Hi!
I have been playing this game for a few hours now and there are some features missing that are, imo, crucial for an AoE. I could not find them so far, but perhaps they already exist, so excuse me in advance.
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Shift+Drag Box/CTRL+Drag Box to only select Military Units or Villagers: In AoE II, you could hold shift or CTRL while dragging a box over units to either select only military units or villagers. Why not here? It’s super useful.
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OPTIONAL Hotkey for each Building: In AoE II, you could assign a specific hotkey to each building in the game. I find it plenty more useful to hit e.g. CTRL+M to access the Market directly instead of having to press the hotkey for all economic buildings and cycle through them until I get to the Market here in AoE IV.
As it is optional, you may leave these keys for each building unassigned and continue to use the “select all economic buildings” hotkey, but since it’s an option, it would not hurt anybody. I personally would like to have it. -
Town Bell: Yes, in AoE II (ugh), you could click the “Town Bell” key at the Town Center to automatically order all villagers around to garrison inside the Town Center and click the “Back to Work” key to let the villagers go back to work.
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Show Queued Movements/Actions of a Unit: When selecting a unit, its queued actions or movement commands should be shown, like in AoE II.
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Automatic Exploration with the Scout: A unit command for the Scout to explore the map automatically.
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Aggressive/Defensive Stance on Military Units: Self-explainatory.
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Free Player Color Selection: Come on, in 2021, I still have to play as blue all the time?
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Individual Player Handicap: A feature that has just recently released in AoE II. It allows players to gain a boost to all economic and military units on a given percentage.
A possible improvement would be to separate the economic boost from the military one so that the handicap boost isn’t forced on both aspects when set up, since it may be sometimes enough for one player to keep up when only his economic power is being boosted and a military boost would be too much. -
Basically all of the AoE II Game Setup Options: Game Speed, Team Positions, Lock Teams, Shared Exploration. Options that allow us to customize a custom game more for our own specific needs. Options never hurt.
I am aware that more options are already planned to be implemented, I just wanted to list a few here.
Don’t get me wrong. AoE IV feels smooth and I like to play it so far. But in many aspects, it feels unfinished and rather like a downgrade in Quality of Life matters, which is a sad thing. We all paid full price for it and you would atleast expect the same features, if not more, that a several-years-old predecessor already had implemented, wouldn’t you?
