I mean modding as in changing functionality rather than creating content. Better camera control is currently only achievable using a cheat engine, as far as I’m aware. Someone has made an overlay app to show details of other players in games. I’ve looked at the mods currently available in the game and haven’t seen anything that can change functionality in a ranked game, which is what I see as useful modding, as opposed to creating additional content. Such mods are by far the most popular mods in AoE II DE.
I don’t see why it needs to be more complex, it’s still fundamentally civs, units, buildings, terrain features. It has a drop down for AI difficulties but it doesn’t include a “do nothing” AI. That’s not more complex, it’s just lacking a feature.
So “useful modding” is a personal definition, alright. I have a different definition, so how do we square this?
Do you think making maps isn’t useful? Do you think balance mods aren’t useful? They might not be at the top of your list, but I really would be a bit puzzled if they weren’t on the list at all.
Why would you want a “do nothing” AI, for the record? Genuine interest. If the AI does nothing and just sits there with a TC, a Scout, and a few Villagers, how is that different from disabling the AI slot in the pre-game setup (which is what I do when testing stuff)?
As for it being more complex, it’s twenty years on. The graphics are more advanced, the simulation is more advanced, the terrain generation is more advanced . . . it’s what happens. Modding DoW II was more complex in a lot of areas than modding DoW I. Despite the fact they shared a setting (Warhammer 40k), genre, even units, and so on.
If I wanted to change a unit’s damage in DoW I (released 2004) . . . actually actually that’s a bad example, weapon hardpoints and armour types were one of the most complicated parts of modding that game, hah.
Okay, if I wanted to change an ability’s damage in Dawn of War, it could in theory be as simple as changing a couple of values (min and max). There are far more complex abilities in the game, but some were that simple. The files were originally readable in Notepad, though a later patch turned them all into binary files you needed to convert to text first (and then back into binary so that the game could read them). But that’s because abilities then could do less than abilities in DoW II. And the same goes here.
I appreciate that stuff is confusing and you can’t make the changes you’re used to. But that’s the trade-off in people (generally) demanding games that can do more, with greater fidelity. I’ve been learning loads about the maps on Discord (mapping is historically an area I haven’t dabbled in much). Putting the amount of logic that exists - by default - in the generated map scripts for Age IV would crash a map in Dawn of War. Trust me on that.
It’s not that they aren’t useful, I don’t see them as mods at all. They’re additional content, not mods.
In 2, you use a “do nothing” AI to test scenarios where you don’t want it to disobey your instructions. So you set up x spears vs y knights, say, pause and take control of each player in turn to tell it to attack move into the other, then unpause and see what happens. I know people have done this in 4, so it must be possible, but it just seems a ridiculous amount of work in 4 vs 2, and I can’t see that there is any extra complexity to justify it, all of the relevant mechanics seem essentially the same.
Weird. I’ve seen this opinion before from Age veterans, but it’s still weird to me. Mapping was always counted as modding in Dawn of War. Balance mods were, by definition, modding.
Oh, so you want a scripted scenario where you have specific units that then engage with specific behaviour. Yeah, fair enough. I’m unaware of a flag to disable AI like that, though if it doesn’t exist it would be useful. The problem is how fine-grained would you want it? If it was just “disable all AI for AI units on the map”, that’d probably be straightforward.
If you wanted to disable it per-unit spawned on the map, it gets more complicated. And that’s when you’d need scripting. Which is more of the extra complexity that you’re not a fan of.
Modding the balance in ranked games would be modding, but you can’t do that, and quite rightly so. Creating a balance “mod” in 4 is just like creating a new game mode. It’s new content, something extra that people can play, but it doesn’t change what happens in normal play. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what we call them, as far as I can tell you can’t create mods that do similar things to the most popular mods in 2 that can be used in ranked play, whereas people are managing to do some similar things with cheat engines and overlay apps.
All I want for the “do nothing” AI is just an entry in the drop down for the AI, so as well as the 4 difficulty levels it has a “do nothing” option for that player. There may be other ways to do it, though, maybe you can have multiple human players in a game that one person can switch between.
Creating a new game mode would also be modding, if it were possible. Creating new content for a game, for a modder, is modding the game. We’re not developers, so we’re not developing the game.
But I agree, it’s a bit of a tangent. For me, it just comes from “modification”, which is literally anything a third-party does to a game. Replacing icons? Modding the game? Recolouring UI elements? Modding. New units? Modding. And so on, and so forth. It’s a very broad umbrella, hah.
For your request, I’m not sure it’d work easily as an AI dropdown, because you’d still need scripting to ensure something like the Knights and Spearmen were spawned (for example) (which is the same as not populating an AI slot currently). It’d have to be in the scripted map itself, which is probably a large amount of the learning curve for someone like you who just wants to set up tests between unit types.
