Co-op campaigns would make this game 10x better than it already is. Something that is enhanced with multiple playthroughs, whether that’s challenge modes, mutators/modifiers, or randomized objectives.
Giving people a reason to play with friends and family of all skill levels would open this game up so much to new players, and give people a reason to stay invested in the series.
there a reason (well part of it) why aoe 2 still relevant
Could be neat as an optional setting
Other improvement requests:
No, just a better AoE IV
A complete competitive game like Starcraft 2 or Age 2, please. By the way, there´ll never be a new game, RTS are not profitable for shareholders scum.
Its year 2025 out there, if we learned anything from gaming, it’s that age of multiplayer is over.
I doubt 4 or 8 more same side-factions would do anything.
Actually shareholders are getting smarter, in terms to back up single player games
and that’s what next AoE game should focus on.
The request is for more solo content that can be played with others???
Ottoman needs a few more buffs, here are my suggestions.
Suggestions
Thoughts?
What needs to improve is the AI.
It’s far from saying the problem has been solved.
The AI in this game won’t improve, and what the management is giving us is despair and resignation.
Option to block chat of opponents in team games… I won’t be buying any DLC until this is added.
Yes, but we have to write it in shareholder language.
“year 2025 solo content = maximal profit, with minimal investment”
Look at games like space marine 2 or kingdom come deliverance 2, thats how you make money. It does not matter what it is, it simply has to give people the feeling they have something good in their hands. A thing where you spend on story 20-40 hours is a experience you pay for.
That’s simply no longer possible and feasible with a multiplayer product, if the game loop is 30 min -1 hour, you have like replayed the game 4 times in a day, and its a loop you kind of play anywhere just with different background. That has no real value very fast.
I’m playing since the release in coop vs AI with friends, and in all this time I’ve never seen an improvement on the following topics. I was looking for a solution but I realized I can only leave feedback for now.
Game management is really poor: save, reconnect, restore crashed games. AOE4 have basically nothing right now, and for games that are not competitive or very short (like less than 40m-1h) it makes it unplayable.
The netcode must be reworked a lot. Right now the game has SERIOUS issues with FWA connections and in general it has very bad management of network lag. If the connections are not perfectly stable and with very low latency the game tends to freeze, lose connection, lose sync, have aleatory change in speed. As said above, when one of the player plays with FWA or any mobile connection (5G, WiMax, WISP, Starlink, whatever, even specific bandwidth limits or using QoS doesn’t make a difference) an hard crash is guaranteed before 2 hours.
Another issue with the netcode it has no ability to manage backup connections: Windows can be setup, as well as many routers, to rely on a backup connection when the main one isn’t available. It is made by redirecting the traffic to a different network interface. It is common on laptop that integrates 5G module.
This small disconnect/reconnect, while it is managed by Windows and have no influence on basically every game I ever played, makes AoE4 disconnect and drop the game istantly, even disconnecting the whole game from the network and it needs to be reconnected by the notification panel.
I’ve read some time ago that the save/load and reconnect was impossible to implement because of the way the replay works. If it’s true, i mean, just remove the replay, as it is a completely irrelevant feature.
Or, if somebody want to use it, make it available on demand as a game setting, as it was in AoE2 and as it should be, even because it has serious impact on game performance.
Those are SERIOUS issue: it’s not a matter of reducing 15something% armor of war elephants, which is shit and can be hotfixed, as a game developer myself I don’t understand why those day-1-patch issues are still not done.
The game has to be manageable a recoverable from distruptions, the netcode needs to be robust.
Those are the basics.
After 4 years we are looking for an alternative in order to drop AoE4.
I think AoE4 is still the best version of AoE we have. But, it is riddled with issues, make no mistake. What is dreadful is seemingly that the studio does not want to invest the necessary amount to iron this crap out. The game came out half-baked and they’re still only polishing that initial creation, rather than add the critical infrastructure that would make this a complete game.
Ultimately what I think is sad is that this venture is entirely artificial. The workload is split into multiple studios that does not communicate with eachother and whose only real tangable link is that they ought to “make money” for Microsoft.
As a result, the developers are faceless, nameless, and entirely void of personality or interest. No proper community can be built on such foundations, and the only ones we have, are strictly and directly tied to prize-pool funds, which without, we’d have NOTHING to show for all of these years of work.
