Terrain should have an impact on unit attributes

Aoe4 has unprecedented added rich terrain, which is great, but the terrain seems to have no real effect except good-looking. Maybe it can increase the impact of terrain on unit attributes in the future, such as the attack bonus from high to low, Units in the forest take less damage, etc.
Of course, this is a good design, and the official may think it is too complex, but similar mechanisms have already been reflected in Red Alert 2 and rise of nations, which will certainly develop more tactics and possibilities and make the game more fun.

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They should also play around with muddy terrain (slowing siege and heavy units down), high grass (light units can hide there), foggy areas etc.

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Eric Wrobel during the community stream last week said that the reason the hill bonus was removed is because elevation changes are drastic in Age of Empires IV and they didn’t want one player downhill to be at a constant disadvantage.

Do I feel drastic elevation changes were the right decision for the game? No. It’s a purely aesthetic positive which removes expected gameplay mechanics and causes other gameplay issues as well.

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In this way, seizing the highland can also become a very important tactical indicator. It’s fun to think about it…

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The extreme high ground does not work well with the very limited camera. It’s pretty sad when you can only see half a battle on the screen at a time because of their zoom restriction.

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This is like saying “we don’t want the player who failed to control more map resources/capture more sheep/upgrade/use the right counter to be at a constant disadvantage, so we removed that element”
which directly translates to “we simply do not want to do it” in English.

Because there is such a simple solution that I can come up within a second:

  1. Try to spawn competitive maps as more symmetric
  2. Set a cap to the elevation bonus so that it does not stack to infinity
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@BossPaprika1647 Found the answer to your question.

So we see further and that’s it. I mean, it could be worse I guess.

Only thing that can make that LoS bonus worth it would be letting the camera zoom out more on a mountain. Otherwise I’d just be staring at the tips of grass.

I do wish they would do something more with elevation other than just LoS. Even if it’s not as strong as AoE2’s 25% damage increase/decrease.

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They why even have these “drastic height changes”… They make no sense

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Yep, I agree.
It doesn’t have to be something drastic, I suggested on other topics that hills could slightly affect the speed of units, I dont know how good this would be though.

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Lol, creating terrain a certain way and then trying to fit gameplay around it is doing it in reverse and a pretty bad design proces. Not a promising insight into the development tbh:(

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i tried to point out this option from years…i don’t think they’re able to do that successfully

Imagine posting nest of bees or cannons on a high terrain. I’m sorry but that would be way too OP. Especially if you were playing some of the terrains in the closed beta. You could mow down the units from the cliffs flawlessly and nobody would be able to approach your walls.

Or if people’s bases started below cliffs. Just mow them down from above.

Eric did say you get improved line of sight from being on high terrain. So you can put keeps or towers on it or something.

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Okay, is understandable. But you will be agree with me that at least units on top of a mountain or hill should have more vision and LOS, don’t you think? For example a scout or a outpost on a hill.

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They confirmed that it is a thing in the same stream that RadiatingBlade is talking about

Disvantatge of view is not at the same level that the disvantatge of damage, for example China scouts have more area of view than other scouts.

Perhaps I am remembering wrong, but I thought Wrobel said it was the random map generators fault they removed high ground power advantage because it doesn’t distribute mountains evenly on a map so one player could have all the hills closer to their map side.

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Yeah he said that. I feel like that’s more an indicator that they need to rebalance the map generation rather than remove functions of terrain though.

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Solution: pvp map no hills. What a simple solution!