Non-forum user perspective - This game looks awesome!

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I understand the irony being that I’m now a forum user lol. I think we can all agree that forums usually represent a very small percentage of any game’s playerbase, perhaps 1-5%. I’ve been active on many game forums, like Civ5/6/Rev, C&CRA3, HaloWars, Halo3/Reach, LoL, etc. and I always notice a similar trend; forum users tend to be very vocal about their perspectives, which can differ starkly from the perspective of the average in-game user.

I just wanted to create an account here to say on behalf of myself and a handful of old gaming buddies, this game looks amazing. The shadow/light source, time period, color scheme, unit animation, asset artwork (those buildings are so beautiful), all of it. We’re psyched.

The ‘pastel’ color scheme is something that I like too, but I’ll admit my first reaction when seeing the trailer was that in scenes focusing on the outside of the castle, the grass is not saturated enough and there is a bright haze in the background/sky that makes the whole scene feel too white/grey/bright. But in scenes lacking this haze, like the helicopter-views of the town’s buildings, I think everything looks beautiful.

What strikes me as inviting and makes me want to play the game is the earthy color scheme. I’m seeing the color of stone, grass, mountains, wood, etc., which are natural and inviting. Bleak color palettes of alien worlds or underground steel foundries involving blacks, purples, maroons, black-greys, etc. feel lifeless and can get weary to play through for hours at a time (as can overly-whitened scenes such as the aforementioned haze). Darker colors have their place, particularly in regards to psychological variation and manipulation of user perspective, and I’d like to see more of them for sure.

For example;

The red of a unit’s blood being a ‘reward trigger’ of adrenaline
The jet black of a fully-upgraded late-game knight’s armor being a show of bad-assery
The deep blue as a sign of deeper, resource-rich water as opposed to lighter blue streams that units can cross
Black/red smoke/rubble indicating destruction of buildings/walls
The deep grey/molten glow of fire arrows or aflame catapult ammo
Deeper browns of a standing forest communicating to the user it is lumber-rich

Etc. The idea being to make sure every color choice has a purpose. Earthy colors invite people in, make them want to build/expand/etc. Scouting a lush green (not as pastel as the trailer) field or forest just feels better for most people than scouting a deeply saturated purple alien world. On the other end of the extreme, to keep everything 5-year-old friendly and introduce no darkness, grittiness, or violence (blood, smoke, black accents, grey accents, deeper saturation levels) would be a mistake, and would lose out on the impact of really using color psychology to keep the audience feeling engaged.

That’s how we feel anyway. Cheers and much love! This game looks awesome!!

5 Likes
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With this in mind, wouldn’t be it really cool if the city’s level of dirt is some metric of the player’s gold? Shiny walls = rich player, dirty walls = poor player. It can be a subtle difference, but I think it’d make the game feel even more ‘alive’ without adding any complexity.

Perhaps the citizens can cough more when the player is often at food lower than 50, and appear more well-fed when the food is often over 500 or something.

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That sounds like a pretty nice touch, but it would be at odds with how the game plays.
A player with more unspent resources is the one playing worse than his counterpart. You could tie it to total amount of resources collected in a match where the negative effects start appearing if the player starts lagging behind the average. That might be a little punishing to people who are already struggling and it’s not easy to communicate.

A player with 500 food to spare and lots of gold is not a good king. IRL, that’s an autocrat hoarding the resources for himself instead of using them to better his kingdom for his subjects’ sake. :wink:

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I see your point!

Perhaps the total resources collected are shown in all buildings, whereas the time-average unspent of the last 3 minutes is shown in the town center(s) only? So a dity city with a fancy town center suggests autocracy.

Regarding the food, I don’t know. Perhaps only a low food = coughing?

Edit: though to be fair. A player who has a shiny city obviously has their priorities wrong. Medieval times were anything but shiny. Warfare is anything but clean. But warfare wins the game. But I do agree that people like to have a good feeling when doing good, and that is better reflected with a cleaning town.

Oh, it’d be cool if like:

Town Center: Dirty if low gold income for a long time
Unit production: Dirty if not used for a long time (always clean if it contains a relic, though)
Houses: Dirty if no gold spent (as that keeps the economy running)
Walls: Dirty if low stone income for a long time (or wood if they are pallisade)
Blacksmith: Dirty if lacking upgrades in those types of which you have at least 10 units for a long time
University: Dirty if standing for a long time without any upgrades

1 Like
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The idea is cool, but I’d rather any information shared about progress be generic and obvious, like how aging up changed the visuals a bit in AoE3. I think micro displays of variance in resources like gold or food communicates too much to the enemies. In a strategy game, I want to give them zero information about my plans, my units, resources, etc. Displaying that information freely and continuously really takes away from the stealth element of the game imo.

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It’s not a game that focus on sim and you can manage the ageing of the buildings/units. That would be tricky - if you want ageing you need also units that constantly require food to stay alive so if someone is not fed you will see him emaciated otherwise if he’s well fed you will see it vigorous. About structures should usually degrade over time and you will need units to fix those buildings. The game would become slow and complex or at least that’s what I think. Having it just as graphic it’s something I would not like to have - My village should shine 100% the time. Keep in mind that buildings can be attacked so you will see a structure degradation for sure.

The only thing I can imagine might work is:

  • A graphic setting where you put the degrade state of you buildings.
  • This is something you have to set before every game from match panel/menu.
  • A range of 5 state so everyone can pick how dirty may look your village from 0 to 4? where 0 it shines and 4 is nearly a ruined village.

Keep in mind that if we get 5 ages and we do not have a degradation system we need 5 unique templates for the each civ - that’s alrady alot of work if we get for example 5 state of degradation we need 25 template for each civ (5for each age) that would be alot of work.

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I was indeed not referring to anything that would add any kind of complexity to the game. It being a toggable option sounds good as well.