hello big Age of Empires family !
Most of the players of Age of 4 are old age of empires 2 players.
That’s why it’s important that the new game is backward compatible.
Especially for hotkeys. That’s why I made a design for the interface that should be.
I hope this suggestion will be taken into account.
AGE -I-
AGE -II-
AGE -III-
AGE -IV-
I like it. I like it a lot.
They’ll never use it. But I sure wish they would.
I have to admit, that’s a disane I can get behind!
In before Relic / World’s Edge reaction: “But how are players going to know what buildings they can unlock by aging up without the 4 separate tabs? Waaay too confusing for our target audience!”.
The more I think about this the more I realize this is the kind of thing that means I won’t be buying this game on release.
They could do things like this, things their customers want.
But they don’t. So I’ll wait. Maybe in a year they’ll figure it out.
It would be nice to have both options. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
Also, you are missing either stone walls or stone wall towers, not 100% sure which.
That is actually an advantage of the current one, makes it very obvious for new players when they will be able to build what.
so advantage that some civs have some buildings on different keys.
Mongols for example.
You may be right, but Age of empires 2 floundered after many players played the Demo…
At least it can be given as an option. There is also a solution to that problem.
Well that’s obviously true, but the endangered species that are players who use hotkeys will have to remember what age each building belongs to before pressing the hotkey, which is a useless additional mental load, and I’d argue it also affects players getting used to the hotkey system. All in all, Target Audience 1 - Endangered Species 0 for this round.
Hotkeys must be completely customizable, this is a must have in any RTS (especially the AGE franchise). With Grid or without Grid, this should be an option, never an imposition, the way we press the keys is related to how we play and interact with the game, it is a primordial factor for the experience to be pleasant or not for many players.
1 suggestion would be to put the gates under the respective walls, i.e. palisade gate goes under the palisade wall button and the stone gate goes under the stone wall button. Just makes it more intuitive from a muscle memory perspective.
I actually like the current aoe4 grid system but I am not gonna lie, your set up is really, really good, you could include the age up option on Q+C and they could definitely set this up as an alternative hotkey system to their own, so ppl have the option to choose.
Really nice work there.
I think they used a new design due to the fact that you have access to various other buildings depending on which faction you play. Chinese would need up to 4 buttons for every 2nd dynasty building, granary, pogoda and probably something else that doesn’t cross my mind atm.
One way they could add this option wtihout having to change anything, is to allow us to make each building on a separate hotkey, and allow us to make all the Age keys the same key. This way they can keep the UI the same, but players will always hit the same one or two keys for build, and then a unique hotkey that they’ve memorized for a specific building. This way there’s an option for everyone with minimal change.
I second this motion. All those in favor say, “Aye.”
I have to be honest - I like the current design of separating by age.
But honestly, what will satisfy everyone is completely customizable hotkeys.
One thing I’ve suggested in the past for AoE 2 DE is that there should be an option to have icons follow hotkeys.
So, for example, to me it would be more logical to have stone wall on A rather than D. If I set my stone wall hotkey to A, then the icon for stone wall should move to the A position to reflect this (if I have turned on the option to have icons follow hotkeys).
For AoE 4, of course, they would need to allow individual hotkeys to be set before they could even consider making the icon layout follow the user’s preferred hotkeys.
Separating by Ages causes problems customizing hotkeys.
The ages are already clear in this way.
Not really, separated grids are way more easy to read than a little roman number at the corner.
But as people already said, being able to customize it would be great.
As i see it, there sould be only one buton for the gate and it sould adapt to stone gate or wood gate, when player hover any type of wall.
Hovering the wall whit a gate could also show cost at the same time.
Also, I don’t see having two hotkeys to put a door on a wall, when one should be enouf.