AoE2 currently has some of the worst balance it has ever had in its history, excluding original steppe lancers. I have never had so little fun playing TG. The mere existence of civs like Pers and Khmer, and the ability to pick them in the exact position you want them in a TG, has ruined the balance completely. There are some maps where if you do not have khmer, and the opposing team does, you will lose. You can neither match their economy nor the unit they're making.
In vanilla AoC there were obviously better and worse civs, but it was never ever this bad. If you picked a meso civ because they are good on flank, you may get them as pocket and be at a disadvantage. If you picked huns, mongols, or persians cuz they were a good pocket civ, you might get them on flank where they get outclassed by other civs to varying degrees.
And even if you were to play AoC with set positions, it would only make civs like persians and franks more viable to be picked, as there would be no danger in getting them as a flank, and they can actually compete with huns by matching their unit, and in the case of persians, their eco as well. In Arabia TG alone, with set positions in AoC, all of these civs could be viably picked: Pers, Huns, Franks, Mongols, Brits, Aztecs, Mayans, Spanish, Chinese. That's half of all civs in the game. Now you have 2 pocket civs way better than all the others, and like 4-5 flank civs, even though there are 35 civs.
Balance the blatantly OP civs and either force or in some way encourage random civs in ranked matches.
And what I mentioned in the patch topic recently about them fixing units freezing when retreating, they didn't actually fix it, just happened to me today.
In vanilla AoC there were obviously better and worse civs, but it was never ever this bad. If you picked a meso civ because they are good on flank, you may get them as pocket and be at a disadvantage. If you picked huns, mongols, or persians cuz they were a good pocket civ, you might get them on flank where they get outclassed by other civs to varying degrees.
And even if you were to play AoC with set positions, it would only make civs like persians and franks more viable to be picked, as there would be no danger in getting them as a flank, and they can actually compete with huns by matching their unit, and in the case of persians, their eco as well. In Arabia TG alone, with set positions in AoC, all of these civs could be viably picked: Pers, Huns, Franks, Mongols, Brits, Aztecs, Mayans, Spanish, Chinese. That's half of all civs in the game. Now you have 2 pocket civs way better than all the others, and like 4-5 flank civs, even though there are 35 civs.
Balance the blatantly OP civs and either force or in some way encourage random civs in ranked matches.
And what I mentioned in the patch topic recently about them fixing units freezing when retreating, they didn't actually fix it, just happened to me today.