No problem at all! Thanks for reading my opinion and for your clarifications. As I said, huge respect for your work and especially your documentation – I did read it all! I will personally be using your patch myself, I just wanted to hopefully provide some insight for you for why maybe it’s not been as enthusiastically recieved as you hoped.

I agree that many (most?) people are not going to even notice the changes, and the false placebo results you talked about don’t surprise me. Especially when you’re talking like 2% changes in HP, attack, resource rates, etc. Such is the life of a game designer, most of what you’re doing is changing things people won’t even notice to make the game more fun by aggregation. I think it was Sid Meier who said “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game[, therefore] one of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves.” It’s very telling barely anyone noticed the EE completely breaking unit damage modifiers. I only noticed on ships and even then it was just a vague feeling things were “off”.

One other thing I’d like to say is that my feedback on the Katyusha is coming from my personal viewpoint of game design, which lends itself more towards CnC style gimmicky “balance” and flavour over Starcraft style fine tuned balance. Like as another example, you mentioned in another blog that the light tank power spike is oppresive, and that anti-tank guns are mostly useless. You suggested (and rejected) buffing the anti-tank guns to compensate, and instead decided it would be better to nerf the light tanks by reducing their range.
If I was making a patch to solve this problem, I would instead focus on increasing the time between aging up to industrial and fielding tanks (maybe doing something unconventional like making tanks require a massive oil investment to research, or additional library mil research), so you’d have a period early industrial where horses are uselss and it’s just riflemen and machinegun stalemates (western front..?).
Entirely for flavour reasons. I just like making up little stories in my head while playing a game. Tanks are more fun when they feel like a tremendous technological breakthrough that will finally be able to break that frontline stalemate! Not when they are “just an upgrade” to horses that function as “industrial age heavy cavalry unit”. I feel the same way about the unique units, they should feel like serious power spikes for their nations during the ages they get them, and even make you reluctant to upgrade when it comes time…
There seems to be a number of these sudden paradigm shift unit upgrades scattered throughout the game (cav->tank, biplane->fighter, fireship->sub, arquebusier->musketeer, elite pikemen->fusiliers), and I find them super fun personally. But then again, I enjoy building a gigantic army of flamethrower units and using that as my main army.

As I said though I am the last person you want designing a competitive mulitplayer game 👀

Thanks for taking the time to write out your thoughts. Addressing some of what you’ve brought up (pretty long!):

1) My expectation certainly wasn’t that any other person would dive anywhere close to the levels I have in understanding all the technicalities. I am perfectly content to contribute disproportionately in such areas with no expectation of reciprocation by others, and just have them just pitch in their 2 cents here and there. Expecting most people to at least read the patch changes before judging (and especially before dissing) it is imo a very low bar, and to my dismay was not met.

Thinking about the people who complained about early versions of the patch — back when it had even fewer non-BHG changes — on the grounds that it deviated from the original dev’s intentions (while objectively being literally orders of magnitude closer to them) made me repeatedly consider deleting the patch entirely.

2) If reverting a large number of the non-bugfix balance changes significantly increased adoption in multiplayer, I would be willing to drop what I’m doing and push out a new version of the patch ASAP. However, because of (1) we know that the contents of the patch seems to have little sway on whether people use it. Secondarily, when concerns about changes being too much were brought up, they were discussed / tested etc; I think the observable effect of many (but not all) of the changes is greatly overestimated by many players.

RoN is hugely complex in some regards so I don’t expect everyone to know X Y and Z in a discussion, but we even received feedback about certain matchups being too different even though they hadn’t been affected at all(!!!), so even the thought they ~maybe~ something changed was more significant in people’s perception at times than whether something had *actually* changed.

3) I spent perhaps ~100 hours trying to find the least intrusive way of delivering the patch. Although there’s a bit of leeway with exactly how it’s implemented, the results of my testing show that a custom (open source!) launcher is the only way to do it. Directly modifying or otherwise replacing game files is unfortunately the ONLY technically-feasible way of delivering these changes without compromising multiplayer stability because all other mod formats are not robust in RoN and unfortunately do not “just work”.

