My concern and suggestion:

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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Background information that you can skip if don’t care about the context of my concern: I am a huge AoE fan, i became a gamer because of AoE. I am also a competitive player and for almost a decade now there is no RTS game except starcraft that managed to scratch that itch. I hope with the revival of the franchise comes the revival of the genre as well…in fact i wish for the revival of the genre in multiplayer terms even more than i wish for just another AoE game. This is obviously my personal taste and what i want to play, i am just mentioning it because it is relevant for the rest:

At first when i heard that the Civs will be assymetric i was excited, this to me seems the best thing that could be done for AoE…it is the ONLY part in my opinion that age of empires 2 was worse than other games at. Assymetric civs and randomly generated maps seems a recipe for success, great replayability and huge match moments.
However, i thought that there were going to be like 3-4…maybe 5 civs. I know this is an unpopular opinion to want so few amongst the general audience…especially the more casual one or the people who love the campaigns. The current number of civs makes it almost certain that there are more to come through DLC’s etc… this can disturb the delicate balance in multiplayer… Either civs will be “assymetric” in name only… or they will be truly assymetric and interesting but there will be no competitive multiplayer because balancing x! matchups (factorial of the number of civs) is impossible to keep up (even if you can balance…lets say 6…which is a big stretch already…adding extra ones is expanding the complexity beyond any rate that you could keep up.)

So what i think the game will need more than anything in order to succeed in multiplayer competitively is more emphasis in team games and synergy. The civs will be plenty with this design…that can;t be changed…i also feel like most everyone would agree that they wouldn’t want “assymetric” civs just in name only and as a flavour… they would instead prefer AoE2 system if that was the case.
So in my opinion both of these problems can be circumvented by having bigger emphasis in team games, were synergy between civs and different maps can make or break a meta. Were small rotational buffs and nerfs can keep the meta changing and evolving new strategies. Because, in 1v1 i dont think there is any method of making this system work… i hope devs prove me wrong though in any case. I just want multiplayer to be stable and good again :slight_smile:

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It is almost impossible to have truly asymmetric civs on a historical Medieval setting.

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I don’t think so, this is really to the designers control. From a pure gameplay perspective civs can be as assymetric as they want. Even having the general units because of historical accuracy in all civs won’t make them symmetrical if these units are useless for one civ and have extra bonuses like walk in forest or make boats by right clicking for another civ.) This is just an example obviously.

Anyway, my main point (maybe i wasn’t really clear due to my big ramble) is not how assymetrical civs will or won’t be, is that making team focus will give them design space to make it as much as they want. I am pretty sure devs have considered this trade off between 1v1 vs team because there are alot of games on the market that have used one or the other succesfully.

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