Gameplay: Early Game, Starting conditions & Act Direction: can AoE4 break the repetitive genre curse?

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I’m still not sure what you think will be cut out using your analogy above of pushing everything into 3 ages instead of 4. All your tech is available it’s just the padding that everyone goes through that’s reduced. There’s no strategic decision making to go from one age to another. It’s an example of unnecessary complexity that adds nothing. Every civ has to do it. The conditions are the same, there’s not strategy to employ. It’s just fat.

You give us a lot of games where things are made more accessible without actually explain what’s wrong with it.

I’m a long time RTS player and enjoy complexity as much as the next person. But complexity for the sake of it is bad. Complexity that adds strategic choices and decisions are good. Complexity for the sake of it, simply adds a series of mechanical button presses that do nothing to add depth. It’s button presses for the sake of button presses.

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Each of their games has a typical issue, they pick handful of previous game + “original” idea is not going to pull entire project if basics are not done right.

And people do legitimately complain, run completely out of resources after 15 min is bad, units and buildings offer no real variety compared even to old C&Cs, for example no: commandos, engineers, tier 3 units like mammoth tank , tier 2 defenses like Tesla coils or obelisk of light.

A base build game, without fluent base build just does not work.

The sing is, your issue can be easily solved by just launch custom game at other age, like at feudal or castle.

I really do not understand where this “make simple and accessible” is coming from and for RTS only.
Why not make Call of Duty simpler and accessible with Auto-aiming?
Why not make Need for Speed up-to-date with auto driving?
Maybe because the reason to play the game would be removed?

Its right in the name of the Series Age of Empires, it’s about ages. I already see that AoE4 Mongols are going to have just 3 ages as a big mistake.

The main concept of “tech up or tech rush” is to have tech for it, without it you can’t, by the way in AoE2 some people use this extra time to proper scout map with sheep and steal enemy sheep.

I would prefer to have more ages and tech, like 5th age renaissance with doctors, fire arrows tech, mace, flails and morning star weapons, lances for knights.

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While the games got more accessible, they kind of lost a lot of strategies.

Supreme Commander 2:
Without tier 2 and tier 3 units and buildings, the game simply lost a lot of strategies and the approach to make factions more different did completely mess up balance. Worst was in my opinion the red faction, they research buffs and walking ships, which did mean they could very easy unlock way faster very broken tech. Imagine entire navy suddenly get legs and walk to your base and if you could deal with them, you had to face an unstoppable epic unit. Tier 1 units had there no chance, and it was the moment where you did miss your tier 2 and 3 units from previous game.

Empire Earth 3
Empire Earth 1 basically pick age of empires and make it 4 times bigger with 15 ages you could very well experience tech up, from stone age till space, your balanced perks factions work quite similar to AoE and you could even make an custom and decide perks for it.

Empire Earth 3 was with 5 ages and 3 unbalanced factions very painful, sudden quantum jumps from Rome to Crusades, over to napoleon to today, than to Future was a big mess. EE1 had 5 resources, EE3 just 2. Base build was nerved into oblivion with territories you had to capture.
Empire Earth 3 is more accessible, but very boring due to it.

Dawn of War 3
They removed a lot of base build and did not add proper counter units. You had no longer defense towers and tech to focus economy on one of the 2 resources, quite a lot of unit very missing alongside their strategies, by marines like transportation and healer units. Overkill was gameplay about just destroy 1 object on the map.

I really did not understand the motivation to make that game so awful.

-strong heroes that could with 1 ability wipe armies did completely mess up strategy

-destroy first defense structure did give you massive economy boost, but second was hard to breach without later game tech, I assume they did not want casuals to lose too early, but created an abomination where more skilled player got economy boost and had to wait till he had the tech to break through to objective. Pace was simply absurd, rush to key location, wait and crush.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
This game is somehow not simply symbolic end of C&C, but the RTS genre. Because somehow they got into their head the idea base build has to be simple or even be completely removed.

There are no tactics, rush, tech-up, turtle, scouting, Micromanagement or Macromanagement, by just move handful of units who just shoot at each other to key locations.

We have seen a lot of projects ever since, but non of them seems to understand how important base build is for an RTS.

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It is Age of Empires. Of course it is about the immersion of building a great empire. And that is indeed a good thing. Maybe some people don’t like that, but then AoE is not for those people and there are many RTS that work differently which they can then go and play. This is a fundamental part of this game series and should continue to be so. Not rape this like EA did with CnC 4.

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You can make the same arguement the other way. You can always play a custom game with whatever settings you want. Ladder, competitive play and the standard is what’s going to matter.

That’s a nastalgia arguement. Which is fine but lets be clear that got nothing to do with game design.

Yes but the ages do not actually provide strategic choice. You don’t have a choice everyone has to get feudal and castle etc and once you get it automatically unlocks a whole lot of new units. Obviously the tech path is needed but there are other ways of doing it that offers more choice for the player.

e.g. and this is very not thought out, but if you didn’t have castle age but had to research knights to get access to them. Now you have to chose do I research knights or cav archers for example. They don’t just appear because of a step that everyone has to do.

