The biggest problem in AOE 4 is defender’s disadvantage. (except few civs like china who have defender’s advantage through landmark/TCs). Its all down to who gets to attack first. When an army is in your base you can do ■■■■. You can’t make army, you can’t gather resources because TC is trash at defending. TCs AI is trash, same goes for towers/castles.
Behind that the enemy who pushes is growing crazy. Its all comes down to who gets to be offensive first and the defender is always on disadvantage. NO MATTER HOW MUCH RESOURCES YOU PUT IN DEFENSE, THE OFFENSIVE WILL ALWAYS HAVE ADVANTAGE. So there is no safe play. Either you attack first or they will. This is why the game has become so dull.
The counter to early push to push earlier than the enemy. This is why mongol tower rush is so effective.
I know I’m a broken record, but I feel like bombards being pretty heavily nerfed would fix a lot of this issue, it’d for sure draw out wall sieges and give defenders more time to respond.
This is part of the reason I think batch training is so important and necessary. This game follow’s AoE3’s “balance” style more than AoE2’s, where it’s much faster paced and battles happen quickly. AoE3 doesn’t have such a large advantage to the attacker because batch training allows for a military to be trained at one’s base quickly enough to respond to an attack, whereas AoE4’s lack of such a feature means it’s impossible to defend on the fly - Either you’re already prepared, or you lose.
I know you said this sarcastically, but a lot of people genuinely think this is the answer. It isn’t.
The main problem with building 30 barracks to get 30 units at a time is that the 30 units you trained are now massively spaced out, and in a game where units attack quickly and often, those 30 units will be picked off individually before they can make it to the rendezvous point set. You could get 30 units at once from 6 buildings in AoE3, but you need 30 buildings to accomplish the same in AoE4.
Trust me mate, with treaty mode you’d only see 4v4 all china 200/200 pop clocktower bombard wars with fire lancers smashing into one another and animation cancelling to siege down landmarks. Total shitshow.
Lmao while you’re not wrong with the game in it’s current state, hopefully this won’t remain the late game meta forever and treaty would then be more viable.
I love both treaty and non treaty modes and would love to see the -option- to have a treaty game. I’d also love to see an option to increase maximum population, as like you referenced 200 pop maxes out very quickly in late game
I dunno, AoE3 has great mechanics for responding to a surprise attack. AoE3 is about how well your economy can respond to an attack, not about how many standing units of a wide variety you have idle in your base.
I’m a Delhi player and i think you don’t play Delhi at all.
To resume delhi as “elephant cancel animation”…first you see rarely elephants in delhi matchs.
I love compound of defender but the both are playable, and the capacity to wall, u can well relics / sanctity spot, bridges…dears… you never can do all so you have lot of options…that make a whole different match…the simple capacity of walling make game all time different. And affect the rest of game… but “animation cancel elephant” lol 1% of a delhi match average ^^
This is completely pants on head backwards, sorry. Since changes to TC (can manually target), there is a big defender advantage (for reinforcements as well) in AOE IV. You do have to scout though. If an army just shows up in your base and you’re unprepared, that’s on you.
You did not understand my point at all. Countering hurts you more than your enemy. Except china who can quickly produce units from its military buildings all other civs have to put down more than 1 military building. And If your enemy is good he won’t directly attack your base. He will just not let you expand picking off units here and there. If you force counter them its a huge loss to you.
The best counter to such cases is to just attack their base instead of trying to fight army lurking around your base making them retreat. But at this stage they wall up and you have no choice to carry fight to castle. Letting them boom.
I don’t know about “biggest problem”, but I agree that there’s such a disadvantage.
Defending is an art, it’s difficult to perfect. If they surround your military infrastructure, you’re in hot water. While we don’t develop higher APM to keep our cool under pressure, attacking first can make a huge difference.
But wasn’t that also the case on other iterations of AoE, though?
Coming back to OP’s point, my experience continues to be quite positive. Some balance needs attention (we all know where), but I can see the minutia in every single match. Of course the goals are often the same, based on what civ you’re playing, but the devil is always in the detail!
So, to sum it up, I see this game as a very good example of “easy to pick up, difficult to master”.
I find the main problem to be lack of options in controlling units (ie patrol, following, stances) and the lack of the card system from age 3 (controversial).
I agree with the poster though, each civ has basically one good strat and that is it.
I don’t have a firm enough grasp of Mongolian history to form an opinion of to what degree they had female soldiers. But I do know that the Mongolians had women, and I do know that they didn’t have any units called Men at Arms, which were exclusively Western European. So I’m far more forgiving about the women part than the units from England part.
I think this is kind of inevitable in a medium asymmetry game. When each civ has ~3 selling points, you are required to play into it. If a French player tries to do infantry against HRE, they are strictly at a huge disadvantage. In low asymmetry like AOE2, your selling points aren’t so strong that they can’t be ignored. If you go full infantry and knights as Britons against Franks, those generic units are still close enough in balance to be worth using. In high asymmetry like SC, you’ll always have another strong bonus to fall back on. So if you don’t want to use Zerg’s ability to rush, they’re also uniquely powerful at expanding quickly, and uniquely powerful at responding at the last moment.
I never really played the other medium/high asymmetry AOE games (3 and M and O) so I’d be interested to hear how things shook out in those games.