Take a good look at the whole game and write the pros and cons.
Cons: - terribly much smoke for cannons and firearms. The whole army is lost in the smoke.
When you destroy the siege weapons, the whole animation is a few wood chips. Are you serious . Make quality animations of destructive siege weapons
The map is small. Big disappointment. Players split the map in half and make walls. They build castles and shoot castles at each other - whoever enjoys it.
and the last negative: the fiery arrows look awful. And I see that the arrows always hit the target, which is the worst thing about the game for me.
everything else is fine
graphics, sounds, mining, units.
Small map better for competitive game, you can play in much bigger map. Biggest probleme to me is readability in late game as dead building don’t disapear.
Welcome to age of empires. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Build a Castle right next to your enemy’s and you basically get a castle stalemate.
It’s a 1v1 map. I’d expect it to be smaller than the other maps.
They could just let you control castle agro, kill the villagers instead?
It looks like they were built around the same time and the amount of progress +villages on the english castle would make killing those foundations impossible.
The maps are if anything too big because you can always choose to select a bigger map (unless you are 8 players) but smaller maps are actually locked in AoE4.
The same number of players defaults on a bigger map compared to AoE1-3.
But I think the size is perfect.
It would be nice to have larger options for custom matches though. I hope at last scenarios can have larger maps but who knows.
How did you not notice that yet?
It was clearly visible in the Fan Preview already months ago and both Betas confirmed it. There are so many threads about it here.
I’d imagine you’d have a pretty bad time stuffing 4 players in a 2 player size map.
I think it’d break map balance and ruin people’s game experience.
This is the same case in most RTS games but the ones that allow you to do it still make it pretty clear the map generation is messed up.
You mean like playing an 8 player map with 2 players or something?
I recall being able to do it.
Quite a few people were complaining about the “machine gun arrows” from the keeps.
I think it’s been designed this way to allows both the defender and attacker to have a clear view of the firepower of the keep.
People are suggesting that the arrows should come out of different places in the keep.
I don’t mind how it is, but I also think I wouldn’t mind the suggested change.
Chemistry on arrows look incredibly bad (arrows look like fireballs and some new year rocket explosion on the target) and there’s ALOT of smoke clouding the area, especially on the big bombards.
There should at least be a graphical setting for the smoke to decrease the level of fx that’s getting put out on your screen.
The visual responsiveness for the player is simply not there anymore:
Just luck at this push into the enemy bombards, good look trying to figure out how the fight goes.
Fire arrows straight up needs a complete visual rework.
I’m dead serious, the game suffers from odd trajectory lines that you notice cause arrows and bows seem to be so bulky/big anyway, and pair that with the awfull looking chemistry one that even clouds your vision and it makes the game look and feel cheap…
Even AoE1 had cleaner arrow and “chemistry” design and animation in 1997.
Siege weapons are almost identical when packed. At a quickly look its very hard to distinguish trebuchet from mangonel. And also their cannonball/stones are too tiny and so fast that I cant see where it is heading to or hitting. No impact on the ground when cannonball drops or hits it.
Also machinegun like castles are absurd.
Also hate the fact that we cant select players colors. It is always blue vs red.
UI needs to change to illustrations or photographs instead of icons because it is not easily distinguishable.
I like machinegun arrow from keep, it’s fun too watch and fun is good in a video game. Too much pure reality is pretty bad, imagine no wololo from aoe1 (its probably a way more absurd but it was one of the best feature in aoe franchise)
I personally like the smoke, it adds a lot of inmersion and mess which I like. They just need to make it dimmer or add more transparency, but I love how big it is actually.
I also like how it looks from a cinematic point of view, but it can be terrible if you are the one enduring it during gameplay, especially in competitive play, as you can see in the parts of the video brought up by keempf and beetlerock.
destroyed buildings should disappear over time, when playing stress test and you already have a lot of destroyed buildings on map and you move the camera to those buildings i had huge fps drops, if they optimized that then keep it otherwise get rid of it.
