The game is in BETA at best (and that’s sad for a 2 year old game).
I come from Age of Empires 2 and I can say the game is miles behind, not because of the gameplay (which has it’s problem) but from a development point.
-
Many quality of life mechanics are missing, such as:
a) A hotkey when you press it your drag selection only selects villagers just like in AoE2 with ALT. In AoE2 there is military only drag selection but when you want to select only villagers you press the ALT key and drag. b) A quick ungarrison hotkey for units in rams.
c) A lot of hotkeys are missing (ex. one of many is select the Golden Horn Tower, when you want to change the waypoint, why should I dedicate a control group or time to find the landmark instead of being selected with my mercenary houses?)
d) Zhu Xi’s Legacy unique horses share the same hotkey and you can’t change it.
e) Many more that I can’t think of right now (I will update it as it goes). -
Team ranked maps, especially in 4v4 ARE WAY TO DAMN BIG. Without knights you can’t find damage before the enemy Town Centre is built. There is a lot of empty space that you will never use. This make infantry play very situational and bad, you found a way to make infantry viable, witch in AoE2 is not, and you ruin it in team games.
-
The maps in the pool right now are all open maps, no diversity in the map pool. I still wonder why there is no vote for maps like AoE2 and a rotation every 2-3 even 4 weeks.
-
You can’t see unit stats in the Tech Tree… why?
-
Why does Attack Move work like this??? When you try to micro in a fight and you accidently attack move on a unit or building all your units try to kill that single unit or building before attack anything else. Imagine trying to raid and attack move on a farm.
-
When you want to build a building and then a mill/ lumber camp/ mining camp the villagers doesn’t start to automatically gather after they finished building.
-
Observer/ Replay for team games it’s BAD. You can’t see how many villagers every one has, you have to select them one by one. The observer in AoE2 is perfect, copy it and expand on it.
-
You can’t see how many points you have in your profile, only way to see them is after the game or using a third party app (ex. aoe4world.com)
-
You can’t search for your friends in your friends list, you have to find them in the list to invite them.
-
You release new content, you are a top seller on Steam and, as of now, you have for 2 days straight server problems with them overflowing. This is how you lose the new players.
-
I am not even going to talk about the modding tools, I am not using them but I saw a lot of posts complaining about them. I made a lot of mods for AoE2 and I understand the struggle for the people in AoE4.
-
Most importantly NO “NO SNOW” MOD. This is more of a personal problem but why not have people choose there own biome, like the terrain mods in AoE2. What’s the point for the DLC biomes and the special event biomes if you can’t use them in rank??
I am not going to talk about bugs, balance, path finding and input lag on the commands, these are things that are going to be fixed with time I only talked about features. I don’t want AoE4 to be copy of AoE2, just borrow the quality of life things.
Personally, I don’t like the hero unit in Jeanne d’ Arc (in my opinion the King, Khan, Mehter and even banner men are better designed hero units) and the Order of the Dragon which I think will be a balance nightmare between high and low elo.
The game cut a lot of corners and still not deliver.
Saying all this, I really enjoy the game and the new civs. I have a lot of fan playing with friends the new civs and as a Greek having the Byzantines in the game and have them speak Greek is awesome. I like the game and I will continue playing it, these are just some things that in my opinion need to be fixed.
P. S.: My point is not AoE2 is better, but AoE4 could have been a lot more improved. I would like to see in the comments more suggestions. I am sure a lot of people in the comments will start “crying” and defend the game like they did with Spirit of the Law when he only voiced his opinion while pointing to facts. Don’t be like this and just try to make the game better. Criticism makes us better!
Note to Devs: please stop adding new things and fix the existing ones!!! You have AoE2 with 20 years of experience and feedback, you can borrow things from it, like you did with the walls in the recent patch!