The order of troops is small but there are upgrades you can research to increase sizes of shipment from the homecity.
Following is a developers blog that talks about the dragoon crew but also gives u info on HC shipments sizes of them, and upgrades. Hope this helps.
– 6.8.2005 Balance Testing the Dragoon Screw
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Balance Testing the Dragoon Screw: I wandered into our test lab recently and pulled up a chair to watch part of our balance team take the Age of Empires 3 multi-player game through its paces. The game I watched was 2v2 on one of our North America maps, and all four players were Spanish (all the other civilizations were temporarily broken).
The game got into combat very quickly with players of this high skill level, and I was amused by the teasing and taunting that passed between them. If you had followed me into the test with little foreknowledge of what was going on, you might have been tempted to think this was just some friends having a good time playing a game. But you would have been wrong, llama breath.
Playtesting like this, which goes on many, many times each day for years over the development of a game, is central to our design process. I call it design by playing. Basically it works like this. We prototype our design as quickly as possible to create something playable, and then we play it over and over, making adjustments daily based on our experiences until our instincts as gamers tell us the game is fun, balanced, and finished. Everyone at Ensemble Studios is asked to take part in regular monitored playtests and give feedback, so we can gather a variety of opinions.
The balance team is at the top of the studio testing pyramid. They are players of very high skill recruited especially to test that all of the units, civilizations, and strategies are in relative balance. We don’t want people who buy the game to find out that only one civilization is worth playing or that one unit is vastly superior to all others, or that one strategy cannot be countered. Part of the balance team’s work is to discover these “screws”, some aspect of the game that is out of balance. Our games have been traditionally so rich and deep that this is very daunting and time-consuming task.
In this case the team was testing the Dragoon Screw, a strategy that centered on creating large armies of Dragoons (cavalry with ranged attack, especially good against other fast units like other cavalry or light infantry). The screw worked like this. Players focused on food early, and then food and coin, in order to rush up the ages. When Home City shipments were earned, they were not taken, but hoarded. By waiting and getting the correct upgrades ahead of time, players could have a backlog of Home City shipments each delivering 8-11 well upgraded Dragoons. If pulled off, the player had a large (and largely free) Dragoon army very early, with a minimum investment in other buildings and virtually no other military units. Most of the resources gathered in the New World were applied to aging up, and increasing and improving the shipments of Dragoons.
The Dragoon itself is a difficult unit to balance because it is both fast and ranged. It can stand off from any hand-to-hand units while shooting them down. Dragoons can run from danger and threaten many places. Units like these have been a pain to balance in all of our games.
The game I eavesdropped on had Matt Scadding and Kevin Holme facing Brian Dellinger and Nick Currie. Kevin built no Dragoons but was trying to counter them with infantry, which our design said should work. I didn’t see Kevin having much success, however, as his outnumbered infantry was mowed down by combined Dragoon forces of Nick and Brian. On the other hand, Matty seemed ahead of everyone and was harassing regularly the towns of both Brian and Nick, while chipping away at their Dragoon groups, and keeping them out of Kevin’s town.
It almost looked like a naval game to me, with each group of Dragoons like a fleet. No player would let his fleet sink completely, and if at a disadvantage would pull back to defenses (ports) to strike out in another direction. I think classic naval strategy preaches keeping a fleet in being (at sea and potentially dangerous, versus at the bottom of the sea, however gloriously it got there). It looked like the Dragoon players were trying to keep their fleets of Dragoons in the game.
I had to leave before the game ended but it looked like Matty was soon going up to the last age and would thereafter have greatly improved Dragoons. I thought at that point he would be able to force his attacks to conclusion and prevail, and Kevin would be a formidable ally, even when experimenting with units and strategies.
The test was much more than fun and amusing banter, however. As I watched, the team continually paused play, had a discussion, and made notes. They could access the data base and check what it was saying versus what they were feeling about the relative strength/speed/staying power of units. They wrote down suggestions for bringing the Screw back into balance. They recorded bugs and saved games to capture particular game events for later review by designers and programmers.
After the game one or more of the players discussed the test and their suggestions with Greg Street, the Lead Designer on Age of Empires 3. He and others on the design team working on balance issues (and testing the Screw among themselves as they could), especially Jay-Rome (Jerome) Jones and Sandy Petersen, put together a plan for bringing the Dragoon back in balance.
Part of that response was to slow Home City shipments (make it more attractive to build armies in the New World), decrease the size of late age shipments (instead of increasing them as they were working), and maybe increase the cost of technologies that increase the size of Home City shipments.
As Greg pointed out in an email thread about the Dragoon Screw, at least it got Dragoons into the game. We hadn’t seen them used much, then some changes made them overwhelmingly good, and now we have to move them back a little.
This give-and-take, test-and-adjust, is the essence of design by playing. As a process it can be difficult to predict (and thus potentially expensive to pursue), but it has always delivered a great game.
–Bruce Shelley
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