One of the biggest factors that held AoE2 back from being the premier competitive RTS title is the variety. With 40 civs at this point, it is completely impossible to balance the game. With each of the 40 civs offering unique bonuses as well as a unique unit that often don’t fit well into the rock-paper-scissors gameplay, the balance still to this day remains horrendous.
Now, I like how AOE 4 is adding variance to existing civs, expanding on how a civ plays instead of forcing another redundant civ that doesn’t add much to the game. I kind of feel like adding one or two landmarks would have took care of adding playstyle variance, but I don’t exactly know how things will play out.
BUT I am extremely wary of how drastically different they will be. Will they fundamentally switch things up to a point where they are no different from forced diversity in AoE2 (absolutely demolishing balancing along with it)? Adding a civ variance gives me this uneasy feeling that they will fundamentally switch up how the vanilla counterpart plays, not just tweak the playstyle.
With just 10 civs, win/loss percentage is looking much better for AoE4. I am a huge proponent of slowly adding new civs, balancing the existing ones as perfectly as you can (getting them to as close to 50% win rate across all matchups, balanced around the top 25% of the player skill level where skillsets necessary for good RTS gameplay actually shines through… but I digress).
So I like the idea of adding 2 new civs on top of 4 playstyle variance to existing civs.
But I HATE the idea of essentially adding 6 civs at the same time.
I guess we’ll wait for more info.