We don't need a ranked season when the game isn't fun first

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

aoe4 isnt as fun. and a LOT ppl are going back to either aoe2/3. some even aom, or starcraft.

you guys are pushing competitiveness and broadcasting it, making your focus around the competitive aspect of the game. you don’t make a competition and make it fun. u take something that’s fun and captivating, and that itself becomes competitive without having to do anything.

I havent played the game in over 3+ months, yet i follow the patch notes etc because i am a longtime fan of the franchise. all i see is pushing for competitive gameplay, ur losing sight of the casual RTS focus.

games like world of warcraft and fortnite didn’t become monopolies of their respective mmorpg/battle royale sectors by starting up a competitive ladder. they didn’t have a competitive ladder for a LONG time. eventually, the competitive scene bloomed because of how addicting the games were (in terms of fun).

atm i see u devs are catering to a hardcore competitive playerbase, yet you’re not catering to 95% of what brings u revenue, which is casual players. even from a business standpoint i just dont understand this decision.

and my credentials, i competed in 2016 Blizzcon 3v3 $100k tournament, also qualified for the fortnite worldcup, and a few minor $1000-$3000 warzone tournaments here and there. so i’ve been in the competitive gaming scenery for a while

as to what i suggest, is to drop the tunnelvision on ranked gameplay, and think about what the casuals want. THEN u can get a huge competitive scene from it if thats what u want, to make an esports rts.

U have the tools to do it and the engine is actually decent i was quite shocked.

and i’ll start by saying, add more civs. 8 won’t cut it. please already add vikings, byzantium, spain, mali/gana, polish-lithuania.

U extend from sub-early medieval time period (800-900) through beginning of 16th c (1500s). U could literally add so many features that would be just captivating, i just dont know why the focus isnt there.

we’ve been asking for a reword of abbey of kings for english, and some of the other uselss wonders/landmarks. like the focus should be there BEFORE attempting to throw a ranked ladder.

Put NORSE civ in this game, let us play viking berserkers and make the civs have a unique EVOLVE civ:

Norse civ → start as base norse, huscarls/berserker, and age 2 → a Norse landmark or English/Norse landmark (like Pagan/odin temple of Jorvik) if want to go for a norse/english mix (as it historically happened) or a Norse landmark (raider building, something). → Then age 3 → IF remain norse, then age 3 choose between becoming sweden or norway → Sweden landmark: Temple of Upsala . Norway landmark: temple of forgot the name in Olso/Vestfold.

And for the Norse/English option in age 2, for age 3 - 4 heck man throw North sea empire/ Kingdom of mann options. why aren’t you doing that, like cool decisions to give the game more variety.

same thing with spain, i just dont understand why u wouldn’t add a civ that portrays it. and when i say portray, i mean because u cannot just throw “spain done”.

Make it “Iberia/Hispania” civilization, as such starting in late pre early medieval time period (850s).

Age 1, everyone’s just “visogoth civ”. going into age 2 landmark → u choose : become catholic (kingdoms of navarra, aragon) or feature the Temple of Cordoba and become an Islam faith (Umayyad Dynasty, Kingdoms of Andalusia, Bajadoz in 9th-10thc.

Then age 3 ageup → if choose catholic option, u get 2 different landmarks for age 3 : u can either go Castille or Leon, and maybe one has a Reconquista feature making steroid priests, the other giving maybe strong spanish Jinetes (cav).

And if had chosen the Islam faith age up, upon going to age 3 u get 2 different landmarks, maybe something focused on Butr/(Modern day moroccan) mercenaries, and get access to unique Islamic Andalusian techs.

Umayyad =/= Abbassid, two completely different cultures, even their faiths, though islam in background, weren’t the same.

Things like that is what u should be adding to the game, to make it fun for casuals man. And with this, the hype for competitive gameplay would be even better.

Atm, i just fund the game too robotic it’s hard to enjoy it. Hope this idk gives insight in some way.

this video also explains well the mistakes many RTS franchises do etc

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And here’s why u want more options : with all sincerity, 8 civs isn’t enough at release for a game featuring the entirety of the middle ages.

The big “focus”, is the knights in shining armor.

But you’ve an entire world to cover. I’m very glad u did add the Delhi sultanate, but not having a Spain is just bonkers, and personally, what i enjoy the most, is playing vikings so not having a Norse civ that can transcend into the pre-early modern period, is just ridiculous.

If the “evolving civs” idea that i mentioned is too much, or u feel it may overwhelm players, u could’ve just taken the easy way and thrown sweden.

