This game is riddled with bugs, some that totally ruin the experience. I apologize for not making separate threads, but there’s just too much. I’ve been playing since launch, but started taking notes for the past month. I mainly play solo against AI or with friends against AI. I’ve also included some suggestions. If you’d like me to elaborate or provide pictures/video of anything, let me know.
Bugs:
-
Great Wall Gatehouse loses defensive weapons after being destroyed and rebuilt.
-
Stone Wall Towers, Keeps, and Outposts STILL stop firing weapons after taking damage. (My favorite is having an enemy Kahn run the perimeter of my town, pinging my towers for 1 damage, and disabling them!)
-
Often, when more than one villager is assigned to build a Stone Wall or multiple queued up towers, one or more villagers will walk to the location and then stand and do nothing or continuously pace back and forth.
-
Placing a Keep too close to a stone wall causes the wall segments to become visually jagged and misaligned.
-
Chinese Imperial Officials often glitch and stand around endlessly without collecting taxes…sometimes right next to a building waiting to have taxes collected.
-
The sections of wall underlapping the Great Wall Gatehouse can be destroyed, allowing enemy units to walk “through” the gate. This isn’t immediately noticeable as these sections of wall aren’t visible or selectable.
-
French trade carts and ships only return gold, despite toggling to a different resource.
-
On screen notifications shows that an enemy landmark is destroyed when it is repaired.
-
Scoreboard and timeline are inaccurate at best.
-
Monks, Shaman, etc will freeze and remain locked in an animation for the duration of the game, and will appear to float/glide instead of walking. (This does not apply to mounted religious units).
Maybe Bugs
-
Removing and placing a Relic back into a Monastery, etc counts as capturing a Relic every single time. Relics captured should be the total number in your possession at end of game.
-
Scouts can’t be deleted. They make a dying sound, but their health just gets reduced to 1. (This was mildly inconvenient when I accidentally made 15 Scouts instead of trade carts the other day.)
-
In team games, an opponent is not defeated when all landmarks are destroyed. You must completely wipe them off the map or destroy the entire team’s landmarks.
-
The Hill and Dale map (from what I understand) is supposed to generate a hill with 1 large entrance and 2 small entrances. However, it often generates incomplete cliffs around the perimeter creating additional (very) small entrances.
General Complaints
-
Location of resources in Boulder Bay map sometimes heavily favor one player/team.
-
Location of trading post in Black Forest map often heavily favors one player/team.
-
Villagers hidden in fog of war or within a unit’s line of sight, but out of weapon range can infinitely start rebuilding a landmark as its repeatedly destroyed. (This is annoying if I’m focused on an event or battle elsewhere. There must be some way to counter/smooth this out like a short cooldown timer on rebuilds)
-
The AI programming is awful. It seems like a lot of time was spent on perfecting their nuisance attacks on villagers and nothing else. Often an AI army will be en route to some waypoint, and will totally ignore attackers until they reach that waypoint. When defending their base, sometimes their entire army will just run a tight patrol around their town center and ignore an attacking army. Also, the French AI never pulls resources from their Guild Hall.
Suggestions
-
Match countdown timer should be longer than 2 seconds. That’s not even enough time to react if you catch a last minute mistake in the game settings. (Even 5 seconds would be fine).
-
Can we limit the max pursuit distance (or add back ‘defensive stance’)? I’m tired of focusing somewhere else for a moment, only to look back and find half my army endlessly chasing a villager or one of the many AI Scouts that aimlessly wander.
-
Units that are already in combat should only pursue other units if they are attacked. Often units that are already engaged in combat with a Keep or other defenses, will break away to go chase non-combat units passing by like trade carts, villagers, etc. Whyyyy?
-
There’s not enough diversity between civilizations. It feels like the units are the same, but just have different skins. IMO AoE 2 nailed this with some civilizations having limited or no access to certain units and technology upgrades, but of course you could play with “All Techs” enabled if desired.
-
Can we make maps a little more natural and dynamic? Some of the maps look really robotic (like Black Forest).
-
Bring back the “combat” and “economy” modes on the Mini Map.
-
Add more gaia/animals to maps.
I can only hope that some of this is being fixed in the next major patch coming out in a week. I miss the days when games had to actually be complete on launch because they were pressed on a disc.