Siege is really underwhelming

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I wasn’t around for the nuke nerfs that apparently happened to Siege earlier on in AoE4, but they seem agonizing to play with right now. They are all incredibly slow, none of them seem to serve any purpose besides shooting down walls, and the variety from Ribauldequin to the french Cannon seems arbitrary.

Nest of Bees stands out as being a stronger Mangonel obviously. And, it looks cool (which the rest don’t).

Why is it that the Ribauldequin costs 1000 resources and shoots in a straight line? The model is literally a cone.

Why does the French Cannon actually also have a miniscule packing time even though it is not meant to? And why is it that it has an inconsistent splash ability that can only be used once per new patch?

Why does the Bombard do no splash damage? I get that this is meant for walls and Keeps, but the unit costs 1000 resources for gods sake. It feels so one dimensional and sad for something that is meant to be the best of the best unit you can buy with resources. Make the Trebuchet the stronger Wall buster, and make a Bombard a bit more generalized to give the advantage to those that holds more of them. Sounds busted? it should be.

Why do both Springald and Culverin feel like completely unnecessary units? Yea, I understand that they exist for the purpose of destroying siege units. But, they feel like artificial parasites that only exist for that purpose. Why can’t the Springald and Culverin also function as an AoE2 scorpion in addition to being Siege killers?

The Great Bombard is great. But, if you ask me, the regular Bombards should’ve been more like it. I don’t have any issues with the Great Bombard, it even follows terrain unlike every other siege unit in the game (how is this not fixed?)

Overall Siege feels completely deflating. It doesn’t help that AoE4 heavily favours the Archer/Horseman/Spearman gameplay, making it feel like that is all there is. How sad is that while a 40 min AoE4 game, you are effectively doing the same thing as you were 20 mins into it, while in any other RTS, players have upgraded to special end game units that have fun and unique abilities?

As of right now, it does not feel like you can really “play” with Siege units. They’re all one dimensional and hollow. Please take a look at siege once more. It should not be as mundane as it currently is. People that complain about the game being too defensively oriented are mistaken in that the issue is actually Siege being too weak and uninteresting.

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Aoe4 lacks aoe3-like siege.
Falconets that destroy infantry with area dmg and blast the units away with amazing physics.
The bomards in aoe4 sound like a dry fart and do singletarget damage, super boring.
On top of that, there is no siege-crew, only golden ghosts.

No thanks, not playing this game.

Look at how majestic the aoe3de siege is

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Holy crap I love how those cannon balls make splashes even after they have hit their targets. Chef’s kiss.

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And to think these physics/animations are from 2005. Crazy how ahead of its time AoE3 was. The siege in AoEIV broke my heart, and AoE3 players in particular see how uhhhh underwhelming it is.

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The beauty of Havok physics. I hope AoM: Retold also uses Havok.

As for the thread - there are two things I don’t like about AoE 4’s Mangonel: 1.) the lack of friendly fire and 2.) not being able to cut down trees.These two are imo one of the best aspects about AoE 2’s Mangonel/Onager.

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Sorry to report that AoE3 does not get to hog overall underwhelming feeling of AoE4 siege. AoEO doesn’t even have gunpowder, but its siege is miles ahead of AoE4.

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Siege hasn’t cost 1000 resources for a while now and it’s not just horsemen spearmen and archers made in Late Game.

I just noticed that you haven’t played the game in a while and you don’t follow the competitive matches.

It is true that there are unique units that can be upgraded, that more micromanagement can be added (in the form of abilities) and that units can be filled to civilizations that are more empty in that.

I absolutely refuse that all civs have 8 UU, 15 different bonuses and 20 unique technologies, it would be a nightmare in the balance (because there will always be 2 civs per year, since the player population always ask for new civs) and it will become a chaos.

And don’t worry, currently in team games you can make a brutal mass of Camel Archer for Mid / Late Game (they have been buffed in the hit and run).

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Because eSports players complain, so Relic made the game boring to please 1% of player base…

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Your comment addressed nothing in the post, made claims about me which are untrue and spat just straight up misinformation. 1000 Resources is obviously a rounded off number, but since you’re so keen on misleading details, Culverin is still at that number.

The post is about how Siege is underwhelming. They do not function in any way that is actually exciting or interesting, from visual effects to actual mechanical output. There is no real variety, and they do not add much to the general experience in their current state.

Imperial age units should be exciting. That is the endgame, and should be featured shaking up gameplay in exciting ways. From slow moving siege to siege with one dimensional purposes, they simply do not fulfill that role.

They are no Battlecruiser, Carrier or Ultralisk. Not that I am asking them to be that absurd, the point is for them to stand out in a meaningful way.

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One should be careful with such numbers.
1% of the playerbase being competitive huh?

18341 people playing ranked 1v1

33459 people playing team ranked

I don’t know the number of total active players in aoe4.
The number of people being online at a time (steam) can be seen here:

In the last 30 days, around 7500 players have been online/playing at the same time.

