Feedback from 5 of the top beta players

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
41

good post lads

agree that eco upgrades are too expensive, and if you make them affordable fast TC becomes way stronger - and therefore TC should be limited to building upon castle age.

also culverins are OP

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42

Ya Chinese felt way better in closed beta when they had +2 extra vills. Without it they seem extremely slow.
Also surprised the zhuge nu didnt receive a buff since it was mediocre last beta.

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43

I also still disagree 1 TC all in with archers can beat 2 TC boom. It can’t at least vs an english player

You are right and that’s because the english privilege in this game is unreal atm.

I find it a bit strange people still think horsemen are weak and need a buff. Horsemen literally are the safest and best opening for literally every civ pretty much because it gives you map control and counters longbow. Horsemen are literally insane and mobility is king in this game right now.

Personally I feel horsemen serve an important role in the feudal early game and are overall in a good spot. They can deal with early archer aggression early on but if you’re going heavy into horsemen VS 2 TC boom you’re not gonna have a good time.

44
  • Tower and keep upgrades should not cost gold - stone + wood/food

Can you elaborate please?

Completely disagree with this.

Civ – England

  • HuT – wayyyyyy too OP

Completly agree with this.

Yes, Great Idea.

Yes! Horseman need to be tankier or have an ability to dodge arrows otherwise their bonus damage to archers is completely useless.

No. I love units that can shoot-move like mangudai. Please don’t change this.

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45

YES. Controling army feels so bad compared to in sc and its largely because of this

I do think playing for map control is a very important part of age of empires, but find myself almost always going for cav even with civs that’s supposed to be infantry civs, because the mobility is so important and I feel their civ bonuses for infantry cant make up for that

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46

+100 for the command bar/ wireframe!

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47

Allows better control of units and splitting off small groups
Allows for better harass and defence for players

I totally agree, I am sure that almost all the players who came from StarCraft 2 will agree.
I would like more options for control and multitasking

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48

While I always appreciate players providing their own feedback, I really hope the devs allow the meta to develop a bit before jumping to the whims of 5 players that have barely played the game, and who in NO way represent the broader Age of Empires community. I’m an average-skilled AoE player, and I personally don’t agree with > 50% of the balance-related changes suggested. I enjoy actually exploring a game’s quirks before jumping to conclusions. Also, balance for a top-level player is very different from balance for an average-level player. For example, I think the short build time for houses is a God-sent. Getting housed is the worst, and it’s not a fun mechanic. Also, removing shoot-move from Mangudai would strip them from everything that makes them special and cool (and historically accurate, for that matter). Balance can always be done by adjusting cost or stats. Don’t remove awesome mechanics in the name of balance; add awesome mechanics in spite of balance, and then balance with numbers afterwards.

However, I do agree with a lot of the criticism around unit control. I hate that assigning units to a new control group doesn’t remove them from their old group. I have no idea how to split a large group into several smaller ones. And I want the ability to add, remove, or isolate individual units from my selection. As the OP pointed out, every other RTS has this. If it’s possible in AoE4, I either don’t know how, or maybe it’s not working as easily as intended.

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49

I hope the devs take each suggestion very carefully. I really do not want AoE 4 to turn into SC2.5.

For example, If I have to unit steal and divide all of my units in a second, it will not only made it hard for me as a player to pull the move but it will kill the immersion of the game. I really do not want to get arthritis in my hands for playing a game.

The game is fun as it is. It just needs a couple of tweaks.

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50

I’m a mediocre player and do not consider my opinions about balance to be relevant in any way. If I find one civ better than another, it’s usually fixed by me improving my gameplay than looking for the game to change. I consider balance the sole province of elite players.

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51

Thank you for the comprehensive feedback. It sounds like, regardless of one’s game play preferences, that many of the quality of life features we have become accustomed to from AoE 2 and 3 are missing. Seems unlikely all of these could be added in a month.

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52

Comments on the feedback from a competitive beta player who is good at RTS in general.
To give developers a balanced perspective.