I don’t neccessarily disagree but again what you are describing is nastalgia not good game design. If we are talking about game design then being so fixated oh a complex age system is also essentially hoping some developers 30 years ago when we had far less knowledge about game design magically stumbed onto the perfect formula.

Absolutely and if we talking actually about AOE2,3 etc I would completely agree. The games there, don’t like it don’t play. We are talking about a new game here. And presumable as fans we want to make sure it’s actually successful and makes money and attracts more fans. Not so a few people can have their nastalgia shot.

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I believe…
In a slow-paced game, having various techs you can individually research which totals together at ex 8 techs in total to an Age (granting a free extra tech or something) could be fun in more slowpaced games. But summarising together multiple techs, we get ‘ages’ in AoE 3. And within the whole Age of Empire franchise.

Though in theory 800 resources worth of tech could send the Settlement into Age II, and then having 2800 resources into tech sets it in Age III, etc.

It would enable war-tech aging, whilst making it more risky to ‘tech-boom’.

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@Hardform
Big problem is, while EA was not involved in most projects in last 10 years, still all RTS teams somehow managed to design pretty much similar lame games.

@AuroraStardaze
I have a very bad feeling to entrust complex AoE resource mechanics to current team, their games do not run out of resources, that’s a heavy transition.

@PowerRose373309
We both do agree the game needs to be improved, I just think it should make sense for the series, or franchise name might turn into a huge disadvantage.

The thing with ages, you do set game how you like it
-you want and accessible chill game, stay in dark age
-you don’t want to research, set game in last age

Just make one age for whole game, will backfire.

ages provide strategic choice is a valid point, but I think its rather unit related.
-Starcraft and C&C units are already at tier 1 full combat multi role ready, AoE does rather mature at end tier units. That’s why AoE has more base build strategies, than its counterparts. And that’s a very good thing to have an own identity as a game, to be not another flawed and failed attempt to copy starcraft. We need here an idea that does fit AoE, remove ages is obviously not.

4 Likes
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My problem is simply for last 15 years, we are getting legitimately indifferent flawed and bad designed RTS games.

Check my first post again, I mean what happened?

If I take for example C&C Red Alert and Company of Heroes, both take place in second World War, but that’s 2 completely different games.

So I did pick here some videos which do show how different are C&C Red Alert 1 and Company of Heroes, its very clear both games are different and follow different strategies. the base build and navy RA1 is clearly a different experience than take cover Coh. Its clear that loats of RA1 units, like tank does a different thing than an jet that needs to be reloaded with ammunition. Or handful of Coh soldiers who hide, while tank can push trough obstacles. Its clear in CoH you collect points to win by holding different areas while in Ra1 there can be several enemy bases of enemy, that can be located anywhere on a huge map. Both are different games.

If I take Grey Goo, Universe at War, Dawn of War 3, Spellforce 3, Ashes of the Singularity and Etherium Completely different universe and settings, but can you even tell any difference? All games start with some kind of fixed HQ location, have some kind of broken heroes/Epic units and blobs of armies, on almost identical maps, fight on almost similar frontline in maps middle, with units that do simply shoot or hit each other. With an objective to destroy some kind of central structure.

While they are from 5 completely different teams, from early till end game, you do not experience here a different game. After starting at HQ location, rushing to your first and second expansion, you fight at front line till you have the upper hand, to destroy one object. That’s very repetitive.

My point is, I am not against improvements and changes, but somehow all developers always end up by same “modern day” game formula again. That’s why I think AoE4 needs an own approach and formula, to not end up like those disappointments we had in last 10 years.

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Not denying that, but was just making a good example that I knew of and which concerned me personally. :cowboy_hat_face:

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To me this sounds like a much better approach. Great idea. In addition from a scouting perspective, the age will now tell you how much your opponent has spent into tech and those tech decisions actually matter in terms of strategic choice.

If you want to keep them, make them actually matter and not simply make your buildings look different. Aurora’s idea is actually very good to making it matter. Otherwise as i’ve said already it’s additional complexity for the sake of it.

And I think there’s a reason for that. It’s the better way to make an RTS. That’s why there are games like civilisation for example which is purely about city building or dare I say the Sims. RTS is about strategy and realtime combat as the name suggests. Base building should simply be there for strategic differentiation not just so I can have a pretty city.

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Replace food with a new kind of extra research resource,
has an issue as it could not be used to produce units.

Problem is, there are people who use 800 meat to make 16 soldiers out it to attack earlier.

I think the problem for RTS today is much more fundamental, let me quote Aaron Garvey Ph.D.Professor of Marketing.

