My Personal Analysis on the Consequences of Age of Empires V's Setting

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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In China, and from the perspective of myself and many in my age group, there are only a handful of games truly considered classic RTS: Age of Empires, StarCraft, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer (Red Alert).

-– Scenario 1: If set in the Colonial Era through World War II
Then it would cover an era that the other three classics do not. Maybe Red Alert 2 touches on it, but very few people play Red Alert 2 anymore. This period would essentially tell the history that comes after Age of Empires IV. Can you imagine what Age of Empires IV with air forces would look like? If they continue to use the Age of Empires IV engine, I suggest directly integrating Age of Empires V into the Age of Empires IV game menu as an option. That would be pretty great. If they do this, could it make Age of Empires IV great again? If it’s released as a standalone Age of Empires V, I feel it might be slightly inferior to Age of Empires IV, though it would still be worth looking forward to.

-– Scenario 2: If set in a Futuristic Era
Then Age of Empires V will be unable to surpass Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3.

-– Scenario 3: If set in the same historical period as Age of Empires IV
Impossible. Completely impossible. They have already exhausted their creativity for the Medieval period. If this happens, either everyone will still just play Age of Empires IV, or everyone will abandon Age of Empires IV for Age of Empires V.

-– Scenario 4: If set in Antiquity
Because Age of Empires I is effectively dead, I highly recommend this setting. An ancient setting is the one unique, prominent advantage that the Age of Empires series holds among these four classic RTS games. Games set in antiquity can highlight a crucial strength: simulation and management.

-— I have always really hoped for Age of Empires to introduce day-night cycles, seasonal changes (spring, summer, fall, winter), and dynamic weather. These elements should directly impact the farming efficiency of villagers. Also, Age of Empires IV lacks birds in the sky for players to enjoy.
— The reason we play Age of Empires is to chop wood in the game. Hahahaha. As long as Age of Empires V lets us keep chopping wood, it will absolutely be a massive hit!

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Ancient times would be the most fitting period for Age of Empires V.
There’s a lot of content to explore, and the campaigns can be very well scripted/romanticized.

Another important thing is that Ancient times will have much more freedom in portraying various historical themes.

While more modern and contemporary periods tend to suffer more censorship if they portray certain subjects.

Rsrsrs

Yes. Chopping wood is life!

I definitely need that!

Curiosity about C&C:
About the Command & Conquer community.

They are divided into many branches…
Some play the game on Steam and others on other platforms (I forgot the name)…
Many members only play mods, which can be followed on the website “moddb.com”
And another part of the old community also plays the classics on this other platform, called “cncnet.org”.

In short, they are all scattered. Rsrsrs.
But they’re still very much alive, even without receiving anything new for several years, regarding new factions or new campaigns.
They only received silly games for cell phones… who knows, maybe one day they’ll go back to developing a new game for PC gaming.

There are still some YouTube channels that make videos of Red Alert 2 and other C&C games, which get impressive numbers of views, showing that there is a large community, but spread across each niche, whether playing single player, PVE, PVP and Mods.
Which makes it difficult to calculate the real size of the community.

Examples of 3 cool C&C channels on YouTube:

  • Scorched Earth
  • RA2 World Series
  • Bryan Vahey

If you search, there are also channels specializing in C&C Mods.

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Strongly agree with your points.

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Boy it’s so sad this little start up studio Blizzard couldn’t beat Red Alert 3 with their obscure Sci Fi RTS Starcraft 2, they never had a chance.

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Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 is a truly remarkable masterpiece. Its development studio created Dune, the foundational title that established the real-time strategy genre. Only a developer with such profound expertise could have achieved this.

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I like the return to ancient times the most right now.

One idea AOE4 introduced which I think had potential to be executed better was the variant civilizations idea. What I like about it is that it would allow you to have multiple civilizations within one region or cultural tradition that shared some units and gameplay styles but differed in other respects. The civilizations as a whole would still be asymmetric, but civilizations within a region would be less asymmetric relative to one another.

To give you an idea of how this could work, let me list some regional civilizations and their variants that I’d like to see in AOE5 if they choose an ancient setting.

  • Nile Valley
    • Egyptians
    • Kushites
    • Ptolemies
  • Aegean
    • Greeks
      • Could be subdivided into Athenians, Spartans, etc…
    • Macedonians
    • Minoans
  • Rome
    • Republic
    • Empire
    • Late Empire
  • Anatolians
    • Hittites
    • Trojans
  • Mesopotamia
    • Sumerians
    • Babylonians
    • Assyrians
  • Persia
    • Elamites
    • Achaemenids
    • Parthians
  • Indians
    • Harappans
    • Mauryans
  • China
    • Shang
    • Zhou
    • Han
  • Syro-Palestine
    • Hebrews
    • Phoenicians
    • Carthaginians
  • Celts
    • Gauls
    • Britons
  • Germans
    • Goths
    • Vandals
    • Suebi
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If AoE5 is already in development it is very likely that they already decided on a setting so it’s highly unlikely that we can convince them to change now.

How relevant are games from >20 years ago?

The latest ones are Command and Conquer 4 (2010) and Starcraft 2 (2010 with Expansions 2013 and 2015) which are both over 10 years ago.

They won’t. AoE4 uses Relics engine and it’s very unlikely that Relic will make AoE5 since the studio is a lot smaller now.

Also there are many hints it will be in the Unreal Engine 5.

CnC Red Alert 3 has a very unique and specific alternative history setting that would very likely not impact the popularity of AoE5. Also the game released in 2008 so it is probably 20 years old when AoE5 releases. Many AoE players weren’t even born when the game released.

Not sure why you picked CnC here instead of the way more popular SC2.

The best thing about a future setting is that it can be super creative and do whatever so it’s easy for 2 futuristic games to be entirely different. I mean they could even make a Warhammer 40k game.

Yes, I think almost everyone agrees with this. AoE2 and AoE4 are already competing about being the better Medieval AoE.

You forgot about Chronicles. Also AoMR to some degree.

Sounds very gimmicky to me.

I especially dislike day-night cycle. Night doesn’t really work in a competitive RTS because the core feature of the night is to not have light. So you are not supposed to see anything. But you need to see things to play the game, obviously. So it would have to be just a blue hue which doesn’t look and feel like night at all to me.

Empire Earth 2 had weather and seasons but it felt very superficial. It could work but I’m not sure how well it fits into a relatively fast game like AoE. Also seasons would make making scenarios/campaigns a lot more annoying because most historical events happened in certain seasons so most scenarios would have to disable that feature.

Also climate would be complicated to manage on larger maps that are supposed to include different climatic regions.

I don’t think many people heavily associate AoE with chopping wood.