What should Age of Empires IV improve?

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1073

I’ve been playing a lot with the English civilization, and while I really enjoy their defensive and economy-focused design, it’s clear that they often feel a bit slow to get going — especially in metas with early aggression or fast tempo plays.

Their late-game economy is amazing once it kicks in, but getting there safely can be tough.
That’s why I’ve been thinking: what if the English had a small passive bonus to Stone gathering?

It would fit their defensive identity perfectly — giving them more flexibility to build early towers, walls, and keeps to survive the early pressure — until their economy naturally explodes in the mid and late game.

This wouldn’t be an overpowered buff to their economy or army; instead, it would support their intended playstyle and make them more consistent across different matchups.

It could also open up new strategies, like turtle builds or map-control play, without making the civ oppressive or changing its core fantasy.

What do you all think?
Would a small Stone bonus help bring the English back into the meta — or would it push them too far defensively?

2 Likes
1074

Yeah would be better to improve English on defense features as the civ was designed to be

1075
1076

Going back to the task in hand

A thing that should be improved a lot is Pathfinding!

1077

Can we get military ship hotkeys? I love the select all “melee/ranged/cavalry/siege” on screen hotkeys, if we had something like this for ships I feel like it would make water much easier to play. Something like select all: springald/archer/demo/bombard ships etc. I would change my modifier but use the same hotkeys as my land units and have a much easier time with micro on water.

1078

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Please adjust the terrain texture of buildings. Currently, buildings have a bunch of little pots, bushes and tracks on the ground alongside the building itself, which is a type of smart environmental grouping. The issue in particular with the ground texture is that it utilizes its own set of textures with their own colour, which has, throughout the entirety of AoE4 looked wrong. Malians, Abbasid for instance, will look particularly weird in snowy biomes because of the saturated red earth surrounding their buildings. The image above is demonstrating the new biome with blackened sand contrasted by the dirt that surrounding the Tughlaqabad Fort. This is a perfect example of why this doesn’t work.

So my suggestion is simple. Obviously keep the pots, decals, bushes and track textures with the buildings, but if you want the building to also feature its own set of earth, then use an existing texture from the biome rather than a set that is only colour-coded for the buildings themselves. This way it will match whatever biome they are on and will look infinitely better. That or straight up cut the ground textures that buildings come with (don’t cut the flagstones, bricks or roads, bit I think you get what I mean). Though perhaps there is a solution that is better than this as well.

Actually, this extends to some Siege as well. Cannons, Ribauldequins will drop a decal of dirt around them, which mysteriously vanishes when they are packed back up. This… is just bizarre.

1080

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I’m happy to see new weapon models, however, it seems as though the Imperial Spear model being shared by Ottoman, Abbasid and Delhi is swapped with the Castle age one. Though I haven’t researched the weapons themselves, I’m making the assumption here that the more ornate, complex spearhead is a later development compared to the one being wielded by the Imperial spear men. Maybe I’m wrong, please correct me if I am.

On another note, please do something about the default Spear model being used by English, HRE, Byzantines which has a plastic-white texture unlike actual steel, as shown in the image below.

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3 Likes
1081

Hello,
Could you flatten the color of the minimap on the black sand biome and the snowy one ? I really like the biome and I it would be nice for it to be readable.

1 Like
1082

The game not crashing on a regular basis , my buddy crashed on Xbox 20-40% of the time last season , would be really interesting to see actual stats on that , and this season since new update I’ve played 4 placement games crashes right out of 2… please fix

ETA also in team games if a teammate does quit or drop out why don’t we get their housing cap space ? In 2s get extra available pop if teammate quits early , 3s remaining players each get 100 to account for the 3rd dropping out 4s would lose 1 pop 66 each player 1 gets 67

1 Like
1083

Co-op game modes alongside 2-3 new civs. And variant civs need to be free at this point. Relic is just taking us on a joy ride until we all decide we arent interested with their “experimenting” anymore.

1 Like
1084

I think to reflect the current state of things, I think if you put “developmemt team” as a choice up there, youd find that might take the lead real quick too.

1085

Absolutely.

Variants are certainly not ‘lazy’ as there are some new assets and lots of planning are required obviously, however in the grand scheme of things they seem like filler/DLC-lite of fan expectations.

I think most would rather wait longer and get some well-crafted unique civs instead in more solid DLC expansions.

1086

Thing is, the vast majority of assets aren’t made in-house. They contract 3D studios for it. So in a way, you could see this as them strictly cutting costs for the same product. It’s a double edged sword, for while variants are almost indistinguishable from regular civilizations mechanically, it means the developers are expecting us to pay more… for less.

And while this may not matter for a lot of players, it sure matters for me. A big appeal for these games is seeing a new take on cultures, and while a sort of goldilock zone has been reached with a good blend of thematics, mechanics and relevance (Golden Horde with settled tents, new units, thematically fits and name is relevant), I would still vastly prefer to see Tibetans, or Portugal, or Khmer.

Macedonian and Tughlaq Dynasties seem to differ in this equation. Tughlaq seems to be very Khmer coded, having Ballista Elephants that seem frankly like placeholder assets (floating Springald model with no animation pasted onto a War Elephant). Macedonian, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, seems much more like a Norse based civilization and making it a variant is really stretching it, especially when you consider that the Macedonian Dynasty was the pinnacle of the Eastern portion of Rome. Sure, they hired Varangian mercenaries, but they had so much more going on than that.

And so, it definitely seems to me that these two civilizations were planned to have assets created for them via a third party company, with Macedonian featuring a lot of new character models, it seems they were half way there. Take into account what has happened to Microsoft in recent times, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they have been cutting funding for a lot of projects lately, AoE included. This is all to say, I don’t think the developers necessarily expected this, and it almost seems as though something major changed during development.

I don’t think we need to be against each other as players. I want a civilization with more fully fledged models. Not getting that disappoints me. This shouldn’t make you defensive about the notion of a variant. It is simply cheaper content, but I don’t want that and you should be okay with players expecting more. We’re not pointing fingers at developers, instead, it clearly is a case of executives investing less in the project and that is ultimately bad for all of us.

1087

Assuming this is the case for IV and Relic still isn’t involved with asset creation, it still falls under WE’s resource umbrella. “in-house” for WE is kind of a loose term given the studios that operate “under” it (I’m not sure of the exact relationship).

This doesn’t really matter when it comes to players seeing value for money in any DLC offered, of course.

1088

I’m 100% sure it’s a bug, the weapon model should change as soon as the technology is researched without considering the age (just like Yari spear for Japan, for example).

1089

Please fix the Crucible bug: When you exit the game, the medals you’ve earned disappear, so the points you’ve gained are practically worthless.

Until it’s fixed, I’m even considering not playing Crucible at all.

1090

Yes, we’ll probably have to wait and see what happens next year… if they don’t release completely new civilizations, I’ll just give up on the game…

1 Like