At the very least, I hope someone creats a scripted map like this, because it seems like a very popular part of testing stuff in Age games. That way you’d just be able to use the map and run the tests yourself, without developing anything for it.
I’d love to have a bash myself, but I really don’t have the free time at the moment.
That certainly explains why I can’t find anything in the GUI to drop units or buildings onto the map. If someone were able to create a map that somehow enables a GUI in the game itself to create test scenarios, that would be terrific. I think there’s a lot of bad discussion around balance at the moment due to it not being easy to do this. E.g. the complaints about fire lancers, I’d like to create a test scenario with landmarks, a defending army, and an attacking army, and try two different attacking armies, one has rams and the other has an equal resource value of fire lancers. This would be really easy to do in 2.
On the other side of the fence, there at the Flight Simulator 2020 forums, there’s a voting system. You vote on things you want implemented and devs routinely run a list of those things with ETAs. That’s how you do it if you care about your player base. I agree my list is very much my own wish list, but I certainly didn’t want 8 revisions to mangonel damage, for example. Instead I would like the AI not to completely collapse if I rush early, or, well yeah, animated chicken.
The unfortunate nature of the Internet is that what may work in one place, doesn’t work elsewhere. A poll, for example, isn’t representative of the entire playerbase.
This will work better for games with wider adoption (like sim games, vs. RTS games which are conparatively niche). I feel the results in the case of Age would be too heavily skewed by the active posters vs. the community at large.
Genuinely, I believe this would still result in the skew you’re perceiving now (because poster sentiment across the various forums and social media is how we got the roadmap we did, for starters). But if doing that would get you on board with their decisionmaking, then I’m all for it.
Not saying I’m right of course. But it is what I believe would happen, in the best case scenario.
Yes! That’s a real issue. As that video states, the hardcore gamers which comprise ~10% of the player base have a lot of say about where changes should be headed. Some of them have YouTube/Twitch channels or websites and really influence the game development. Somebody like aussiedrongo saying in a video “this is the new meta” is enough to throw devs into chaos, despite that him and the players he streams are the vast minority.
The same thing happens in this forum. Most of the posts circle around the ranked meta and I am sure we’re missing context from all those players who only play with friends or offline (AI skirmishes or campaigns). They come and go unnoticed, never make a forum account, never complain about the issues they see.
Devs should stop and think who they are listening to. But that should come hand-in-hand with proper communication, which is something they haven’t done here and only marginally in patch notes.
E.g. “we are going to stop playing with siege balance until the meta settles. Meanwhile, we are going to focus on other core issues like visual bugs and AI. This doesn’t mean we’re abandoning the eSports base”.
Going back to the spectacle part. To me, a mostly offline player, this is where AoE IV fails harder. There’s nothing interesting in the mechanics. Nothing that makes me say “wow” or pulls me in when playing. I always feel like I’m throwing a bunch of fake units at each other like a meat grinder. Little else to see other than who comes out not dead. AoE I had little things like lions attacking deer, not to mention being the first historical RTS which is a wow factor in itself. AoE II was (and still is) one of the best looking 2D games ever. Unit vs building scale was perfect. UI, art design, iconography, campaigns… man, you felt like you were there in medieval times. I don’t even have to mention AoM, everything was memorable (throwing meteors at your enemy? Yes, please!). AoE III had groundbreaking graphics and physics and beautiful attention to detail. Some of those games ended up not being too popular but they nailed the spectacle part.
AoE IV has nothing. It’s one of the most uninspired games around. Icons look the same, units look the same, keeps are reskins… (except for sound design which is great). It does what it’s supposed to do but nothing else. I can’t shake the feeling that the aim was to do a StarCraft clone in AoE terms.
I mean, we disagree pretty heavily on the game itself, hah. I’ve got nothing against that, I just don’t really know what to say here. It feels like you want a completely different game, that Age IV might never be.
What I will say, as someone who primarily follows Relic’s games (vs. AoE let’s say, though I played a fair bit casually back in the day), is that doing something new vs. doing something safe is a tricky gamble. Relic are often known for trying new things, but here they hewed pretty closely (not in all respects, but a bunch of them) to AoE II (in my opinion). And that’s because taking risks with an established franchise - especially as the new devs on the block (in this franchise) is even more of a gamble.
I will die on the hill that while AoE II was great for its time, replicating it 1:1 in a modern game ain’t going to work. People champion its icons but I just . . . don’t. Not anymore.
