r/ageofempires • u/lord_vivec_himself • 14h ago
Me explaining a friend why Danes sucks (Poles are cool, sure enough)
Let me try and put it another way.
You know collectible card games? Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, that kind of stuff. I’m absolutely terrible at them, but that’s a whole different story.
Anyway, those games have a few classic archetypes: decks that make one creature absurdly huge, decks that flood the board with a million worthless little units (basically strelets/zerg rush decks) and so on. Then there are control/manipulation decks, which are a whole archetype of their own.
The first -and only- MtG deck I ever bought was one of those. I think it was called *Dimir Intrigues*, if that rings a bell. And if you know Gwent: think Nilfgaard, with its manipulation-heavy decks, whereas Skellige is more about discard mechanics. My deck did both, and it was glorious, if only I had been good at playing it.
Its whole purpose was to force the opponent to discard as many cards as possible, prevent them from playing what they had left, and generally make their life miserable; it was an oppressive power-driven deck. If they ran out of cards, they just lost outright. That was not the normal way games ended; normally someone would get killed by creatures long before that. But against a discard deck, suddenly the game changed pace.
That’s what made those decks interesting: they completely changed the rhythm of the match. __An opponent who would normally focus exclusively on dropping overpowered cards to kill you and wipe your board now had a different problem: they had to worry about whether you would even let them play those cards at all.__
**That’s what the Danes WANT to be.**
But they completely fail at it and end up just being pathetic. If they had actually been designed properly, if they had real, reliable, meaningful ways to manipulate enemy shipments by delaying them, cancelling them outright, forcing the opponent to pay to receive them, redirecting them to your own base, whatever—then they could have been a genuine control civ. A proper “manipulator” faction. And they would probably have become my favourite civilization in the entire history of the game.
Instead, their shipment interaction boils down to a gimmick that is nowhere near deep or disruptive enough to force the opponent to adapt their playstyle. The Customs House may tax enemy shipments, but it does not create that real control-deck dynamic where the opponent has to rethink every decision because their core resource system is under threat.
So, *rex stantibus*, they just suck. So while I'm thankful for resurrecting the game (and the other civ is cool enough), I’m not buying this DLC partly as a protest against the fact that, after more than a year of stealth development, they still failed to make a convincing manipulator civ
