A lot of people use their phones for games.
Most of those games are of course games with short play sessions so they can be played on the go.
“RTS” is one of the most popular genres on mobile, just not the type of game we’d want to play. I think mobile is maybe even more than consoles the reason why RTS as genre died on the PC.
This is also the reason why Age of Empires 4 can’t have any other name or people will think it’s mobile.
Most people haven’t seen any RTS outside of mobile since Starcraft 2 so that is one explanation why everyone is shouting “mobile graphics”. There is no game that AoE4 can be compared to.
Total War or Manor Lords are very different games. Try seeing what your units/peasants do without the UI.
This is not too different from the angle AoE is usually played at . Now try to find how many people can be seen on here.
Than take a Galaxy S10+ or a Note 10 5G. iPhones always have surprisingly little RAM but I guess they have enough optimisations so it doesn’t matter. Not that I ever had an iPhone or will ever get one.
RTS, technically, covers a lot of games. Chess is an RTS. A “traditional” RTS game however is like AoE, Starcraft, Empire Earth, ect. Mobile would have nothing to do with the downfall of that genre as they can’t run it, at least not new games.
There is also a public Pre-Alpha you can try out, or find vidoes and screenshots of on the internet.
Company of Heroes 3 is developed by the same studio as Age of Empires 4 but will be, unlike Age of Empires4, published by Sega.
Which game looks better?
Age of Empires 4
Company of Heroes 3
They both look equally good
0voters
The games aren’t directly comparable despite using the same Engine because:
Company of Heroes doesn’t have random maps and all buildings (besides the small ones you can build) are all pre build on the map.
The setting is obviously different
The game is different, Company of Heroes has squads of unit and no individual units, being able to spot every infantry man and being able to tell what type of unit he is is not as important
The game will likely release next year
AoE4 wants to show the knight in shining armour while CoH3 wants to show the dirty reality of a World War we all have seen pictures and vidoes of many times.
My personal opinion is that I like how both games look like because they both have the style that fits the gameplay and the way the games want to feel like.
Age of Empires is bright with a high contrast so you can micro each unit without having to highlight them while Company of Heroes contrasts the beauty of the Mediterranean with the dirtiness of war but making the player rely on interface elements to interact with the units on the map.
Company of Heroes 3 uses PBR (Physical Based Rendering) while Age or Empires 4 uses NPR (Non-photorealistic rendering). Age or Empires 4 goes more for a timeless look without using abstract graphics.
Games with dark environment, usually uses the flag system to solve the low readability problem. Yes this solves the problem. These are the games that also usually have squads of units etc.
I would like a comparison between AoE4 and a not squad/flags RTS. This would be a real comparison. Without the flags you would not be able to play CoH I think. We have seen videos with 200 units in screen. I cant imagine how terrible it would be to have 200 flags to detect units in AoE4.
That image perfectly illustrates the practical need for oversized units in any Age game. Maybe the people who clamor for perfect realism have never looked out the window from a tall building and seen how incredibly small humans look compared to our buildings. Great post.
Not sure about that, In age you have siege, archers, cavalry, heavy infantry, light infantry etc, they are very distinct from each other, also you add the players colors and now they are very different, IMO we don’t need that “Readability” we never needed in age 2,3 and in many RTS of the past.
Why is this assumption being made? If AoE2 was realistic looking for its time in 1999, why can’t developers achieve the same look two decades later? It’s 2021 folks.
The answer is quit simple.
Quake was the best looking most realistic game of it’s time.
But if you want to make a shooter that feel like Quake (an Arena Shooter) you have to add unrealistic elements to it or it will feel wrong.
Make a shooter that feels like Quake but looks like a modern or WW2 shooter than it will just feel wrong.
If you want to make an Age of Empires where you want a relatively small number of units that can be individually controlled without them needing UI indicators, than you can’t make it look like Total War.
Total War can have thousands of units but you don’t control them individually, you have big flags floating over them.
Games like Manor Lords also don’t allow you to control the individual units because they are way to small.
Other games that were mentioned here like Ancestors Legacy also need UI elements on their units for you to see them.
You want a floating icon over every allied and enemy unit?
Also imagine how empty a big town would look like with small unit when you can only build 200 of them?
The point is not if they are realistic or not. They have details similar to action first person games. So much detail is very bad design logic for a RTS game. I don’t know if there would be many PC to handle these graphics without lag problems. You see now the graphics with zoom. In a RTS usually you have much more zoom out. This means there will be much more 3D models the PC will have to render. This takes a lot of performance power. Also if you have units out there (which with these graphics means that they will also have much more details) this will be something that can easily knock out even power machines. The zoom you play a RTS game like AOE does not need so much details
To be more specific.
Manor Lords asks for 16 GB RAM (recommended)
With these graphics and so much more zoom out you would expect AOE4 with these graphics to ask for 32 GB RAM for example. Right now it asks only for 8. ( and practically because of lag, you can not play a RTS with not the recommended specs).
PS:
Graphics AOE4 are great. There are many games out there with much worst graphics asking for 16G recommended for example. This is the reason that its not correct the logic that they did not pay attention about graphics etc. From the perfect UI (you get a lot of information and you still have a very clean UI - compare it with DoW3 for example) to the very low specs although the graphics are great ( I know some may complain about the textures they have ) you can understand that they gave a lot of effort for these graphics. Sometimes to minimize something without loosing so much information is the hardest part.
We read in the forum that the head of the graphics left to go to a company to make mobile games. This is an evidence of what I said above. He designed very good graphics with very low specs. This is the holy grail for companies that makes mobile games. I suspect a company asked him giving a very good contract.
