Some ideas for features to change or add without trying to unbalance the game.
Defensive Arrow Slits in Town Centres / Keeps / Towers : When garrisoned, id like to see arrows come out from more than one location, depending maybe on the amount of units inside the building.
Its a bit underwhelming to see the Keep for example spray a blob of arrows from one slit, when it clearly has many!
I think it would be also be good for allowing the likes of the Keep / TC or tower to shoot arrows at multiple directions when surrounded, making keeps a bit more effective .
Allied Stone Walls : This I think I’ve seen mentioned here or maybe in-game, but linking walls to your ally in multiplayer would be a nice feature. It would clean up a lot of choke points and pathing issues (for traders maybe) caused by poor positioning of walls because we can’t link.
Palisade Wall & Stone Walls : It would be cool to have palisade wall’s integrate better with stone walls in age 2, converting the line of palisade walls you created in age 1 into a stone wall with palisade stakes to better upgrade your defensive walls. This could add additional HP to the wall or maybe even go as far as to stop RAMs for example to only approach the gates, while siege towers can still get access.
Keeps Integrating better with walls as an option - having keeps integrate with walls like how the gate or tower is on it would be a nice new defensive structure choice as they are very limiting in AOEIV. It could give bonuses to the player, i.e. - unscaleable by towers, more HP in that section, garrisoned from the inside, better range etc.
On Defences - id like to see an additional one or two new defensive options for each Civ - im not sure what these might be - maybe you guys could post some ideas below.
Offensive - like defensive structure limitations, one or two offensive structures would be nice. Im talking like the camp tents you see in the campaign, wouldn’t these be a better aesthetic choice as forward buildings then blobbing all your archery ranges outside? Same functionality as your military buildings, less HP, faster to build, unlocked in your Keep maybe. Built by your infantry rather than having villagers running across the map.
Banner Units - This would go well with the seasons / ranks and banner reward feature in AOEIV and make it a bit more of a point to go for - If you select say 15+ units in a group 1 of those units carry your AOEIV profile banner. So for every 15 units, there would be 1 banner unit. There would be no benefit to the units to carrying this, just an aesthetic feature. When attacking ,it would just be dropped or disappear. maybe.
Formations - id love to see some more formation options, for example we have the line formation, but a column formation might just as useful when marching your troops across a map to reduce the amount of visibility so they are not marching in a giant blob, but a narrow snake.
The diamonds formation I think needs to be much tighter then it currently is.
Split formation I think is a must to add, it actually shows this feature in one of the tutorials I noticed the other day, but its not in the game. Splitting the formation for flanking a charge is really useful and I used it all the time in AOE2. (mangonel dodge!)
Maybe adding these and allowing the player to choose what 4 formations they can use would be a nice touch and open up the military action a bit more .
Day / Night Feature / GameMode : I had seen in the editor that you can adjust to day / night lighting - I hope to make a map with night lighting if possible. Im not sure what’s going to be possible in this editor, but if a day night cycle was an option, it might be an interesting game mode, Having your villagers go back to the houses during the night at a result of a reduction in production would be a cool feature to work around - challenging also if you are attacked at night, killing a house is killing your villagers - this could be a specific game mode.
I think aesthetically, it would look awesome, Trebs with flaming ammo, archer volleys, units carrying torches outside an enemies base (like the banner idea, every x amount of units could be carrying one)
One of my favourite things about the new AOEIV is the look of the game, it looks and feels great to play, sound design, scale, its great - would be great to see some updates and adjustments in this when the time is right to improve it even more.
Let me know if you guys have any ideas for features or aesthetic upgrades.
