Hi all, I’ve been playing the free weekend of AoE4 and I would like to give my honest opinions on the game so far. I’ll only be posting what I heavily disliked in hopes that the devs fix these issues and make the game better and more user friendly.
Issues
Issue 1
The hotkeys are completely broken, see the bug report below.
Issue 2
No option to disable the “all” subgroup. Lets say you want to put all your military or economy production buildings on one control group, there will be an “all” sub group where you have to annoyingly skip the subgroup to utilize accurate hotkeys. I’ve noticed the hotkeys change in “all” depending on what’s added to the control group. I’ve also noticed that it doesn’t fit all units either.
Issue 3
When adding buildings to a control group, the order is based on the order that you’ve manually selected the buildings. This is very annoying because this means I have to go out of my way to make sure the order is always correct in order to keep using the same muscle memory to produce units. Buildings should have a standardized prioritization of order in control groups disregarding how you’ve selected them.
Issue 4
“Secondary UI panels” are absolute cancer. Why do you have to press a hotkey known as “Acccess secondary UI panel” in order to produce a unit from the keep? Why wouldn’t the produced units be in the first panel? Why does it still force you to use secondary UI panel if you have all unique hotkeys when utilizing “Fully Remappable” hotkeys mode?
Issue 5
Cannot toggle minimap mods to easily find markets and such.
Issue 6
No way to have unique colours for teammates but team-based colours for enemies.
Issue 7
Cannot use ctrl/shift to decrease selection of selected villagers. E.g. you selected 5 villagers, but you only want 3 and you try shift/ctrl+clicking the # in the selection, but it doesn’t decrease the selection.
Conclusion
Off the top of my head, these are most of the issues that I’ve noticed. Which is why I’ve been heavily disliking AoE4 when trying it out on the free weekend and probably won’t buy it during the sale. It doesn’t seem right for me to pay for a broken or half-baked product.
I haven’t stated what I’ve liked out of pure laziness.
Hotkeys are not “completely broken”, but yes a couple have issues. The cancel construction hotkey is a known bug that’s being fixed.
It sound like you don’t like the All tab when you have multiple buildings types in the same group. I don’t really either, but you can completely ignore its existence. I haven’t seen other RTS games that even have it, as far as AoE games go its a new feature.
Units in the keep are on the secondary panel because most keeps don’t produce units at all. So the first panel is consistent for each civ. The unit panel is added for English and Delhi (with their unique tech).
I would love the ability to rearrange the UI panels. Maybe eventually.
Which RTS game are you coming from? Your issue 5 makes me guess AoE2?
Check the bug report, there are more issues than just cancel construction hotkey. There are at least 2 more issues that I’ve found. Shift+Key combinations don’t work when regular Key is set to something. Alt+Key combinations don’t work when Alt is set to “Focus selected unit”.
You are unable to have both of these on at the same time:
The only way to ignore it is by mandatory pressing “Next subgroup” when selecting a control group. It’s an annoying unnecessary extra movement.
I’m already considering setting up Autohotkey to press this automatically when I push a control group key.
After playing a round with Autohotkey skipping “All” subgroup, I noticed how annoying it is that if I have archeries subgroup selected then it won’t queue Longbowmen for Council Hall (English) when it’s in the same control group.
Everything feels so choppy and sloppy when I want to queue units to build.
CheckGame()
{
result := false
WinGet, active_id, ProcessName, A
if active_id = RelicCardinal.exe
{
result := true
}
else
result := false
return result
}
#If CheckGame()
toggle := true
#MaxThreadsPerHotkey 2
~i::
if (toggle) {
Send, {Numpad6}
}
Return
~o::
if (toggle) {
Send, {Numpad6}
}
Return
~*Enter::
global toggle
toggle := !toggle
Return
But if you say something like it. There will be 10 players who will teach you, that you do not understand and Beasty do not use Remappable hotkeys, so you should not use it either, just because someone with 1000games get used to aoeIV struggles.
Looking at Fully Remappable hotkeys again and I’ve noticed that you cannot set hotkeys for Council Hall. It tries to utilize Q as a hotkey for Longbowmen when I have it set to K for archery ranges.
You’ll also notice that the other hotkeys for upgrades are correct and matching though…
I understand that hotkeys should continue to improve more (and some related bug), but don’t you think it’s too harsh a criticism? We already know that the game didn’t release out complete last year, but it’s in the process of reaching its perfect form. Be patient.
many people paid their 60 bucks (welp 30 for the discount) and they wanted something that is mactually worth of what they are paying. now we can see that the 30 $ discount is not enough to make it worthy to pick.
For the OP, he has only criticized the hotkeys when there are many more elements of the game. But everyone is based on what they want. What I see is quite harsh criticism, as if the game was unplayable and that is not the case.
I get it, they may just want all enemies red, but still be able to differentiate their teammates. Seems like a useful feature. However most of the RTS games they said they play also do not have this feature
I’m a fan of one colour for my side and one for theirs, but I can definitely see enabling one colour for all enemies while differentiating me and my allies at a glance.