I would LOVE if CBP was a dropdown mod for example, because that would incredibly easy for players: we tried it in alpha 2, tried to fix it for alpha 3 when it had problems, and tried against around alpha 5 or 6. It just doesn’t work reliably, and the other mod formats all have their own issues which I’ve documented / discussed elsewhere. Without custom software of some kind (or official fixes for critical bugs in other mod formats), CBP would not be viable even as the zombie project that it now is.

4) It’s interesting that you note the menu changes as a con! These were added because it’s almost impossible to tell (outside of testing it in-game) if CBP is loaded without adding some kind of indicator, and this was causing issues in multiplayer lobbies where people thought that they’d put CBP on, but actually hadn’t. After so many such issues I consider having a clear indicator an essential feature that’s incredibly useful. Even for non-multiplayer players it’s still pretty handy to know what the current state of the game is (vanilla vs patched), and without any indicator it’s pretty tough to until you start loading in.

5) On the topic of UUs, and specifically your comment that you want them to “feel unique and powerful” and retain their existing niche: **exceedingly** few of the UU changes actually change how you’re able to use the units. Bantu Hawk Fighters still dominate the air at an absurd matchup ratio (how many UUs can beat how many non-UUs) that is quite frankly pretty broken, but this was kept because it’s their identity. British, Chinese, German, Nubian, and Persian UUs play the same and retain their identity. Only in niche situations (such as British UUs vs pure non-HI infantry) are the changes reliably noticeable. When both armies have +armor (i.e., normal combat), even the nerfed +20% damage for Highlanders still wipes Musketeers over the floor because of how damage scales non-linearly against armor. To me they *do* still feel unique and powerful, and maintain their original niche — just in a way that’s less oppressive (Musketeer corpses on the battlefield instead of Musketeer smoothies).

Roman and Spanish UUs did receive small nerfs – yet play exactly the same. Note both units are still considered very powerful in EE despite having atrocious nerfs due to the damage bugs; given that, it’s difficult to argue that the CBP changes prevent them feeling unique or powerful. Mayan and Inca UUs became *more* powerful. The Mayan UU niche remained similar but yes its identity did shift from “useless” to “actually kind of good, and still good at its old job”. I would strongly consider that a net gain, and not less flavorful.

Ranged elephants might feel a bit different with their fake melee attack removed (and their new preference for staying out of melee range as a result), but their role and best usage is unchanged vs T&P. They were never meant to be a heavy cav replacement because of how much damage their take from enemy foot archers; I would say on balance them trying to fight at range is at the very least not clearly inferior and subjectively a small improvement.

It’s really only the Katyusha Rocket and Mongol UUs that I expect to be appreciably different vs T&P based on damage numbers and testing. As you saw, the Katyusha change is trying to prevent a situation where somebody upgrades and the unit becomes worse for what they were using it for. I think that’s worth the tradeoff of reducing the strength of its identity slightly (the difference is honestly not that extreme because Age VII combat doesn’t revolve around clustered fights due to tanks and weapon ranges) and the numbers were chosen after testing the effects of the splash etc. Regression from following “what the player is supposed to do” (upgrading their unit) is imo a worse game design sin than reducing the sharpness of something’s identity; both of our opinions are valid and mine is certainly not objectively correct here, but obviously subjectively both sides were weighed and the reduction to 40% (with small compensation buffs) won out.

In my opinion the implied identity of Mongol UUs is a significant player trap, a particularly egregious game design sin. Even at full, unnerfed power, their UUs still lose against the gunpowder infantry which they have damage boosts against. In this sense, nerfing the unit’s damage boost has not materially damaged its identity because its former identity was “player trap” and reducing that is not bad. If you pit 10 Arquebusiers (IV) against 10 Hordes (IV) with T&P balance, more than half of the Arquebusiers survive and all of the Hordes die. Using them in this matchup imo isn’t a meme strat, it’s a death trap, and only equivalent in meme value to doing the same thing with ordinary ranged cav and watching them get massacred.

