Quality of life changes for AOE4

This might be a small thing, but I noticed in AOE3-DE that there was only full screen or windowed options for the window setting. For AOE4 it would be nice to have a windowed-borderless option since it makes alt-tabs a little smoother. Just a quality of life thing, but it would be cool if it was available. I’m curious if anyone has any other quality of life changes that they would like in the next game.

9 Likes

Checked on AOE2-DE and there is also no windowed-borderless.
Would also suggest:

  1. Simplification of the hotkeys menu by showing the bind in the keyboard overlay (Idea removed from Nili´s How to set up your Hotkeys in AoE2?!) and a small video preview of some binds similar to TWW spell preview but with aoe2 commands (for example difference between move, atack move and patrol)

  2. Automatically pause for player disconnects since it can easily ruin the game for all players.

2 Likes

Would love the windowed borderless mode, definitely a nice to have QoL function if they implement it - don’t see why they wouldn’t.

Also the hotkey scenario has been improved from previous AoE games (at least from using villagers to build etc) we can see that here:

As we can see building hotkeys have been divided into their respective ages:

Q - Darkage
W - Fuedal Age
E - Castle Age
R - Imperial Age

I think this has made hotkeys much easier to navigate with the assumption that it follows the original grid layout of keys as in prior AoE games for selecting a building from that subgroup:

1st Row Q W E R
2nd Row A S D F
3rd Row Z X C V

So to build a House it would be Q Q
Build a barracks Q S
Build a Blacksmith W Q
Build a Stable W S

Its fairly intuitive and wouldn’t require a player to move their hands drastically from one side of the keyboard to another, generally keeps a players left hand over the left hand side of the keyboard unlike the example of Nili’s keyboard layout where it almost spans from side to the other.

Hopefully the hotkeys can be remapped with this new division of hotkey subgroups, before it was just civilian or military buildings.

As for other quality of life items I would like to see would probably be resources per minute, that way you can kind of gauge how long you need to wait before you have enough resources to build something. Also would be a good indicator as to how efficient your villagers are, an example would be you have 5 villagers cutting wood with a logging camp on the treeline giving X wood per minute, you notice this is dropping over time as the villagers chop more wood the time to walk to the next tree increases therefore reducing the resources per minute and you could quickly check and see if you need to build another log camp closer to the new treeline to improve efficiency - not sure if this would apply to other resources really as it would seem that stone/ gold is a single node as opposed to multiple BUT it would be a clear way of indicating once economic upgrades are in place how much of an impact that has on gathering resources especially for new players.

3 Likes

I just want reconnect option in case the game crashes and implement a built in capture age not as another 3rd party software.

1 Like

From me:

  • when u click to build a hunting cabin and you are choosing to place it, you could get a gold count which you will get in your current place; currently we have to clue how much gold we will take without counting each tree in the area

  • IMO scouts could get their own button to auto-collect deer corpses near their place

  • more ping options could be very useful; I miss options like “fall back!” “saw enemy here”

  • the first Town Center in the Nomad game mode could build like 50% faster

  • gather rate/minute would be very helpful; I couldn’t find information in the game e.g about differences between sheep, berries or fish gather rate; to find it I had to search that information on the internet while we could have this in detailed information on a clicked object

1 Like

forgot that one should be accounted. wow but that one is low one to aoe 4

Biome diversity, in AOE 3 there were many animals to hunt, it made the maps more unique

4 Likes

I agree too. Each biome must have its own animals corresponding to its true habitat.

4 Likes

From me :

More animals for each biome , different fruits for the berry bushes on each biome .

More biomes lol .

More diversity on terrain textures , make it 3D please like on Aoe3

Update on projectiles so we can finally get 2021 projectiles and not 1978 ones .

Market should be on the dark age .

An option to disable unit alpha (option from Aoe3)

A new UI with proper icons

1 Like

Maybe the biome could affect the texture of weapons and buildings.

Like the wood parts, depending on the biome wood color.

1 Like

That would definitely make the game epic