HuT

Bugs

Buildings

  • Town Centre should be able to be retargeted. Ram allins are probably unstoppable due to how the TC currently functions. [If this is true, good catch ]

  • Tower and keep upgrades should not cost gold - stone + wood/food [ nope. if the upgrade includes a weapon emplacement, it should cost gold. ]

  • The repair building cost should only consider the resources used to construct a particular building in the first place when considering repair cost – keeps require wood + stone to repair when they only cost stone to construct [ Repair mechanics are not really clear at this point. Valid point made but neutral on this. At least it doesn’t cost food ]

  • Building LOS is pretty bad, including the Outpost. Town Watch upgrade perhaps? Alternatively increase the outpost line of sight as you age up. [ Having such an upgrade option would be nice, fully agree ]

  • Farms feel too expensive for every civ 
 wall of text. [ No they are not too expensive. Farms are INFINTE and do NOT need to be reseeded
big bonus here compared to AOE2. You are supposed to transition to a farm economy as your hunt/sheep/berries run out. And might I add it has 50 pierce armour. It should stay as it is. ]

  • Palisades should be cheaper. The initial 15 wood for starting a wall should be removed too. If the game is going to be about securing all the food sources before adding farms then walls are necessary to prevent cav raids from just endlessly ruining you. Also possible Mongols should be allowed to construct palisades at least for this reason.) [Fully Agreed]

  • iaguz - Houses should not be built by more than one villager and the Chinese building speed bonus should not apply to houses. When a player attempts to train a unit and lacks the supply then it shouldn’t start training until supply is available. The game is far too lenient to players who get supply blocked, players should be more impacted by missing their house timings. [ You got to be joking here. Something wrong with your so called competitive mentality. What does your so called enforced house timing add to the game?? ]
    (HuT) – disagree with guz regarding houses being built with more than 1 vil, however housing is definitely very lenient in this game, so would prefer a longer build time on houses. [People can still get easily housed mid-game, with this leniency. Another point of consideration not exactly related to yr point. If your houses are being razed down, you are doubly penalized in being pop capped + not being to rebuild houses quickly and unable to mount a miiltary defence. ]

Civ – Chinese

  • HuT – Oh China, how you have fallen. I didn’t play any China this beta but did play against it a few times and my god, they’re so slow now. The landmarks for China need looking at, the only redeeming one is the Astronomical Clocktower but even this, I think, is pretty bad now. It should have a similar effect to Council Hall, creating siege faster, not with more HP. Perhaps they should have the Zhuge Nu available at Feudal but this civ is just so slow at getting going. Probably a powerhouse in late game if you can get there
 if. [They are not slow. And they are a powerhouse in age 3 onwards. Clocktower is one of the best landmark in game period. Never thought of using an imperial official to speed up the production speed? This combo alone makes it so versatile and a extreme late-game siege powerhouse ]
  • Seither- I thought china was bad before the nest nerf. They have good boom potential but nobody will let you. I tried playing zhuge nu last beta but it didn’t seem good enough to warrant 2 landmarks (mind you the villager build buff was nice). Especially vs civs that could go lancer or maa counter in feudal. [ Building 2 age 2 landmarks is not optimal at this stage of time. Going up to Age 3 gives you better options to defend, attack or boom.]
  • iaguz- Civ stinks. What happened to the extra starting vills? It’s a staple Chinese civ trait in other Age of Empires games. Why not here? In any case, I recommend a massive price decrease to the second landmark construction. Unique units and dynasty bonuses are not worth such an immense cost to attain. This may require reducing the strength of certain dynasty bonuses, like maybe Song’s 35% vill production speed decrease had ought to be closer to 10 or 15%, but it’s the biggest barrier to playing Chinese. [ Extra starting vill would be nice. Agreed. Price decrease not needed if there are extra vills.]
  • PandaBearMe- I only used this civ on water maps to rush people with junks and fishing boats to repair. They seem pretty good for rushing on water but not much else. [Did you even play or analyze Chinese civ mechanics properly? So much for a “top” player. Means nothing here. You might as well not comment at all.]

Civ – Holy Roman Empire

  • HuT – prelate is S tier eco bonus but I struggle to see how this civ will play out on release. Infantry sucks in general since they can’t raid compared to cav and they can be kited by Archers. Probably gets overrun in Castle by Knights. Landsknechts are too weak. [ Landsknetchts are glass cannon with 17/20(elite) Melee attack. Their hp could be buffed slightly, or a significant cost reduction to make it worthwhile to use]

  • Seither- the prelate eco buff and the relic castle landmark feel insanely strong. I think the factions biggest downfall is its speciality (infantry) just aren’t as good as going knights and mangonels. They can still do it and with a mighty fine eco i just think abased ones are better at that style. It probably didn’t help that the maa heavy hitting upgrade was bugged? [The MAA +6 bonus to heavy tech is huge, making it cost efficient to use MAAs against knights, having exactly half the attack of a typical knight in such a battle.)

  • PandaBearMe- To me, this is clearly the 2nd best civ in stress test. I think the prelate is an insane econ bonus, as well as having a turbo repair ability to hold on longer than you normal makes HRE a relatively strong defensive civ in the early game. Mid game ends up feeling won or lost based on relics which is very HRE esque. Units like Landskenchts feel kind of underwhelming. Ultimately I ended up just using uniquely upgraded MAA as a meat shield in place of what would have been my lancers. I think MAA are a better/cheaper meat shield than lancers, but with the obvious drawback of harass compared to a lancer. I ultimately end up playing a slow ball of death inching across the map with MAA+siege+prelates. It feels relatively strong, but all in all HRE feels strategically uninspiring compared to a civ like Abbasid. [Excellent comments. Agreed on your slow deathball and using MAA as a meat shield. Also as they are the half the price of a knight, you can do twice the siege damage when attacking an enemy base. That is another way of looking at it.]

Hotkeys / Unit Control

  • Hotkeys should be fully customisable – some hotkeys such as map rotation (alt) are not able to be altered [Fully agreed . Already feedback this in the survey. Major sticking point in preventing enjoyment of this game]
  • Mouse buttons should be able to be bound in hotkeys [Yes!]
  • Modifier hotkeys (using shift + a button or alt + a button or shift + alt + a button) should be allowable [Yes]
  • Would prefer an alternative to grid being the only hotkey setup – AOE2 style economic / military buildings or similar system would be nice [YES!!!]
  • No patrol hotkey [ Missing patrol is huge! such an important military command]
  • Monks should be able to return relics to a Monastery via shift-queueing (like in AOE2) [yes]
  • Shift queuing unit indicators are too hard to see, should be clearer in game and also displayed initially on minimap when setting (so you can shift queue on the minimap itself) [yes]
  • TC rally indicator is also too small and hard to determine if it is rallied correctly (rally chages colour but the current thing being rallied too is too hard to see, whether its a sheep or a tree) [yes]
  • Felled trees should have a different coloured circle hitbox to make woodlines clearer [i would prefer a mod to have small tree if available later.]

Allow control group stealing [yes]

  • Allows better control of units and splitting off small groups [yes]
  • Allows for better harass and defence for players [yes]

Allow wireframe/command bar selection and deselection of units [yes]

  • Allows players to have more control over units
  • Easier to send out single units out to scout
  • Better to send individual vils to locations
  • Used in almost every RTS

Technologies

  • Upgrades across the board are too expensive, especially economy upgrades. (HuT - Level 1 eco upgrades are in an awkward spot – would like to see how games would play out with eco upgrades costing only food + wood initially.) (iaguz- eco upgrades costing gold is fine, imo, but they all cost far too much, especially in Age IV. The increased cost of Age IV landmarks should be counterbalanced with significantly cheaper upgrades, particularly the university ones.) [Devs can look into different costs for the various upgrades]

  • Dock upgrades besides fishing are either hit or miss – something like 2 extra armor as an upgrade is incredibly useless when Castle Age ships do 50 or 100 damage a shot [Naval warfare/techs in general should be reworked totally]

  • Higher damage units need to receive more damage per upgrade level to make them worth it [depends on the internal balancing tables devs are using]

  • Perhaps a +1 range upgrade for foot archers in Castle Age? They fall off hard in CA so would prolong their usefulness a bit [NO! They already have 100% accuracy. Can be considered if accuracy is dropped.]

  • Scouts with Professional Scouts should automatically kill the selected deer and auto drop it off at the closet TC, way too much micro involved with this tech to make it worth it [That will be nice]

UI

  • iaguz - Archers shouldn’t have bonus damage vs Spearmen. Spearmen lack any pierce armour as is, have the same movement speed as archers and therefore struggle to close the gap, don’t really have good damage once they do close and are generally extremely weak vs everything except cavalry. Properly microed archers would, I imagine, crush spearmen just as easily without the bonus damage.
    [NO! What are you smoking. Do you not understand the current game counter mechanics? Archers should wreck Spearmen. This was the same case in AOE2 and is important as the Spearmen mechanic of having bonus damage versus Cav.]
  • Possible that Horsemen should have 1 pierce armour. This is a matter of some debate since they can struggle vs Archer balls. [It would be nice, as horsemen have a bonus damage vs ranged. Plays into that counter role]
  • Should siege weapons, or at least trebuchets and mangonels, have a ‘siege/unsiege’ akin to Siege Tanks in Starcraft? Mangonels especially are annoying to use when retargeting since they will pack/unpack sometimes. [They should. I would prefer mangonels not having to siege up (aka AOE2) but this is AOE4
so i will let the devs think about this. It will make mangonels so much more useful.]

Final Thoughts - Metagame

TC IN FEUDAL AND BATTERING RAM RANCH

HuT – personally I think archers shouldn’t be able to build any siege at all until Castle Age, although having the option of just killing someone who is being greedy is enticing. The problem is for a civ such as Abbasids who can straight up kill you for being greedy or double down and go for 1 TC more than the opponent. Infantry generally suck in all AOE games because they’re slow, weak and cant raid so giving them all the cool siege building stuff is probably better. If the TC is able to retarget this might not even be a problem, however 2 rams still shred through a TC quick enough it still might not be possible to defend. [ A ram is 300 wood, so it is a pretty costly investment. Keeping it to castle age till u can build one, is a good idea.]

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53

Super minor thing, but you actually could siege any siege unit already. You hold right click to force it to siege in a spot and you can put it on hold position it will not unsiege from there. Just most people dont hold right click when issuing commands. I can upload a video if needed, but it is how it works.

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54

Why is this an issue? If you have to delay eco upgrades, this might give a different feel, but it isn’t really bad.

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55

Perhaps I should clarify my position with houses.

Currently houses take 15 seconds for one villager to build, 7.5 if Chinese. A villager takes 20 seconds to produce and most units take about 15 seconds or more. It varies quite a lot. As the mechanics currently stand, if I’m at, say 80/80 supply I can be producing a vill and 9 supply worth of units, see the pop up warning me I’m currently blocked and can immediately throw down a house assuming I have the simple sum of 50 wood available. By the time it’s finished, perhaps I use 3 vills cuz I’m in a hurry, I will have lost 0 to almost 0 seconds of production time on my units. I noticed this was common in my games, I never experienced supply blocks affecting my play, was never punished for slipping on my macro rhythms and I feel like I should be punished for making mistakes like this.

Now perhaps I’m a traditionalist but I happen to think getting supply blocked is a fundamental aspect of games like this. It sucks and it should suck because you messed up and you should have to pay for that. Currently you don’t. And I’d argue it’s crucial to have supply blocks matter as it’s part of raising the skill ceiling, which is exactly what you want if you care about this game having any kind of competitive scene. Part of what makes games like AoE2 and SC2 so great to play and watch is that the amount of stuff you have to do and think about is staggering and the desire to achieve mastery over all of this is what pushes top level players to constantly up their game and makes the whole thing exciting to watch. What’s so commendable about players who never experience hiccups in their production due to poor multitasking because the capacity for that to happen just isn’t there?

I understand that a strict 1 vill to build a house does kinda go against the grain of how these games operate and perhaps there’s a better solution but ultimately my point is that supply blocks should matter and currently they don’t. I know this is hardly a popular position to take, nobody likes getting supply blocked, but it’s important and I feel it’s absence,

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56

I agree with this reply. Maybe removing queue when housed might be a solution that many RTS games have already. Players already get a yellow text when they’re about to be housed.

or maybe their entire ship line because each tier is just weaker than other civs apart from Delhi’s (they have the exact same ship line but Delhi’s fishing ships can attack, Abby’s cannot for some reason).

From my experience I believe this is already possible? At least in the closed beta it was. It’s just a problem because it’s actually fairly difficult to confirm whether the monk/prelate/scholar/whatever would pick the relic up before hand because it’s incredibly annoying to confirm whether the click on the relic was successfully registered or not. Sometimes the monks would just hold the relic next to the monastery instead of garrisoning it. Seems inconsistent.

Maybe not automate the entire procedure but there should be some hotkeys where you can:

  • pick up nearest carcass
  • deliver the carcass to nearest TC/mill.

At the moment it’s too hard to click certain things (felled trees, sheep carcass, etc) so this delivery system becomes tedious. I am aware you have mentioned this.

They kinda can though. The bigger issue is perhaps the surrounding part where units kinda feel like fluids and can be shoved by each other (allied units) and can then perform tokyo drifts and such.

This is awkward because the scout vision slightly out-ranges the TC’s attack range which I personally am OK with considering homing missiles. Other units could probably have an extra LoS or maybe we might be forced to add a scout for every group
 maybe the game devs are trying to make scouts more relevant and have done this deliberately. I am fine to try new things.

I believe when any cavalry unit is charged towards a spearmen they’re stopped (for a very short duration) and the damage is registered immediately upon impact. Just hard to follow up for more damage which is a general problem that exists in AoE2 but at least the spearmen do more relative damage there.

I think this is unnecessary. Possibly more to do with English LBM production being so high which makes horsemen difficult to manage sometimes.

I’m going to quote the ships problem again. The naval warfare has the worst design at the moment. 3/4 ships with almost redundant upgrades (like +3~6 armor against 50-100 damage? lol). We’ve had Archipelago and Warring islands and nothing was changed between them in terms of naval balance. Delhi’s/Abby’s have the worst line of ships. Explosive ships are too slow and fragile to be meaningful.

Most of the other points I agree with and the meta seems quite one dimensional at the moment. It has however only been 3 days (or 17 if closed beta is included) and it’s probably too early to give suggestions to change the pace of this without more days/weeks of experimentation.

I think Abbasid’s are popular because of the extra units they’re able to produce, much like how mongols were quite popular during closed beta (maybe they’re more popular because of such a different possible play style unique to, or a combination of, many different RTS games). Having 6 units across three production buildings seem very stale in CA (3 in FA for Dehli’s and Chinese (excluding Zhugenu’s), 4 for others). The closed beta had small map in qmm (max 4 players) as opposed to the stress test which had the smallest (max 2 players). This paired with 4 starting villagers (6 for chinese) gave the slower civs a bit more of a breathing space to deal with fast council hall or scout/knight rush. (I’ve noticed it’s not a huge difference in the FA timing, but more so the production/economic management for an all-in).

57

Aye. That’s what the French said at the Battle of Crecy.

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58

Also close beta top25 player here.

Imo spear is very underrated.
2tc with spear could works well vs cav raid, especially Abby’s with upgrade.
Abby’s 2tc follow up with 1 barrack and 1 stable is something I want to try.

English is not as strong as HRE in compares. HRE is surely the strongest, with their eco advantage able to lead for doing nothing, and able to counter everything English can do.

I did some obs and review video, a lot of lost vs English was due to losing too much units from raid when actually leading vs English (Player can’t tell when playing due to no score). Now the beta ended, I think of build able to push HRE age 2 time even closer to 4:00 mark 


Currently there is no game record and scenario, once they are available I think good players could improve very quick
 (Also hotkeys too, I am playing with no hotkey
)

On the other hand, water need a totally rework, I don’t even want to try when seeing water map. I did a post in test forum about Abby’s arrow ship only does 50% damage than others, and even lower when upgraded. Other problems like fishing boat healing, also some sieges should able to do bonus damage vs boats (One thing from AOM to make player able to retake water)

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59

Lots of fantastic feedback, thank you to you all for making it!

Only thing that immediately sticks out that I disagree with strongly would be removing the ability of some units to simultaneously move and shoot outright. I would much rather let units like the Mangudai have that really visceral specialty but adjust its strength with things like the aforementioned Spearman move/attack speed slow in combination with a brief movement speed slow every time the Mangudai draws and fires to make reliance on point blank stutter-step retreats risky.

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60

Balance is not a question of representation. You say barely played
 I have more than 200 hours total in age of empires 4 now between the betas -and also from being able to get in after stress test ended. And I’m sure the guys in OP have quite a significant number too.

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