Hello everyone,
I recently tried to get together with the best non edain team 1v1 players who play Edain on a daily basis. Smeargollum, Jojo, Seleukos, MaxPower, DSS, Luke and me (Fabian) elaborated on current edain gameplay and balance. There is much to love about 4.5, but in order to give constructive feedback we listed which gameplay elements we think are hurting the multiplayer experience the most at the moment.
About inflation & 300 resource farms
Making external farms more expensive and introducing inflation nerfed economic map control. This buffed clumping and turtling. In particular the extremely boring strategies of early outposts and hero spamming are a lot more viable now. Even if they are still not optimal, it takes a lot longer to punish them since your economic advantage is smaller now. And while it adds a little bit of decision making, now that just going for internal economy buildings is much more viable it removes a lot of action packed gameplay from the early game if there are less farms to fight over.
About heroes
Currently if one player gets a hero the game becomes a lot more boring. In straight up fights heroes already fight quite cost efficiently at level 1. Most heroes have more than 4000 health while only receiving 65% damage from infantry, giving them more than 6000 effective HP in melee fights. A good player will always retreat a low health hero from a fight and heal and within a minute they are healed back up. Thousands of damage points were tanked while the other player took permanent damage on their troops. A much bigger problem is the insane snowballing of hero leveling. Their good stats get better and the abilities they unlock add extreme strength and cost efficiency to any army. Therefore the correct response to an early hero or straight up hero spamming is avoiding the heroes, not fight and only attack once you are certain you can actually kill the heroes. Heroes are vulnerable alone and must not be lost so the player usually clumps everything together. So it is usually possible to get map control against heroes. Now you wait until your economic advantage is enough to crush your opponents death ball. Since inflation this takes a lot longer and is much more difficult. Overall it makes games more boring.
About healing (and towers) on the map
Any outpost with a heal makes it borderline impossible and extremely costly to conquer that position. The stronger towers compared to the megafix add to this problem. More importantly though, it means you need to avoid fighting your enemy in general. You cannot even fight your opponent for neighboring settlements, since your opponent can just heal back up after the skirmish while you took permanent damage. All you can do is getting more map control and wait around until you have such a massive army advantage that you still win. Inflation makes this a much longer process and outpost rushing got more viable. Outpost rushing might still not be optimal, but it takes a very long time to deal with and is very boring.
The rohan assembly point is even worse since it costs less for the almost the same utility while you can even place it in front of your opponents base. An intermediate fix could be reworking the rohan assembly point into an upgrade of the exile camp and reworking maps to feature outposts only at the corners like it was done on fords of isen or nurn.
About in-base healing & mass cavalry
Most experienced edain players are annoyed by the strength of mass cavalry that just yolos in your army and kills too much for the damage it receives. Especially sending out smaller groups of units is suppressed. It forces clumping. In-base wells exacerbate this problem since the mobile cavalry can quickly heal back up and get back on the field while infantry either takes permanent damage or is taken out of the game for a long time since going home and healing back up so many units takes a very long time, especially on big maps.
About horse Archers
Mobile archers always win map control because they always force clumping. With roughly equal forces foot archers fight horse archers efficiently. But if you split those foot archers into 2 or 3 groups to get more map control, the concentrated mobile force of horse archers will pick them off one by one very efficiently. On top of that, each group of archers also needs a lot of pikes to deal with rohan's cavalry. On top of that, horse archers and normal cavalry can quickly retreat home to heal back up, retroactively turning cost inefficient fights into favourable ones.
About sieges
a fundamental problem of sieges is that time is on the site of the attacker. Despite inflation, map control gives you twice the economy of your opponent. In a serious game the attacker benefits from dragging the game out for a very long time. Opponents to this argument say that you are also giving the defender time to get back up, or that your relative advantage cannot grow once you reach a maximum power level. However, with twice the economy you’re always outgrowing your opponent and this maximum power level is only reached once you have every eco & unit upgrade, most heroes and all outposts. These things take an eternity to get and until then you benefit from waiting. In reality, what gives your opponent a chance to come back is deleting an economy building, investing in a siege works and spending even more resources and command points into siege units while your opponent is investing everything into units, upgrades or heroes. Inflation didn’t change this dynamic, it just made the whole process slower.
If this is such a fundamental problem why don’t we see it every game? This has two reasons. Sometimes a player wins the early game by such a massive margin that they can invest in siege units while knowing they still have more than enough army power. Strictly speaking this is neither optimal nor safe but it doesn’t matter if a game is already that one-sided. The second and more common reason is that most experienced players of edain will leave the game since they know a very long, very boring and very pre-decided siege is about to follow. A common suggestion is making siege works cost less and siege units cost no CP but instead limit them by number to reduce their opportunity cost. This way a player that is ahead could start with the siege earlier without sacrificing too much of their army power. However this will not change the fact that map control makes it beneficial for the attacker to wait around because they are outgrowing their opponent.
In Summary
Generally it seems that under the current inflation system, map control is still what wins games, it just takes a lot longer now to take effect. Which is why sieges are still pre-decided, horse archers that guarantee map control are still game deciding while boring, annoying strategies that force waiting around like outpost rushing or hero spamming are still not optimal but take a very long time to deal with.
About losing through baserushing
You should only lose the game when your entire base is destroyed, especially on camp maps and especially for lorien the current system is very frustrating and exploitable.
Outpost Units
Most outpost units see very little use. Settlement units on the other hand (cirith ungol, rangers, lindons, dunlendings, and even beorn's) are used often because they have either a unique role or are higher tier units. The mordor outposts unlock heroic units and heroes and provide better orcs and it's needed to level sauron. The exile camp recruits extremely quickly and later unlocks higher tier units. If players build a mirkwood outpost it is usually for palace guards to get higher tier pikemen (besides the healing ofc). In theory Mirkwood does unlock useful heroes and mirkwood units are just better units but to most players the investment seems still too much. The dol amroth units have a unique role and are of a higher tier, but the advantage does not seem worth the cost of the outpost to most gondor players. The problem with most outpost units is that you need to invest more than a thousand recources just to recruit them but they don't add any new functionality to your army, aren't higher tier or more cost efficient.
About stuns and fear resistance
Stun & fear abilities should be more late game, some enemy factions have a very hard time getting fear resistance and without it they are too strong. Haldir's arrow and gamlings horn are their respective 2nd ability and they could be swapped with their respective 3rd ability
