Yeah that would be nice!
Direct to the point and pretty useful, actually
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In my honest opinion, zhu xi legacy is fine⊠Its the chinese civilization after the legacy of zhu xi philosopher, its not an issue.
Jeanne dâarc howeverâŠ. needs a renaming for sure.
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I will give examples on ui with pics.This will make game play quality a little better.This is AoE 3 ui for units:
This is how it looks like and as you can see you see everything without howering over it.
And this is the meaning of the icons:
Again this is not super important but a nice quality change on game and since this game come after the AoE 3 it could have been in the game from the begining.
Personally, I donât find this anywhere near readable enough. I do think IV could always benefit from UI improvements, but I think there are higher priorities.
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What isnât readable about it? What would you improve about it while still conveying the same information?
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A lot of these things can be altered translating the style to AoE IVâs UI style, but generally speaking: it contains too much information to be digestable at a glance, and on top of that you need to memorise a bunch of icons (Iâm counting 13 distinct icons that will repeat across unit types, but 13 is still a fair amount to hold in memory). Things are too close together. Titles arenât distinct enough. Font colour isnât used consistently (make it either for text, or for numbers).
This isnât to say icons shouldnât exist; they make the UI pop more, reduce the need for text, and make it more visually-interesting. But using them is a trade-off from (localised) text, and vice versa. One is not better than the other. They are a choice to be leveraged.
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The problem with AOE3 is readability. There is too much going on. I tried so hard to like it but it just hurts my eyes. Too much detail and too much information. I would say that I would love to see more information about units but maybe in the panel when you hover over the ui
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Guys this is so easy to read:
Horseshoe is bonus against horse.Horseshoe with arrow mean horse archer.Man is heavy infantry.Attack,range and attack speed is too obvious.Besides AoE4 dont have that many unit counter or damage balance.It will look much simpler in AoE 4.And worst thing is in AoE 4 you need to put your mouse on to the damage and wait to see all those stats.
This is the best ui in all AoE games and it will increase the quality of game.Last word is devâs of course we will see what they are gonna do.
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If you seriously engage with it, you quickly notice how easy AoE 3 is to read. I totally get that the UI can feel a little overwhelming, which was my first impression too, coming from AoE 2.
However, the most important stats in the screenshot posted by KnowingLamb are essentially the attack value and the multiplier. These are the two values you should look at first to quickly see what the unit is good at.
To maybe pick an easier example, this is the Culverin:
According to the game, it is Anti-Artillery, which is why it does 40 x 4 damage to other Artillery. As itâs useless against Cavalry and Shock Infantry (which replaces Cavalry for civs like the Aztecs), it only does 40 x 0.5 damage against those type of units.
It is also easy to visually distinguish it from other Artillery as the cannon is bronze.
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One more thing is anti siege was never a big problem in this game but in AoE 4 it become a problem i wonder why is that?
Yeah, hover-only isnât very accessible, but also the game is pretty unplayable without a mouse and keyboard (or controller) so making it truly accessible the way we can websites (Iâve done a lot of VPAT and DAC work at my job) is difficult. Maybe if there was a keybind (bearing in mind IV has a lot of keybinds already).
Agree to disagree then.
I think weâre all allowed our own favourites, but assuming / suggesting that people arenât seriously engaging with something simply because they have a different opinion is investing too much in that favourite.
Iâm welcoming of UI updates to IV. I always have been. I do not think going the AoE III route is necessarily practical, even if the unit cards in IV could do with work.
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Gorb, Iâm talking about my personal experience here, coming from AoE 2 that used to show no bonus attacks at all. 3 will feel overwhelming the way it presents its stats as you donât know where to look first but if you seriously try to engage with it, it will make sense.
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I agree with you
Age of Empires III is my favourite title in the franchise, but it has a lot of problems
Readability is one of the critical ones
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If itâs so bad, why did they decide to implement the same system in AOM-R?
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The original AOM had something similar, and it was refined in Age of Empires 3 in 2005. Later, AOM-R incorporated these innovations.
It makes me laugh when people say the Age of Empires 3 interface is complicated, when Age of Empires 4 doesnât even have a villager count per resource. XD
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This is so good it can be sometihng like this too and AoE 4 unit ui will be much simpler because counter damages are fixed.Also there isnt too much counter thing going on in the game(compared to AoE 3).
The most important difference is that Age of Empires 3 and Age of Mythology base their statistics on percentages. Otherwise, the differences arenât significant.
And obviously, Age of Empires 3 has more statistics, considering we have units like mercenaries and shock infantry (pseudo-cavalry). And on top of that, there are different statistics for melee and ranged combat. So itâs simply more complex. Thatâs all.
AOE-3 has many questionable things, but the interface is not one of them.
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Sure, letâs say you can divide it into AoE 1 and 2 on one hand, and AoM and AoE 3 on the other⊠many improvements from 2 can be incorporated into 1 (RoR) and many improvements from 3 can be incorporated into AoMRâŠ
About Unit UI and Counter-Unit Bonuses
AoE2.- To find out the counterunits exact bonuses, in 1999, with AoE2, you had to test in the Editor by having units fight each other to find out the damage of Counter-Units. And this was because neither the manual, nor the base game UI, nor the tech tree explained âin numbersâ how much extra damage certain units did to others.
Age of Mythology (2002)
Even in Age of Mythology, unit bonuses remained hidden. And yet, they gave you percentage stats showing how much the unitsâ stats increased from their base form.
AoE3: Counterunits UI
It was in 2005 when AoE3 created the advantage that bonuses were no longer hidden, but could be seen with numbers and everything. And they did it well, because the Vanilla UI was very nice.
AoE3:DE (2021) Counterunits UI
However, with the Definitive Edition, balancing was implemented, and they began assigning âfractionâ attributes to almost every unit to reduce its effectiveness against others. While this helped with the balance, it also messed up the UI. Now we have things like this:
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It doesnât help that the cream-yellow text is difficult to read on a brown background.
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Putting ALL the symbol icons together on the same line is also quite confusing.
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On the other hand, if I want to know what a unit is good against and have to move my head around looking for the right icon, it would be better if it were just text like in Age of Empires IV.
AoM: Retold (2024)
Combining aspects of the base game and adding the counter-unit vignettes from AoE3, comes the new UI for AoM:RE:
Personally, itâs the most beautiful UI theyâve released. Itâs uncluttered and neatly organizes each important attribute into rows.
I still donât particularly like the attack speed; I donât understand why two arrowheads have to symbolize it, but the rest is very good.
AoE4
Itâs gone through many evolutions; the Alpha version is the one from the campaign, and the current version isâŠ
Since absolutely no one knew what the â+â symbols meant, I suppose theyâve already removed them, because the new UI was already present in replays from 2022.
Reflecting on it, I like the current UI.
If they added more miniatures like in AoE3:DE or AoM:RE, it might be too much information (oversaturated) for a single panel. Perhaps it could be, but well, that will be for another post.