One of most celebrated new key features of AoE IV is the fact that we can finally put archers above the city walls which will make siege battles way more epic and challenging.
This immediatly remind me of the awesome and sadly under rated Lord of The Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth series. One of the coolest mechanics of those games were the possibility of building catapults and towers above the walls. If well implemented, this mechanic would be awesome in AoE IV.
Also, I’ve noticed something really cool in the Naval Teaser. If you look to the left, you’ll see some units placing spikes on the ground to prevent the attackers from advancing. That’s an awesome feature!
I would like to see the ships being manned with units and being able to board ships/take it over. Of course the ship would perform worse the less crewmembers it had(there would be a way to replenish it) Naval invasions would be interesting with this feature
and don’t forget one of the coolest thing is that infantry units would be able to build siege engines and not only villagers which is really an interesting thing
Even though we see a lot of criticism about everything looking like in a cartoon and this and that there is something real cool when u look at it together. I think it looks way better than some of those ultra real pictures from other games that was shown for comparison about how game should look like. Those ultra real picture looks like garbage comparing to this. So gj guys for making this.
Regarding that feature you mentioned on the naval attack. What you see are archers anchoring down, i believe this applies only to them. In the same way we say that pikes can get on one knee to cope with a cavalry charges.
About the siege on wall, i think those should be an university/castle upgrade and only apply to certain civs, being more of a late castle thing. Along those line, it would be nice if they could have them drop boiling tar at the gates or have man-at-arms on the walls pushing ladders down from invading armies.
Also, on the naval front, i think a good idea would be for civs like Portuguese/Spanish to be able to train military when a specific naval unit is at shore. To balance this out, during training they could make so that that ship is unable to attack while training the next unit (crossbow/pikemen).
Those ideas you had are really cool. Specially the boiling tar at the gates and people pushing the ladders down from the walls. I’m particulally interested in the siege mechanics of AoE IV.
The possibility of invading armies using ladders to climb the walls is something I didn’t thought until now. That would be awesome. It reminded me again of LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 where the Goblins faction had units that were able to climb the walls. Those were really annoying to deal with. The other evil factions (Mordor and Isengard) had to rely on siege towers.
Looking back now, those Battle for Middle-Earth games were really cool and ahead of their time. It’s a bloody shame those game aren’t even available for online purchase nowadays (which makes me guess they’re in some kind of legal limbo).
I remember Mordor had siege towers that were almost impossible to take down. If you saw a few of those coming at you on Helms Deep or Minis Tirith, you better grit your teeth and get ready for a fight! Isengard’s ladders were annoying since they were easily spammable