In that way, it is exactly the opposite of AoE2. AoE2 I think can stand on its own two feet, and has been able to foster a community because of that fact. AoE4 will crumble unimaginably quickly the second support drops.
So to conclude this rant with something productive; before more DLC, before more meaningless patches buffing or nerfing micropercentages of stats, ADD A FUNCTIONING IN-GAME EDITOR AND PROPER AI TO BOOT. And then MAYBE, just MAYBE the community can survive these two-year gaps between real DLCs.
If i’m playing English and have a White Tower (or any other keep), it would be a nice QoL feature if i use the “select all barracks” hotkey and my keeps are included, as i can produce those units from them. As of right now, i have to manually hot key them to a number and then add the Keep to that number. One other possibility would be if i have my select all Stables hotkey set to 7, and I add a keep to 7, i’m then able to select all stables plus that keep.
Similarly, if i have the Abbey of Kings and i use the select all stables, It would be great if we can reproduce the King from that hotkey instead of having to find the landmark or give it it’s own hotkey.
Maybe the different Wynguard units groups could be shown and able to be que’d up by using the “select all” of the corresponding building type?
I imagine there are other Civs with unique units that can be produced from specific buildings that fall outside of the standard 4 production buildings that could benefit from being able to be que’d up alongside their corresponding building type.
Yes, I think that AoE 4 has the potential to reach a climax of the game by 2028, but those of FE have to focus more on it and leave AoE 2 aside a bit (or at least have CaptureAge take care of it with the Cronicas DLCs) … in theory by the end of the year, we would have an American DLC like The Conquerors / Forgotten 2.0 (Spanish, Aztecs, Incas, Vikings or just Spanish and Incas to fight on the Atacama map) (maybe some Tatars as Mongol variants like the Huns were in AoE 2 and Novgorod for the Rus for this DLC or next year’s DLC) … and with the DLC would come the QoL patch incorporating the scenario editor into the game and hopefully a campaign book like in AoE 2…
The Normans
The Hundred Years’ War
The Sultans Ascend
The Mongol Empire
The Rise of Moscow
not exclusive to farms, what happens, and has been happening for long enough for me to quit the game alltogether, is when you shift queue the construction requests, it auto exits the build menu when you run out of material and cancels the entire queue up to that point
we’ve been loud about this since closed betas, but to this day, the camera has top side locked in place and simply swings to change the angle, it never moves back and forth, even in panoramic, its without a doubt intentional and its smt that’ll probably never change because a) target demographic (beasty, demuslim, other pros) don’t give a damn, and b) its only a part of the issue, there’s also messed up proportions to take care of across the entire game
not much to add here, just truth, i think if foundations faded after 3 or so minutes it’d be a net benefit, siege units is a balance thing (aoe4 devs can’t get siege right if life depended on it) and in terms of animations, just speeding them up would fix like 95% of the floating and slow motion, its not even poor animations once you set past games examples to the same speed as aoe4 ones, but that speed bump/ not locking it to 30 fps should also be done to destruction, and ofc aoe4 having 0 physics is not a downgrade i expected in this day and age
Maybe, maybe not
An addition of Civs that are highly requested will be good
I think what AoE IV truly deserves is Well done SP/CO OP Content
The majority of RTS players are casuals.
If you do not believe it, please check why SC2 became so popular with well done Campaigns, Single Player content along with CO OP. Same with AoE II campaigns. In II there is a very large amount of Campaigns truly well written, with newer and revamped missions and bunch of difficulty levels (even sole missions vary on difficulty one to the other)
In IV campaigns, in addition to beign short, are boring, repetitive, very bad executed in terms of gameplay and learning key concepts. Sultans Ascend DLC campaign missions were better, thats for sure. Pretty fun, engaging, challenging.
We just need more content like this!!
SC2 was popular due to its MP-centric design and being a successor to Brood War. The (decent) campaign content didn’t arrive until quite a bit after release (with the second expansion I think?).
There are things that SC2 should inspire other developers about. But these are mostly the consequence of Blizzard having an infinite budget at the time (WoW was going strong, and they hadn’t blown budget on Overwatch or HotS yet).
So should AoE IV devs aspire to have a better replay system? Yes. Should they do it because SC2 had it? No, imo.
The same goes for SP content. We should get it because it’s the right move for AoE IV. We get enough things from “be like SC2”. It’s not a measure of success by itself.