As for the small reduction to attack speed, that’s in response to people freaking out about horse archers returning to their intended (more or less) 2-hit-kill state vs citizens. There was concern that Mongols would raid rampant (probably unfounded given that it wasn’t uncontrollably oppressive in T&P), so the attack speed was lowered marginally and they were given a small bit of projectile speed to help improve their average raiding performance without affecting their best-case (potentially-oppressive) performance.

I am leaving out *one* use for the Mongol UUs which is probably their best use in army-vs-army combat, but which I have literally never seen used: they can be used to attack from the flank, in which case their matchup is viable and the damage boost (and therefore nerf to it) does matter. Given how little this strategy gets used, this can’t count for much in a weighing of the pros and cons of the change, and we ended up with the nerfs that we have.

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I’m super open to making changes to the patch based on reasonable feedback; your points about Katyusha Rockets being a good example of where it might make sense to revert or otherwise avoid making a change to what people are used to, and where the balance gain of the change is comparatively small. I might discuss reverting some of the changes with the Advisory Group and doing another round of poking people to try the patch. Other than consuming my time, the situation can’t get much worse from trying I guess.

What we actually wanted to happen during Alpha was “this is some changes that we’re thinking about including and we’d like to discuss, and here are the best ones implemented so that we can all easily test them and figure out what’s best”. What ended up happening was we got almost zero feedback even when we explicitly asked heaps of people, and very little of what we did get was useful or actionable (see also: previous mention of placebo-induced feedback). So the “best guess” of the Advisory Group (fueled predominantly by only myself, dave, Jatin, and HnZ: four players trying to weigh up everything!) was barely iterated on at all. Thoughtful discussions and broad consensus are impossible if people refuse to participate.

Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to not only check what’s changed but also provide feedback on it.

Of course it sucks to have your work feel underappreciated. I can’t help feel like your expectations were too high though – did you really think that the crowd of people who still play RoN included dozens of people like you, willing to get stuck in and put in huge amounts of work to fix up this game? I’m amazed there’s even one of you.

You’ve done a good job and I think it’s fantastic you’ve blogged all your work as well – what a resource!

However, I wanted to address your post’s topic of your patch’s underappreciation and lack of adoption. I also wanted to just quickly explain my own reluctance to install your mod, in the hopes it might make things more clear for you. You mention that it felt hypocritical for people to dismiss your changes while happily playing the broken EE version – which is fair. However, the EE version is “official” and your changes are a “modification”. This is always going to be a barrier. Extra steps are required to apply your changes – there’s even a custom launcher and the mod changes the main menu graphics! It bring the vibe that a player is no longer playing the game they love, but some dude’s custom version of it. “I just want to play Rise of Nations, none of this ‘patching’ and ‘modding'”.
The biggest hurdle to get over to install the patch too are the non-bugfix changes. I know you made careful balance changes to make the game better, and documented them all, and so on, but the point is that again, after installing the patch a player feels they are no longer playing RoN (as intended? as remembered?) but some guy’s interpretation of it.
Especially for me – as somone who only plays vs AI – MP focused balance changes just feel needlessly flavour reducing. E.g. you nerfed the splash of the katyusha rocket arty so that it made more sense for the rocket arty upgrade after it. It’s a similar story for most of the UU. Better balanced? Yes. More fun? Not really. I like my soviet rocket arty to excell at the one thing it’s known for. I like all my UUs to feel unique and powerful. The small nitpicky balance canges make meme strats less viable and make the game feel more uniform – less asymmetric and surprising. I know this makes the game work much better in MP, but as someone who plays only against the AI, that just doesn’t interest me.

Finally, I wanted to say, if your mod only fixed bugs, didn’t require a custom launcher, and didn’t change any menu graphics, I would recommend it in a heartbeat and would never not use it – I assume others would agree.

Best of luck, and thank you for what you’ve done already! It’s more than anyone asked for and you’ve made a real impact for the fans of RoN who are still playing 🙂