Civ Drafting Deserves More Credit For Fixing Competitive Age of Empires II
Civ Drafting Deserves More Credit For Fixing Competitive Age of Empires II
A feature set worth leaning into
I was a pretty casual Age of Empires player during my first several years with the franchise, mostly playing skirmishes against the AI with my older brother in Age of Kings. When Age of Mythology came out, it replaced the relatively cumbersome Microsoft Zone with a newly streamlined online interface. This made it easier for me to try multiplayer, and with my brother off to college, I started to play more custom scenarios and friendly matches with some friends I made online.
After the release of The Titans expansion pack in 2003, I began to play more competitively. I was almost a complete noobie when it came to the concept of ranked 1v1, so I didn’t think too hard about how I went about it. The Norse, especially Loki, were my favorite race, and Loki rushes were my favorite playstyle, so I just jumped onto the ladder and started doing a lot of that.
At the time I had a vague awareness that the Egyptians were really strong, and the new Atlanteans were even stronger. As I got better at the game this awareness became more acute, and eventually became a real point of frustration. I often took it in stride, using the weaknesses of the relatively weak Norse civilizations to turn myself into a better player - grinding out the mechanical complexities of Odin and Thor, realizing how important it was to follow build orders, learning a “killer instinct” to close out games before an opponent got too far ahead. But just as often, I felt sort of hopeless. What’s the point of trying to grind with a weaker race when I can just switch and immediately climb up the ranks?
I credit those years of playing Norse with forging me into a really good mechanical player. But like most other top players, I eventually just gave up. Most of the tournaments I won in Age of Titans were off the back of meta-civilizations like Isis and Oranos. And indeed, the same would hold true in Age of Empires III, where top-level tournaments featured only 1 or 2 civilizations by the final rounds.
(It’s possible that no one remembers this guy, but I’d like to briefly acknowledge the Japanese player Fird - just an absolutely incredible high-level Norse player who put up some phenomonal games against top-level Egyptian players. An early inspiration to me on the power of just playing better than your opponent.)
Huns Mirrors on Arabia
I think people nowadays sometimes underrate how big of a problem competitive balance was back then, for games that featured large numbers of civilizations like Age of Empires. I think this is because balance has always been a topic of discussion in real-time strategy, so the fact that it was a problem then doesn’t really mean a whole lot given that it continues to be a problem today. But I think it’s worth recognizing that things have gotten a lot better, and that said improvement is partly the result of cultural and social shifts rather than changes in gameplay design.
The most concrete change, in my eyes, is the move toward civ drafting in high-level tournaments. In the early and mid-2000s, when the mainline games first came out, large tournaments like World Cyber Games allowed players to select whatever civilizations they wanted. This usually resulted in most players picking from a handful of meta civilizations, limiting the number of match-ups and producing lots of mirrors.
Civ drafting changes that. There’s different ways of setting it up, but the general idea is that players pick, snipe, and/or ban civilizations to use in a best of 5 or best of 7. This results in a much larger variety of civilizations - depending on how it’s setup, it usually prevents players from picking the same civ over and over, prevents mirror match-ups, and ensures that the top dozen or more civilizations see playtime instead of the top two or three.
Here’s one example, from a series I played against Eli in Hera’s RBW5 community tournament a couple years back:
In combination with a map draft on a varied map pool which elevates civs that may not be strong on Arabia, civ drafting significantly increases the total number of potential viable match-ups.
No more Set vs. Set on Watering Hole!
If you started following Age of Empires sometime in the last 5 to 10 years, this is probably not news to you. But if you’ve been following the franchise since its inception, it’s a major change. When T90 jokes that Age of Empires II’s meta once consisted of literal years of Huns Tower Rush mirrors on Arabia, it’s only a mild exaggeration!
(I’ll mention here that civ drafting is also used in Age of Empires III and Age of Empires IV tournaments; the concept of pick/ban is also used across genres, too. I focus on Age of Empires II in this article because, aside from playing it more nowadays, I also got to recently use it a few times in community tournaments like the one above.)
The thing that draws my attention is that this is a competitive rule change, not a design or balance change. Age of Empires II still has civilizations that are clearly stronger than others. With 42 civilizations in its repertoire, that’s probably an unfixable problem - one that critics of civ drafts probably underestimate, at least from my perspective. But instead of tackling the Sisyphean task of balancing it all, the community solved the simpler problem of changing the rules they use to host tournaments.
Credit where credit is due - I think this has materially improved high-level tournament play, in a simple and elegant way. And the neat thing about this is the way Forgotten Empires, now the developers behind Age of Empires II, leaned into it from a gameplay perspective.
Lean In
Soon after the launch of Age of Empires II’s Definitive Edition, Forgotten Empires added a Mutual Random option to the ranked ladder. The way this works is that if both players opt into mutual random, both automatically roll a random civ. If one or both opts out, they roll the civ they selected.
It’s a simple idea - instead of disadvantaging yourself with Random against a top civ, you only select it when your opponent selects it, too. But I feel the inclusion of this feature, in combination with a cultural change at the professional level to play a wider variety of civilizations, has changed the culture around civilization selection.
It’s quite unusual nowadays to see high-level players only play one or two civilizations - they are sometimes even accused of being gimmicky “one tricks”. There’s nothing stopping them from doing this, and there’s a lot of material advantages to only playing the best civilizations. But the culture and perception around it has changed, and this has been surprisingly effective in modifying people’s behavior. Honestly, it’s quite awkward to play only one civilization on the ladder. Back when I was doing so as part of training Age of Empires II, I frequently got questions and pushback on it - even when I was playing some of the weakest civs in the game!
It’s really interesting to me, at least based on my own experiences on the 1v1 ladder, the degree to which the ranked gameplay has materially changed in response to tournament rule changes and, essentially, social pressure. You’re no longer considered a top player if you just grind out the top few civilizations, and this has had a ripple effect beyond the sorts of players who play in high-level tournaments.
I think it would be a good idea to incorporate mutual random into other games, particularly Age of Empires IV. That game generally sees civ drafting in its tournaments, but mutual random hasn’t yet made its way onto the ranked ladder. And I think - again, based on my personal experience on the ranked ladder - this produces a less varied ranked experience, with a lot of players picking the same civilizations repeatedly instead of experiencing the full breadth of gameplay, which I think detracts from the experience overall.
I sometimes talk about how real-time strategy games should borrow more from each other - like how every RTS should incorporate cooperative gameplay, in recognition of how revolutionary that was for StarCraft II. I think mutual random and civ drafting fall into the same bucket, at least for games with a lot of races. These are features that, from my perspective, don’t get enough credit for “fixing” competitive Age of Empires II.
Until next time!
brownbear
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P.S. My apologies for missing last week’s newsletter - I wrote up a long piece on more aggressively tuning Protoss, but I feel it’s going to be controversial, so I want to take my time and get it right. I’ll publish an extra piece sometime in the future to make up for it. I will publish 52 pieces this year!