecture fashion, like large windows in gothic cathedrals.

nigga I don't want you to concede I'm not shouting you down or anything mate.

if he's sending villagers then he's hindering him self

Why are you playing RTS. You can play RTT or Total War games. Being able to harass an opponents resources to accrue an advantage is an important part of most RTS, especially those that are asymmetrical. It allows certain factions the ability to apply pressure in places that they would lose in battles, creating an ebb and flow of the gameplay and an ongoing back and forth.
Seriously, if you just want army battles, play that old Warhammer game where you could play as Humans, Elves, Skaven or Chaos. It featured armies and hero duels and was a lot of fun. You clearly don't want to play the equally important parts of RTS such as managing an economy and teching up, so why subject yourself to it?

Look up the muslim-byzantine wars, they spent centuries like that.

You might be functionally retarded.

Armies of great magnitude didn't just throw down at each other like some RTS. They raided, skirmished, and tried to outmaneuver each other for months. Do you know why? Because they didn't want to lose everything they had accomplished in exactly 20 minutes. They had common sense.

Because while tedious RTS games tend to feel like full games.
RTT games feel incomplete to me.

While tower rushing, sure. But there are plenty of common situational uses for murder holes. If one or both players go full castle, there aren't going to be any trebuchets. In later game with keep (for the few civs that it's viable) or bombard tower spam, the minor investment in murder holes is worth it to micro down melee, especially something like a group of battle elephants that might survive long enough to destroy a tower without that +1 bombard fire.
And murder holes is even more valuable in the expansions now that Arson turns mass infantry into mass siege.

Why are you suggesting RTT instead of 4X? RTT can be fun but you often end up having a very simplified economy or none at all. The entire game ends up being just the battles and they always start somewhat simetrical to some degree.
That's like telling someone "why are you playing an action RPG if you enjoy the fights? play a fighting game instead!"

Usually this is a thing IRL but not in RTS because there's the next day to consider IRL.

Not much good to win a war losing 80% of your army if your other neighbor stayed out of it and now outnumbers you 10:1.
Meanwhile, everyone starts on equal footing in an RTS as if past outcomes reset.

You also can't just throw some meat and iron inside some barracks, wait a bit and then tell the soldier that comes from there to throw himself against enemy forces without any regard for his own life.
Meanwhile, almost every RTS is a Clone Wars sequel that avoids the moral quandaries completely.

well if there's no trebuchets then there's got to be siege ramsfull of petards, although alot of the pro level never really micro their towers or castles even with persian douches tbh

Why even go there ?

I said RTT instead of RTS because the user sounded like he didn't want to have his resources harassed, which is something RTT typically downplays in favour of positional battling.

It's a joke, you dip.

The truth is, RTS are eugenics programs. You throw retards into battle that don't even try to get away from harm and will even charge the enemy when vastly outnumbered, you're just cleaning the gene pool.
The few games that have something akin to moral or loyalty are the few where the retards are a bit above the average.

I dunno, a lot of RTT games still have an economic side to them but they rely on area control instead for the most part, something that's far more vulnerable to raiding than bases you can build up anywhere and in any number.

Uh… Depends what game? I think only Age of Empires has some way to really secure your resources by building walls, and even then you run out of resources and have to push out. But for most other RTS your base and resources can be super vulnerable, dying very quickly if not protected by an equal military force. C&C, Starcraft, Supcom…
You could make a case for Dawn of War, but it has similar area-control elements, especially because uncapping is faster than capping.

...

No siege rams in castle either, lad, and you can't put petards in rams. And you wouldn't be microing towers or castles in a persian douche since it's an all-or-nothing dark age play. Are you a bot stringing AoE2 keywords together?

what's with people calling others bots, I thought it was just one user being autistic as fuck in various threads but shit seems to be more common

Difference is that those huge armies had all manner of officers commanding them while in the game there's only you giving orders. Try playing Mount and Blade leading a "huge" (as in, a couple hundred troops) army against an equally big one and see how much battlefield awareness and control you can maintain.

Is this a JoJo reference?

...

Tolkien wasn't a historian, user.

I haven't seen much of that. I just called him a bot because he keeps bringing up AoE2 units/terms that he clearly has no understanding of.

