The gameplay is monotonous and difficult. This made it difficult for many players to play Empire 4. Due to the decreasing number of players in Empire 4, opponents are matched in different tiers. The gameplay is so difficult that most people either cheat or abandon the game.
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Do you still play the game… or do you cheat?
Try new civs. Play with homies.
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Although the RTS genre is not the easiest to learn, AoE4 is one of the most affordable RTS games.
While there are issues to be resolved regarding cheats and matchmaking (among other things) the game is still affordable and there are other game modes you can enjoy.
And by the way, justifying cheating in PvP (for whatever reason) is inappropriate behavior and rejected by the community.
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I don’t find it monotonous. Every match develops differently and you can always try to improve your own playstyle or maybe your communication with allies.
About difficulty: try to see it like a sports club in competition. People play football or other sports in their own bracket. Some people are happy to play from time to time and against a town 10 km away, others train for years and years, get lots of money (depending on popularity) and compete with the best of the best.
The more you train the easier certain things get. Take hotkeys: if you train using them you can start eco upgrades or training units in a super short time. If you don’t, then you need to find the building, find the icon and click on it, which is obviously less efficient. Everyone is free to do it that way, but then you will hardly ever be able to compete with the ones that mastered this.
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all civs i have try ,i often see match
Someone finally gets it.
I play AOE3 on the third difficulty level and win every time.
I play AOE4 on the second difficulty level and the AI has HUGE ARMIES ALL THE TIME. I’ve given up on 4.
There’s what, six difficulty levels? Why can’t the first three be more like AOE3 and actually be fun to play?
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I thought everyone was saying that the AI hardly even makes army or attacks at like every difficulty level?
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One of the biggest attraction of Age 4 is that each game is different, like a game of chess. And that’s why it has a great replayability appeal. I don’t think its monotonous, but it can be a bit difficult for beginners.
The player base is not decreasing at all, in every month of 2024 we had more players than in the same months of 2023.
If you can, bring a friend to play with you. It’s extremely fun to combine strategies and play with a friend in team matches.
i mean ,if you want win,you should use the only one playstyle ,so it monotonous
but i havnt friend play with
Every time my army meets their army their army is 15-25% bigger. And their cities too. And they raid earlier than me too, don’t know where they’re getting the units for that. I’m an experienced Age player. Finished both the AOM and AOE3 campaigns on moderate.
I have hundreds of hours in various Civ games over the past 10 to 20 years. I still would get my behind kicked if I played Civ III or IV (the two I haven’t touched on much) until I invested all the time I could into figuring out how those games work. Being good at other games in the franchise doesn’t necessarily translate in raw terms.
If the AI is beating you in every possible respect, and you’re not on one of the resource-cheating difficulties (the last two or three, from memory), then you need practise. That’s all. No judgement from me. I stay at the lower difficulties (though the Campaigns I do on Intermediate), and that’s challenge enough for me 
I find AoEIV easier than AOE2DE, despite my much longer history with 2. One of the things I like about IV over 2 is you don’t need a billion vills to maintain a decent economy.
AoE3 and AoM are different enough that I don’t compare their difficulty to 2/IV.
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On the 2nd difficulty level? Not one of the cheating ones?
Maybe watch a replay and you can see how they’re getting more units than you. Compare villager numbers, floating resources, and number of production buildings, because something is going very wrong. Or even just look at the after game time lines, maybe you just aren’t making villagers, that’s what a couple of my friends always struggle with.
That difficulty level is beatable with like not even 20 APM so not much speed or multitasking is even needed.
I can’t really speak to the AoE3 AI, I have not tried it since the DE came out.
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I’m constantly building villagers five at a time. Constantly.
Maybe I’m attacking too soon before I’ve built up a big enough army?
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Hmm hard to say without seeing a game.
The most important things though are always making villagers, and then always making military.
Making military can get bottlenecked either by not having enough resources or not having enough production buildings to spend the resources.
If you ever have lots of resources in the bank then you probably don’t have enough buildings or your buildings are idle.
Microing units, and even unit composition and strategy are all less important than the above.
@CagierNebula24 But he is given advice (a video was posted to him) and he does not follow it. 
My friends and I have noticed a change in the AI difficulty. We think it was the 7/11/24 update that dorked up the difficulty settings. The first level is too easy and the 2nd level - which is what we always played - is much, much harder than what it used to be. We played a few games with the difficulty set to Hard to compare the difference and they seem to be the same. The intermediate and Hard levels are pretty much the same diffaculty now. And Easy is too easy. You shouldn’t have to use mods to win at a game. We were hoping the issue would have been fixed by now, but it hasn’t so I am replying on a few threads. There are 4 of us that play this game and we all agree that the Intermediate AI diffaculty has changed. Very frustrating. We used to have a lot of fun playing this game together. Now not so much because Easy AI is too easy and Intermetdiate AI is too hard. Again we don’t use mods or want to use mods. Do we need to find a different game to play?
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