Mounted Samurai are no fun

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I play a lot of team games, mainly 2v2. And before someone says 1v1 is the main game mode: more team games are played than 1v1.

The knight meta is very stale and reduces the number of viable civs to only those that can spam strong knights. Sadly, it has come to the point where I actually enjoy seeing Age of Empires IV French as an opponent. It’s way better than having to face Japan or Sengoku. There is no real counter to population-efficient Mounted Samurai. It’s just not fun watching the shield absorb spearmen damage and heavy cavalry as a whole ignore keeps and TC fire. Once you fall behind, there’s no way to recover.

Japan and Sengoku just feel like they are on another level. Once they hit Castle Age, it feels like you’re playing against tanks.

I’m going to take a break and try other games and RTS titles. I’m not enjoying Age of Empires IV anymore. If there’s a major rebalancing, I’ll come back and check the state of the game again. I don’t think there should be six civs per year. The game’s quality feels worse than before. Release one variant and one new civ, polish the content, focus on balance and bug fixes, improve UX, ban cheaters and exploiters, and rework civs like JD and Zhu Xi. There’s so much that could sustainably grow the player base and revenue instead of pushing more and more content to a declining player base.

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And? For balance, 1v1 is generally the standard to balance for, with secondary considerations given to larger modes (and to be clear: larger game modes shouldn’t be ignored). But adding more players pretty much exponentially expands the amount of viable combinations. Something that could never happen in 1v1 can happen in team games when you have someone to screen you. It makes it much harder to balance.

Lots of people play the Single Player, but we probably shouldn’t rely on them for balance insight (this includes me; I’m just talking general design theory here). Popularity is not how balance is managed - what makes the best possible impact in as many game modes as possible, while causing the least negative impact in the most game modes as possible, is generally the favoured approach.

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