The thing that a lot (!) of people in this forum who keep begging for 1 million more new civs are forget is,
that there is a BIG NUMBER of people playing ranked.
And ranked is competitive.
Even the player on last spot of the ladder with 1.9% winrate is playing competitive.
He’s playing ranked and wants to improve and tries to win games.

It’s a misunderstanding that only high elo ranked players need good balance.
All (!!!) ranked players need good balancing.
Though the way to easily balance the game is checking out the higher ranked games and observing winrates there and getting feedback from high ranked players, because they understand the strengths and weaknesses of each civ, unit and strategy and use them to their potential, whereas midrank and lowrank players don’t.

If the balancing is weak, then ranked is basically unplayable.
Especially in team ranked the game gets out of balance very quickly the more civs are being added and the less the balancing is heavily worked on and observed by devs.
Whereas casuals can have fun nonethless.
If balancing is good, ranked is playable and (!) casuals have fun.
That shows, it does not matter at all for casuals, wether or not the game is balancing for competitive.

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it might, heard aoe3 DE version of bang is used for retold (which also explains many AOM mechanics being included with african royals and knights of mediterranian, likely prep work),ofc i can’t say its 100% true, but looking at it logically, its the most logical approach

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aoe2 is ahead even, cuz most have splash damage

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more accurate % of competitive vs casual/everything else kind of player is about 20% at most, usually lower, for competitive, and 80% for everyone else, sadly the support with aoe4 specifically (but most other modern RTS make this exact mistake as well), is split closer to the exact opposite of this ratio, when looking at the whole picture, i’d say its about 60/40 atm, with 60 being the competitive portion

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How much effort do you think the redone terrain rendering / shadows / AO was in the S5 update, vs. the balance changes in the same update? How can you determine the effort involved in both pieces of work?

(also I’d like to keep it solely to balance - new units and icons benefit casuals as much, if not more, than competitive players, because we don’t have to minmax nearly as hard. I get far more use out of Wynguard units that any competitive player does)

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effort is only a part of the picture, i can only judge by results, as devs do not communicate scale of effort, but i can see and feel the results, also the graphics update being needed is big enough indication of not focusing on right areas during development itself, also its pretty clear balance changes are prefered for devs because they are low effort, require simple coding compared to rendering redux for instance, new units benefit both sides, there’s only gray, no black (competitive) and white (casual), but even gray has gradients of lighter and darker

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Do you not think the graphical updates were a great result that were appreciated by many players? The stereotype of competitive players (however accurate or inaccurate) being that they don’t care about graphics, logically, this has to be for casuals?

I’m not interested in going backwards and saying “well this should’ve been done during development”, because anyone can say that about any improvement to any game made post-release. I’m trying to map out the effort in catering to fanbase demographics.

Also this is the Siege thread, which I forgot for a moment, sorry, but this is relevant because we have casual players asking for design and balance changes, without an appreciation of how balance trickles down from the top to benefit all players. The trick is to ensure that things aren’t made unnecessarily homogenous for the sake of competitive play - which I think the devs realise and are working to address - starting with the UU changes in S5.

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Even if we are arguing, remember that there are things we agree on.

  • The siege destruction animation is bland and nowhere near realistic.

  • There are useless or uninteresting siege units.

  • The visual of siege machines with operators can be improved aesthetically.

If I argue with you, it’s because I’m afraid that the direction of the game will break like in AoE3 and everything will go to waste. AoE4 can have a little more depth and its units (like siege units) can have interesting functions. From there to there being mechanics, units, technologies and ultra broken bonuses is another story.

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You also have to count the number of hours played and the average fidelity of a ranked player and a casual player (I’m not saying that there are no casual players who don’t have fidelity, but the number is lower) who usually play 5-10 different games.

That 20-25% of competitive players put in more hours than casual players.

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funny that i never put graphics into this is competitive only or casual only, just said plainly its easier to code balance changes than a new renderer, which i can finally say is good enough for this day and age, as long as i ignore water, but thats not the point here

fair, this one is just a matter of me having no major exposure to “modern gaming” ways till just ahead of aoe4, so i got to see all the problems with its approach with what you can call “boomer” perspective

as for here, i do agree with whats being said, but the part with UU changes in S5 is smt i wanna add to, it proves that relic is working on getting that portion of the game in line with what it can be at full potential so to speak, but the cold hard truth is, a lot of the individuals that wanted to see these are already gone, moved on, because it took way too long to adress in any meaningful capacity, the problem isn’t necessarily it wasn’t addressed at all, its how long it took for the addressing to start happening, the ingame tournament advertisement being put higher on priority list than stuff like this also doesn’t help matters at all

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Ah, sorry for not being clear. This is because you talked about the split of competitive vs. casual focus in support, saying it was the inverse of where it should be. Previously I would’ve agreed with you more, but I’m seeing a switch to more focus on stuff that has a greater ROI for non-competitive players.

If I misread you, I’m sorry. This is what I was replying to: