For me, RTS is all about self-insert to the faction what I play

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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Blizzard RTS games did great job about it with their epic cinematics. My life for Aiur.

AOE series have its strength in this aspect due to people already know about the history and have other sources to lean about what they played by their own even the game didn’t provide it. but if game sorely depend on player’s knowledge, players will just keep complain until their native/favourite civ implemented.

For this reason, game need to keep provide “fantasy” about the faction to the players! and the best way to do this is well designed campaigns.

Personally, I enjoyed AOE2’s Sundjata campaign then research about Mali empire by myself then.
Now I stuck with AOE4 because of Malians!

Please give us campaigns and unique cool civs!

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Campaigns are essential for bounding the player to the civilisations’ history. That’s how it was for me as a kid, AoE II was the main reason I started loving history so much, by playing the campaigns and having these tales told to me, based on real stories. William Wallace, Genghis Khan, Barbarossa, El Cid… I loved how they were told and I felt engaged.

Now, Blizzards cinematics are waaay above what’s possible now for any game in the franchise, like they can’t compare, but with good voice acting and artwork, narration can work fine, as it did in the past.

So yeah, without campaigns people will just want to get Civs they already like on their own.

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This is the same for me as well. AoE 2 was one of my first video games and the campaigns were the highlight for me. The narrative being focused on individual characters with a witness figure narrating their story was enchanting.

Between the different campaigns that are available in AoE 4 the Sultans Ascend campaign module is the one I keep going back to. My favorite campaign from AoE 2 was the Saladin campaign. I grew up with a lot of stories told from the crusader POV, so it was great to have a new perspective on that period.

I like to play a lot of the civs in AoE IV, but go back to Abbasid and Ayyubid because of their connection to my favorite campaigns.

It would be very nice to explore more of history in this format, they are timeless experiences that I play through over and over again.

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