Solution to 8-minute walling meta: more wolves!

Title is pretty self-explanatory.

Everyone, myself included, has been complaining about the meta being too defensive and players just full walling their bases within the first 5 minutes and skipping through the feudal age entirely seemingly without suffering any consequences. This has been especially infuriating for the scout meta, which is now pretty much useless when your opponent is full walled.

I've seen numerous proposed solutions to address this issue, like making palisade walls more expensive or slower to build to increase the negative effect walling has on a player's economy, the devs opting for more aggressive and open maps in the map pools, giving palisades less hp and nerfing quick-walling so that melee units can break through the walls quicker. I now have a more nature-themed solution to either delay, de-incentivize, or flat-out prevent players from walling so early and so often: wolves.

Maps being scripted to have wolves/bears/crocodiles/jaguars/etc... spawn more frequently, especially around forests and ponds, has the following three (in my humble opinion positive) effects:

  1. its more risky to wall, especially when your villagers don't have loom. Players who choose to wall do so at the risk of losing a villager or having it be low-HP and susceptible to getting sniped. The fear of losing a villager will be a a negative incentive for players considering walling too early (before loom).
  2. Its more expensive to wall. If players use multiple villagers to wall and double-team vills, that's two villagers who aren't collecting resources. If players get loom and then start walling, they'd still have to fight the wolf off before continuing to build, adding time to the wall's construction and less time the villager spends collecting resources.
  3. Building walls will be delayed. Villagers fighting wolves or waiting until loom kicks in to start constructing the wall can extend the period of time where they're not fully-walled by just enough for a drush, scout rush, or man at arms rush to prompt them to use units to defend and not buildings

I know this raises a few concerns, including but not limited to:

  1. What if a wolf attacks my villager while its luring a boar/making a mill for berries or deer/making a mining or lumber camp? - Wolf spawn locations can be controlled to spawn a good few tiles away from boar, or boar could spawn a bit closer to the initial TC so as to not be near any wolves. With that said, it might be tricky to get wolves to spawn far enough from forests to not aggro on vills building lumber camps but close enough to aggro on vills building walls. I'm open to suggestions about this one here.
  2. Won't this create a new strategy where the opponent sends one militia, aggros a bunch of wolves, and leads them to my base? - possibly, but this can be fixed either by wolves not aggroing on dark-age military units or just fighting the wolves. They don't do much damage and it won't be like golden pit where all the wolves spawn in one central area. The 175 wood for an early barracks, 60 food, 20 gold your opponent spends on creating the militia and time it takes for the militia to go around forests finding wolves is a pretty expensive combination to get a few villagers down by 15 hp. At that point just drush instead.
  3. Won't this deincentivize drushing? - This is the only downside I'm concerned about, but seeing as the usual drush strat is to drush, full wall, and fast castle, I think fewer people will drush period regardless of how the walling meta is fixed or changed. If it really is a big problem for drushing and we see 0 drushes in the meta, then wolves can be programed to not aggro on dark age military units.

So that's my 1200 1v1, 2k1 tg viewpoint on changing the walling meta without breaking anything else. What are your guys' thoughts?

- Zeza

submitted by /u/easbr101
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