I think I'm done

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

I am so tired of some things of the game.

Before the patch, the meta in 3v3 or 4v4 was about build walls and build a wonder as fast as you can.

Now with the update, it seems another known tactic has arised. Basically, people returns to the stupid tactic of build an army of full knights and go to the landmarks.

They don’t want fight you, or get map control, or nothing. They just build 50 knights, and get to your base to fire your landmarks.

In case of the chineese it’s way worse. They build 50 fire lancers and they burn your entire base in a minute, without being able to do nothing.

Had a match, 4v4 where two dudes of the other team just were doing this. They built some walls to get time, and when we were fighting the mid they just come with knights and fire lancers to fire the landmarks.

If you build some walls, no problem, they will come with 2 bombards and then enter, and with the walls build time nerf, and open maps, it’s really difficult to wall your entire city so they don’t do that, and too easy to just break a part and flood your base with knights.

Basically, all games now are: english/french rush, or knights flood. We return to months ago, where people seems to only get fun sticked to these two tactics.

Yesterday I’ve played for 3h, and all games were trash. I’ve ended thinking about, more or less, 8/10 matches are boring. That’s a very raw number.

Talking about the 1v1, or 2v2 with a friend, all boils up to the same. 1v1 matches are rush matches, where if a french/english is in front, you know exactly what he gonna do (and for so, it’s so easy to counter), if a chineese, he will boom to get a thousand nest of bees, if a mongol, he will build just mangudai, etc…

2v2 is the same, almost all my 2v2 games are against french+english that build knights+longbows+rams to end the game in 8 minutes.

To resume, I am no longer getting fun with this game…

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Ever since I bought the game it was only knights + siege meta, nothing else. Fast rush, if against English with Longbowmen if against anyone else just knights or spearmen, mostly French, Mongols, English or Chinese, sometimes Delhi are seen, rarely Abbasid, I’ve discussed in another thread about this:

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This is why landmark victories are stupid. It literally just encourages obnoxious players to just avoid your armies. The only way to avoid it is to play custom and disable landmark victory. But then you have to kill every single unit your enemies have to win if they refuse to leave after you beat them. I guess the landmarks were to avoid people hiding 1 worker on the map but it just doesn’t work.

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Yes, you are right.

And in the end, knights trade well against spearmen, when they are the counter.

It’s clear that spearmen are cheaper than knights, but when you reach imperial and you can get infinite food from farms and gold is not a real issue, it doesn’t matter if you “lose” a fight against spearmen, because you can build another knight army and just evade the spearmen, search for commerce, or if they are not walls just harass the entire economy or the landmarks.

I am one of these players that like to fight for map control, and reach almost castle age or imperial.

But when everyone around just do the same things in every match, you need to adapt and do the same things or the same defense.

I’ve played a 1v1 match against french as abbasid (I’m main abbasid), and known exactly what he was about to do. Result? I won because built spearmen for they knights and horsemen for their archers, after win the battle just got to castle, and harass their base with rams and mangonels. I won, but if I play against another french the game will be exactly the same…

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Yep, but if not your landmarks it will be your economy doing exactly the same thing, get to your base avoiding to fight.

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It has been knight blob rush for months now depending on the ELO and map, so I don’t know why that has become a new thing for you now. I haven’t seen much of FL since the patch on them. I see one or more Abbasid players in all of my 3 vs 3 or 4 vs 4 games anymore.

For the most part, I find the game less fun since the current patch slowed down the game by a few minutes at my ELO since it takes just that little bit longer to capture the SSs as Delhiman and I can’t drop SWs to help, and Elephants aren’t viable enough to include due to their low damage to buildings and inability to catch siege, so it comes down to trying to get walls up around SSs and moving forward with Mango+MaA spam. With each patch, my army diversity shrinks and my micro improves.

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Knight balance has never really made sense to me from the beginning. They were weakened a bit when crossbowmen and spearmen were buffed in one of the earliest patches, but those units become less and less viable as you get later into the game*, which leaves knights to be the dominant force. It’s notable that in the late game it’s not just the cheap units that get ignored (archer, crossbowmen, spearman, man-at-arms and horseman), but the expensive ones too. People aren’t bothering with handcannoneer, nor expensive unique units like streltsy, grenadier, elephants, camel riders and archers, or horse archers.

I’m a bit worried that Relic’s recent comments are very oriented around civilization balance, and less so around unit balance. Everyone getting the most overpowered units is not a good way for the game to be balanced.

*for two reasons: mangonels/NoB are oppressive and while they are cost efficient vs knights they aren’t supply efficient against knights

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It’s not new to me, just that the players that used to boom and put a wonder now returns to the knights flood. People do three types of strategies, wonder, knights flood or feudal rush.

In 3v3 or 4v4 that feudal rush ends 3/4 times with the player being focused dead and everyone else surrendering.

It’s not about “you have to scout and check for what is the enemy doing”. I scout and almost every time build some army to defend myself or my allies, but if the others players just do nothing… I know that this is not a problem of the game, but is sad that every game is the same, anyone getting rushed, or being knight flooded, or a wonder (before the patch wonder seems to be too expensive).

About the elephants or special units, I share your thoughts. I am main abbasid, and camel are so situational and in most cases inefficient.

180 food a camel archer, that will just support you when fighting against chivalry, but for 140 food you get a knight that have the greatest harass rate.

Knights must be expensive and time to build greater, so people don’t focus just on building massive armies of knights.

35 secs and expensive than a knight to build a camel, that it’s obviously worse in all kind of situations.

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9

Aoe4 convinced me that Aoe3de is maybe the best AOE ever made but it has not been understood at launch.