Age 1 - norse raiders, age 2 → norseman conquest of england, age 3 Christianization of scandanavia and age 4 → featuring the innovative King Gustavus Adolphus modernization of swedish military. something as simple as that.

Spain is too complex also, dont want to make an iberian civ and then make choices of staying 1 or the other ?? ok fine → make a simple visogoth civ age 1 → age 2 reconquista → age 3 El Cid’s reconquista (cause let’s be honest, the “medieval spain” that’s covered is just catholic spain taking over islam, even though theres so much more depth to Iberia) → age 4 → unification of Castille and Leon -_-

Just don’t understand why more wasn’t added at release, and even now it’s been months.

But i highly suggest u take a look at civs evolving gameplay i mentioned, it could add some flavor to the game. atm is just too bleh.

And personally i find it hard to play without a norse civ being there alongside England, when it’s such a rich part of English culture and history

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the game is no fun for me because I feel like I am playing professional level gamers every match …

its not enjoyable to wiped on the floor and crushed each game …now with the new mods its nearly impossible to get a custom game

im trying to stop playing and just walk away …sad …i am a trash can pos …on a saturday night at home alone …cant even enjoy a video game anymore …

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4

play some team game. there kinda fun if they dont rush a wonder victory.
I like the team game alot more then boring 1 v 1. The custom games are popin man. There so fun and non stressful.

I would say play some 4v4 and just do a crazy meme build like all knights or try and find a new combo to work with

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Despite the season one update I agree that the focus on the first patches were all only for competitive people interesting. They did only balance changes and added no new content or features.

I think with season one and further seasons the orientation also to casual players is getting better.

@Spiritof1973 I understand your frustration. There should be an option to setup custom games to a max player level. So that when you do a custom game for beginners that really only beginners come in.

I also think team games would be better and more fun for you.

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I have. the thing is it gets repetitive, u know :/?
I’ve done meme shot and pike, full French light cav it’s super fun in 4v4 but after a while it just became overly repetitive.

In aom and aoe3, u were able to feel the variety every game. currently, it feels overly repetitive specially since every civ has got the very exact same unit, just colored/reskinned differently.

In aom, u wanted priests, u had to forcefully be an egyptian civ (out of the 3 picks). U wanted “x” units, u needed to be greek, or norse, and so on. and they had civ specific units.

here, EVERY civ has knights. EVERY civ has MaA. EVERY civ has light cav, and heavy cav.
and while some may be more prominent in some civs, it doesnt feel unique whatsoever man.

and sure, while every civ has their respective unique unit, it’s not enough to make it feel differential from the other civs.

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Yes there should be much more unique units per civ. This would make the game much more entertaining.

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Im sorry that I’m saying this but…

If you haven’t played since 3 months , you can’t make assumptions here .

You probably remember the bad times about this game . The game is seriously better now , in a more polished state , and yes it has its problems and this update has some bugs , it won’t affect gameplay that much though . Except for the scout thing .

But the game is fun now , the new content has bring the game to another level and possibilities are almost endless

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9

Personally i think they need to fix spamming issue. Counter and Hard Counters don’t work as intended. And dont trade well. Some civs have great disadvantage against some units and have no good counter to begin with.

  1. Spears now trade well against knights. Which is good but other units didn’t get attention like spears got. They have now became filler unit. Just spam it and with good mass you can even siege buildings. Late game spears are tanky as hell. Siege doesn’t counter mass spears as they have so much HP and can catch up siege. They can even trade good against MAA.

  2. Archers are really bad against spears. I think archers need huge specific bonus damage against spears. Giving a an average bonus damage against all light infantry doesn’t make it a good counter against spears. Even spears can just rush into the archers and kill them in lategame as they become so tanky. Archers should trade effectively against spears.

  3. Horsemen are good counter against archers. But knights dont. Knights were suppose to counter archers effectively. But currently knights are very slow both attack and movement speed. They stop at each attack animation. Its always better to go with horsemen against archer mass. As they are fast. Deal damage more often. Animation doesn’t take too long. Can catch archers easily.

  4. Spear damage against horsemen seems too much. Spear damage against horsemen and knights should be different. Before buff spears used to counter horsemen well but not knights. Now they counter knights but shred through horsemen. Horsemen even received HP nerf.

  5. Buff springalds to balance siege. Damage against siege can be increased but i am in more favor of increasing movement speed of springalds so it cannot be burned down by infantry. Springalds have already been nerfed against units. Siege + Spear spam is mostly what lategmae composition ends up being. You can’t make too many archers to counter spears as they will by shreded by mangonel. If you bring some springalds to counter siege. They can throw away some spears to burn down your siege as now they can easily catch up to springals. You can’t make horsemen + knights as they get shredded by spears. Making springalds faster than infantry will make it possible to counter siege + spear/maa spam.