Blockquote
Garvey worked in product marketing and would test prototype products with consumers. Some of these industry experiences inspired his later research. “I was just amazed that you could change what price you were going to launch a product at, and you could change what brand it was, and people would have dramatically different impressions of that product. And they would tell you incredibly different things about the product: they thought it was made of different materials, they thought it weighed more or it weighed less. Really out-there stuff that, at the time, we joked about but we couldn’t explain.”

-latest civilisation is still civilization
-latest Sims is still Sims
-city building like Anno is still Anno

So why is it OK for Anno 1800 from Profit Orientated Ubisoft to resemble Anno Series like first Anno 1600, but AoE4 has to be something completely different? What we have today has a barely resemblance of those complex maps and lots of tech we once had.
At that point it does not matter what is changed, if the core structure is not there.

And here is the simple problem to change too much, if it comes to an RTS, a base build RTS of today is not only, not related to own Series, it’s not even related to own base build genre.

Exactly this “RTS has to be completely different” mentality, did run genre into extinction.

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I am guessing you have NEVER HEARD OF, a tower rush, town centre rush, militia/man-at-arms rush, scout rush, Persian Douche, macro-micro economics, scout/scouting potential, and many more. :smiley:

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If something IS NOT broken. Then DO NOT fix it. :smiley:

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And Age4 will still be Age of Empires.

  1. Every Publisher/Developer is “Profit Orientated”

  2. Who wants that Age4 is something completly different? Not so many people. Age4 wont turn into a turnbased-moba-hero shooter-battle royale-survival-game, however what people want is refinement and modification of the formula. A sequel is good when it improves/refines in most ways compared to its predecessors. Its boring to play the same game over and over again without change. Look at Anno how changed over the years.

We haven´t seen any gameplay right now from age 4 and yet people are so afraid that it will turn out garbage if they try to change too much compared to Age2? Why even bother making a new game when the fans/consumers don´t want anything different from previous titles.

Yes, better make some repetitive clones and milk the franchise to death. Sounds good. :slight_smile:

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heard of all of those things. they are not standard play. If a tower rush or militia rush was meta then i would agree and actually would make the game more interesting. Except they’re not. The tower has to do damage or the militia has to do damage they are surprise builds you throw into a BoX.

If we had a game who’s meta was like make some militia move around, get some scouts do some skirmishes, get some archers etc then it would be a more interesting game much sooner. Instead we have (assuming 2 competent players) some scouts and militia or archer walking around…maybe sniping a vill or another archer…wait around for castle and imperial bam 200/200 army fight around the map. oh wait you lost 2 vills and an archer earlier…meh whatevs.

Then just make aoe2 remastered rather than make a new game.

sounds a bit hypocritical. Cause you keep saying why make it follow the same path as other similar entries into the genre but now you’re saying rts has to be different is running the genre into extinction???contradiction much

And yes i completely agree the game shouldn’t be completely different and draw on the successes of other games that are similar rather than sticking to a decade old formula.

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Yep. I hope the developers actually do something interesting given they are throwing a lot more money into a new engine etc. Otherwise they could have just done a Age2 remastered for a lot less money.

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The developers already did JUST THAT. It is called the Definitive Edition. :smiley:

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Except they are standard? I am not at what level you play. However, in AoE 2 DE i play at around ELO 800-900. I have seen such tactics used many times. In fact, over 50% of games i play, usually involve at least one (1) of the aformentioned strategies. I have even seen multiple games, especially in the professional games, streamed on twitch and on youtube, by T90 and other youtube channels and streamers. These tactics are used quite often.

Militia are almost completely useless, unless you specifically go to man-at-arms immediately after going fuedal. Even then, if you were to go militia, it would not usually be of any benefit and would most likely set you behind in terms of your economy. However, i can agree that militia are mostly useless, yet the dark age, and feudal age, are not completely useless, and serve some important functions which are not immediately obvious. Such as having your scout, well, scouting, and also the placement and positioning of your buildings is useful, do not forget, you can harass your enemy with your scout.

I win at least have my games while at the fuedal age. Or, at the very least, i have destroyed enough of the enemoies economy, so that when i get to the castle age, the enemy is still far from getting to the castle age, and so they are stuck in the fuedal age.

They already did. They call the remastered edition the “Definitive Edition”.

I am not sure if you failed to understand what was being stated. However, it was stated that such a “mentality”, of “needing to be different”, was the problem. It was not a statement in supprot of such practices, it was a statement in “condemnation”, of such practices. :smiley:

Change “for the sake of change”, is illogical. If, in a hypothetical scenario, a particular object is, by defintion, at the peak of “perfection”, then any change, would subsequently, by defintion, make such an object, “less than perfection”, and thus, the object would be of a lower and inferior quality. :smiley:

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Thats exactly why Age 4 needs some changes compared to Age 2. DE remastered Age2 already enough so there is no need to make Age 4 too similar when you can also play DE.

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Yes, but AoE4 need there logical changes, or it will be just another nail in the Coffin for the genre.
This means economy optimization, tech tree advancements and new units.

We are in same boat, everybody should be free for suggestion, but be aware not every theory might be good in realization.

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