FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF AGE OF EMPIRES IV
This is what I expect Age of Empires IV to have in its first anniversary. One whole year after its launch, this is the bare minimum to make this game better and shed some life to it.
- Fully remapable hotkeys (already adressed by the devs)
- Color picking (already adressed by the devs)
- Not “placeholder” icons. After playing this game for 7 months I still have trouble to distinguish between some units icons aswell as to not get confused on what technology I already upgraded. So after one whole year of the game being already released, I fully expect the devs to give us proper HUD UI icons.
- Let us properly shift-queue Chinnese Imperial Official to collect tax and supervise building. As of now, you cannot queue the Official to collect tax and then supervise a building, you have to wait for him to collect the tax and THEN you can queue dropping the gold and his supervise ability after.
- Waypoints. When I shift-queue a unit, like a scout into the fog, go to take care of my base, then get back to the scout, and I can’t see what path he’s taking because there aren’t waypoints markers. Basically this:
- Streamlined HUD. I expect this to be updated to not eat 1/3 of the screen. To be able to hide it, show it, etc.
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Proper spectator and casting tools with updated UI. As of now, spectator mode is a pain in the a**. Nothing of interest is showed, the UI is cluttered, it’s hard to see players stats properly, etc. Third party tools already have better options than the actual game.
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More intuitive wall building. Building walls is really a pain in the a** right now. If there’s a single tile of wall that isn’t able to build because God knows why, the entire section is canceled and you are just there juggling around for 20 seconds to be able to build a 5 tile large wall.
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Make the online chat not take literally 10 seconds to be sent. It makes the game and the online experience feel absurdly unresponsive.
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Proper sound options. As a player aswell as a spectator, we don’t have the proper options for sounds to be set properly. For example, we could get absolutely annoyed non-stop with scouts shouting every other minute the same enemies spotted.
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AI enhancements. As of now AI is a joke. It’s totally broken, sometimes they could be harder in the easy setting than in the hard. Playing skirmish against AI (solo or coop) is not fun at all. AI is so bad it also affects the main campaign of the game.
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Proper siege and building projectiles animations. With the game editor being out, some people got to make better arrow arc animations in a couple of days than the entire game has. I hope to see this cannon and arrow shots improved upon so they don’t look so weird.
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Projectile visibility. As of now, in the heat of any medium to large battle, it’s impossible to see siege projectiles. Mangonels projectiles are 98% invisible. Trebuchets rocks go unnoticed if you don’t actually see the trebuchets and see your Keep getting low on health. Cannon projectiles are like magic bullets where if it weren’t for its smoke trail you wouldn’t even know where they are shooting. Tower cannons are just invisible most of the times and you only notice for the sound effect of it. Keep cannons are also hard to follow since the arc they do is laughable (cannon emplacements seem to have got the arrow arc applied to them instead of looking like actual cannon shots).
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Let me see the CD before using active abilities (as of now I can only know of the CD After I used the ability and hover over the icon to see it)
- Ranked medals artwork enhancement. As of now, they are all the same with different colors and just a couple more flourishes than the lower ranks. For instance, right now it’s impossible to dinstinguish between a Platinum and a Diamond rank at a glance.
Besides the rewards we get for earning ranks, the medal is a big part of the ranked experience.
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Put a visible CD to Tax collection on buildings. A lot of times I want to manually collect tax with the Imperial Official, not knowing I’m not able to due to them beign previously collected by other Official automatically.
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Let us see building health when enemy garrisons vills/troops. As of now, if you’re attacking an enemy TC (or any “garrison-able” building) and some vills get inside, you cannot see the building health bar since the game just wants to show you the TC icon and the vills icon.
- Properly show unit in training queue. As of now, if you queue let’s say 5 Palace Guards, and while doing so you upgrade them to Elite Palace Guards and put more on the queue, they’ll show in the global queue as separated units (using the same icon) because the game thinks Palace Guards and Elite IG are a different unit (despite them being Elite Palace Guard when trained)
- Let me close dynasty tab by clicking outside (now you can only close it by clicking in the dynasties icon again)
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Make bell notifications sound effect louder. When Wonder or Sacred Site Victory is close and you’re in the middle of a game, worst if in the middle of a battle, this notification goes unnoticed since you barely hear it. Make it more noticeable.
