It takes 6 months for an entire development studio to add a patrol command to units? really
and is anyone else concerned at how sparse this roadmap is?
Where is zoom?
Where are hotkey changes?
This is basic basic stuff and it should not take months of development time, especially for a game like this with a heavy emphasis on e-sports.
Itās not that itās in an ongoing development for 6 months. Itās more of a priority thing. Patrol isnāt at the top of their list. I donāt think anything would take that long while in active development. Roadmaps are mostly just to show a rough time scale for when these features are going to be released.
Read a little closerā¦? On the announcement itself they have addressed the issue.
My question as well.
After their most recent change to the zoom levels, the community has become fractured in their advocacy for further changes.
A lot of people seemed to be satisfied. I canāt say how much theyād want to do it if only a small subset of people want it now. Perhaps much later.
I do not think it is a small subset at all,
the vast majority of people Iāve heard opinions from have expressed they would like more zoom,
ātheir most recent changeā was literally around 1 extra scroll out which even the content creators have pointed out it basically may not have been a change at all
Make a poll!
My point is that it isnāt as clear cut a topic as it once was.
Before the change, everyone had a general idea that they wanted more.
Now that a minor change has been made, some people are ok with it.
Relic will ultimately have to decide. All im saying is it doesnāt feel like the āmovementā it once was.
I could be reading a different image to you, but I think thereās more listed than the patrol command.
What you seem to mean is āwhy arenāt the things I want on thereā, which is fair enough, but if everyone defined that themselves weād have a thousand roadmaps. What do you do when your ideal roadmap clashes with someone elsesā?
cool bro I would like to introduce you to the term vocal minority
Zoom is fine, if anything itās just the fow that needs to change.
As someone else reminded me, the game was rushed for release and actually released on schedule which is a rarity. All of this is now catching up
Iām also frustrated but it makes sense. on top of relic being itās usual slow self
In the meantime the game is definitely playable and in a fair enough condition barring the insane abusable bugs (relics and deleting buildings mainly)
Thatās because weāve all asked for it, and now weāre waiting for them to do it. The passage of time doesnāt invalidate peopleās previous posts saying they still want to be able to zoom out more.
You donāt have to justify it to me, Relic is the decider here.
All Im doing is speculating the result and why we havenāt heard about it since.
Can we just appreciate that we have a road map finally? And whoever thought that every single thing we want to see addressed to be on the road map or fixed ASAP must really re-think about this whole thing.
What do you want to celebrate? Fixes for a game thatās not in the early access stage? Basic changes to UI that are correcting poor design choices that never should have been made (leaving most of the GUI issue not being even mentioned)?
Roadmap? When IV is going to release, summer 2023?
Having a patrol (Age of Kings feature from 1999) option for spring? I guess player colour selection (Age of Empires 1997 feature) should hit autumn 2022.
Considering how many games come out these days- mid-2022 might as well be 2026.
These days itās a normal thing to have balance patchesā¦ Not sure whatās to appreciate- this game is not meant to die 3 months after release, so obviously they have to tweak it constantly to keep mp scene at least semi-fresh so basic support comes with the package.
Not sure whoās the tech lead over there (or whatever is the title of a guy that picked this engine) but that might have been a bad pick for this position. It looks like Devs are struggling with serious issues behind the scenes and instead of expanding the game they are working on core things that meant to be ready for normal release.
It reminds me of ME Andromeda and the fact that picking Frostbite 3 engine lead to a double-digit number of months wasted implementing basic features required for it to support TPP RPG format.
From the positives- of course, it would be bad if it didnāt exist, so itās good I guess.
And being realistic is better than overpromising. But thatās about it, considering the profile and importance of this game.
Those are internal problems we have no control over.
All weāve been able to do is provide feedback and hope they implement it in due time.
Is the current price worth the current state of the game? I would say not really.
But neither is it a total disappointment. The game did pretty well at launch actually and the quality of the campaigns is nice IMO. Multiplayer is still really fun for me but I havenāt had the misfortune of meeting any glitch exploiters so far.
I donāt think I agree with the ME andromeda/Cyberpunk comparisons people keep making considering how badly those games released. Literally unplayable.
Whereas generally speaking Aoe IV is a perfectly serviceable game.
Should @Fryapan90 be happy about the roadmap? Sure, heās interested in seeing the feedback finally implemented. Ultimately most of us want this game to improve and this Roadmap is a gesture towards that.
Now if Relic fails to meet the roadmap we will have something to criticise them with.
I never used the word celebration, you did. All Iām saying is that you can still show appreciation that they are doing something good like showing us a road-map thatās been wanted by the community for quite some time now, while still having things you want to see fixed and/or addressed.
We wanted to know if they are listening to our feedback, and also to provide us with a road-map. Well they did and they have stated multiple times that they are, but now when they finally showed us a road-map, letās start whining about something else. Why?
