Is it just me who becomes more and more afraid of AoE4 and a potential dissapointment?

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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As we get more and more info of AoE4 all our expectations start to bubble. Since they dropped the news I have been worried for a continued development as the “less popularized” games of the series.

I think I speak for many of the AoE2 crowd, and if they don’t mind us, I think that the community will be further divided and AoE2 (DE) will continue to be the most played game of the series and that AoE4 wont be the successor that we all have been waiting for.

Fortification builder:
Hopefully the game dont become the fortification and citybuilder as we see in the trailer. I know that a lot of the casual crowd like to play slow, build a big base (and city) and a grand army and attack after 30 min. BUT I think that walls need to be a big investment and that it doesnt becom standard in the game. As we all have seen i Aoe2 tournaments, walls isnt that common and rushes are. This need to continue.

Hero units
This turned me off extremely. I can accept the kind of hero-units in AoM with the passive abilities, but to include a hero unit with active (usable) actions and 3x HP and x2 attack of a “normal” unit is unrealisric, boring and just takes another game mechanic from a lesser played game. One of the core elements of AoE2 for me is that “all units” are equal or equivalent.

Unit HP,
Something else that I think Aoe3 and AoM did that AoE2 dnt have was the ridicculusly HPed units. Musketmen in Aoe3 can shoot eachother with like 20 shots and still live. I know its “almost the same” in AoE2 but having a single knight rushing against 12 archers, i needs to die after 2nd or thrid volley.

“Snare” or other “battle elements”
as fatigue or stun NEEDS TO BE EXCLUDED, this is the one factor I dislike with the Aoe3 and AoM games, just watch SOTL video on the subject.

TLDR:
Don’t make this game to “Fortification builder” or Total War, don’t include the aspects that every other RTS game has (Heroes, Elite units, status effects). You don’t need to be everything, you just need to be the Age of Empires which we all want. And I think that AoE2 needs to be the template and AoE3 DE and AoM need to step back, the were less favourable of the reasons we all know, especially the developers. Dont try to “fix” the problem, dont include it from the start.

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Instead of heroes unit I will prefer like a commander, a unit that is a little bit better than other units but with some habilites, something like DOW1 where you have commanders that are good but some units wipe them easily, they are there to support the army, not the army to support the heroes

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Just to clarify,
No I don’t want a AoE2DE2

I like the factors of fighting and ambush in the forest, depleting resourses etc

But I dont like: Farming INSIDE you base (non historic accurate and continue the “Fortification simulator” thing.

One other thing, 1 unit = one popcap. If you think an elephant needs more “pop” make another population resource like “Stable availbility” or “Available Horses/Elephants” equivalent to the amout of stables you have.

And dont restrict the amout of buildings you can to. If i want to funnel my enemies in a labyrinth if towers i a ranked game - let me.

And we need mod compatiblility, just like the one i Aoe2de/aoe2 (2013)

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Hello

don’t worry, developers are moving towards e-sports.
I personally play PvP multiplayer and there won’t be time on the wall :slight_smile:

Maybe someone will be concreted in, but as we all know who controls the map and resources win :slight_smile:

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Why does it need to continue?

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Its my explanation of why Aoe2 was the most popular in the series. It built from Aoe1 and complemented its flawes.

Aoe3/aom tried to shortened the early game at the expense of early rushes, I think this was a bad mistake (from an Aoe2 players perspective, and we are the majority :slight_smile: )

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Thats why the “Active used abilities” need to be realistic, maybe a morale-modiying trumpet (or arrow) not not a massive snare, one shot kill ability or alike

But yes agree, a commander for and army, not an army for an commander. Like you explained it.

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Rushing is for noobs :stuck_out_tongue:

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There is no heroes in multiplayer with the exception of the mongols, which have the Khan

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I’ve not yet seen massive snares, one shot kill ability or something like that.

There are lance charges, scout hunting, archers got deployable obstacles.

Now there is the “Hardened Khan” That has 3 active abilities that seems to buff speed, attack or defense. Now his hp is 115 which isn’t that big since there is a video of a scout with 135hp. That doesn’t look like a hero unit. More a buff commander type unit.

Now there will be heros for the campaigns. No heroes for pvp gameplay so far.

