AoE4 is less interesting than AoE2 because its units lack ‘coolness’ and ‘personality’

You want a game like Age of Mythology but it’s sooo hard to balance, and how successful has a game like that been? He was not even in “Red bull Wololo”

ah yes the good old lets use esports tournaments for a game that never targeted that demographic like aoe4 is as metric of success, news for you, aom is still talked about 20 years after release, while aoe4 is instead heading down the aoe online route so far

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Age IV has the most concurrent players of any game except AoE II: DE. On Steam alone.

This fearmongering has to stop.

Where is AoM talked about? It’s a great game but outside of its niche, where? What metrics are at using? That people care about it? For sure. That it’s a good game? Heck, I still remember it. It’s a good game.

Balance is important. People like to whine about esports this or pro players that, but the reality is that balance matters. It’s fun to play overpowered things. It’s less fun to play against them. People making suggestions like many seen in this thread aren’t thinking of the “playing against” part.

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“Agree to disagree” “Respect personal preferences” “Number does not tell everything” at its finest.

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most esport players comes from aoe 2 and not much from other ones and because that is dragged down as the main focus but at the cost of making sothing unique or evolve the series like is happening with aoe 4.

A mi algo que me dolio fue que en octubre durante el aniversario de age of empires, cuando tenian que hablar de age of empires 3, no solo los presentadores no sabian nada del juego, sino que se saltaron todo el tremendo parche de aniversario que cambio un monton de cosas dentro del juego, es como si el trabajo de los desarrolladores no hubiese valido nada


Y cosas como estas demuestran de lo que hablo (perdon por los bajos graficos mi pc no da para mucho) la artilleria otomana gano skins unicas (esto puede significar que en un futuro hagan lo mismo para otras civs) y los landwerh basicamente son el reemplazo del ballestero para los alemanes (aunque es un seudo mosquetero algo raro)

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Sí,decían que el galeón era una galera tipo aoe 2 y poco más no dijeron nada,más perdidos estaban…

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nope bcuz the game still an alpha and most player even pros knows it but tourney money said otherwise. i dont blame them because tourney and comp scene in their home rts are in decay for x reasons.

yup but after you make something fun and interesting to play first or any subtle change in the stats will not work not matter the number of balance patches you add it.

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Recuerda que al monitor lo llamaron galeon artillado, eso ya es pasarse xd

Yeah, hard for me to get immersed in the game when the buttons are just a cold grid of unrelatable modern day icons rather than windows into the soul of the game

No AoE4 buy from me until I can look at the UI and see colors, as if we just walked through the door in Wizard of Oz

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AoM is actually the game most of the playerbase can relate to. It’s the link between AoE 2 and 3 but didn’t get much traction mostly due to being a spinoff. Let’s see if Retold can change that.

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To me, these look really boring, but that’s not even the thing. It is not about how “cool” units look, but about how the readability from the User perspective works in the game and it is funny that everyone here is talking about pure aesthetics forgetting that this is an actual RTS with a competitive focus.

Funny to see people here bombarding AOM with player numbers and esports but rarely touch the other game that AOE4 is actually compared to in OP (because of what?)

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I personally like it because I love fantasy / mythology more than I love history. But it’s a bit of a claim to make that AoM is the game most can relate to - we have people who love 2, 3 and even Online.

People are always going to rate on their own preferences. For some this is balance and competitive play, for others this is single player campaigns, for others it’s modding potential, and so on (of course with overlap).

But none of that changes the fact that balance vs. fun is an important aspect of any game, nomatter how much “esports” or “competitive” players get a bad name. I’m a lifelong “casual” player (and have suffered many, many stereotypes from being a casual RTS player over the years), and I still believe that something has to be in some way balanced for it to be fun.

Maybe if IV had more single player content, more folks would be happy. Single player content only has to be balanced against itself. I’d be a fan of that.

i think aoe4 units are cooler and realistic looking but i agree on their ui pics they can be improved

I refer to personal observation here because I see a lot of AoE 2 v 4 (or 3 v 4 yada yada) discussions but no matter which Age came you come from, people in general only have good things to say about Myth.

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I am about to write something similar on the original topic and then I found myself writing these a year ago.

Thing is, real history is far from “cool”. Every “cool” history you see from entertainment is overly exaggerated. Look at AOE1 and 2. There is unrealistically excessive use of emblems, capes, plumes, etc. Especially in AOE2 a lot of units have “player color on white” design as if people were really so clean and tidy. And there are anachronistic elements like round shields and morion helmets all over the place just to make the units stand out.

AOE4 goes for the opposite direction for more “realistic” and “accurate” unit designs (though not so much in other aspects of the visuals). Within the same faction, unarmored units look alike and armored units look alike. So they distinguish them with overly large weapons. With 8 (now 10) different sets of units it becomes even more difficult. So that’s why every unit from the same civ always has the same design and only becomes golden and more ornate with upgrades.

Also in the era of 3D games it is a usual practice to use the same skeleton for several different characters. That enables faster production of more characters of course but also makes them more “uniform”. On a smaller number 2D sprites they could hand craft each unit to make every one of them stand out. This also applies to animations. AOE1 had very different animations even on different directions. AOE2 less so but the upgrade lines of the same unit still have different animations, and huskarls and man-at-arms do not have the same animation just because they are both “sword and shield”. This is lost since 3D games like AOM, where un-upraded hoplites still hit as if they have a shield but the model really does not. Same for AOE3. More diverse unit skeletons only become a thing since DE. Before that units of the same role all have the same one or two skeletons.

Again this is not to say the current visual is perfectly fine. On the contrary, this is to say it has huge potentials and rooms for improvements. It takes more time and efforts of course but we are in 2023 not 1997.

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The problem with this argument is… that there are only others four AoE games. Aoe 1 has a pathing that makes it unplayable and AoM doesn’t even have a definitive edition.

So AoE4 only compete with AoE2 and AoE3, one have more players and other less.

Great points, but I do agree it could be better. AoE4 looks much more modern, but some units just look a bit too bland imo. It’s still a step up from aoe2 though. That game had WAY less units to design and yet some look pretty boring, like halberdier

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Sí,dijeron “a tiene un cañón de asedio en la proa,entonces debe de ser un galleón artillado” XD y todos los de aoe 3 tipo:

(No te pido que te conozcas todas las unidades de aoe 3,pero si no van a meter a algún conocedor del juego tipo Aussie Drongo o Samurai Revolution,que mínimo se conozcan unidades básicas y no parezcan que solo por jugar aoe 2 esten allí)…

Yeah, that’s true…everyone can criticize all aoe’s with each other, but everyone agrees that aom’s great…xd

Yes, that’s true… now it’s harder to make more differentiated units…

AoM has Retold, but they haven’t shown anything of him yet and then you have AoEO who goes to his ball and they have barely shown much of the Indians…