So, hey. It’s easy for me to talk about patch previews now, because Relic have delivered on enough of the modding tools to make me happy (though obviously I want them to keep on being improved, the beta tag is there for a reason and to me that reason means they need more work). I don’t want the things you do. I’m sympathetic to some of the things you want, I disagree on the others.
I dunno. I just think that even if they were magically able to gauge the entire playerbase, even casual players would respond well to “better balance”, even if better balance isn’t why we’re losing games. It’s a comfy phrase. And imo it benefits all players, even if I’m not going to notice it because I can’t micro my units in a straight line.
PS: I’ll never disagree with a desire for more communication. It’s a double-edged sword, and I wish more folks were aware of that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want more of it. I get you on that.
Exactly. That’s the exact reason why specifically designed icons for different unit/tech tiers (not the same icon with different number of tiny dots), animated chicken and horses in buildings, or color selection ain’t going to work in a modern AOE.
I kinda get it. The reason why AOE4 lacks some details and functions that its predecessors, especially AOE2, had at release, is because it is a safe game hewed to AOE2.
Yeah, there are a bunch of readability and accessibility issues with stuff like icons and UX in older games. It’s not their fault at all, it’s just we have the benefit of a lot more experience with the respective fields, now. Accessibility on the Web, for example, was a lot different 15 years ago than it is now. WCAG itself is only 20 years old.
(and to be clear, games lag behind the Web, and other such frameworks, especially in these kinds of areas)
Disagreement is fine as long as it’s a mature discussion. This is certainly something modern society could learn a lot from, but that’s a topic for another day/forum. Thanks for sticking to your beliefs while not turning into a troll.
I never wanted AoE IV to be an AoE II copy or modernization of it. I actually wanted something even more asymmetric and more grounded in history and perhaps throwing in better visuals while at it.
I’ve played and loved basically all flavors of RTS under the sun and I’m old enough to have played the classics when they were still not classics, so it’s not that I have a preferred style. I just love when an RTS takes risks and breaks new ground in some way:
The asymmetry of the C&C series.
The awesome zoom mechanics and unit/map scale of SupCom.
The ridiculously good attention to detail and production value of the BfME series (especially the first 2 games).
The groundbreaking graphics of AoE III.
The insanity, hilarity and spectacle of AoM.
The “feel” of StarCraft. Mostly around unit control and responsiveness.
The realism, sound design and physics of CoH.
The polish of AoE II and what probably is one of the best looking 2D games ever.
Edit: How could I forget about Homeworld? RTS with one more dimension to play with.
I can still go back and play any of those games (and I still do from time to time), but in a few years from now I doubt I’ll re-install AoE IV because I had fond memories of it.
Give me rain, give me time of day, give me animated things everywhere and varied gaia. Give me manned siege and proper unit vs building scaling. Give me AI that don’t attack a keep with 3 units. You half-assed units on walls by not allowing siege to be built on them too. You half-assed building destruction physics by making them canned. Your units don’t even follow terrain contours properly. Show to me that you loved making this game and it was not just a corporate cash grab using the AoE name. The team who worked on sound design deserve an award, the rest just phoned it in. I know that the game we have now is the game we will have forever and I already made peace with that fact, but it’s still disappointing that with every new patch and even the “season 2” announcement, all changes are just for the eSports group.
Yes stone walls were much better in AOE3. The investment for stone walls are very high. You level up more slowly and have fewer units. Then in Late Castle and especially imperial they get destroyed so easily.
Given devs and ourselves have more experience with what works from UI and UX standpoint, it really makes me wonder, why is AOE4 an example of evolution gone backwards, to the point where i consider it being lazy (its true that i don’t know what budget they had, but i doubt it would cause much wasted effort or money for devs).
love or hate AOE3, icons there were an improvement over its predecessor, you can’t mix tier 2 and 3 icon even if you tried to on purpose, same goes for 2 and basically all other RTS games out there, not saying dots can’t work, but good luck noticing them when the rest of the icon has no difference, also a 4 problem no one seems to mention, why do all techs in specific age, regardless of being eco or military, cost the exact same amount? problem being redicilously long payoff times, with tier 3 eco techs being a waste of resources, and others being either avoided till age or 2 after becoming available to research or completely untouched due to game never getting to age 3
You are completely right. You know how the last server-side patch affected my gameplay?
In absolutely no way.
I don’t expect new features to be added to the game other than new civs as DLCs. The game we have now is the game we’re stuck with. I’m really, really hoping the modding community saves this bore-fest.
Stone walls should be castle/imp age only and have way more health!! Stone towers should do dubble the damage they do now to make them even worth it.
Wood towers should upgrade at castle and imp age. Health and damage increased with age.
Seige caped at imp. Siege damage incressed