Gotta say, after playing the game yesterday, i was amazed of how good and fun it was.
New wall mechanic-10/10
New civ designs 10/10
I am yet to try the campaign, but looking forward to it!
Has ton of fun playing byzantines, even thought I do get it now why pros say you need a phd to play this civ!
The low angles make it hard to see there - TheAchronic has a good writeup here:
I havenât seen one single video/screenshot and I havenât been able to see myself any reflections. Whereas I could see them before (with difficulty as you said, but they were there in that same thread you linked, which I started).
I agree that in some respects the water looks better now, but the complete lack of reflections stumps me.
The reflections do indeed appear to be removed and replaced by a simpler sky reflection. My guess is theyâve done it for performance optimizations, as their old technique required rendering the game twice. They had optimizations, like not drawing leaves on trees in reflections, but there are still newer and better techniques around. Hopefully they look at improving reflections (e.g. screen space reflections) in a future update.
Sorry for any confusion, I meant the water generally, not the reflections. Bad phrasing on my part.
As someone whoâs fairly critical towards AoE 4, mainly due to being disappointed by how slow features from past Age games were added (global queue, ranked, editor, patrol, colour picker) and how they were promoted as one of the features for every season update and how some features (offline replays, pausing and saving MP games) are still missing, however, the devs really nailed it with this DLC. Byz and Japanese are fun to play as well as the variants. Credit where credit is due 
I understand the frustration, however, it is also important to realize that visual fidelity does not necessarily come down to realism only. You wouldnât question the lack of reflection in say, WoW, not that their water looks good. The point is, consistency and a defined style often times matter a lot more in creating a fully comprehensive visual style that can be appreciated.
There is a rather subtle art when it comes to surfaces. Sometimes making a material mimic reality can mean it makes it look better. Other times, you want to exaggerate features, or omit them entirely. A jelly-like material can both be extremely underwhelming, or very exciting, depending on how much you toy around with surface roughness, transparency and lighting.
I personally think the goal should be to make surfaces look satisfying. And like I said above, that may sometimes mean you want to lean into realism. In the case of current water, I think they struck a really good balance. I donât necessarily think reflections would add all too much to that, just as reflection may not add much to, for example, a cell-shaded character.
As stated by @MissionLemur128, if this decision was made due to cost of performance, then that is something that you should be able to understand. From what I can tell, theyâve gotten a really good result with a relatively low hit to performance, and I would rather have what we have now than what we had before + reflections.
I will say that, having the option to turn on reflections (if the shader is built to allow it) could be nice for those that want that. But, I donât personally believe this is a downgrade to how it looked before, even when it lacks reflection.
I am Im impressed by bizantines and japanese design, units looks more detailed and they introduced new mechanics, I still think vanilla civs needs the same treatment, there are civs that units looks generic like HRE, the only thing I totally dislike is Jean DâArc civ, seeing Jean using divine skills is just ridiculous, is pure fantasy and this game should not be related to fantasy.
There are games from the 90âs with water reflections. The previous water rendering in AoE4 had reflections. Heck, games made for the Nintendo Switch have reflections. This day and age, reflections are almost a free asset, resource-wise.
And like you said, adding an option in graphics settings would also take care of addressing potato systems.
Here Iâm hoping itâs something devs will eventually add back.
Reflections are one of the biggest performance drains still. Sure the resource cost of them scales with the quality of the asset they are reflecting, so if the base assets are a low resource asset then so will the reflection.
I do think there should be a setting for it since higher end systems should have no problem with AOE4 graphics.
