You miss the point. All of those could be redundant too. You don’t have to have armors, let alone civ specific ones and historically inspired, to tell units apart and communicate their role. You don’t have to have thematic architecture. Everything could just as well be replaced with symbols or simplistic generic buildings that would be the same for each civ and their role would be exact the same as it is now. You wouldn’t lose anything.
Why having walls that can be manned when you could just as well throw projectiles behind them as in any past title? No need for trees and beautiful environment. They add nothing based on that reasoning.
Yet, they do add a ton, visual satisfaction is of paramount importance in video games. You play on-screen, it is not a board game, not a card game. You want to see something satisfying. Yes, crews wouldn’t necessarily add an extra utility --although they could, in many ways, like separating the hitpoints or making them capturable etc- but, they are a great visual add-on that offer a lot to many players and value them way more than you make it sound.
How? You already have units that serve different roles and created in a way to communicate those roles. You can already have pikemen fighting next to swordsmen or cavalry in the middle of the fight, yet you can tell them apart, can’t you?
What makes you think that those crews cannot be designed in a way that you won’t mistake them with swordsmen for example? The recipe to that is already there. Nothing obfuscates with cannons in aoe3. Those crews do not even have to bear weapons, how can they blend with the rest of your army in such a painful way to lower your readability? It just doesnt make sense to me.
AOE 4 overall smells of laziness, the humans need animations and will be hard for an indie studio like Relic which is backed by a small company like Microsoft which making it’s flagship game AOE 4. Thus they made holographic spectral humans setting up the thing which is symbolic but lazy.
Oh no… that’s an issue indeed didn’t cross my mind.
You know what? I downloaded a fun little game on my mobile phone the other day and noticed that even this game’s icons are way closer to this franchise than aoe4’s and certainly way more beautiful and eye-catching.
I guess this small company couldn’t fund the creation of proper UI icons either but a mobile game could.
Detailed icons need creativity, look at Windows 11, they just made rounded corners and slapped the taskbar on the middle like Mac. They claim direct storage, but lord know how many game devs will actually code their games to use it.
Microsoft wants to make their game as bland as their OS and all other products.
The beauty and details of everything else look so nice and polished until you get to the glaring omission of siege operators. They belong there as a visual reference as much as anything else, such as, windmills that move, gates that close, birds in the air, hunts that run, any details.
As far as readibility, I have never in thousands of hours of AOE3 confused a siege crew unit with a musketeer or anything else… in fact, I think it more helped with readability as sometimes when units are close together they cover things up, and siege are short, and you can make out their tiny heads and foot print/ spacing in a battle.
So to me it is not an excuse, but laziness, to give a partially completed game for a money grab because its just getting too expensive to produce quality work. I see that more so with the absence of mercenary units, native map alliances with tribes/ villages/ vassal states, heros/ explorers (yet only for 1 civ) it just seems like they put no where near the content the game deserves.
didn’t cross my mind.
I think I rather prefer old fashion flashy chess with carved pieces 