Are you trying to tell me that video games aren't real life, OP?

Rushing is a part of AoE2 multiplayer, but there are definitely situations with large-scale battles. There are a lots of strategies that vary in success based on map type, you and your allies' civs, and your opponents' civs.

Age of Empires is a silly game m8. Don't think much of it and go field your Aztec Arbalests and Japanese knights against the scimitar-throwing Saracen Mamelukes and those pesky Frankish axemen.

Mark of Chaos?

What does this mean?

It's not eugenics moron. It's AI/engine limitation. There will come a day when RTS will play like real life.

We call that morale system but there's a lot of shit that needs to be tweaked for it to mirror real life.

Consider
And then IRL

Being those poor guys was suicide.

Sounds like ancient militaries were retarded and video games are helping to fix the mistake.

China didn't see the potential in weaponizing gunpowder.

Research Murder Holes you idiot.
And garrison in more men to fire more arrows.

oh you meant a macro pov as in one game isn't isolated to that map. I do understand. Back when I played C&C Tiberian sun, I always spam buildings and shit hoping that it would transfer them to my next playthrough.. Knight's of honor/Hegemony did that job but in as far as morale system go, I forgot. I think there's also no population involved.

Rise of nation also had a macro perspective but limited to wonders.

If China got every technology they invented IRL in AoE, they'd get basically the entire tech tree. Can't do that for game balance reasons. Also this

If you want big battles like that, the campaign mode would be more your speed than random maps.

I hope you realize that there is absolutely 0 crossover of skill between RTS and actual military tactics

Wow haha it's almost as if developers are absolute talentless double-digit subhumans who refuse to learn and use new technologies that allow us to render hundreds of thousands of A.I at the same time without destroying performance

You do realize how expendable troops are in StarCraft and most vidya in general right?

An SC Master specializes in clicking and using micro-abilities as efficiently and as fast as possible more than anything else, he's more likely to be proficient with a gun and twitch-skills.
An actual WW General specializes in political pen pushing and logistics networking more than anything else. He's more proficient with giving speeches, socializing and analizing the course of action after a battle and his army's ressuply regardless of victory or loss outcome in a skirmish.

If you want someone that actually MAY have a chance at unfucking an army through a doctrine change, pick a Grand Strategy player, and even then make sure it isn't a faggot abusing some lame wacko tech tree that makes zero sense.

it'd go hilariously

All I want is total war with decent AI. Is that too much to ask?

Sometimes games can go the opposite where battles involve entire regiments of armor being wiped out

Reminder that Bannon did everything wrong

He redeemed himself.

Never change, Holla Forums

That's because it takes you less than a minute to lose half of your massive army but the resources to afford that army need to be gathered for 10 minutes in comparison, so the parallels to real life are actually very fitting. The issue is that it is very difficult to actually create a system where you neither just spam units until the enemy dies with no actual strategy outside of which units you pick (like formations, ambushes and surgical strikes) nor have to fight over resources. The reason for it is very simple, you are going to be resourceful only to the extent that is necessary to win, thus requiring the developer to make the game punish you severely for going full retard. It's why you see gookclick play so much into micromanagement, while Age of Empires is a war largely over resources. Grand strategy games can get what you described but only if that ends up forcing the situation into a war of attrition, which too is just a war over resources.

Archers aren't balanced for lean.

You forgot the AI part of what you have described, you not only have to render them but also have them all actually do something. The only way you can have hundreds of thousands of units on the field all interacting with each other is by joining them into larger units and simply having that act as an approximation, at which point you may as well not even have bothered making hundreds of thousands of them, since having hundreds of thousands of simultaneous processes all interacting with each other is going to crash your PC no matter how many years in the future you are looking at.

And before you jump to "muh quantum computing" as a solution, that doesn't actually work for the thing described. Despite what some pop-sci autists have been telling you, it calculating all possible outcomes doesn't actually make you calculate it any faster, in effect you are simply calculating in parallel instead of in series. In fact, quantum computers are for most uses SLOWER than conventional ones.

Metal on stone creates sparks. What are you having trouble understanding? Then the worker smacks the fire for a hundred years until it goes out.