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Delhi and Chinese are getting uniques as well. Researchers and tax collectors.
Also, their infantry have active abilities to entrench and brace themselves etc.

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Maybe that’s why they keep adding changes to AoE2 that upset some of the older players of the game. Get us frustrated enough to switch to AoE4 :slight_smile: [semi-joke]

Disagree with you. Your average AoE2 bases look pretty dumb when you think about it. Houses being the main walls of your city, farms placed around the town center of a town, etc.

Sometimes the Huge Unit HP made sense in AoM. A Mountain Giant ought to have a ton of HP, it’s a freaking Giant afterall. I doubt that we will run into this in AoE4. I guess only Elephants will have high HP, but that again makes sense, as they’re likely to be very expensive units.

I think AoE3 was just less popular because the units were much less intuitive than the units in AoE2, and a game like AoM is just too crazy to balance competitively, but actually a very fun game for casual play. The unit design of AoE2 was probably one of the things that really was making the game relatively easy to get into.

AoE2 has gotten a lot more boring to both play and watch as many things have been nerfed out of the game over the past few years. It’s gotten to the point that tournament organizers need to come up with completely new maps just to keep the game interesting.

I like this, I think different units should consume different amount of pop-space. A knight definitely takes more resources to upkeep than a spearman does. So this change makes sense, and will probably mean that you can’t just spam-click your strongest unit and power through everything like you sometimes can do in AoE2.

But this literally happens in AoE2 as well, everyone puts their farms right next to their TC’s, and not outside of their walls (like it would have happened in actuality)

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Regarding farms being inside the settlements, next to town centres:

What the Casear series has done is designating fertile areas on the map. So you can’t just build farms anywhere; those need to be placed on fertile grounds. That’s pretty much how other resources work: you extract ore where the mine is located for example.

They could add fertile grounds like they do with berry bushes. If a player still places farms next to the town centre then the crop yield would be less.

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Fertile areas are a nice idea, but they have to be plentiful to avoid the rng side of things like AoE2 has with gold mine spawning in awkward locations for one player, and perfect location for the other.

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  • Says the noob. :smiley: :smiley: Who CANNOT rush. :smiley: :smiley:
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The person was referring SPECIFICALLY tyo AoE 3.NOT AoE 4. :smiley: :smiley:

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Yes ofc, but he raised concerns about having hero units that had these kinds of abilities in AoE4 since there is in AoE3.

And he need not concern as there has been no kind of these abilities shown in AoE4 so far.

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Well I have to disagree on many things here.

Rushing should be just as viable as turtling or booming. They are much bigger walls and I hope they do cost more, build slower but are also much harder to take down. Siege should be a thing people have to learn how to do. Hopefully they will keep the sidewalks around buildings so no more walling with houses and markets.

I do like AOE3 explorers. They are a high HP tank and low attack. They are not needed but I like how each of them can have some passive abilities and collect treasures. It gives more dynamic differences to each civ.

High unit HP makes sense to highlight countering. I watch aoe2 and it really looks like counters are not as important. Units die so fast and easily. High Hp units mean counter units have more of a chance to do their job rather than get killed simply by masses of kiting ranged units. One game I played on FFA in aoe 2 all I made was turkish cannoneers. They really did too good even with no micro and a little choke point. So far we have seen 50hp vils and 2000 hp elephants. Now Aoe2 vils are cheaper and I think train faster than aoe3 vils so it makes more sense to have higher HP ones in aoe3.

Snare is good, it rewards and challenges players for correct positioning and lets melee be more effective. Its really important when melee units have to stop to attack while range units can continue to walk way… melee should at least be able to attack while moving for that to be removed. It adds a whole another depth to micro and tactics when people get out of position.

Its the little things like that which should make the game hard to master, yet easy for anyone to play casually.

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Well agree to disagree.

If the game develops in this direction, me an many others will just continue to play aoe2 and the playerbase will just be yet more divided and the game will be remembered as a flop.

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While I loved age 2 back in the day, I just hated those tower rush or castles in front of your base, that one of the things I hated about age2, by the looks of age 4 I thinks wall will be even more important this time, hopefully Relic get rid of those castle/towers rushes outside your base.

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