The development speed must be increased and the orientation on e-sport must end fast to salvage AOE4.
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Of course, but at least you knew that the following year there was going to be expansion… AoE 1 (1997)-Rise of Rome (1998); AoE 2 (1999)-The Conquerors (2000); AoM (2002)-The Titans (2003) and AoE 3 (2005)-The Warchiefs (2006) and The Asian Dynasties (2007)… by now we would have to know if AoE 4 will have a new expansion…
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On July 20, 2011 the Celtic and Persian civilizations were announced for release during the winter holiday season. The Persians were released on October 18, 2011 as a Pro civilization, which meant that the civilization had to be purchased to play (more details about Pro civilization : see Civilization). The Celts were delayed and eventually released on March 26, 2012 with the launch of the game in Steam.
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Yes, I wouldn’t have said it better… but until they release CoH 3 later this year, AoE 4 is going to remain in this limbo…
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Very sad that AOE4 suffers because of COH 3 
I don’t know the contracts between Microsoft and Relic. But if this is contrary to the contracts, I hope that Microsoft will take appropriate measures.
I don’t know why they never differentiated dark and light colors for heavy counter and light counters for an example. A light blue cavalry would let you always know his role and a bold blue means It’s cavalry. The same for infantry or archers. Somehow they lack the 360 maneuvering of Aoe2 units, yeah from 20 years ago. How? I remember when I used to explore the map with a Longbowman and don’t matter if he’s going left, right, below or to the front… it looked awesome in perspective.
Let’s imagine for a moment that Relic is a company with 100 devs (it’s obviously much higher but bear with me):
Now let’s say 90% of Relic’s dev workforce are assigned to their flagship RTS product in development right now: CoH 3. That leaves us with just 10 devs for AoE 4.
So the question is why Microsoft chose to hire a company that already had a AAA RTS in development to reassign limited resources to another AAA RTS? That sounds like a very stupid exec decision to me. You’re missing out on Relic’s most veteran and gifted RTS devs. Heck, Microsoft still owns the AoE 3 engine, why not use that since it’s still perfectly serviceable and looks arguably better than Essence?
The answer is probably cost-savings and very tight deadlines. Essence was already being upgraded for CoH 3 and it was probably relatively cheap to hire a B-team at Relic to work on AoE 4 as a side project (in fact AoE 4 could serve to beta test some CoH mechanics and fix bugs). That’s outright disappointing. What used to be the best-of-the-best RTS franchise around is now an afterthought by two major companies.
What we are seeing with balancing and patching today is just an extension of the resource constraints at Relic. There’s simply no way to maintain a AAA RTS in a good state, with a constant stream of content updates and fixes with the number of devs and resources assigned to this project. The blame for this falls squarely on Microsoft for signing the contract under such terms.
All of this could be just a fairy tale I just made up, but tell me it doesn’t sound at least uncomfortably plausible?
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Not only looks better, but the big thing is that it has stuff like colorpicker, taunts, cheats, hotkeys… already implemented, so there would be zero effort needed from dev engineers to get all of those features. Now instead we’re stuck in the situation that implementing colorpicker takes half a year and then implementing taunts takes another half a year afterwards. And that just makes me really sad, all I see is a slow reinvention of the wheel, as the saying goes.
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Really. Delhi infintry making stone walls no matter what landmark you pick? Did you know?
Delhi final landmark for IMP both of them are bugged. One does not give you proper food. The other does not make units in proper time.
Delhi scholar gets killed or stuck in temples and then you have to delete temple to get said scholar out.
The pathing in the game is horrendous, anyone want to disagree?
Delhi elephants don’t get the upgrades, still.
Delhi tech is still not figured out, some techs do not change time no matter how many scholars you have garrisoned in temples.
blame relic and ms. there’s nothing to do next
And I’m sure you know why all those things are missing: they were missing from the CoH series too.
CoH is on the very edge of not being an RTS. There’s no resource collection as we know it in most other RTS and therefore the engine wasn’t developed with that in mind. Player colors were not a thing either and most foot soldiers are created in groups/battalions so pathfinding and AI logic is very different from 50 individual archers. You can see a lot of CoH traces everywhere like the ‘siege aim overlay’ that is useless in AoE 4. The game is great but the mechanics behind it are so far removed from AoE that I’m not surprised they are basically reinventing the wheel as you said. Relic will benefit a lot from this, as they will end up adapting Essence to tackle CoH as well as more “classic” RTS.
It made more sense to either re-use the AoE 3 engine or license something that was great but sits abandoned on a shelf like SAGE (C&C, BfME, etc.). Not sure if EA still holds the rights for that but that engine would’ve been easier to adapt and its unit responsiveness is on par with StarCraft.
But I bet some Microsoft execs looked at AoE 3 and said " That’s too old! We want something modern that is compatible with DX12 and Windows 11, because damn those are Microsoft products too! Oh, and we want all this for yesterday!"
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In fact it was because there were no more renowned studios to make an RTS like AoE 4,since the other studio that MS could give it to was Creative Assembly, who were already busy developing TW Warhammer II and the three subsequent historical Total War (ToB, Three Kingdoms and Troy)…
Of course, in addition to the three previous games of the saga (AoM, AoE 3 and AoE Online) already used that engine and it is very flexible…I was just playing AoE Online and the trees have physics and collapse and roll, not like in the 4 that do not even flinch…
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Of course, in fact CoH is technically an RTT with small doses of resource collection, the Essence engine is not designed, at least in principle, for RTS such as AoE…
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@EricGonzalezM Yes I think it is the managements fault. Your post seems reasonable to me.
I also think the AOE3 engine would have been a better starting point for AOE4.
@EaglemutOP Exactly. On AOE4 I expected at launch all features from previous AOE titles and of course new features. A year after release we still don’t have all features from previous AOE titles. Placing units on stone walls as the only new feature. Besides very little content. Very disappointing
The development speed really must be faster to salvage AOE4.
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They should had gave the game to Grimlore, the developers behind Spellforce 3. They made and amazing work winning a award for the best Graphic in RTS. Spellforce 3 has a beatiful campaign and already two big DLC.
The graphic quality running on 1650 GTX (a old medium graphic card)
Now, imagine AGE4 with this quality. Unfortunately Pro-players had have too much voices on this game.
MS should stop to ask them for everything and trying to make a game for the casual gamers firstly.
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it’s me personally forced them to the current design.
(no)
you whine about devs asking for pros/casters opinion?
so you think devs should not do it?
quite a good one.
suggestion further: they do not collect feedback and shall not fix bugs.
No, i’m whining about too much influenze of pro- players. Developers tried to make a new RTS for E-sport and this Is the result.
Aoe4, the new entry of a legendary franchise, counts actually 7,300 players.
AOE3de, the most controversial title (for me the best one) has more than 5,300 players.
Why this?
Great DLC, Great graphic, campaigns, interesting modes, mercenary, very different biomas and more.
Quantity+quality.
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You are comparing two games developed by two different teams with different size and Number of employes. Grimlore is a very small team (only 40 people) while Relic has more than 250. It’s a big difference.
I’m speaking about campaign and graphic quality. No doubt about that these elements are very good in Spellforce3.
Also, It solds pretty well for a singleplayer RTS/RPG
This Is the reason why they released two expansions.
Grimlore has much talent and now they are working on Titan quest 2.