Base Unit Auto Ballistics generates a random factor (not always for good mic) that must be removed from an RTS. It would only accept manual ballistics with siege weapons or special abilities.
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Great comments mate. Couldn’t agree more. Hope they can see this and fix these issues.
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me too but they wont, they already said the beta was final and definitive graphics, reason why they are usually streaming gameplays. They wont change anything related to visuals, plus we have over a year calling for those changes and they did not change them, the only thing they might change if they actually care… is the batch training
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Biggest cons for me are probably the homing arrows and no global production queue. They aren’t exactly deal breakers in my opinion, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement.
The whole graphics debate is a little strange to me though. People say the graphics are bad, but it’s really the art style to criticize. I like the art style, and I accept other people don’t (and can see why). Unit detailing is sad for some units, but I can’t force my opinion on someone because it’s just that. An opinion.
Overall, I say the pros outweighs the cons. Unfortunately though, there being more pros isn’t exactly a good standard. It’s lacking, I admit. It needs work that I’m willing to wait for.
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I think the main con for me is a lack of clarity for blacksmith icons, unit upgrades, and buildings.
I still have no idea what tier of blacksmith upgrade I’m on by looking at the icon and I have trouble telling if a unit is base/vetran/elite by looking at it. I also regularly have to search for a bit to find markets and blacksmiths since they tend to be kind of low and hard to distinguish from the background. I also don’t love the way the models for military buildings ended up looking but I can tell them apart easily enough that it doesn’t bug me much anymore.
Other than these issues the game is amazing. Eco buildings and keeps generally look cool, knights and other units are visually pleasing and most importantly the game feels good to play. Charging knights and infantry through a breach in a wall or defending with archers and siege makes me feel like I’m in a medieval world and it’s really rare for games to achieve that level mind theater around the gameplay.
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Basically I share the talking points of the Age of Noob channel.
Plus I want score for single player
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Unfortunately because it’s probably unrealistic to expect that from a 3D engine. Since Age 2 DE is a 2D engine with sprites, they can have a much finer destruction model just rendered ahead of time into a 2D sprite, and there is no performance hit. If you try to make each brick independently fall from a 3D model, no only are the physics computations going to be INSANE, but just the drawing of that many polygons that quickly would wreck most PCs.
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No batch training? You mean hitting ‘shift’ and whatever key to build units and getting five units at a time?
I could swear I did that in this game… or am I mistaken? Or maybe it’s only villagers?
I think overall, every critizism (positive or negative) draws the exact same conclusion, from what I have seen:
It just doesn’t feel to be close to a 60/80€ game level.
Maybe there’s an insane focus on the campaign so who knows? But at the stresstest it really felt like a streamlined and downcut Age:DE pre alpha with great sound, basically no bugs and no network issues.
I take no position in the pricing debate. I’m sure there are plenty of people who expect to receive plenty of joy from AoE4 and will gladly pay plenty of money. I think that’s great and wish them the best. If it makes sense to lower the price, I’m sure it will be lowered.
Have not you played CoH 3 beta? destruction there was incredible realistic without any lag or fraps drops. It was just a technical decision from Relic to do it ugly like it is in AoE 4. Its ugly but its not bad, I mean I am used to it in AoE 3, but that destrucion animation in CoH 3 was insane. Remember they are using the same engine, so I am afraid they did even complicated their work even more just to achieve that ugly destruction animation lol
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Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Relic has made AoE 4’s destruction the best it could be, his question was simply “Why is Age 2 DE’s better,” and I would say that Age 2’s is even better than CoH 3, but only because its pre-rendered, and the same every time.
If I had to guess as to why AoE 4’s looks worse than CoH 3’s, I would say its probably because in AoE 4, it just happens all at once, when the building goes down. In CoH, it happens gradually as shells hit so small pieces come off at once and don’t pile up on each other, which is what I think makes AoE 4’s look so… cheap? It’s possible they clean it up a bit before launch, I think they just need to control it a little more, instead of just gibbing the whole thing and letting it fall all over itself, but I don’t know for sure.
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you are right, the game has really good potential but doubt devs work on those little but important details.
Oh I understand that, and perhaps my comment should’ve been “why did AoE II DE get so much more love into building destruction animations?”. As with a lot of things in AoE IV, the canned and simplistic animations look like a half-assed attempt at getting something out of the way (Icons? mediocre job, all the same, check. Tech tree and asymmetry? mediocre job, mostly reskin, check. Building destruction? Let’s just do massive polygons falling off with exaggerated dust so people can’t really see how uninterested we were in this mechanic, check).
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Going to balance out my top five (in order) dislikes with a top five like, because I DID like a bunch of things and don’t think the game is going to be horrid by any stretch.
Top five likes:
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Classic AOE gameplay, with good hints of AOM.
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Cultures/ Factions look distinct from each other.
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Walls that troops can get on.
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City building is fun, with nice touches like stuff being generated around buildings (even if it is slightly janky).
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Environment itself is gorgeous.
Top five dislikes:
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UI feels almost incomplete, and harder to read than even AOE 3’s UI. I am including in this point the issue of some buildings and units being hard to distinguish, as well as the camera zoom matter.
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Lack of Defensive Stance for unit’s. It’s either full on “chase to the ends of the earth” or “stand ground”. Loads of RTS games (including AOE 2 and Relic’s own Dawn of War) had proper Defensive stance, so this feels like a step back…
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Population cap being at 200 is also a step back from AOE 2 HD and AOE 2 DE, which would have been mitigated if units were controlled in groups ala Relic’s other RTS games. I’m honestly surprised we’re back to individual units instead of groups.
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Speaking of Relic’s previous titles… the fact that the animations look serviceable rather than particularly detailed or dynamic is a bit odd. Relic’s other games have really cool looking motions when units are fighting or idling. That the units just look like they’re doing what all old RTS games did feels, again, like it’s not on the same level.
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As fun as it is, it feels a little too much like “AOE built by fans of AOE”. That is to say, I just feel like it hits a bullet point list of “what people like about AOE”, without bringing much of anything especially noteworthy of its own to the table. I certainly don’t think it needed to reinvent the wheel or anything, but other than walkable walls, I don’t quite know what’s in AOE 4 that hasn’t been explored in some way shape or form before.
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My biggest con is that its AoE II in disguish.
Sure it has new mechanics, but when looking more closely at them they are pretty lackluster and minor. Besides that the game offers nothing of innovativness in the rts genre which is really dissapointing.
This all makes it definatly not worth €60, maybe €15-20 at max.
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Well I guess we all agree the game is not adding any innovation at all and lacks originality.
I get you, we all would love more, but in this one it’s hard to do in a 3D based game, mostly speaking of mp. Remember that you can play 4vs 4 matches which could easily have over thousands units on screen lol so I pretty much understand the limitations.
I don’t understand how making a list is contradictory here.
Based off a list, we can come up with our own conclusions.
There’s one German landmark and Mongols can spend 200 stone to build a batch of 2 but other than that no. There’s so many civ specific bonuses that shouldn’t be limited to one faction. Why only the English can train units from the keep, or why only the abassids have pikemen with longer reach makes no sense.
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or why only mongols have an inmortal hero, youre right, or even the 5 units that HRE can train, I would prefer more asymetryc units than unique unfair bonuses that all should have