Starting today, you’ll be able to install Update 8324 and enjoy the latest features, balance updates and fixes Age of Empires IV has to offer!
If you’ve seen the Age of Empires IV Community Roadmap, then you might be surprised to hear that Winter 2021 was coming early this year (for both the Northern and Southern hemispheres). What can we say? We were really excited to get the Winter 2021 update into your hands!
With this update, we’re bringing a few key feature additions and changes based on your early feedback, along with bug fixes and exploits referenced on various Age channels.
Update 8324 also introduces a substantial number of balance updates. Many of these updates (more than 100!) are in response to callouts you’ve made and will promote challenging and exciting opportunities regardless of which civilization you’re playing as or against.
Before You Update: Please note that upon updating to build version 8324, you will no longer be able to utilize replays or saves from previous builds. Campaign progression will not be impacted.
We look forward to continue hearing your feedback. You can post in our Age IV forums with your thoughts at any time.
Definitely worth a read and after a quick glance - looks… more promising than I was expecting I guess. Still, when it comes to balancing changes some issues seem to be addressed partially or not at all. The same goes for various minor features and customization options, expected to be there already day1.
Horsemen for their cost were already inefficient. Pretty sure the devs are just running their little mindless test tool, and not testing Archers versus Horsemen in real world situations. Losing 30 health to gain 1 ranged armor is terribly insufficient. Horsemen cost needs to be reduced to even be usable with this change. Welcome to Age of Rangecraft, namely crossbows.
Not sure how I feel about Sacred Sites being removed from Black Forest in favor of Gold mounds. I feel having sacred site win condition adds a lot of depth to the game as another potential win condition as well as acting as an Anti-turtle mechanic (forcing players to interact more, in a sense). Removing it from this map is not good for the consistency of the game in my opinion. Just from a systems perspective, it’s generally not good for 1 map to have a different set of win conditions (i.e. newer players can be confused or forget why they can’t go for a sacred-site win in the castle age if they wanted). Not to mention 1 of delhi’s unique techs (Sanctity) is useless on Black Forest now?
Will Black Forest still be in the ranked/matchmaking pool or relegated to a custom-game only function like the implementation of in-game player Scores?
I’m not sure what they mean by “We found through playtesting that the map plays more to the gameplay intention of Black Forest without the Sacred Sites victory condition…” I don’t view sacred sites as a gold generation mechanic (although that’s a nice bonus for it to have). Players can trade with neutral market and collect relics as well for indefinite gold income. I’m not sure how removing indefinite sources of gold (sacred sites) with definite sources (gold sites) improves Black Forest gameplay.
Player still cant choose targets with town center/castle/tower. If you want game to be more dynamic, then you should make rams cheaper or smth, but cutting out such a great micromanagement mechanic as targeting units is a bad idea in general imo.
The horseman nerf is also out of nowhere. Most games are about all-in pushes with rams or snowball with springalds/bombards that counters basicly everything.
I didn’t expect that they didn’t fix the wrong loading animation of Nest of Bees. I am sad. Although many other fixes feel great, some also surprised me, such as Horseman’s changes.
As for Springald, maybe improving Crossbowmen will make Springald look bad? I’m not sure. In short, I look forward to subsequent changes!
This horseman nerf makes the mongol even weaker they were in feudal and even more non-cavalry civ. The only option now is mangudai harass which is costly and really risky.
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