1st Hackers/cheaters
To tackle the maphacking and zoomhacking situation, we have decided to go for a multi-way approach.
For emergency-firefighting, we DISABLE ranked play through steam account sharing.
At the same time, we introduce a premium ranked feature, being connected to your ID card/passport.
Once you registered it, you’ll be able to go for the premium queue.
If you play on multiple accounts, linked to the same document and one account gets (perma-)banned, ALL of the linked accounts will be permabanned.
On top of that, we will now issue permabans ONLY to players who are being found guilty of manipulating the game through 3rd party software.
We are introducing a ZERO-TOLERANCE policy towards cheating and hacking and take this very seriously.
However, playing on multiple accounts will still be allowed.
The only exception is, that you’ll have to pay for the number of copies you wanna play on.
The generated money indirectly will fund the efforts of the anti-cheating campaign.
As a longterm goal, we’ll evaluate wether we will create an internal anti-cheat software/alghorith or have an external team cover the same.
In the mid-future we want to establish a software that scans your pc for 3rd-party software, which manipulates the game.
If such software is spotted, your account receives an instant automatic (!) perma-ban.
Remember, all your other linked accounts will get permabanned at the same time.
We are looking forward to have fair matches and hope you’ll enjoy a cheat-free game!
2nd Attackmove/Attack Prio Fix, QOL feature
We love to announce that we finally have fixed the attackpriority of units and attackmove, which have been HEAVILY bugged since the Betas before the game was even released.
We know you were all extremely fed up with the fact, that units kept attacking buildings instead of fight, so we wanna fix this finally.
We want to apologize for it having taken so long!
To make up for this long waiting, having ignored this insane bug for so long, we introduce a small QOL feature.
You can now globally disable units from attacking buildings by pressing a single button in the UI or using a hotkey.
You can still manually attack buildings.
Attackmove now perfectly functions, so you can attackmove anywhere, even close to enemy buildings and even archers will ignore them, moving straight to enemy units and attacking them at maximum range.
3rd Deserved Budget for developement
We admit that we have almost not reinvested any money of the cash we made from the main game and the recent DLC, which both made tons.
So we decided to actually give this game a doubled budget from now on.
After we had de-assigned almost all the devs from this game to other projects, we re-assign them and even up their numbers from now on, in order to get this game up to a state which it deserved on release.
To underline our new confidence in the game, we will now publish a small roadmap every quarter of the year.
You, the fans, will from now on know what changes are coming up in the coming months.
Feel free to discuss in exchange with the assigned Devs what changes you like, so we can reconsider bad ideas early on and prevent making big (design) mistakes, which will further hurt the game.
4th Monthly Patches
From now on, as the budget is at a level where it should have been years ago, we will bring a big patch every month.
Our goal is to bring up playernumbers massively and sustain the game.
Whenever we spot a balance-issue being discussed in the forum, we’ll get into contact with you guys and work on a qucik solution, bringing a hotfix within days.
5th Map pool
We realized that most people hate playing water maps.
So we decided to give you the choice of playing watermaps only, landmaps only or both.
This will be an option when queueing up for any mode, 1v1 or team, QM or ranked.
You will STILL have your current number of vetos available on top.
6th Tournaments
We realized that afterall, tournaments are a major factor which keeps people interested in playing rts games competitively or at least with a competitive mindset.
Without big stars that play the game at high level, playernumbers will not be able to be sustainable.
So we decided to bring up the price-pools and have multiple tournaments a year.
Each tournament will be having a pricepool of at least 100.000$.
Donations are always welcome and go directly into the price-pool.
For every dollar donated, we will contribute another dollar into the pricepool from our own end.
The money completely goes to the participants.
7th Game Physics/Siege rework
The physics of aoe3de are just awesome, we think the community agrees about this.
So we decided to bring this part of the game into aoe4.
Now, all siege-weapons which shoot cannonballs, will get a similar system as in aoe3.
Also, we will introduce area-damage to all cannons and bombards including cool physics, where units that are killed, are blasted away as it would happen in real life.
This should spice up the gameplay massively and make siege weapons a better option overall.
They will (like falconets in aoe3de) function as anti-building and anti-infantry.
However, heavy infantry units like men at arms will take way less damage from them than archers or hand-cannoneers.
7th Naval rework
We have decided that the current water-fights are very boring, repetitive and one-sided.
We’ll keep you updated on how we are planning to rework this and hope for lots of feedback and discussions.
We’ll listent to what the fans would like to see and make plans together.
8th Damage/armor system
We realized the flat dmg/armor system is incredibly stupid and brings tons of problems.
The %based and factor-based dmg/armor and counter-system in aoe3(de) and aom has been working super well and was a big step into the right direction, compared to the outdated system from aoe1, which was introduced in the 1990s.
We are gonna change everything to %base resistances.
Aoe3 fans are already familiar with this very flexible system, that makes it incredibly easy to fine-tune the game and balance single units vs other units without changing the whole balance of the game.
9th Towncenters/booming/keeps
We have decided, having machine-gun towncenters in early game negates all possible counter-play against booming.
So we will massively reduce to attackspeed of towncenters, but give them more dmg each shot.
This way, the towncenter still can deal with heavy units, but it won’t slaughter light units such as spearmen and archers anymore.
At the same time, we will remove the maxium garrison space limit for both capital towncenters but also non-capital ones.
However, the dmg will be soft-capped. After 10 villagers being garrisoned, the extra dmg per villager will consistently decrease.
We will also reduce the speed with that non-capital towncenters produce villagers by 50% in age2 and 30% in age3 and 20% in age4, but at the same time increase the non-capital towncenter’s hp.
So, the aggressor is on less of a timer, but also has a harder time taking down the non-capital towncenters.
Additionally, we will increase the base-train time for villagers from 20 second to 25 seconds and increase the train-cost to 70food.
All these changes will slow down booming and especially multiple tc booming in age2 massively, but also make it a lot easier to threaten the enemy with an early all-in.
10th Towers
We have come to realize that dark-age tower-rushing feels incredibly frustrating.
So we decided to create a circular zone arround the capital tc, in which enemies can’t build towers until they have reached age2.
To compensate for this, we are looking for ways to strengthen the Mongols early on.
11th Heavy units age2
We have observed a big weakness of the current civ-design and countersystem.
Civs, that can produce men at arms age2 have a massive advantage over others.
In order to fix this problem, we unlock early-crossbows in age2 for every civ.
In age3 you’ll have to upgrade like every other unit, though the cost and time would be very less for the upgrade compared to other units.
12th Malian mini rework
As Malians struggle massively with Limitaneis in age2 and with Landsknecht units in age3 and with abbassid because of Gulams and Camels, as they have no heavy unit for the frontline to tank except of Sofas and they have nothing to tackle heavy units at range, we decided to rework the Musofadi warriors.
They will lose their bonus against heavy units, but instead will deal extra damage to light melee infantry such as spearmen, landsknechts. They will also receive more hp, armor, ranged armor and be a classless unit without a tag, so nothing deals extra damage to them.
Also, we will give early-crossbows to the Malians in age2, as to every other civ.
13th Men at arms
We realized that not having men at arms for some civs, but having them for others in age2 is pointless.
Now all civs will have access to feudal men at arms, except for the Malians.