Units can totally be multicolored and still readable!
See?
EDIT: Here’s another example
EDIT2: And another
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Actually you can nearly Not even See the how or sword 
That’s a rifle, and the weapon visibility has nothing to do with the units being multi-colored. The point is that you can still tell which player the unit belongs to even if it’s got more than one color on it. It doesn’t have to be a monochrome blob.
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Then you really haven’t been following the franchise’s evolution. Have you really played the previous parts AT ALL? If you had, you wouldn’t be asking such a question as it does not reinforce your point, on the contrary, it refutes it.
And I don’t care if twenty years ago aztecs had knights or huns paladins. I am not expecting to see such things again nor do I want to. If you do, you can stay as a fossil of the 90’s and let this franchise move on to more realistic and accurate iterations as it has already been doing with aom and aoe3. You won’t be missed.
wrong again, they did deal with historical accuracy at least as is evident by all the travelling that they said they did around the world, exactly for that puporse. aCcEpT iT
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Im sorry now i See why the devs went for huge Units (visibility) xD
Well thats true, you can recognize the Player. However maybe PPL who are colorblind might have Problems, Not sure
Nothing about it is realistic, it is literally a game about fiction, lol
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Many unit designs are quite realistic, especially on the greeks and egyptians. Very anachronistic, yes, with hellenic warriors in what’s supposed to be the bronze age, but still quite realistically portrayed.
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AOE2 did not have huge units not to mention huge weapons. In fact you can hardly see the weapon of late swordsmen. Weapon visibility is not the sole factor one can recognize the units. As long as their overall designs are very different you can always distinguish them.
That’s why I’m not a fan of “make the weapons huge so that people can recognize them”. That is more like a lazy effort without having to carefully diversify the clothing, color, stance, etc.
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Champions always look like champions. Pikeman have always the same design.
In Age IV blacksmith upgrades will change armor, weapons and shields. Also, each faction will have a different skin for each units.
All of this means that it’s important to be able to recognise fast what type of unit is, and what level of upgrades it has. That’s the reason the weapons are a bit oversized.
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Fictional setting ≠ non-realistic style
You can look at other “fictional” games. For example, Warcraft has overly-ornate armours with impractically huuuuge pauldrons (Blizzard’s favorite), and swords as wide as planks:
Warhammer, on the contrary, has a more realistic high medieval (bretonnia)/early renaissance (empire) style, though it still has overly-ornate and impractical armours for the “high fantasy” races.
Now AOM is like:
Even the fantasy creatures have equipments that fit the actual classical era:
This may be a better demonstration:
Heroes of might and magic 3, which is of course a high fantasy game, but the human units have realistic styles.
Heroes of might and magic 6, similar high fantasy setting, same unit type (even the same tier), typical “high-fantasy” style.
Heroes of might and magic 7, still a very similar setting and the same unit, but this one tends more towards the “realistic” end than the previous one.
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I can recognize that. Diversifying the unit types with more varieties (which aoe2 does not have) might be more challenging. I don’t know how practical other methods are, but “huge weapons” might be the easiest.
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I was referring to age 4 not 2. Tbh If i didnt know age 2 i probably wouldnt BE knowing which depicts which. I think at least for some Units.
Of course there are other ways than Schalung weapons. Which ist still worked on
I think graphic and visual effect is very important, but the AOE4 graphic is not for 2021 year and I think it is for 2015.
Please add more details and add better texture, and correct ratio between unit and building
I like AOE4 has reality design, but unfortunately the now design is very cartoonish 
thanks