Hello
When you watch this video AoE 3.
So cannons, machine guns and other weapons have a crew.
AoE 4 should have a crew! I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal.
Unmanned weapons are a step back when AoE 3 had a crew.
I think they did this because of atack animations of Maned siege. Which looks realistic but takes bit more time. But that’s steel not a good reason for it.
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I’d argue that there are ways to go around that. Just assume the weapons are always loaded and ready to fire, so they can always shoot when prompted, and then have both a reload animation if you’re static, and an internal reload without animation if you’re on the move.
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In my opinion, siege operators in AoE 3 are a step back. They’re just clutter.
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I definitely wanted crews on siege weapons and machinery as well. I’m 100% with you here.
AoEIII did an amazing job with them, it was a step towards a more immersive and entertaining experience.
It’s certainly one of the things that I could easily see working and was expecting to be added.
Something amongst many things that AoEIV could learn and borrow from AoEIII.
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I’ve seen this requested a lot lately, and many people agree and want to see people manipulating Siege weapons.
I hope they do it, it’s realistic, detailed, not so hard to do and A LOT of people want this!
If at World’s Edge they really listen to the community as they say, then we don’t have nothing to worry about.
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In real world loading a cannon, or a musket, or even a crossbow, is still much slower than in AOE3. I think the gaming industry have a lot of well developed design ideas to incorporate that.
Speaking of cannons, AOE2 cannons had operators, and AOE2=great design. So at least for cannons we should add a guy pushing it from behind.
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Operators don’t get in the way of micromanaging weapons. They are clumsy because that is what the game asks for. I already talked about this in other forums that raised the same and explained well about the operated cannons.
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Ok if that’s may not be the case than only devs can explain it. Maybe they could have done it because of Age 2 playerbase cuz it’s bigger than age 3 so more people find it familiar. But it’s just a guessing.
It’s not about micromanaging.
Operators reduce readability but bring next-to-nothing to the game.
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Well, the details usually contribute more than you think. They give more life and immersion to the game. For example fauna, birds, clouds that cast their shadow on the ground, etc.
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have you even saw the trailers? how many soldiers around trebuchets did you saw to make readability get compromised for adding two soldiers managing it?
Trebuchets could be automated weapons in Age II, but admit it, even cannons had a soldier pushing them.
And there is no harm in putting one or two people using siege weapons. Same for the rams
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What is this readability argument I hear all the time? This sounds more like an excuse not to do something.
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The Trebutchets in the image above have lot of empty space around them, the ghosts are translucent, and the image isn’t even from the same perspective that the game is played from.
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I think the ghosts are a decent substitute, regular people would look nicer but this is certainly better than no operators at all.
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Put simply, clarity is extremely important in an RTS, particularly as the number of units in play trends towards larger numbers. In an FPS, realistic graphics aren’t uncommon, partially because camouflage can be quite import parts of the game but also because there are usually only a small number of moving enemies on a static background. In the case of an RTS, the readability is both extremely important for competitive gameplay and for spectators.
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Age games especially AgeIII has a bad history of low fps and stuttering in late games especially when all the civs max capped their population limit. So if this is to counter those problems than it is 100% ok. I can live with that. It’s not a deal breaker but those low fps is unacceptable.
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no sh… readability is important. Do you actually have any thoughtful arguments as to how and why siege engines with crews would be such a huge blow to your readability? I never heard once any aoe3 player claiming that sieges were not readable due to the crews and I never had any issue with them either. Nor have I heard that about any other RTS out there that uses such crews - and there are quite a few.
That’s all fluff that one would expect to hear from people who would have never liked aoe3 either way and their opinion was already extremely biased towards it before it was even released.
I think animations, arrows, armors, building designs are all obstacles to readability as well. Let alone those fires from the chinese nest of bees, have you seen them? Maybe we should remove everything and play with little monochromous geometric shapes so that readability stays unharmed.
That’s such a poor argument really.
I suggest people who are that much concerned with readability to play this specially designed version of chess. You can have all the readability of the world there. No complains at all about it, I hope.
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Readability become a ridiculous argument for everything. I don’t think some people on the siege weapons would be so dramatic, imho.
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They’re not an issue when siege weapons are isolated but if you have them in the center of a densely packed army, if the siege weapon is melee, the operators can obfuscate the real units around them.
All of these things help to understand what is happening in the world. In particular, attack animations (whether that be melee, archers or nest of bees) are super important for informing the user that combat is taking place. In the case of buildings and armour, detail is necessary for differentiation when you have a lot of variety. In the case of siege operators, they bring nothing to the game. Siege operators are about as useful as the birds which periodically fly across the screen in AoE 2.
For the record, I liked AoE 3 on release and I played it a lot back in the 2000s. I only really began to see the flaws when I got older and better at RTSs.
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