Bringing this thread back to its topic;
Death animations are something that really matters, in my opinion. Repeatable, satisfying, they burn into your memory as part of the overall experience and will stick with you for many years as a vague feeling of nolstalgia upon encountering something similar.
A dragoon turning into goo is always satisfying.
And so is seeing a Trebuchet fall apart into pieces.
I think we do have some nice ones in AOE4. Love seeing the Elephant flop to its side with the guys falling over. Camel ones are cool too. And most of them don’t feel intrusive, and maintain an appropriate amount of “noise”.
Siege Engines is where I feel they are lacking. As far as I can tell, the decision to make them all explode is a shortcut. With human infantry units, they share their death animations through the use of a human rig and so, can reuse animations through it. Differently modelled and rigged Siege units though? You’d have to have individual animations for each one of them. So bypassing any animation and models, and going for some wooden effect is much less time consuming.
It is somewhat of a bummer, since these are meant to be “special” and expensive units. The explosion of wood doesn’t entirely feel appropriate or all that interesting. This is unlikely to change now, but I would say this contributes to the feeling of units that you gain access to later into the game, feeling mundane and kind of boring.