My anti-cheese/realism feature requests for AOE4

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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Ok so a while ago I started this thread on the AOE2 forum, throwing a bunch of new civ ideas and new unit ideas out there mostly for fun thinking nothing serious of it but what do you know half the things I fantasised about actually made it into the game so I figured I might as well put my ideas out for the new game as well and who knows maybe some of it will make it into the game. Now obviously since the game isn’t out I don’t know a lot of about what’s already in it or not so some of this stuff might be redundant but here it is anyway…

True Line of Sight:

I hope we get a bit more realism around how line of sight works. I can see that they have kind of implemented this around the ambush mechanism and I hope they expand on it. RTS games where line of sight (LOS) and LOS-blocking objects are implemented are a lot of fun and this mechanism adds another interesting level of complexity to the game. Walls for example shouldn’t just block unit path but also block line of sight. Same with hills and forests and other buildings. You shouldn’t really be able to see behind things that would in real life block your LOS. Unless you have elevation, or a tower for example. This would also give building outposts and taking control of hills an extra dimension of importance.

Elevation:

Elevation was a big thing in AOE2 because of the extra damage you could get from elevation, this was taken away in AOE3 as far as I know which was a shame, I hope they bring this back in in AOE4. And not only should elevation give you extra damage, it should give ranged units extra range (as it would in real life) and also give units line of sight beyond things Line of sight blocking objects such as buildings/walls/forests etc…

Siege mechanics:

I hope that a bit more thought is given to the functionality of siege weapons. The addition of ladders and siege towers is great, but lets make sure that we dont have a scenario again where swordsmen can bring down stone walls with their swords (or even with torches because stone walls dont burn). Make rams an anti-gate weapon. Catapults/trebuchets anti-walls and anti-buildings. Ballistas if they exist should be able to shoot in an arc over a wall only if the target is far from a wall. A unit standing right behind a wall should be protected from incoming fire unless arrows are shot straight up in the air and land on their heads.

Building restrictions:

I hope that we get some sensible realism around where/how/when buildings can be contructed. Hope that we no longer get silly scenarios where castles are built so close to each other that they can fire on each other and we have a war of buildings instead of having war of armies. Defensive structures (castles, towers etc) should only realistically be built as defensive structures not in the middle of your opponent’s town while his whole army is within shooting distance of it.

The most sensible way of doing this is by making it so that major buildings and military presence creates an area of denial where the enemy just can’t build. Also create carts for transporting resources to places where buildings are to be constructed. Villagers shouldn’t just be pulling resources out of thin air to build buildings. Make the material a physical object in the game that needs to be transported. This will create so much more depth and strategy to building.

Capture mechanics:

I hope that there can be more ways of capturing buildings and other units other than by monks. This could be greatly expanded. Monks could still capture monastries I think. But we should need infantry and foot soldiers to capture other military buildings. This would also give a good reason to create infantry in a game that is otherwise dominated by mounted knights and archers. Any military building that isn’t occupied with friedly units or has friendly units in its vicinity should be able to be captured.

Also resource buildings should be able to be looted. And drop off buildings if we end up having them taken over by villagers. Also resource carts for buildings could also be capturable. Resources should be a thing that you should be able to capture, they even wanted to have some version of this in AOE2 but they didn’t end up doing it, but you have it in some campaigns at least.

Better naval warefare:

Please create better more realistic naval warefare. Boarding ships should be a thing as that is how most naval battles actually happened. Maybe you can load your warships with different units and then they can board enemy ships and you could literally fight on the decks. That would be ■■■■■■■ amazing.

That’s it for now If I think of something else I’ll add it to this.

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Im not agree with resources for building, this is age of empires, not Anno. Here you have to focus on fight and be capable of build a barracks can change the battle

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This is basically the game I want to play. Sadly it is the eleventh hour and what we see is far from it.

  1. LOS- Totally agree, walls need to block LOS unless units are in a siege tower. This should be includes for Castles and towers that would have units in range but blocked by other buildings, such as a tower on the opposite side of a castle.

