Adding the unnecessary but joyful things to the game

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

The game is good but right now I feel like it restricts some of the “joy” of Age of Empires. While by no means essential things, these are indeed some aspects that make AoE what it is.

A lot of these may be “unnecessary”, but in a bid to bring new players to the RTS genre, AoE4 doesn’t do any service to long term Age players who they claim have been instrumental in the development of AoE4. Yes, in a competitive setting it doesn’t matter what’s red or Blue, whether an animal is a sheep or a cow as long as it has 250 food in it. But these things have been an integral part of what AoE is.

Here are the things I really want, so that this AoE game is like the AoE games I have loved since childhood. Feel free to suggest more. I hope the devs read this and give us these down the line.

  1. Changing color of your faction: yeah, it doesn’t matter in a competitive setting if I’m red or blue. Only strategy should matter, right? Well… no. I can spend hours playing the game with blue units, but I don’t feel as happy as when I’m red. Sometimes even yellow or purple. I don’t like blue ALL the time. Sigh.

  2. Viewing the map after the game: yes, unnecessary since the game is over. I’ve either won or lost. But please, won’t you let me gloat over the map and look at my units, their shiny upgrades, their stats. I wanna see my town that’s doing so well. I want to see the idle villagers gazing over the deforestation. I want to see these things! Why can I not see the map after a game ends?

  3. Favorite military unit in post-game stats: did I mostly play archers, or elephants, or Lancers? I wanna know what my most created unit was.

  4. Let me pick a random civ?

  5. Let me ungarrison units from buildings one at a time? Why can’t I do this in AoE4 when I could easily do this in all other Age games?

  6. Let me zoom up to the clouds and down to the berries. Guys, look at AoE3DE right now. Beautiful zoom. You can zoom down to see the mustache on the janissary and you can zoom all the way out to see your entire base at a go.

  7. Siege destruct animation: my siege weapons go poof. AoE2 DE has better siege animation than this. You spent so much effort animating building destruction so perfectly but you didn’t do anything for the siege?

  8. I want a scenario editor to compare units and tweak stats and just have fun messing with units.

  9. Just sheep and deer is so boring. Can we please have other huntables and herdables on the map. Cows maybe? Or you know, huntable bison or yak or whatever. Just not sheep and deer.

  10. Some cannon physics… archer got hit by a cannon and behaved like if was shot by an arrow. Where’s the conservation of momentum? I have a genuine question here: is adding physics to cannonfire going to mess with gameplay somehow? All the emphasis on realism and such realistic ways to die for the units, and yet, when they are hit by a cannonball, all realism is gone!

  11. Why do my archers slide forward like they’re on ice before they shoot an arrow?

  12. And why do torches and cannon projectiles trajectories not have a parabolic shape. Instead they have sharp interpolation points. Even on good computers.

  13. 'A.I. hardest has reached the Imperial age". Which one? There are 4 hardest AIs in my game. Dammit, which one went imperial? Can we have AI personalities? Makes much more sense to give each AI player a name. Right now I’m not sure this notification even helps.

  14. Taunts: add player taunts. Also AI taunts…Queen Isabella in AOE3 is a meme… “Is that your explorer I saw napping in a field? He needs a spanking!” Would love the AI in AoE4 do these. Some of the most entertaining things about AoE3 was when AI players made these funny taunts! Hehe.

AoE is not company of heroes. I don’t play it just for the strategy or the competition (I play the game to relax and bully my friend the AI)…but it’s so much more. For the competitive player, its an RTS, but for others, it’s a relaxing game to maybe build a big base in and enjoy the views. For me it’s just a way to be active without actually thinking too much. There’s a lot going on in life and the reason I play is not to optimize a build order, it’s to do Age of Empires things and chill.

I have been completing masteries and stuff… and it’s fun. But I still don’t think this product is quite there yet. But I hope it will be soon.

10 Likes
2

I play campaign, skirmish and custom games I host so I am always blue…

I think I’m in the same boat I am enjoying the game a lot but then there are things that have been missed that I dont think you notice until they are not there!

3

All of your points except 8 are so called Quality of Life features. Lots of them will eventually since there are several topics of most of them in this forum and probably on other sites already also.

8 is a missing feature that - if i am not misstaken was already addressed by the Devteam as a feature which will be implemented at a later stage. Same as Ranked ladder and more Custom Game options.

And saying that comp players dont care about if they are red or blue - we care, but the game is not unplayable due to lack of that.

Its is not the most vital, but Quality of life.

4

Luck runningDuck said, these QoL features (huh… I just noticed that looks like it should be a Klingon word) are likely to come later than, say, mechanics bugs and balance issues…
BUT much love for continuing the campaign to bring as much enjoyment to the game as possible for us “filthy casuals” :wink:

A few more that I would like to see:

  • Make the key back-up out of menus (one layer at a time) until reaching the base menu where it then pulls up the exit menu box.
  • Give me some kind of visual or audio queue when a match is waiting on me to “Ready”-up. As is, the Notifications window (and, Mastery window… and Settings window… and Profile window…) cover up the match window / ready button. Just, like, give me a more obvious clue that the countdown to the match has started at least?
  • Nix the pre-defined colors for banners. Give us at least the ol’ 8-bit color palette?
  • While we’re talking about the banners… more sigils, frames, patterns, shapes, etc. Attach one those to every achievement. Have an absolutely silly number of customizations options. (Compare to, say, the banner customization of the third installment of popular dungeon crawler that shall remain nameless.) Never under-estimate the entertainment value of such things. I say this as someone that has probably spent as much time on paint jobs in MechWarrior Online as actually playing matches.
  • More stats. Make those post-match tables interactive. Let me isolate my own graph, split it out into stacked filled-area maps of component scores and zoom in to see the events causing a delta. Maybe, dare I say, allow me to see my score and the scores of my team (or even the comps in a me vs CPUs? maybe even graphs?) in game in realtime?

Just sayin’. Not vital. But… would be fun.

Now back to farming banner aesthetic unlocks… thinking about going for that diamond background in the HRE mastery… :wink:

All the best! Go. Play. Enjoy.

5

Have I got news for you guys! Go to settings, I think under game UI there is a selection called Unique Colours. You can’t choose your colour but it assigns a rand colour to each player rather than team colours. It works better for coordinating attacks with allies. “Pushing yellow” etc. And of course it changes it up for you from being just blue and red all the time

1 Like
6

Yeah that is what I use. Team colors has always been something I never liked in an rts. If you are lucky you will get a color you like.

1 Like
7

Yes I do use that but it still makes me blue every game as I am player one. I’d like the ability to just pick my colour like green or purple for instance.