Activatable Abilities

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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So far civilizations have between 1 and 3 unique activatable abilities, usually just on a single unit and sometimes locked behind a tech:

Abbasid

  • Convert (Imam)

Chinese

  • Reveal (Imperial Palace)
  • Supervise (Imperial Official)
  • Collect Taxes (Imperial Official)

Delhi

  • Forced March (all infantry)

English

  • Place Palings (Longbowman)
  • Set up Camp (Longbowman)
  • Arrow Volley (Longbowman)

French

  • Deploy Pavise (Arbaletrier)

HRE

  • Emergency Repairs (any building in influence)
  • Inspire (Prelate)

Mongols

  • Signal Arrows (Khan)
  • Scouting Falcon (Khan)
  • Scouting Falcon (Scout)

Rus

  • Double Time (Streltsy)

The upcoming civs have some we know of, but could have more we don’t know about yet:

Malians

  • Stealth (Musofadi Warrior)
  • Stealth (Musofadi Gunner)
  • Festivals (Griot Bara)

Ottomans

  • Fortitude (Sipahi)
  • Switching aura buff (Mehter)

I just counted signal arrows as one since they’re mutually exclusive, I did not include infantry building things or the default relic conversion and healing that everyone has.

So what do you guys think? Do you like the amount that civs have? Should we have more in the future, or less?

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More abilities means more strategic possibilities so a clear yes from me.

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Thank you for compiling this list. On countdown for PUP.

Abilities are fun tactical surprise, more is better. I wish wololo was more of a thing.

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Possible abilities could be:

  • Slowing down enemy units with a curse from the priest/scholar/etc
  • Gaining the ability to walk through dense forests for a few seconds
  • As there’s no overall hill bonus maybe add one as an ability for certain unit(s)
  • Ability to swim for a certain unit in order to cross small rivers or also lakes (As an alternative they could also be able to build a little raft)

I really liked Empire Earth in that regard. That game had priests just like AoE but also prophets. With those prophets one could activate pest on opponent units that spread like hell when having no protection but also earthquakes, firestorms destroying all buildings within an area. After all those abilities were quite expensive but usually came into play when the game became very static as you could easily flip the game when your opponent wasn’t too cautious.

While I do not think that the latter abilities fit into AoE4 there’s certainly lots of possibilities for AoE4 to generally increase strategic options which it certainly lacks at the moment.