  2. Elevation: Let us hope so… I do not want too much extra attack, in realism, a hit with an arrow can have different severity but its pretty much the same wound. Here is how i would like damage to work, Give archers a accuracy rating to whether it hits or not. Then depending on how well the other unit is armored will give a chance to be a glancing blow, a small chance critical strike killing instantly. a small chance for a mortal would that will drain HP slowly unless healed, or a casual wound that does HP damage, and maybe slows them down a little but they fight on… similarly in hand attacks it works same way giving better odds of critical hits if units are surrounded. If archers too are running from cav, they should get easy critical strikes. These chances also would chance with upgrades to weapons and armor and counter types. So a knight has the height on a swordsman, so gets the advantage, the knight is out ranged by the pike man, so gets losing value, and the swordsman, can dodge the spear. Hopefully the result is not just on mathematics, but unit types and positioning, creating a dynamic playing out. Back to elevation, I would like it to increase range and accuracy.

  3. Siege. Walls look great, if they allow high DPS torches or swords to break through them it will be a failed concept. It really needs to focus on the strategic positioning and dismantling of the bases. Forcing the opponent to make flank attacks. Possibly one could spend wood and have them build a structure to undermine the wall if done very slowly.

  4. Buildings. Yeah I have seen too many Toxic games of putting castles right on top of peoples bases its just wrong. and firing through each other as mentioned needs to be updated. In return, castles are very strong vs inf and knights and elephants.

  5. Resources: I really like this idea about resource management… it seems silly to send a vill out on the edge of the map to build tons of stuff… It really is a strategic planner but that could get pretty complex and hard to manage where your res are. I like the Idea and it needs working out.

At first you gather normally, like a wood chopper goes to a tree to chop it down, then processes it on sight and caries a bundle to the mill. as you upgrade you then get the cart and can carry more. but as you upgrade into a sawmill then your villagers will go out to get trees and cut them down fast and carry big logs to the saw mill to process, so the building then is gathering or vills are gathering faster by being tasked to the building while some go and get trees.

  1. Capture-I do not think enemy barracks should be convertable unless they train slower or something, But it does make one think about a risky FB if not well protected… but I do think they should be capturale, and then can be set to burn, this is a way inf can siege non stone buildings.

  2. yeah naval warefare needs a whole rework and I have posted a lengthy detailed list of things to make it much better. Basically giving units a man power rating to be able to board, and put out fires etc… I can explain more or repost if interested.

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Yea and actually while we are talking about buildings. Please no more “shooting through buildings” as if they are a flat 2d drawing. If an archer is standing on one side of a castle and its target is on the other side you cant just shoot through the castle and hit it. Unless you have a giant arc for the arrow and then there should be accuracy penalties for taking such a shot. It goes without saying that they shouldn’t even see the target unless they have other units around that can “share” LOS with them.

This is also true, I get this. I think one thing that elevation should do is slow down units running up the hill and speed up units running down the hill. Honestly I think this is the most realistic way of implementing a hill bonus for units that take a hill. This way archers can get more shots in before units like cavalry can run up and hit them. This seems pretty realistic and easy to implement. They already have something similar in AOE3 with the “snaring” mechanism. But that always seemed clunky and out of place to me, where as doing it this way it at least seems more realistic.

I am not sure that adding RNG elements into the game such as chance to do critical damage and other such things is really good for AOE. A bit of randomisation for accuracy is about as far as I would be willing to go.

One thing that would be awesome which I doubt we would see is real sappers and petards digging tunnels under walls to blow them up. Although I admit implementing this kind of “tunnel warefare” would be pretty hard to implement and I don’t think I have ever seen a game that does it.

Its definitely complex, but people will get used to it. Other games have similar mechanisms. In Wargame you have supply trucks and helicopters and without them your units will run out of ammo pretty quickly. We don’t need to go that deep with AOE, but at least for buildings it would help create more realism and make building and defending buildings more of a big deal.

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Disagree. It allows too easy snowball in game. If you invented this mechanism into AoE2, then whoever just gets the first successful rush in will insta-win, because not only is the defender already having to idle their eco to regroup into safety, they’re now losing resources on top of that. Such mechanism would kill any defensive play what-so-ever.

Disagree. It really adds a lot of depth and strategy to be able to use buildings to support a push. Imagine how much more bland AoE2 would be without tc drops and castle drops.

No it wouldn’t. It would just add artificial delay into building things. Don’t exactly see what strategy or depth that adds. It makes sense in a game like Stronghold, where you actually have stockpiles and a visible representation of your resources on the map, but AoE games don’t work like that. The addition of a stockpile/warehouse mechanism would probably not fit well overall into the theme of AoE games.

