We were promised a game of epic siege battles, mighty walls packed with soldiers on top, majestic Elephants trampling on infantry, Mangudai hit and run and fake retreats, unstoppable French Knight charges, Ottoman giant bombards smashing cities, Malian stealth and networks of trade, civs with real personality. Decisive mega battles to defend / destroy the ultimate hallmark of civilization: a Wonder of the world.
We watch Wololo (zero Wololo btw) and it’s ultra boring spearman / archer / horseman Feudal Fest.
The only thing telling us this civ is English, that is HRE is the look of the buildings… Oh wait. Not even that. Civs have zero swagger, zero personality in this meta and balance state.
Elephants? Mangudai tactics? Mali stealth and trade? Janissary? Great Bombard? Epic siege battles with Siege Towers? Wololo? Wonder of the world? Non-existant. Not once.
Treb is this good in age 3? Age 4 is useless, Treb is all you need. Only go age 4 in rare water maps. Making Elephants crap is sure-fire way to kill Delhi fun; same for Great Bombard etc etc.
An RTS only succeeds with fun meta, widespread casual base, generating talents and hype in competitive.
This is not it.
Next, the reasons why AoE4 meta is one of the most boring of all Age of Empires franchise history. Continues…
You may be missing many of the differences between civs. AoE4 civs have a decent amount of unique techs including ones that modify the core roster of units. For example HRE MAA are not the same as others.
Did you also miss the Mali dark age transport rush? The multiple early MAA rushes? The early French knight raids? Etc… Those are all unique components of different civs.
no fishy thing. this problem was since release and I call out those mistakes as well as other which unfortunatelly they left the forums and the game. No wonder why the playerbase dropped hard in those months.
Nice try man, but i think you have watch some minutes of some random play… You didn’t see wololo either with nice micro trap, nor multitasking fight on water and land with muliple angle of attacks at sime time (beasty vs vortix)…
Aoe4 viewer was around 12k on A stream and 2k on B stream for the whole day.
I can always count on this forum for the swing and a miss hot takes
I don’t want to spoil results in case people haven’t caught them yet but generally feedback from Twitch chat, discord, reddit, etc. is that the event’s day 1 had a lot of amazing and surprising games.
Game 2 DeMuslim vs Capoch was a nail biter.
Couple surprising, quick upset games as well.
You hit the nail with this post. Installed the game to try the new “unique civs”, tried them, uninstall".
The sad part is I know some people like Mlord and Leenock and their potential to control units, to make strategies and execute them well, sadly this game can’t provide this.
Reintroducing and advancing formation abilities from aoe2 like guard/follow, split, flank, charge, focusing siege or structure or ranged or melee might make aoe4 more wild
The complaints on here represent a tiny fraction of players. Often people come along and complain about something that seems strong in their games, but their games aren’t representative of the big picture. One example I remember is someone complaining that archers were crazy strong in AoE 2 DE, and that every game everyone only made archers. I wasn’t seeing this at all in games I watched, but then a streamer I was watching raided someone who was at an ELO I didn’t normally watch, and I saw it! They played several games while I was watching, and every game was dominated by someone making only archers. If you went to a lower ELO, people weren’t skilled enough at microing the archers to make it work, and if you went to a higher ELO, people were skilled enough to defend against it. But at his specific ELO, it seemed like it was indeed the meta.
It doesn’t surprise me that staying in feudal is common at a high level, as castle age is very expensive, and you need to also spend more on upgrades to really get something from it. Someone staying in feudal can have a lot more units, so with sufficient skill to stay outside TC fire range, it should be possible for the player staying in feudal to make life very difficult for villagers outside TC range. Yet we’ve had people on here insisting that the meta is to go straight to castle age and make almost no military in feudal. It might even actually be the meta at their ELO.
Difference is that vast majority like 99.999999999% of players on forums or reddit are ppl with no multitasking capabilities and first thing they do is think how to wall themselves in.
I cant even say how many times I had game where I had to play against lower elo/league players and first thing they start doing is ridiculous walls and some weird late game plans like doing feudal trade with 4-5 markets and walling half of the map
In pro games otherhand if you do this you get instantly punished because micro and macro are completely different level and players are reacting to what opponent does. All that is missing from low league players.
Ofc it depends on the map, but maps where its easy to stone wall urself in lower league players look to do it especially if there is even hint of aggression coming towards you and they’re not afraid of pulling 10-20 villagers just to wall themselves in to buy that little bit of time that they can try to do something pointless.
Top of that vast majority players just leave their scout in one spot and let it idle there not even using the patrol function (I doubt they even know that it exists). My favorite is having someone keeping scout close to own neutral market and starting trade boom. Just keeps the scout in corner of map doing nothing.
Personally, I don’t like very long games favored by the walls and the one who makes more villagers and accumulates many resources, Puppypaw accumulated 5 thousand wood and 6 thousand gold and won
please dont take it seriously, some people have complained about stone walls in certain matches and he has conflated it into this strawman position
you could tell from OP’s text that it was an alt account. im not sure of who, i cant keep track. but the same complaints that have been raised before
all the matches i saw today were awesome, some mistakes from players because the game is still fairly new with all the changes, but all of them were great, such a variety of playstyles and map variation as well i think
i really think they need to zoom in the observer though, so many aoe2 players complaining about things that i think are exasperated by the zoom (washed out, perspective, too top down, unreadable etc)
what op is bringing up here is aoe4’s design punishing any player focusing on unique units, as 90% of UU are either too expensive and thus very resource inefficient, having a role so niche you can never justify making em, or underpowered, and thus not worth the risk, not helped with unique techs only encouraging general units, sometimes with great sometimes with weak results, essentially the game or instead of rewarding use of unique units and taking full advantage of civ bonuses and mechanics punishes anyone trying something even most slightly different to existing meta, resulting in a very repetitive experience with very few suprises from creative players, only from balance patches depending on what devs feel the meta should be
before anyone brings it up, i am fully aware of mali, which is a nice contrast to this as it actually rewards going unique, but this is absent in other civs
