We don’t want units to be larger than buildings, this is not Civilization. But we don’t want buildings to be as large as in real life compared to units. Units should be big but not larger than buildings, just big enough so you can easily identify them and select them individually without issue and without having to zoom in.
So if they fix the default zoom level which I find it to be too close to the ground, I also hope they scale the units up a bit so they are still easy to see and click. They should be still smaller than buildings but not as small as real life.
On my side, i want my unit to be in a realistic proportion whit my building.
I don’t want over size units or tiny units.
I just want every to be normal size.
More readability make me unable to play.
I have to zoom out more to be able to see the game, buildings become flat and ugly, i become unable to select my full army and it become hell to just make tiny group of units, since you need to move the map alot to find space to put them away from your main army.
You can’t have client-side unit/building scaling because it messes with the hitboxes.
Take the game as it is scaled now as the default option and imagine the unit models are made smaller.
The hitboxes can’t change because that would affect gameplay so you will instead end up with units fighting each that are far too far away…
If you make the unit models larger, you have the same problem but instead you end up with units clipping inside each other.
Client-side unit/building scaling is not a reasonable ask.
This only works if you scale everything proportionally.
If you make some things larger relative to other things, you have to distort space in order to accommodate for inconsistent scaling. That’s already pretty bad but if two things are scaled differently and move, you have to dynamically rescale space around units.
Even if this was a sensible option, for it to work client-side, you would also have to scale the movement speed of units. On some settings, units would appear really slow and on others, units would appear really fast.
When it comes to these things - at this point nothing crucial is going to be remade or adjusted on this level, at least for v1.0 release . Personally, I only wish to see basic features expected from a PC game - zoom adjustment with decent range (in other words increasing possible max zoom) and ability to customize, or at very least scale GUI, just like we have in 2DE (in 3DE only layouts are available I think, but the size is ok-ish imho, at least while playing on QHD).
There’s maybe a little wiggle room for building adjustment but those big boxes around buildings are not hitboxes. The units interact with what looks like the building’s model, the boxes around the outside are just to prevent buildings from being too close together.
I personally think that player freedom is the highest goal for gaming. That’s why it’s important that we not only have a readability option but other options as well. Here’s a few the devs need to include for Age of Empires 4 to be a true AAA game:
Micro slider – Players should have the ability to choose how much depth their is to the game’s micro. At low settings there will be a large input delay and you can only attack move units and as you increase the slider the input delay decreases, the player is allowed to do things like target fire, and the number of unit abilities increases. If you increase the slider to the max the game becomes a MOBA. This may sound crazy but DOTA got its start in Warcraft 3 and players shouldn’t have to mod a game for it to support the same gameplay variety as a 20 year old game.
Rhythm game slider – As you increase the slider the game becomes more like a rhythm game. Maybe you get bonuses for issuing attack orders or train orders on the beat. At max the game just becomes Osu.
Setting Sliders – The game should incorporate several sliders for the setting of the game. One slider for year (could be past, present, or future), another for grittiness, and another for the political values expressed by the games setting. There’s a bunch of other sliders that could be used to control setting (scifi vs fantasy for instance) so I think it could be really fun if the devs went all out and got creative here.
World peace slider – This slider determines whether or not world peace is achieved in the real world. There’s a bunch of wars and stuff that people die in so the developers implementing this should be a high priority. It should default to maxed world peace but allow alternative values to support player expression.
Furthermore, most games would use something like a floating point number or int32 to represent a player’s chosen position on each of these scales but this limits players to a finite number of choices. Allowing players to choose any real number would be better. The developers might run into issues with this since most numbers are uncomputable and computer memory is finite but they can figure it out. Come to think of it, limiting players to just one choice of number system to express their desired settings on the above scales would be inadequate. Players should be able to choose if they want to express their chosen in-game settings using any number system they want including: the reals, rationals, algebraic numbers, cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, imaginary numbers, hyperreals, among others. I think I’d represent my ideal micro setting as 3 + 4i, rhythm game slider as omega^omega, grittiness as 16, and my ideal world peace would be represented by the cardinality of the set of all sets. Yes, I know this last one could be a tough nut to crack for the devs but if they’re careful about their choice of foundations they shouldn’t run in to any issues.
How could this possibly break the game? If you choose the right settings you’d be able to play Age of Empires 4 as it currently exists. I’m just suggesting that the developers add more settings to let gamers play exactly how they want. If you want to play the game with the rhythm game setting set to 0 you can do that while I set mine to omega^omega.
How could you possibly interpret OrangePotato’s post as a post to be taken literally??
Obviously he’s making a point - and a good one I have to say. Delivered beautifully.
On the other hand this whole thread better be not serious. -_-
You mean units becomes a little larger so that the camera can go upper (more zoom out) and still the units have a good readability. The buildings are way bigger if you compare them with other RTS like AoE2DE. Yes, I know, you will say horses will be taller than the barracks. This is a reason to make the barracks building for example a little taller (personally I don’t see it as a problem if it does not change, but the units to become a little bigger and the zoom out change a lot, is a major problem), not to make units even smaller. They are already tiny if you compare them with most of the buildings.