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I am sure this could be balanced if done properly.

There is a difference between having buildings to “support a push” and fighting with buildings. The latter is absurd.

That artificial delay is precisely what we need to stop all the silly quickwalling with houses and other such nonsense that ruins the sense of immersion in the game.

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All they have to do with buildings is the same that they did in AoE3 where you cant build too near to the enemy’s 1st TC

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Computer games are absurd. When was the last time you heard of Aztecs face off against the Japanese?

Again, raids would be supremely OP if you couldn’t quickwall to save your villagers.

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you mean raids would pay off, and not be stopped by split second placement of house foundations… ok im am very okay with that.

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Exactly, I don’t see why anyone would like to play like this, its just stupid. I would rather give villagers a better means to defend themselves. By all means build houses and garrison villagers inside them to protect them for example, but it shouldn’t be something you can put down in a split second and then boom you are invulnerable. Build the houses before the raid, plan ahead if you are worried about being raided.

Also this guy’s logic seems very inconsistent on the one hand he is worried about aggression snowballing by removing these cheese mechanics and on the other hand he is completely fine with people using buildings like castles and towers to kill off their enemies with very little military which is the ultimate way of unfairly snowballing a game IMO.

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I don’t know why people keep insisting on this capturing/conversion BS. It is bad for any RTS game. Monks are a meme in age2 and nobody really takes that game seriously for any sort of competitive play (once aoe4 is released and Microsoft stops pouring advert money in aoe2, it will be done).

Capturing/conversion is bad because it discourages you from deploying your expensive units out of fear the enemy will capture them. It negates the investments in upgrades/tech, since one can just steal the enemy things. The fact that conversion exists in aoe4 is a huge, huge let down for anyone who goes PvP.

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lol wut? The competitive side of AOE2 has never been more vibrant and its pretty damn good for a 20 year old game.

Sorry but a game set in Medieval period where wars over religion were a very important part of life conversion should absolutely be in the game.

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I wonder how useful running them into trees will be too, since you could lose the LOS and try to hide…

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Actually that is a brilliant idea. And since they don’t have horses and bulky armour and helmets blocking their vision it would make sense that they could traverse faster in the forest and hide more effectively while maintaining better LOS than military units. This would effectively make it more difficult for the opponent to chase them down. Also this is probably much more realistic as I am sure hiding I. Forests from invading armies would definitely have been a thing back then.

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umm no… I mean raids would be gg because a successful raid would put one player ahead so much that there is no way for the other player to come back. So you’d have quick 5 minute games and wouldn’t get to immerse yourself into the rest of the game outside of campaigns.

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Just checked, it turns out buildings, unlike quick units like scout/light cavalry can’t move. You don’t have to thank me.

Except for Red Bull, you know there is a 100k prize pool event just on the horizon?

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Don’t be so doom and gloom… I have already mentioned obviously for anything to be implemented properly it would have be balanced. I don’t just propose removing some mechanisms and not replacing them with anyting. Obviously this quickwalling mechanism could be replaced with something more realistic and balanced. There is no reason for example why you can’t build the walls in advance, and someone else has already mentioned other interesting concepts like villagers “hiding” in forests. I am sure there are otherways to make interesting gameplay mechanics.

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Yea but they are also much harder to remove and deny a large area with resources. They are far more damaging than a handful of raiding units when they are built in the middle of your economy.

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I think it would be easier to have the game without extreme ideas, because they’re just super hard to balance and maintain any fun factor. Raids in the AoE series are already a very effective way to win a game. Making raids even more effective means whoever raids first just simply wins. So you’d have to make villagers nearly as strong as early game military units to not make raids utterly broken, which could potentially lead to villagers being used as a military offensive force by every civilization. (I don’t mind if 1-2 civs can do that, but probably not every civ in game should be built on such a mechanism)

If you let the enemy build it in the middle of your economy, that is kind of a player error most of the times, not a game fault.

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Age II is with Starcraft II the most competitive RTS out there atm - there is every day some sort of tournament for price money. Monk conversions just need a lower interval on conversion times making it less random but still with some sort of random.

Conversions can easily be countered in Age II - monks are only played in big masses on Arena. And conversions are only possible with a relic in Age IV - Id prefer single conversions like in AoE 2 without relic so. Monks are actually rly hard to play as you need very high apm to task your 20 monks instantly on different targets.

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