Hi,
*My name is Liran and I’m a very passionate and innovative 31 years old gamer, *
I love all kind of games and pretty confident about my skills of taking games I love to their max potential.
For a living I work as a software developer at a known company in the industry.
Today I’ll share my opinions about how to take this game to the next level, I think the devs made pretty good game and usually I’m much more critic towards games, but as for AOE4 I think it’s in a pretty good place considering how new the game is, but there is still some very important things to improve / fix.
I hope someone from the product managers will see this thread and maybe implement some of my ideas in the future, but even if it doesn’t happen it’s still fun to write this down and get your feedback 
I’ll take bugs outside of the scope in this thread, because it’s not interesting and pretty obvious.
I wrote it down like this was an actual real patch to make it sound interesting, and to take your imagination to the point of thinking how would the game be if a patch like that would actually exists, sorry for unprofessional English writing skills.
So lets start:
PATCH NOTES - April 2022
We are proud to present to you the patch details that is coming in the next month!
This is a game changer patch that introduces some big Micro changing and new combat features, and focusing of improving your combat experience drastically, we’ve created a new unit order customization feature that allows to reorder units in your formation by types, as well as many quality of life changes that will make your economy managing experience much more smoother, efficient and fun!
We can’t wait to hear your feedback and watch you experience all of this new stuff live, so lets start with the patch details:
COMBAT FEATURES:
We have added totally new microing features and redesigned some of the existing ones to make them more efficient and to allow you to get the most out of your units during combat. With the upgraded combat system your units will kill more efficiently, and you will have a new option to protect the most important units in your army and prevent losing them too early on the fight.
New combat feature - Attack group of units of same type using the attack move button:
Attack move on a specific unit - Before the patch attack move on a specific target behaved exactly like right clicking a target, what it did was focus all the fire on that specific target and sometimes overhitting it after the target was already eliminated, we thought that two different attack functions that do the same are a waste, and redesigned attack move on a specific unit type to target all the units of the same type.
Example: before the patch right clicking a spearman while controlling longbows would command all the longbows to kill that spearman, the same goes for preforming an attack move on that spearman.
Now - preforming an attack move on a spearman will make all your longbows attack only spearmen.
If you want to do focus fire you can just right click the unit just as before.
You will no longer need to manually select and kill all the springalds one by one, you can now save this important time during a fight and just perform an attack move on a single springald and your army will attack them all one by one with maximum efficiency.
New combat features - added Protect / Block button to the attack options
Block - By selecting an enemy unit or group of units with ‘Block’ attack option, your army will surround this targeted units and block their way of escaping to kill as many as possible.
For example: using block while controlling an army of longbows targeting a group of villagers will make the longbows interfere in the way that the villagers will try to escape to make them slower, the longbows will try to surround them in a way that they can’t escape to kill the most of them, same blocking technique can be used on springalds, cannons and more…
Protect - By selecting a friendly unit or group of units with ‘Protect’ option, your controlled army will surround the friendly unit/s and make sure they are protected from attacks from all directions possible.
The protected units will still be able to move around freely, while the protectors will follow them around and make sure they are well protected, the protectors will never push unless their protected units are threatened.
For example: performing a ‘Protect’ move on a group of springalds while controlling spearmen, will make the spearmen surround the springalds, making sure your enemy will have to first kill the spearmen and only then will be able to hurt your siege, also your siege can move around the battlefield while staying protected all the time, the spearmen will follow.
Attack move algorithm redesign in order to be more efficient killing enemies:
Before patch attack move on ground would simply attack the closest target to your units, if no target was found an enemy’s building will be targeted instead.
We have found that targeting the closest unit is not efficient some of the time since it’s ignoring the target amount of HP left, we redesigned attack move to kill as much units as possible, by performing the minimum amount of attacks needed in order to kill units, while avoid attacking a unit more than needed in order to kill.
In addition units with low HP left will be targeted first in order to take them out fast.
We decided to remove the automatic building attacks from the attacking move algorithm, since it’s often resulting in false attacks when the player’s intentions were to attack opponent’s army and not the buildings.
For now attack move will make your units move until they see an army in range, building will be ignored and can be focused fire instead as before.
Auto attacking move:
Auto attacking move will now be an option to trigger manually, by default it will be turned off (you will be able to turn it on for all units in settings) or manually for group of units.
We have watched community games and came to the conclusion that people are abusing auto attacking to lure the enemies army into a death trap while their opponent is not paying attention, this can be frustrating and for now the army will attack back but won’t follow the enemy all across the map, for example horsemen attacked by longbows will try to attack them back but will not follow them everywhere, while melee vs melee will attack only when they are attacked and will not auto push into their deaths.
Military formation order feature:
When selecting an army builds up from different types of units, now you will be able to customize and choose which unit type will be standing before another rather than using our default order.
for example you will be easily able to make spearmen walk as frontline and have the knights stand right behind them while the archers will stay on the back as the last line.
All you have to do is click on the new button we added near formation types and drag a unit type back and forth to the position you want them to be in the formation.
Note that for a sub select of units from the larger group, the order will remain as you picked before, as long as those units belongs to a group with a custom order.
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS:
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Shift select a villager gathering a specific resource will now select all the villagers on the screen that gathering this type of resource (food types will also matter, shift select dear will select all the dear gatherers on screen)
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Idle villagers will now trigger a small sound cue and a message on screen similar to ‘out of capacity’ current behavior.
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Villagers production queue will always appear on the screen to prevent players for consistently be in the need to switch for their TCs all the time in order to make sure they keep creating vills (this can be turned off in settings but will be turned on by default)
Military production queues will stay the same and will be placed above new vill production queue. -
You will now be able to see the exact time you and your opponent aged up near your names, we made this change to make you more aware of your opponent’s progress, before the patch you had a message for opponent’s aging up, so this is not a new information for players rather than just write it down on the screen so players will not have to remember the exact time their opponent aged up.
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Double click on units icon sub selection from a group of different units will focus screen on that unit type.
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On every point on the map, when trying to build a wall - using shift click will create the shortest wall possible that blocks the nearest passage or bridge, for example wall shift click on a bridge will make the shortest wall line that blocks the bridge’s passage, same with trees, no need to aim with mouse.
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Vill total count and military total count numbers will be added to UI screen right above the idle vills count.
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Clicking on vill count will select all your vills, clicking on military count will select all your army.
but again i like how you worded a few of them to make it clear… specifically the whole attack move topic