I seen the roadmap for Aoe4 and i don’t see anything for the singleplayers apart of mods. This game appears every day as a game oriented to competitive scene and this is the reason it will never be a success: a decent game yes, a success not.

Many features that will come are simply forgotten or unready features at launch but we are not talking about new gameplay modes.

How much time should we wait for new civilazations, graphic updates, better phisycs, better gaia, animations and more? 2023? For that time there will be more strategy games like COh3 and AOMDe and new DLC for AOE2de and AOE3de.

In the meanwhile i decided to reinstall Aoe3de and this is what i see: one the most beatiful games ever made in terms of immersion, graphic and unique civilizations.

  1. Homecities; it could be a really great add for the next AOE

  1. realistic physics
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  2. a vivid and beatiful world where developers have implemented zoom out and zoom in ver well. You have the choice to play with a strategic vision with a perfect zoom out and units are very good readable or going deep into the action with the zoom in and seeing the detailed battles and units more close.
    Content 2022 03 05 12 05 32 08 - YouTube

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Content Screenshot 2022.03.05 - 11.40.32.771920×1080 380 KB

Content Screenshot 2022.03.05 - 11.41.36.01
Content Screenshot 2022.03.05 - 11.41.36.011920×1080 430 KB

Content Screenshot 2022.03.05 - 11.46.23.58
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Unfortunately Aoe4 not allows. Developers blocked the zoom in and the zoom out due the performance (and i suspect also because they don’t wanna show the unit models to prevent other critics).

I was waiting for a better roadmap but it seems i have to stop for now until they’ll give me some reasons to play again.

A bit delusion due i had have the hopes after the launch.

Hope to people will have a fun with this game. I know there are people who like it.

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For me the problem is that I never know what the enemy’s doing because I don’t want to use the same strats non stop, I want some freedom of choice in playstyle. It’s really easy to learn the meta, it’s harder to play on weakness and expect to win something.

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Played a 3v3 just right now as abbasid in nagari.

Started with some horsemen and camel archers, and easily won the map control. Stablished a base in front of the mountain pass of this map and built some siege to break their stone wall and put mine.

Tried some times to enter, but got rejected 2 times without major loses, so I got to imperial.

Surprise for nothing, two of them landed with horses to fire my two landmarks as abbasid, but just because I knew that they were going to do that, because EVERYONE do that right now, I built like 4 castles near to the house of wisdom.

Result? All his horses were killed trying to burn my two distinctives, and when I was entering their bases with my army they just surrendered.

So annoying that they even avoid to fight, it’s a all or nothing, try to win the game with horses, and if goes wrong just surrender.

Is that funny? lmao

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Man, aoe 3 really is a gem, isnt it?

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quien gana? un tipo a mano pelada o un ninja con una espada?

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If I were that guy i’d fight to the death with settlers while selling my buildings to deny the pleasure of pillaging. I don’t like surrendering without a last epic defense. Too boring. The game’s too focused on ‘‘I start, I rush, I win’’ mentality, it’s just too competitive for me sometimes. I even played unfair matches with drophackers to the end just to waste their time a little. Like if they would’ve kicked me out too with the rest, why play the game at all? :rofl:

It’s like they consider it a waste of time to fight with other means, and probably because the game doesn’t let you to do that most of the time because if you play for fun you end up losing because someone has to win for the game to end and some units are just plain useless against others. Maybe you can make epic battles with friends but we’re doing the go-pro mentality.

I’ll quote something that relates to this ‘‘It’s not winning that matters but how we win.’’ -Someone of who’s name I forgot.

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i guess the question i have in response to this whole thread is in the simplest possible terms, what are the specific changes that would need to be made to improve the state of the game in your opinion?

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Absolutely yes, no doubt about It.

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It’s complex, because, there are some things that could be done:

  1. Increase knights cost and production time (so it’s not that easy get a full knights army)

  2. Disable non-siege units to burn landmarks, castles, and reinforced outposts (no more torchs destroying stone castles lmao). And maybe, made them less effective versus the rest of the buildings.

  3. Add torch resistence to the university technology that increases the buildings health points.

These are some fast ideas, that could individually be applied to the game.

Obviously, I haven’t thought about the consequences in the meta or in the game, these are just some fast ideas to avoid people to just build knights army because they are “cheap”, fast to produce, and effective against almost everything, and their high mobility don’t expose you as much as an infantry army.

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i don’t know how i feel about making siege weapons the only way to destroy landmarks, but giving them a slight hp buff might be a start. landmark victorys are honestly my favorite way to play (sacred and wonder are cool too but just don’t feel like the classic “destroy the enemy base” victory i tend to prefer in RTS games) but i do think it should be a somewhat hard fought battle assuming the other player has bothered to muster some decent defenses. i will say though if you leave your base wide open to attack you shouldn’t really be surprised when the other guy is able to outmaneuver your army and steamroll you. not saying thats whats happening to you just saying

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Yes, but in the other hand it’s ridiculous that the only “effective” building to defend your base is the castle. And it’s not really as effective, because due to the mobility of the knights you can easily get to all landmarks even if there are a few castles.

In my opinion, a player base should be a harder objective, not as easy to beat with a few horses with men on top throwing torchs.

I like also the landmark victory, but not for the idea of killing the landmarks, just because it mean you had to win some battles before, but in my opinion the most interesant win is the sacred one.

But defend three points it’s almost imposible, that’s because I love king of the hill map.

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I would move the stone wall to Castles as it is already in the 1vs1 tournament rule, thus avoiding boring meta.

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