The game time period runs primarily through the 1000s up to the 1550s. At this time period we already have pike and shot warfare, advanced gunpowder artillery and pistols. We got full plate harnesses, cannons and deep water, ocean fairing ships.
It just bugs me that HCs still run around with sticks while streltsy already have arquebus correctly depicted. I hope it could be changed or maybe introduced as an upgrade.
Not all the civilizations in the game switched that fast on arquebuses. I believe that they are trying to depic that, for sure in the future there will be more civilizations with more advanced form of gunpowder units.
AoE 4 is the Middle Ages. Most civs did start out with rudimentary Chinese stick hand cannons which spread through the Silk Road, later improved upon by Mamluks and Turks.
What’s missing in the game is some of the main civilizations of that age, that made this breakthrough.
Spain invented the important arquebus in ~1413, but is not represented in the game (!), even though Spain was more important than England, even Rus during 80% of the game time interval!
Most important of all, the Turks (Ottoman Empire) invented the musket circa ~1465 in the city of Edirne, located in nowadays’ Turkey. Needless to say, the musket (the basic firearm of Age of Empires 3) transformed warfare, history and even world geopolitics.
It is very wrong and unfair (to put it softly!) that the Ottoman Empire is not on Age of Empires 4. Rus learned to make muskets from the Turks decades later (before most Europeans), this changed Russian history, and now Rus are in the game and have the later “Streltsy” while the real great empire Ottoman with the original Janissary not in the game!
Talk about crazy unfairness.
There’s literally no reason for Rus to have Streltsy’s at all in the first place. Seems like dev’s ran out of ideas and just made a 1600s unit into a unique unit just because.
But by the time streltsy appeared, clearly most of them already had switched to arquebuses…
I’d enjoy a few more upgrades that can transform handcannoneers into something resembling arquebusiers over the course of the imperial age to give it more depth. More than this I’d love proper phalanx mechanics for pikes! No rts beyond Total War has bothered to implement them properly