Some suggestions/thoughts

Actually loving AOE4. I’ve been an AOM player for… the majority of my life at this point. But I’m really enjoying AOE4. The variations are nice, and for the most part games are interesting. The only thing that really frustrates me from a strategy perspective is when you know exactly what your opponent is going to do, and it doesn’t feel like there’s anyway to stop it. So some thoughts I haven’t seen in other threads.

  1. Castle dropping / tower rushing / Chinese Landmark rushes don’t really make a lot of sense historically, and are practically frustrating to play against. One easy fix would be to make buildings that are being constructed WAY more vulnerable to damage (by at least villagers). If China rushes in 6 villagers to build a forward landmark on my gold, I should be able to prevent it going up by having six villagers attack the building development. Right now, there’s no way to stop that from going up – scouts and villagers don’t do any damage, and they can’t kill the enemy villagers in time. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me… AOM did a much better job at balancing this and seems to be an easy change.

  2. Walls should take much longer to build, and shouldn’t be blocking until the section is completed.

  3. Siege isn’t usually a huge issue for me in 1v1 at my elo level. They seem mostly balanced… BUT I think the further changes I’d like to see are 1) siege engines take twice as long to set up/take down. Deploying them should be a real commitment. 2) lower the HP a little bit even more than the last patch.

  4. Siege towers are fun. I like using them even if no one else does. Would be nice if they let you get over wooden walls too, but get I may be alone in this request.

  5. The dominate strategies for major civs need viable counters. English longbowmen, French early knights, Mongol horse, are too difficult to counter even if you know exactly what they are going to do. I don’t want to lose uniqueness, but even if you play perfectly with a weaker civ knowing what they are going to do, it’s extremely difficult to win. Maybe it’s buffs, maybe it’s nerfs. Two ideas:
    a) Make outpost health much weaker, but given them more viable ways to deal damage to armored units for cheaper early. (and again, see point 1, make them very hard to be built if being attacked). Less health is fine because if they are used defensively, villagers should be close to repair.
    b) This is a bigger mechanic… but it would be cool to have ways to unlock “come back” upgrades. For example, once I take a certain amount of arrow damage, I could unlock the ability to research the “next” blacksmith upgrade before the next age. So if I’m getting buried by early archer rushes, eventually that painful education allows me to develop better counter measures sooner. Feels historical, and may be a small way to give me a chance to make a recovery from a single unit type of rush.

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