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Torch arc. Is as weird as the building cannons arc. Could be a lot smoother.
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Game map editor fully released (out of beta)
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Just as the lumber camp, the mining camp, the windmill, the blacksmith, the TC flags, etc, are all animated. I expect these to be animated too.
EXTRA AND BEYOND
This is what I hope the game adds beyond getting to be an actual complete game. Hopefully after and earlier than later we get the game to be better and better.
- Coop campaigns.
- Customized campaigns. Proper spotlight for customized campaigns with their own tab in the campaigns main menu.
- More official campaigns.
- Voice acting and characterization of the historical figures. I liked the approach the main campaign had, with the narrator telling us the historical events.
HOWEVER, I couldn’t feel more detached from the historical figures when playing them, since they do not have neither an icon, or a drawing representarion, or a statue figure, or a proper voice, etc etc, etc. - Well thought out new civs. I know people are clamoring (and will keep doing so) for new civilizations, all the time. But with the AoE IV approach to make civs more asymmetric than their AoE II counterpart. I’d rather have fewer well thoughout new civs than a plethora of them not being well differentiated nor balanced.
- Make this a little bit more prominent? (At least when playing 1v1 where there’s a ton of extra space). As of now, our banners are not shown too much, and when they do, they’re completely underwhelming due to their tiny size.
- Ranking feedback. As of now, when you rank you get your medal, and when you rank up, you just see a bar fill up (you don’t even see the bar fill up animation, you just see the bar already filled). No animations, no sound effects, no proper feedback from the game when you go up in rank.
Here’s a good example of a proper ranking up medal:
(AoE IV doesn’t have any kind of animation nor sound effect)
- Lobby UI streamlined. Yeah, another UI/UX point. We need a proper lobby UI. As of now we need to juggle around 3 tabs in order to set up a game when everything could be front and center. Map picking, game mode, and custom options could all use a simple UI with everything shown in just one tab.
- Integrated ban/pick system for competetive play.
- Integrated automatic mini tournaments in-game.
- Dedicated “Arcade” tab for custom games.
- Proper score summary. As of now, score is just broken. And besides that, it doesn’t show interesting stats. How about instead we get a score number in economy tab, we get how much gold we got by our Tax Collectors, how much extra resources we gained from Prelates buff, etc? How many units and from which we made? How many kills? Which was the most effective/favourite in this game, etc?
- AI charaterization. Remember when the AI used to trash talk you in previous Age of Empies games? Where they took the place of a historical character and talk directly to you in Skirmish?
- Taunts. Iconic in the AoE franchise.
I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting stuff, but anyhow I’ll add it if I remember something. Also you can add anything you think should make it into the game.
NOT BALANCE WISE, that’s an ongoing thing.
MORE
- In-game player list also showing their respectives civs.
- 5 seconds countdown at match start (game sometimes is a bit unresponsive at start)
- Tech tree button in-game (now only accessible through esc menu)
- More unit stances (defend ground, defend unit, aggresive, passive, etc)
- More (and more meaningful) unit formations
- Fix wall gates. Or clarify if they’re working as intended? And if they are, what’s the point of palisade walls gate being able to close???
- Let us alt/ctrl/shift/anykeymodifier click on market resources to sell/buy in batches (now we can only spam click/hotkey if we need to sell/buy a bunch of resources)
*Let us see buy/sell market prices directly on the icons instead of having to hover over
- Let us see number of Trade Caravans just like number of villagers (separate them in economic numbers)
- Ability to resize UI
- Unit upgrade stats
- Show map in loading screen
- More flora&fauna diversity with the different biomes
- Scalable and separated requirements for Wonder construction according to number of players (i.e. 3000 of each resource in 1v1, 6000 in 2v2, 12000 in 4v4, etc)
- Team ranked
- Higher pop cap for custom games
- More water maps variety
- More mode options in custom games such as Diplomacy
- Hitbox clicking optimization
- Make custom games mode options available for all custom games rather than needing to download a mod pack for these game modes: i.e treaty, diplomacy, regicide, deathmatch, nomads, etc.
- Spotlight best mods periodically (just like Royal Rumble but with more mods created by the community)
- Properly show all mods (as of now even selecting all mods and all modes, the mod list doesn’t show everything)
- When making max Imperial Officials don’t let queue more (as of now it lets you queue more than the max allowed and halts your TC production)
