Almost the One Year Anniversary, Yet Still

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:

  1. Great Wall Gatehouse loses defensive weapons after being destroyed and rebuilt.

  2. 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!)

  3. 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.

  4. Placing a Keep too close to a stone wall causes the wall segments to become visually jagged and misaligned.

  5. Chinese Imperial Officials often glitch and stand around endlessly without collecting taxes…sometimes right next to a building waiting to have taxes collected.

  6. 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.

  7. French trade carts and ships only return gold, despite toggling to a different resource.

  8. On screen notifications shows that an enemy landmark is destroyed when it is repaired.

  9. Scoreboard and timeline are inaccurate at best.

  10. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.)

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  1. Location of resources in Boulder Bay map sometimes heavily favor one player/team.

  2. Location of trading post in Black Forest map often heavily favors one player/team.

  3. 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)

  4. 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

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

  4. 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.

  5. Can we make maps a little more natural and dynamic? Some of the maps look really robotic (like Black Forest).

  6. Bring back the “combat” and “economy” modes on the Mini Map.

  7. 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. :roll_eyes:

3 Likes

This is actually intended. I believe to prevent landmark sniping.

I am on board with most of your other suggestions though.
Only thing I disagree with is to have more unique units. Coming from AoE3, too many UU just make everything more chaotic. In the end it feels good to have bread and butter units to be accentuated by UU.
But of course this is a really subjective thing to discuss, we cannot possibly agree on everything.

I would also love to see some little ponds or lakes. Also birds would be great.

The AI opponent is a complete idiot :smiley:
Unfortunately at this point we have to wait for the AI fixes. I really want the AI in AoE4 to be similar to the AI in AoE2DE.

Yeah the AI needs work, it has been slowly getting a little better.

Keep in mind the AoE2 AI used to be completely worthless. It has received improvements for over 20 years at this point. Still, I don’t think it will take that long these days to get it in a good spot.

A new Patch is coming out soon :slight_smile:
Changelog Update 24916 :
https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age_of_empires_iv_update_24916_season3/

In the AI tab a lot of nice changes :slight_smile:

4 Likes

While you wanting issues fixed is completely understandable, more often than not this simply wasn’t the case.

Plenty of high-profile issues in plenty of games. They just got fixed slower, if they did at all.

does age of mythology 2 coming??

It’s most frustrating when you reported a bug, received a reply that the team “will look into it”, then topic closed and nothing followed up, even tho it’s a small bug that’s super ez to reproduce and work on. There is an impression that the team behind this game is too busy to care / doesn’t really care about polishing the game. Here is a bug that could be added to your long list:

Military academy tech doesn’t affect Clocktower sieges - Age of Empires IV / IV - Report a Bug - Age of Empires Forum

[Bug] Clocktower sieges are not affected by military academy - Age of Empires IV / IV - Report a Bug - Age of Empires Forum

@HighPingLord we care very much! Closing bug threads helps keep track of the ones responded to and are logged in our system. It’s just untenable to keep every single thread up-to-date on our progress, especially with other work that needs to be done. Unfortunately the workflow is not as simple as EASILY IDENTIFY BUG → BUG EASILY FIXED → THROW IT INTO NEXT PATCH. But we do what we can when we can per production schedules.

That said, you are heard. There are a lot of things in discussion. I am personally a big proponent of transparency.

2 Likes

We the clients are expecting a bit more action than just being heard especially since things (still many other things, I should probably make another post for them) that can be considered polishing touches that haven’t yet arrived to a 1 year old game.

The threads shouldn’t be closed anymore until they are fixed. A quick reply from Savage to say it’s been seen is good, but I don’t see the reason to close it. Many times I have additional info to add to a bug report, but it’s closed. Or I want to bring up that it’s still bugged, and it’s closed.

I would also like to see the “known bugs” list updated. It’s referenced in official posts now and then, but when I look at it it’s extremely incomplete. It’s missing hundreds of bugs that have come up and been fixed or are still unfixed. It would be amazing to see the bugs added to that list simultaneously as Savage says “they will look into it” because then there’s some accountability. When the thread is closed it becomes lost and there’s no record to us that it’s been documented.

1 Like

This ^

Closing a bug thread implies all the context are provided and its outcome is determined. Being seen does not indicate the outcome (won’t be fixed / will be fixed / gathered enough information?). Neither is it possible for anyone to provide further information for the devs to work on.
In my case the bug has been reported and closed 5 months ago but still is an issue. This is why you give out the impression of negligence.

Correct and correct. It’s not all up to me.

If I close a thread with a “thanks”, that means we have enough information on a bug. If I close a thread with “contact support”, that’s what needs to happen.

This is still true. Things aren’t instant.

2 Likes