Hi all, hi devs,
Since the DLC my friends and I have been enjoying AoE IV again. The gameplay seems is a far less buggy state than it used to be. However, outside of the game there still appear things to be really clunky which is actually frustrating to us. Hopefully these non in-game features can also be addressed somewhere in the near future.
- When booting the game you get -a lot- of notifications. It downloads/updates every map. Every single item iterates through the UI. Which is obnoxious. I really do not buy that every single map is downloaded/updated every time I login. Even in the notification menu I cannot cross these out.
- Team invites are to sublime. They disappear again and, because of the aforementioned, they are easy to miss in the notification menu. Make them more prominent/lasting when an invite is send.
- Quick match and unranked is sometimes difficult to differentiate between. We always open into the quick menu game play, even when we want to play ranked. Because we are so used to this from roughly half a year ago, and are talking on discord, we often by accident queue for QM rather than ranked. Unintended. Ranked is just one of the multiple options in the top menu and thus easily missed.
- Arguably the most obnoxious: only the team caption can requeue for the next game or quit the score screen. If any other player in the party does this, that person quits the team as well. So no player can actually leave the score screen and for example go check on someone his profile or chat messages. The same goes for when someone quits games, rather than surrenders: then the person also quits the party. Because this is not clear to others from the game/score screen, hitting the “play again” button causes us to requeue for next game while missing a friend in the party.
- In addition to the prior point: screens can be very laggy. Chat messages more often than not take up more than 3 seconds to appear. Sometimes even 20 seconds or so! Even cancelling search queue seems to take up to 5 - 10 seconds which is heavily frustrating if the prior point is also applicable.
- It is often quite unclear how stats are calculated. Even something as simple as villager count seems to be very unclear if trade is included, are fishing boats? It seems that wololo’ing armies does not provide any army score, but losing them causes a deduction in score. So many wololo’ing with success might actually yield a negative score. We have no idea how economic count is actually compromised. A small tooltip would solve this.
- When in game and we are, for example raiding with horsemen, and add freshly produced new horseman to this group and reassign the control group the game will jump to the newest added horseman; which is typically not the cluster of raiding horsemen but the fresh one still making its way over; providing irrelevant focus/view of the desired location. Ideally this should be set to the largest cluster of units.
- I know this one is AoE thing but it is still on my wishlist, as well as my friends: give us a toggle for movement formation. Especially at potato level we often use the select all army function and just move our legions from there. However: rallied units will now cluster and move at the speed of the slowest unit. Especially late game, where multitasking is already more chaotic, I don’t need horseman to escort a culverine out of my base. Hurry up and get to the front line! Micromanagement can be done from there!
- Team invites appear buggy. If we both send each other an invite then 1 might accept but bug out. Then the other can also no longer accept. It also seems buggy when receiving an invite when still in score screen. Overall, this is just just clunky although I wish I could be more specific.
- It is actually very common that a player can not enter the game. We sit there, 3on4, waiting, and after a minute (or two) it bugs out and requeues. It is not uncommon this happens 3 times in a row.
And last, and probably least:
11. As a random player I’d love to see a little dice or question mark added to my name/flag/icon on the loading screen. At least then people know why I picked HRE on Arabia or French on hill and dale 
12. I’ve set focus on selected unit to ctrl + D. However, since patrol was introduced it seems to bug out quite a lot and rather than focus on my selected unit, it will opt for patrol. And thus my army dies because I cannot see…
13. The sword, victorious or defeated, is glorious, but it is also very slow. I’d like this to be a little bit faster (or at least have the option thereto). Or at least reconsider the clickable button afterwards which appears in the middle and you actually have to chase to click it as it swooshes to the top of the screen.
14. Add a watch replay functionality directly into the score screen.
15. Observer mode in game still seems funky, at best. The only way for me to watch pro’s play is to search their profile (or worse: their smurf accounts) and then manually click through games to find specific maps or matchups. Assuming it isn’t hidden. This is far more of a hassle than it should be.
16. It is nice to know when a player surrenders, but it also gives a messages when he leaves. Since both are gray notification in the chat it often gives the sense a 2nd player has left, while it is just the first player that has surrendered now also has left.
17. There should be an option to mute all signals. I know there is anti spam but many random team players still abuse this to the limit. Same for taunts by the way but you can at least set the volume to zero.
By the way: i love how we now have waypoints and religious units are no longer selected in all army. It is weird how much these two things changed the quality of life for me, hehe. Keep it up!