Castles too "narrow"
In general, the castles are shown to be much too narrow in width to be believable as a castle. They would have to be at least twice as large and it should also be possible to place units on the Castle walls, as is also possible for the Town walls. The defense options for playable military units in Age of Empires 2 are far too low for the Middle Ages, so you should definitely start here. Wider castles would counter this fact. They would also make the game even more balanced.
All buildings are too “small” in height
All buildings in the ages of the knightly and imperial times (Renaissance) look much too small in height to be believable as medieval buildings. The building heights come into question at most for the Iron Age and the subsequent Dark Age. Here, too, they should still start. The fact that elephants are the same size as residential buildings is a bit of a stretch, and that should be improved.
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I can totally agree with this.
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They could keep the size of the base, but increase the height
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With the base, possibily yes with the size and just increase the height, but with the Castles you should extend the width, the Castles look much to tiny to appear authentic.
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Regarding the buildings’ heights, it’s partly due to the silly choice of scaling them down that the devs made in order to favour competition to the detriment of realism and immersion.
As to castles, in AoE II I used to regard them more as keeps than proper fortresses. I usually built walls and towers around them so as to have real castles:
This was pretty useless in competitive playing btw.
I’m a bit under the impression that the current AoE IV fortification system falls between two stools: the old AoE II system and the more complex one of Stronghold games.
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Since relic wants to make an effort to portray the middle ages proparly, they should do it right. In direction to the stronghold series should the game also work to. In depicting the Middle Ages, stronghold is also much more authentic than Age of Empires 2 ever was.
It was suggested here on the forum recently, that the game should be less hectic. This would be the case with accessible Castles for the military units. Just occupying the Town walls with military units is not enough. Then players would have more time, to build up their settlement more calmly instead of acting every second, what they should or should not do, to fend off timed attacks, which often come from the computer opponent, from the human opponent anyway in the standard degree of difficulty. Realtime strategy would remain the game, only the defending units would gain ground against the attackers, they did not have so far. In the case of castles accessible by military units, however, the automatic shooting arrows that the castles give off would have to be reduced, to keep the balance.
I hope, that Relic gives some thought to it, it would improve the medieval aspects from the game significantly. And of course yes, the sales figures would go up significantly, but as it currently looks, this is not the case with the current game, that we could see for testing. In the autumn even better next year, there will still be enough time, to make adjustments.
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I definitely don’t think realistic proportions should be aimed for, but bringing them closer to realistic shouldn’t hurt readability too much and would be a good compromise, imo.
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Yeah the AoE2 castles are essentially castle keeps rather than full castles, they’re all single structures.
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AoE3 has a great compromise between readability and realistic sizes.
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The preview trailers for the game seemed to me, as if the urban landscape was more of a loose village structure than a Townlike environment. The feeling of being in the middle ages is clearly missing. I think therefore, it would be better for the game, if it comes out next year and not this year, to change that, if they do not want to flop.
I agree. That village feeling (which is very good for Dark and Feudal ages but not for Castle and Imperial ages when it comes to Europe) is largely due to the fact that there is some kind of perimeter around buildings, like in games such as Empire Earth, etc. You seemingly can’t build buildings just next to others unlike in AoE II. Definitely something to fix.
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Good point, i would like to have many houses (maybe 2 storey houses in later ages) very close to each other to have a bigger medieval town feeling.
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It just came to my mind, that they made gaps between houses to avoid house-walling to make players to use walls, not buildings, which would look silly in 2021. I understand this, but still something could be done to make it feel better.
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The Town walls look very huge at the moment, the Houses and Castles in it, however, are far too small. This is a wholy distortion of real building heights. An adaptation of the house style for the knights and imperial times is definitely advisable. It currently looks like there are large empty spaces within the Town walls, when they are building houses, what looks like really bad. The town feeling is completely missing thereby. The players want to feel yourself confident in a medieval city and not in village conditions like in a semi desert.
I like the above mentioned proposal for two storey Houses for the Knight and Imperial times. And yes, again to the core issue, next to the walkable Townwalls, please wider, higher and also walkable Castles.
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“Walls” made of civilian buildings are easily destroyable though. But I’m indeed afraid it is the reason why the added those perimeters and it’s a shame, it’s like they are forcing the players into a certain gameplay. Devs, let me build my silly house-walls if I want. AoE was also about freedom of the player.
I don’t care about competitive, me and 90% of people don’t care… if the game is good it will have it’s competitive, even fornite the most casual game ever has competitive
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You mean 10 percent of the peoples? I can you guarantee, at least half of them will take care of whether and how the game is competitive. You deceive yourself enormous. In the current state, the game is not competitive and a case for the garbage, if nothing sustainable is changed. The flaws of the game are so obvious, that even laypeople take knowledge of it. If you include the inconspicuous defects, for example that armaments of the military units are implemented for later ages and not for the middle ages and that for multiple peoples, things get much even worse. Therefore will not be good for a larger audience 
Whether the game is for hobby or fulltime players, does not matter, because the game overall is more bad than good.
Realtime strategy is not a mainstream game genre nowadays and will served by a niche market and their players. And if something goes wrong with it, it will definitely end badly. That is the truth.
Relic should listen to your forum experts, because they know a lot about historical contexts and about the video game industry. If not, you will receive a evil billed soon.
I have now moved the post to the right topic. Thank you 
Age games have never gone for realism
For the most part already. If not, they could have ignored her description of timeages. And as you see now, they want to present the middle ages and need the necessary help from the forum community.
