Seriously, soldiers can still attack castles?
If I remember well historically Castles were the last refuge for a king but with the dynamic of the game it is still the first building that is attacked and destroyed
They should have special abilities and maps be made in order to let players to build them in strategic points such as high ground or moats…
They are tough and defensive buildings. Quite tanky. Even in Age of Empires 2, you could use normal units like infantry to attack a castle, but they would lose a lot of men doing so.
Yes castles and stone walls should be much stronger. In reality non siege units can not destroy them and the attackers loses a lot of units. Furthermore a wall breakthrough should, as you mentioned in another post, something rare.
The Keep is not the same as a Castle.
The Keep is the main defensive building inside a Castle. The walls and towers around it are also part of the Castle. Only siege can attack stone walls.
Some civilisation bonuses symbolise this function but it’s not like that for every civilisation.
I do agree that Keeps feel kinda underwhelming.
Also historically a lot of smaller castles were build offensively close to enemy territory. And some castles were just a Keep but usually they also had a wall and some towers.
Many were build is strategic locations like where two rivers joined or where two roads crossed.
In reality it took centuries to build some castles and in AoE it takes seconds to build a wall.
Yes in reality it takes much longer to build castles. But I stay on my point that stone walls and keeps are to easily destroyable.
Recently they increased the time for building stone walls. But the stone wall are as easily destroyable as before. If the stone walls not get stronger most people not build them. This is especially sad because one of the new features of aoe4 was the ability to place units on walls. Because of the weak walls this is rarely seen.
Maybe there should be an upgrade for keeps once they are built.
So quick offensive keeps are weaker than those built in advance and had more resources invested.
My ideas:
Fighting on top of walls is underused in AoE4 because walls are so cheap, easy to destroy and siege towers are bad an annoying to use.
For me I think the #1 reason keeps feel weak is because of how quickly bombards deal with them. Trebuchets can too, obviously, but trebuchets are easier to handle and less proficient at other things.
A castle SHOULD be a strong building VERY HARD to take down… (its not of course since the only units used in this game and key to win is SIEGE) bombards take castles down very quickly (and walls, buildings, units in general, landmarks etc)
If they do this, every game will be decided in dark/feudel age with ram pushes.
In my opinion rams shouldn’t do any damage at all on buildings, just walls and castles like in the good old days.
We need more games advancing to Castle age if you ask me.
Really? What is the point of a castle if it takes 200 years or more to build? Genuinely interested though…could you give some examples of castles that took so long to build?
@TheTrebuchet @Player748528464 I totally agree.
I suggest reducing the damage from siege. Especially from bombards and mangonels.
Aoe4 is already designed for mid-late game. We barely see any dark age agression and most almost all matchups arent decided in that age. Not everyone likes to book minimum 20-30 minutes for a match or wait 15 minutes until the action begins.
I like the current design of castles. They are strong in castle age but get weaker in imperial age. No need to make a game that is already very turtle and late game friendly even less appealing to people that like the early game.
Bombard simple don’t fit into this game, they are OP, bombards on age 2 were slow, If you remember the attack and projectile speed was slow at least, so you have some reaction time, in Age IV they delete everything, no matter if you have defensive upgrades…
English longbow, and hre mma ram push are too hard to stop when executed right.
Scouts fall to easily to those two types of attacks, and on maps with stealth forest they can build 3 rams on the border of your base and roll in.
Extremely hard to defend, one single mistake or a bad seed with an gold mine out of range of your TC and you are done within 10 min.
I like AoE mostly for having fights over map control, swinging trebuchets, forward castles, secret sites fights, relics collection, and sneaky raids.
Not for who selects the english or hre civ, follow the meta build into quick feudel, and build 3 rams to gg.
I stopped playing 1vs1 because 80-90% of my games i fought english ramrush.
Boring af!
On >1300 elo the english have a negative win rate on all maps bar mountain pass. Taking into consideration that england is one of the most one dimensional civ right now and ppl usually go for the longbow rush your point does not seem to be valid at all. So of course it can be stopped, the data clearly shows that. It seems like you just haven’t figured out yet how to stop it.
That might be a bit extreme.
Maybe bonus damage against stone fortifications but less damage against wooden buildings.
That would also make sense if the hitpoints of walls would be increased.
Making rams even better at destroying walls then other siege units.
You don’t have to see that like a modern construction where they lay out a plan and then build it.
A lot of castles started as small wooden fortifications and then gradually got improved over time. Around 1000 AD (where AoE4 start) nearly all castles where made out of wood but then many of them where converted into stone castles.
Often they just started a a Keep (a single tower) and then walls around where added later sometimes generations later.
If AoE4 would want to be more realistic they would have a wooden keep in Feudal Age that can be upgraded to a stone keep in Castle Age but that would probably be to complicated for gameplay reasons.
It’s hard to find good real world examples because the book keeping back then wasn’t as good. Often castles we only find the first mention of a castle 100 years after it’s construction.
But a good example is the White Tower (Tower of London) that was build around 1100 but then got expended multiple times thought the centuries adding walls, towers and other buildings around it as well as improving on the keep.
Not sure what the fix is here but keeps should definitely be a bit more durable
I think the fact they get taken out by bombards quickly is ok because they’re imperial age units.
I don’t think infantry or cavalry should be able to attack them at all similar to stone walls. I think this would help a bit.
That’s actually a good point.
In that manner Abbasid can defend better against landmark sniping by building a castle or two on the side of their house of wisdom and TC.
Boiling oil upgrade really deters melee from hitting keeps. You actually want the enemy to go under your keeps because they take so much damage