While there’s been plenty of attention paid to the problems with the small scale of buildings in AoE4 relative to other Age titles, I have not yet seen anyone completely diagnose the problem.
It is not simply that the buildings are too small relative to the units. They are. But that’s not the point. You cannot simply increase their size, because rescaling the height of the buildings would exacerbate yet another major problem – they are too damn wide.
AoE4’s buildings have footprints that are significantly wider than the buildings themselves – they include open space. While this open space allows for some landscaping and artistry, it also adds up very quickly to spread cities out horizontally, choking the field of vision.
This image gives a great view of the building footprint.
Comparing this building to the AoE2 TC drives home the point.
Whereas the AoE2 TC’s footprint literally ends at the exact pixel that the building itself meets the ground, the buildings in AoE4 have this built in curtilage around the building that expands each building’s footprint horizontally. So if you rescale the building vertically, you would only spread this curtilage further horizontally, further reducing the number of buildings you can put on the screen at the same time.
This significantly reduces the building density of AoE4. While true it perhaps makes for a more beautiful landscape visually, it spreads out buildings, making your cities harder to see at once, harder to manage, and easier to get disorientated.
It is also worth mentioning that this spreading out of buildings, preventing them from being built immediately adjacent to each other, is part of the decision the developers have announced about eliminating the ability to wall in with buildings.
Again, this otherwise innocuous and arguably realistic gameplay decision of eliminating walling with buildings (which, I may add, has existed in all five prior age games without any major complaints ever), is not so simple to remove without dramatically altering the visual perspective of players.
This is a big deal. While some players are turned off visually by the scale, the effect on AoE4 is much deeper than that. AoE has a certain feel to it. If you can’t quickly see the right amount of your base, you get kinda lost in it and the placement of buildings begins to feel meaningless or arbitrary. That ends up creating an experience that feels foreign and un-AoElike. I have tons of experience with all five existing AoE games, and they all have about that same exact sweet spot of camera altitude that allows you to see and access about the same amount of the map. There’s nothing magical about how AoE2 does this. It’s the same everywhere. And it comes down to that Goldilocks zone of building density.
I took the image above and based on the size of the building’s footprint roughly measured out how it would look in the prior four Age games. As you can see, AoE4 gives players a dramatically hemmed in, limited field of vision.
Here is what the Viper’s field of vision would be if the buildings in AoE2 took up as much of the field of vision as they do in AoE4:
Age of Mythology:
AoE3:
Age of Empires Online (I love that Roman architecture, btw):
I think Ensemble Studios implictly knew the importance of this goldilocks zone of field of vision, whether they ever said it or not. Clearly it is in the AoE DNA. Yet it is not coming through in these publicly released images of AoE4, and players seem to be processing this as a scaling issue. That’s close but not exactly the issue. If we increased the building size, it would just further exacerbate the scaling problem, which is unique to AoE4.