  6. Camel Archer spam needs to be fixed. First I don’t know why a camel is faster than a knight. But thats fair to some extend as they should counter knights. The issue is with horsemen. Recent speed and damage buff made it very hard to counter horse archer with horsemen. Using archers against camel archers is so hard. As CA has so fast mobility. On top of that now camel support give +2 armor to infantry and you can’t fight with archers. Their archers will easy shred through your archers. Even spears with +2 wont trade effectively against your archers.

These balance issues are the main reason why I might soon leave game. It isn’t fun because a single unit spam can easily become annoying. Knights used to be a spam unit. But with walls and spears now knights spam doesn’t do well lategame. But there are still so many units that need fix.

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For me, the most annoying thing at the moment is that the siege units are too powerful, mangonels to be precise, with 100% accuracy, just over a certain number of mangonels can be devastating to any infantry group. Even for knights, as long as the pikemen block the knights for a few seconds, the mangonels can still cause great damage to the knights.

There are several solutions I can think of at the moment:

  1. Make the mangonels take longer to prepare and reload to increase the mangonels’ vulnerability time and give the enemy more chances to attack the mangonels

  2. The vision of the siege weapon is further narrowed, so that it cannot fight alone and must cooperate with other units

  3. Give siege weapons a slower moving speed, make the low mobility of siege weapons more prominent, and increase the reward for the enemy to carry out mobile operations.

  4. Further increase the population demand of siege weapons to ensure that siege weapons can never become the main force, but auxiliary.

Now the game still uses siege weapons as the main force in the late stage, which is a bit different from AOE3; AOE3 is very powerful even with siege weapons, but other arms are more important, and the artillery unit of AOE3 is always in a supporting role, not an army main force.

Expect to see these changes soon, after all this is Age of Empires, not Age of Siege Weapons.

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11

Rock/paper/scissors works perfectly in the game today. The horsemen, archers and the pikemen fulfill their function perfectly.

Knights counter archers well, but admittedly not as well as horsemen, due to being more versatile (they trade well against MAA and horsemen and they raid better).

You seem to have a bit of an obsession with spearmen, I don’t remember any player saying that spearmen are broken at any point in the game. The archers perfectly counter the spearmen (unless you have fewer numbers and don’t hit and run, that’s the player’s problem).

Regarding the siege, maybe the Springald should raise the price and have more bonus against siege to be able to eliminate the Mangonel in 2 shots.

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Because it is problem. Rock Paper Scissors isn’t working as intended. Literally every game is spear + siege spam mix in some MAA. And archers take so much time to counter spears. They have to constantly retreat losing more and more ground. Losing resources and getting cornered.

Spaers are very cheap and easy to mass. If you try to counter them with siege they can easily burn down all. And at the end losing siege is more damage than losing spears.

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Yada yada what’s not fun for me is hearing constant complaining about the game…if you don’t like it fine go back to 2 or 3 no sweat off any one’s back but a lot of people myself included do like the game

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Where perhaps rock/paper/scissors may have a problem is in area siege where some adjustment can still be made. In general, counters do their job well.

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Do you base your claims on your own experiences or further data? Because spears being broken is something I have not experienced in a single game. Also judging from the Golden League matches it seems to be just very well balanced between spears, bows and knights/horsemen.

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16

It has only ever needed content. It needs any content it can get.

They can fill that need much quicker than they can improve the base game, and they’ll be better for it.

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Mods, map editor. These are contents you know.
I think the main problem with the game is that everyone comes to cry on the forum while they say they want back to play aoe2-3. But actually, all of them are still here on these forums.

It would be nice if everyone who does this, goes back to aoe2-3 and leave this forum too.

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I want to note that the above video (which has been thrown here more than once) largely draws the wrong conclusions, and vice versa, sows more misconceptions about the RTS genre, and even AoE 4 has nothing to do with it, the video is terrible.

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19

I play last 2 games, 1st game China cheaters kick me from game using Desync tool (aka Cheating) and devs know about this thing, 2st game right before the fight the game just closed after 30 minutes. I have a powerful PC and do you think this is fun? Can’t see anything on this tiny minimap as well. The game is still in early access and I realized that it too early to play. If the game spoils your mood with such things better not to play it.

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I and my friends only occasionally have experienced crashes with this game since launch. It is mostly stable.

Drop hacking is definitely a problem, especially the higher the 4 vs 4 ELO gets. It is not a particularly awful problem for the average 1000 ELO player though, unless you happen to be getting matched against Asian character players a lot.

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