We got to question whether Relic is good making RTS game at all, when even their flagship fails them.
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This could be a very long long process. We donāt know how many developers are now involving on the project due due recente lay-off.
This Is not a good sign.
Donāt you think It would be Better bring the IP nto the hands of the other Teams?
Creative Assembly could be the only right Developer at this point due their great experience with ancient and medieval times, great sieges, Dynamic map, really unique units, great sounds and excelent animations (they have incredible motion capture studios) and a beautiful graphic engine
For example, this Is a video gameplay from their last Total war game: Parahon
This engine is perfect for AOE.
Funny moments
MS tried to buy Sega two years ago (and it could happen anyway)
Relic Is a good developer but they are now in troubles and they already said they wanna focus on their best IP, so no AOE.
At least the graphic representation and animations are much better than Aoe4
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Well well well!
Since you are a lot closer to the dev team and know internal information about the whole process, which we donāt have access to, Iāll just straight believe your words.
Them according to you, having had a well suited budget, makes me shake my head even more.
I thought it was plain greed driving this game into the ruin, putting the minimum into to get the most profit possible for a small investment only.
Whereas now a picture is drawn, where manpower and money were just burned.
I myself have been working in the industrial business for multiple years, in the automation field, building machines and all.
The company I worked in, designs and produces automation facilities and (being said in an easy way) robot-hands for industrial use.
There, mistakes can NOT happen in the process and hence there is a constant quality control.
If an error is spotted, it is being taken care of RIGHT away. The later in the process of manufacturing a product the error is spotted, the more expensive it becomes.
Hence, the company is very eager to spot erros ASAP and IMMEDIATELY have a meeting/brainstorming about how to fix it ASAP before more time passes.
A company wants to make the maximum amount of profit, that is for sure.
There are 3 ways:
Sell products in larger amounts, increase the price, or decrease the internal cost.
As Iāve explained, missplaning and errors, mistakes cost TONS of money, hence there are supervisers, quality management and so on.
Having these new information from your end, it seems these positions in the project aoe4 were either missing, the people who had a say did not do their job.
Had things worked properly, we would have a FINISHED game now, not an alpha version.
Basically money was burned without results.
Had the game been a full version release, it would have sold a lot better and hence the profit would have been way higher.
This is just super sad for both ends. The Publishers/Devs and us, the fans 
To me it seems as if the top positions have majorly failed, not the executing devs.
Even if you make mistakes, someone ABOVE you has to make sure, things are being noticed and corrected.
If the devs struggled with this (for them) new kind of RTS, it was not THEIR job to find a way to deal with it.
Itās the decision-makers being responsible for guiding them.
Which seems to not have been happening.
No company in the open market could afford to fail so hard, lose their image in the process and the profit in the project.
I personally feel really bad for the RELIC employees who have been laid of, as a result.
When itās the head of the snake, which should have been cut off, not the working hands, which did their very best.
Very honestly, I donāt have any hopes anymore for aoe4.
So many SEVERE technical bugs and problems were reported in the betas, but they are not being addressed.
- Attack prio (units attack buildings instead of enemy units) is still being completely ignored as an example.
I reported this in the bug section multiple times (in beta, later on and another time after last patch) and got responses which I interpret in a way, that they just donāt give a damn and donāt wanna take care of it or got no manpower for that. For me personally, this is a game-breaking bug, which makes many matches unplayable. - Traders get stuck behind markets.
Hundreds of more examplesā¦
How can this happen?
Again, in an industrial company, if a CUSTOMER reported such a problem, there would be an IMMEDIATE apology, followed by an express-speed fix free of cost.
Afterwards there would be an internal meeting about finding out, how such failure could happen unnoticed and how to prevent that in the future.
Not WHO was responsible, but HOW it was possible.
The next step would be, adjusting strategies right away and tightening quality control and observing the process more strictly.
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Everyone who is ācloseā to the developers in any measurable way will be under NDA. They cannot and will not share things that break that agreement. Take their arguments as opinion - my own included 
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Indeed, for me personally it seems like the engine they built on is utter trash and doesnāt really support games like aoe4.
I mean lets be honest here, 20 year old games managed to do many things better than AoE4 and this with like 1/100 of the resources computer used to have.
Iāve never seen a game where the ingame chat doesnāt properly work one of the simplest features and not even this works.
