The crusades theme was a slam dunk, as Age of Noob said. It falls in the right time period AoE4 wanted to cover, it has always been a popular theme with movies, books, etc. It has a ton lot of commercial/spectacle value: knights! sieges! massive armies! intrigue! sultans!
For all I love the Japanese, this wasn’t their DLC. I have no f… clue what they are doing here. It’s like stuffing a pre-colonial American civ in here. Nothing to do with Sultans, nothing to do with the other variants. If nobody bats an eye at these decisions in internal team meetings, then I’m really concerned about this being a ship without a captain, but I guess that should’ve been more than clear by now.
A crusade-centric DLC with 2 completely new civs: They already had one, Byzantines. The other could’ve been Egyptians or Venice or another Sultanate (to stay within topic). Finally, a few variants of existing civs sticking to the crusader theme (they already had 2, OotD and Ayyubids but don’t get me started on Jeanne D’Arc being a civ). They were so close and yet somehow were able to completely botch it.
The developers know the game so well that those who took photos of the new DLC did not avoid continuing to put the Gates backwards, which in this way allows the enemy to be able to climb on top with archers and other units without having to have siege towers or break the wall, without saying that it’s the opposite!!!
this shows once again who we are entrusting ourselves to.
how can you be the creators of the game and not know how it works, I understand that maybe it was someone else who made these constructions, but they could have at least told him…
On Reddit, there is a diverse (and broader) playerbase. The names of the variants were heavily criticized there as well (and it’s still happening with JoA).
Because it is easy to play. I imagine it will decline in popularity as players get better, because it offers very little diverse gameplay, just like HRE.
There is variety on Reddit and many of its users play AoE4 (and it is one of their favorites) as well as criticizing things about the game more or less (the biggest criticism, the name of the variants).
Each network has its own thing, but in the competitive scene there is more there.
Reddit is more well known than the aoe forum, which few and few people knows.
Not to say that core fans don’t use reddit and casual fans don’t use the forum, but I believe that it’s fine to assume that the one attracting more people have the more casual fans compared to a more niche forum.
I use reddit casually for a couple of games, I’m not actually active in the AoE IV reddit, and I’ve used more forums than I can count.
And I can emphatically say generalisations like this aren’t the case. I’ve seen plenty of newcomers to AoE IV post here, mainly for technical advice or to express dissatisfaction. They haven’t always stuck around. And vice-versa, by just reading the AoE IV reddit, I can see there are passionate and longterm fans of both the game and the franchise.
I agree that reddit has a more generalised exposure, but I don’t think that means much qualitatively.
In actuality it does not matter whatever the attributes of this forum or reddit are. They could both be purged tomorrow and it would hardly change the playerbase or fate of the game.
They’ve spread the butter too thin with the variants. I would have rather we got two variants of a higher quality. Ayubbids and a Crusader variant civ that could have some elements from England/France/HRE with some unique stuff like special landmarks and crucially some actual unique units not kitbashes and recolours
I thought the variants would be similar to Command and Conquer 3: Kanes Wrath subfactions which I think are a really good example of how this could work but they don’t hold up.
It really is pretty shocking. It is such a nobrainer to go with relevant civilizations rather than all of this. This would’ve solved the issue thematically, it would’ve given more attention to the individual civilizations mechanically, even visually, it should fare far better to reskin a Knight unit into a Crusader-Knight than to give it gold all over the place like its straight out of Final Fantasy.
We could’ve had real civilizations, with proper themes that are relevant to the DLC at hand, good visuals that represent real historical military and interesting, varied fun gameplay. Instead, it is all over the place.
EDIT: Here is my idea for a new variant. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (LdV). Yes, I know he isn’t French but he died in france so good enough!! He was a real person so that makes the civilization historical, which is good enough. It plays just like French, except the units are all painters with residual blue, red and yellow paint splashes on them. Painter Archer, Painter Knight. Oh and the units have some random gimmick likeee uhh yes they all cost 50% less resources (because they’re all poor artists). There, variants in a nutshell.
And this isn’t even appealing to absurdity. This is how this feels to those that care for the historical elements of AoE, packaged in a way for those who don’t care to digest and understand.
“Four low quality variants or nothing” is a “dilemma” that should not exist but created by them (meaning either the business, or people defending it) to divert you from the main problem.
There is another choice of either one other full civ, or two higher quality variants, but they don’t present that choice to you in the discussion.
Disclaimer 1: by “low quality” I mean relatively lower quality than the new civs. In fact two of the four variants seem to see more work than the other two. But all of them are still well below the average work put into other civs.
Disclaimer 2: I’m not saying “variant civs” should have the same workload as full civs either. If the full civ has 100, right now the four variants are like 25, 25, 50, 50. It would be better if we got two 75s.
Civs be like:
Greeks
Romans
Egyptians
Babylonians
Carthaginians
Achaemenids
Maurya Empire
Celts
Germanics
Chinese
Sacred Band of Thebes (variant Greeks with higher cost but more effective units called “bronze something”)
Boudicca (variant Celts which you upgrade the Boudicca hero unit from a villager to a chariot and eventually an elephant rider)
Shah’s Army (variant Achaemenids)
Kingdom of Sand (variant Egyptians)
