My critiques/hopes for AoE4

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I played like 10 hours of the preview last week and though I did like the game I do have some critiques which I hope will be fixed before release. I’m comparing AoE4 with AoE2 which I have played for over 1000 hours in my life. I have played AoE3 like 100 hours.

  • Some Unit weapons should be made a little bit smaller. The spears seem absolutely massive

  • Units should have less but more distinctive player color and more neutral coloured armor

  • Some animations are very poor. I think archers look worse than AoE2 DE, the animation in 4 isn’t even in sync with the arrows

  • Weird ■■■ ‘Wanted’ arrows which follow enemies and change direction like a hummingbird

  • Some buildings seem way smaller than others in terms of height and like perspective

  • There is no global production queue

  • There is quite a delay in you clicking vs your unit moving (might be server lag though)

  • I can not see how many villagers I have in the blink of a eye, I need to use my mouse on my population to see my villagers.

  • The garrisoning in this game is extremely bad compared to AoE2, I cannot easily choose where my villagers should exit and press a hotkey, they just go out random a random direction and run.

  • Villagers seem insanely fast when the town bell rings, can out run cavalry nearly.

  • Infantry speed compared to cavalry speed seems a bit off to me. Infantry seem quite fast.

  • Black Forest has insanely weird artificial hallways of forest, pretty much all the time. Nothing like the more ‘nature’ like Black Forest where seem you have more diverse small paths instead of weird maze like hallways.

I am pretty hyped for AoE4, I think the core of the game is very nicely done. With additional civs and content in the future this game could become very big, the content on AoE2 DE quite nice. What do you guys think about these points above?

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The lack of global queue pains me the most from this list. I can’t imagine why such a feature is still missing.
I also had difficulties with garissoning/ungarissoning vills, it’s not easily done and I definitely miss the function of the town bell.

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I think this is for readability - so it’s easy at a quick glance to see which infantry is which.

In interviews they’ve said this will be added post-launch

I found this as well, I would hope they just exit to where the building rally point is. From TC, there is a ‘return to work’ option so maybe it was that where they go randomly or based on what they were last working on?

I think it depends which infantry and which faction. HRE infantry all benefit from a unique research making them move 15% (I think that’s the amount) faster. Men-at-arms are generally quite slow, spearmen faster, etc.

I think this is just a side-effect of arrows always hitting their targets once fired. Hopefully they do some fine-tuning to how projectiles work post-launch.

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Only thing that seem to me flawaed (though I had never tested AoE IV other reviewing its trailers), is that the artillery had no men to operate it. Hope all pssobile improvements as you listed will be provided in AoE IV patch updates, as in my opinion they should launch the game by this year not delay it any further.