This is what I call MOBA contamination in RTS…
AOE IV is more of fantasy game, age 2 still the real RTS.
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AoE is never gonna be starcraft. Its never even gonna be Warcraft.
Deadeye historical acctuacy isn’t needed, but relevance is definitely an appeal the aoe4 has (once had…) over aoe2.
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No, you’re just biased for wololo and biased against newer things. This isn’t a criticism, it just is what it is. We tend to be less critical of things the we first encountered when we were younger. Wololo isn’t and has never been realistic.
This has been the norm since WC3, many RTS copied it since then… before that you have EE1 in 2001 or even the CnC of the 90s with units with abilities…this is nothing new and has always been the case… as long as they are realistic abilities, I don’t see the problem with them being in RTS…
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As far as I know, combat and even building in Age of Empires is a “Simplification” of real building and combat. The only difference with other video games is that AoE does it to represent historical themes, but it is still that: “A video game”.
That units have elements like HP, attack or armor already gives an idea of what is being simplified: the mechanics of units when fighting.
If this were a Pacifist Visual Novel you couldn’t attack anything and those stats wouldn’t even exist. But since it’s a war game, there are military stats for units and gathering and building stats for villagers.
As in this game (Considering the campaigns) a group of units, let’s say 50 would represent an army of 1000 in real life, the attack is also a simplification of that, making units not kill each other in seconds but take longer to kill others, the “Attack” stat being a representation of the stat for a unit to “finish” others.
That being said, the combat and skill trigger effects in AoE are no different: They are simply a way to simplify the activation of skills or changes in army strategy. If I have to give more examples:
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The deployment of the Arbalests’ Paves was a tactical deployment that this type of unit made. Although the French were not the only ones to deploy them, they did so massively during the 100 years war, copying the example of the Genoese Crossbowmen whom they hired in the first years of the war.
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Mether’s musical aura: In fact, it was the Ottomans who invented a formal notion of military music, which inspires the army and keeps it in concentrated formation, improving its military capabilities. This was copied in later ages by other European armies because it bore fruit.
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Warrior Monk Aura: At the Battle of Kulikovo, it was the charge of a warrior monk who felled a Mongol champion that inspired the Rus soldiers to fight the Mongols even harder.
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Royal Knight Regeneration: French knights, unlike those in other Christian kingdoms, were always expected to be nobles of high birth. Most of them had not one, but several spare horses if one was wounded in combat, and attendants to care for these horses and spare armor. I believe this ability is a reference to that.
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Cataphracts, Trample: While this is a reference to the unique technology of AoE2, the reality is that most cavalry “overran” the infantry they passed by. Due to the weight of their armor, cataphract troops generally couldn’t make charge attacks with a lance, since the horse was always at maximum capacity to even trot with so much weight. So they were given the ability to “roll over without fear of taking damage” and charge with all the weight of their armor into the units they pass through, which was the greatest virtue of the cataphract.
OTHER AOE GAMES: On the other hand, it’s not like AoE IV has innovated with this: As other comments say, AoE III (2005) also has them, and debuted them with the scout skills. In fact, in vanilla AoM (2002), there are no activatable skills but there are “Automatic” skills and that’s because it wasn’t until the new software resources (2002) that it was possible to implement the skills in an activatable way, already in 2005 with AoE it was possible and in AoE: Retold (2024), now the automatic skills can also be implemented in an activatable way.
ANOTHER RTS VIDEOGAMES: In other franchises the same thing happens: From “Empires Earth”, to “Medieval Total War” there are Morale auras, activatable and static skills.
It’s not that the genre was changed but that it “became more complex”, another thing is that one doesn’t get used to the changes, to the new mechanics or new systems.
It’s actually less realistic than all the things questioned here. It would make more sense in AOM than in any AOE.
True. You can invoke all kinds of calamaties in EE1 with the prophet:
And the gameplay is not good in the end…
I love the gameplay.
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