Everyone should know that itās impossible for them to please everyone with a road-map that works for everyone, and just because something isnāt on this road-map doesnāt mean that they arenāt working on it behind the scenes, as well as we have not the full patch notes details on this first major patch.
This wonāt be the last road-map, as Iām pretty sure that they will continue to give us new road-maps in the future with further content announcement. Itās OKAY to show some appreciation and gratitude that they are going into the right direction, while also know that there are things still in need to be addressed.
So how about that we take a moment now to chill, and await the first long waited patch for the game that is said to come as āearly Christmasā present and we go from there on-wards.
Edit: Road-map are never final and will always change in development, so we might see things switching place with each other to get them sooner than expected.
Iām also thinking that their engine is biting them on every tiny thing they try to do, which might be considered quite easy in another context. But, Tbf, I think it was a plausible one to stick to something that was working for them. Once they found out all the issues unfolding when not doing a CoH-like game, they couldnāt just go āyeah, ā ā ā ā it, we made a mistake and need to start overā, when they were already late. Especially if thereās no expertise in another engine or let alone writing one. So they just played their hand as well as they could and I donāt think, any one person is to blame for that.
zoom is already good. Stop spamming about it so they can fix actual bugs and big problems such as hotkey. Only aoe2 players think that the starcraft2 zoom is bad
Itās general consenses in communityfeedback that some of the stuff is too barebones.
Unit stances (agressive/defensive) to adjust the agression-area, patrol, visual responses ons stuff like command queue is just a basic layout for any RTS game, especially AoE.
Having low/0 priority on those things, that are getting spammed here in the forum since april, makes the responsible devs just look absolutely disconnected.
I just hope that it gets tackled as soon as possible, but again.
Waiting since april.
No, the general consensus is that the game is both good and enjoyable, as evidenced by the concurrent player count and the user reviews. Given the amount of confident predictions that we had another DoW III on our hands, I have to laugh a bit when people try and paint Age IV as anything less than a solid success.
This isnāt me saying ādonāt ask for moreā. This isnāt me saying the game is perfect. So donāt take it that way, alright?
All Iām saying is that āgeneral consensusā on most things is a lot less āgeneralā than people think. This roadmap has made me pretty confident that they are listening, even though some folks understandably want things faster (regardless of how possible that is).
These things do not contradict each other 
Being fun doesnāt nullify the objective fact of the lack of basic features - and the real problem isnāt that they are coming in slowly. The issue is nobody thought to put them in in first place.
Obviously thereās a matter of the deadline, but delaying games, to put it lightly, isnāt an uncommon practice and since we donāt have access to a parallel universe- we wonāt know if delaying IV 6-9 months would be a better course of the action.
Early access format, as long as itās named as such, isnāt potentially any real issue. You only release game once and once people move on itās even harder to make the second impression that would make them to not only go back but also stay, to sustain multiplayer community.
IV is totally fine and fun to play, sure. But Age of Empires IP is creme de la creme of the genre, one of the most recognizable PC series, and its success and impact is important for far greater things than just the bottom line for studio execs at the end of the fiscal year.
Indie strategy scene is big on PC, but RTS games like that arenāt big part of it, and Iād just like to see a game of this type on AAA level of size and production values, that is transcending the usual level of RTS popularity and spearheads RTS to broader awareness among younger players.
Blizzard is pretty much dead, and weāll sooner see Mario as a playable CoD character than see EA make a new, honest CnC or BfME game. For the most part- itās either MS or no one (ANNO1800 is super strong, but thatās a different subgenre, and Settlers are a big unknown but most likely will remain also its own thing. So no luck with Ubisoft).
And I donāt think AoM2 would get a bigger budget.
Iād definitely argue that lacking basic features would impact perception of the product. For example, people frequently criticised the decision to go with three factions in Dawn of War III, as well as the limited map pool on release, the types of cover provided and the lack of āsync killsā. There were arguments about the art style and whatnot, but irrespective of whether people came from vDoW, DoW II, or another franchise entirely, over the past five years the most comments Iāve seen about the game needing work was to do with these areas.
We can see similar trends in some of the Age IV criticism, but the difference is these arenāt enough to harm the product itself to any great extent. Every issue is important to someone, right? The ultimate line in the sand is whether or not these add up to push the product into one of two general states: āis badā, or āis good regardlessā. Generally speaking, if the only thing someone can say about a game is āneeds improvementā, thatās the same as āis badā (when boiling things down to two possible outcomes). Based on that, itās very hard for us to know why so many people like Age IV (just as itās hard for me to work out by myself why DoW III was so universally rejected. Itās evident that it was, thereās no argument there. But - like here - there are a lot of different reasons that add up to the overall judgement). All we (non-developers) know is that people do like this title. Pretty substantially.
I get that you want more. I get that you want them to pour as much money as they can into Age IV and make it the best they can. Iām not knocking either of these two things.
Can you not read? Quite written in big:
UGC CREATION TOOLS ā
