Forums / Miscellaneous Discussions / The Myth of Greatness

I was bored the other day, so I decided to put this together because I was curious.

Below are era wins by races. Winning an era doesn't make you great and score isn't end-all-be-all, but it is an easier statistic to measure.

I broke them down to "Halfing Exploit Eras" (HEE) and to "Post-Halfling Exploit" (PHE).

A halfling exploit was considered such when an individual had 40+ sci's. Is this possible with normal gameplay?...potentially, but most likely not. A good Halfing can should top out at 26-27 sci's naturally. This was only done for Fantasia.

The findings show that during the HEE a full 47% of all era winners were Halflings. These were no farmers either, as the avg. for them was 2m killed - 58 cities captured - 102 battles fought.

In the PHE the Halfling has only won Fantasia 14% of the time. The new king? Orc at 55%. Though AoTD is not an exploit, I would argue that this clearly shows AoTD to be too powerful in the current meta of the game since Orc is the King of AoTD.

Why is the title "The Myth of Greatness"? Well...because a full 34% of HEE wins and 47.5% of HEE Halfling wins were through exploit usage. I purposefully did not tally names - you can go look yourself if you want to, but a significant number of those exploit wins were by people considered "Great" and "Legendary" today.

I'm not saying those players were not good, just that their reputation may not be what it is today without exploit usage. This is also proof of why knowledge hording led to "great" players to seeming be godly. The great KDs/players of the past hoarded their VU knowledge - which put them in a significant advantage over their peers who may have lacked it.

I think a leading "consensus" is that AoTD itself is fine, it's the AoTD Chain that is the issue.

A simple fix for this is how AoTD brings units from the dead. Instead of units becoming instantly available, they should instead become injured first, and then recover from there as regularly. 

This keep AoTD the powerful spell that it currently is, doesn't nerf it, but ensures that Orc is no longer an indestructible machine of death. It will be more like Troll now, which can AoTD and benefit greatly from it, but can't chain other armies to death.

This doesn't nerf anyone per se, but it does allow non-AoTD armies to compete now.

In it's current state AoTD chaining is far too strong with Nazgul specifically and is one of the big reasons it should be nerfed.

AoTD is a cool spell and should still exist/be a powerful tool but the ability to AoTD chain down armies with Nazgul makes Orc too strong and Dwarf/Halfling too weak in the late-era

Great players can take advantage of game mechanics, but when it’s an obvious bug in the game that is never relayed to the admin to fix, that’s when it becomes an exploit. It existed for a long time, and since no one told ZeTa why the Halfling could get so much XP, his only option was to Nerf finds into the dirt. 

It takes more 'skill' to be better at a 'solved' game or a game with a more developed metagame.

Comparing players in a 'solved' game to the players that came before them is like comparing apples to oranges.

You can't compare a Starcraft Broodwar player like Jaedong to a modern Broodwar player because modern Broodwar players might be 'better now' than he was but they wouldnt have been 'better' than Jaedong if they played during the era and time period were Jaedong was superior.

Being good at anything requires a certain amount of talent and commitment.

Fair point

Wow, didn't realize so few dwarf wins *eyes emoji* lol ^_^

Wins do not really show who the best players of game were, but they were all playing Halfers and therefore score really high. Scores have been broken for many years. 

Fun fact: hobgoblins and rockthrowers score the same as other T1 and T2 troops :D they just cost so much more per unit you don’t get as many of them. This is why Halfling and Dwarf score so well, they have quantity of troops.

@Percy I didn't know it worked like that

@Konstant AGREED, it's far more beneficial to split land and have 1-2 players  on late-era races who capture "good land" (Large well-built mines and farms)

There is a certain point where land even takes your income into the negatives if you capture too much 'bad land' as was evident during the first era of the fifth age so many years ago due to land upkeep being static but production being 'dynamic'



The most interesting but under-utilized game mechanic is that razing 'bad land' can actually send your income up- like razing down captured mines that dont have a production bonus from mountains.

I used to wake up for every tick because I didn't want to let Kingdom members or the Kingdom down, it was less about protecting my own reputation and more about wanting the kingdom to win. I think later in life it negatively affected my sleep health, but at the time I didn't really consider that because I was a teenager.

He refuses to sell the game for decades which is either a big win or a big loss