- patch management is pretty shitty from their side, two of my friends left the game for good because of the recent patch as we tried to play 10 games and 9 out of those 10 crashed at somepoint.
2 Weeks later still no fix for this issue. I assume they just want to get rid of the game at some point they way they behave.
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Warscape (total war engine) has its own problems, its really most of all optimized for large scale unit battles where there are 1000s of troops on the screen, if you ever played the game you will notice that the models become 2d once you are far enough away to save resources, this isnāt feasible or useful for an AOE game where realistic you dont view more than a couple 100 units at a time and where you also see most units at about the same height.
Honestly at this point I have lost any hope that AoE 4 will be improved to the point that it is fun for me to play. The poor animation is a big thing for me. Washed out colors, fake looking weapons and armor clunky unit movements. It is what it is as this point they are not going to change anything significantly. Not a horrible game but a disappointment, very meh and boring to play. Oh well I have AoE 3 so Iām good.
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I just feel like microsoft forgot about this gameā¦
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I donāt think so. Halo wars 2 runs on warscape engine and It works and looks very good. So itā s a very flexible engine, imbo
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Oh god please donāt. I donāt know anything like that. Iām speaking from my observations from the game.
Yes, I remember that I was moved and everythingā¦
Here my hype died xdā¦
I saw it comingā¦companies always do thatā¦remember Ubisoft with Watch Dogs in 2012 and EA with Anthem in 2018ā¦they show you a game with super graphics and then they downgrade it to no endā¦
Because it was made by Bruce Shelley and what was left of Ensemble Studiosā¦
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No, donāt ever trust CA on this. In the past 10 years CA couldnāt make a good total war game. This TW pharaoh is just a TW troy reskin. Every new features CA advertising in the trailer already there since Rome1 and medival1. In rome 1, unit without armor could swim. in Shogun 2 calvary could dismounted, the horse could be scared and run away. In medival1 gun unit couldnāt fire in heavy rain, and gun unit could only fire straight, if there is allies between gun unit and enemy they wonāt fire. CA just remove features from the old TW to put it back in and advertise those as new features. I donāt know if Relic is the best developer for AoE4 but they certainly better than CA.
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So, there are only few developers available for RTS
AoE 3 even got the award for the best graphics back in 2005 and that oneās usually won by FPS, it was looking that good.
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I was incredibly excited with the announcement at Gamescom in 2017. I had blind optimism for the longest time that things would be fixed and it would feel right to me as an Age game eventually. Itās simply not the game that I hoped for and check it out about once a year now because it has always taken the dev team an incredible amount of time to do even the simplest of changes.
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People have covered a lot about what they have found disappointing about AoEIV so I donāt have much more to add here but one thing that boggles my mind is for a game that was marketed as being historically friendly, I find it odd but not surprising it does not a have compendium where people can learn aboutā¦history.
I didnāt find the campaigns engaging so if one also shares the same opinion but likes the historical aspect of something like this a game can provide they are out of luck. The AoE2 compendium is a wealth of information and one of the overlooked strengths of the game.
IDK, if this was just a marketing ploy, or perhaps the esports crowd, suggested they didnāt think it was important to include just like more Gaia or ranged units taking their knives out while in melee or QoL things like color picker but as others have said it seems as though Relic listened to the wrong people and over the past two years have been playing catch up. You might think a missing compendium is trivial but when things like this start to mount up it becomes glaring.
Some things can be improved but others like unit models, animations and scale probably wonāt be so my expectations are rather low for me to ever give this game another chance. I have periods where I feel motivated to try it again but that quickly dissipates. I donāt play any AoE game to feel hollow inside.
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Yes, agree. I found the Aoe2 camapaigns more interesting but i like also AOE3 ones. In my opinion, AOM has the Better campaigns of all saga and iām really excited to play them again with the upcoming AOM Retold
No, at this point. There are few developers working on AOE4 and as you said they have priority to e-sport alienating many other fans.
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Itās really strange but Aoe4 would have been the new great title in the saga but at the end Itās a normale RTS unfortunately. Itās too late to change It. There Will be other good patches and some x-packs but i think that the main game Is this.
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Why zealots? So, people canāt explain their opinion After two years? Really? Come on mate. Personally i feel quite legit to open this thread and i gave my suggestions.