Why aoe4 sucks:
1.There are still insane amounts of game breaking bugs and exploits a 10gb hotfix is a joke adding even more bugs. I counted 4 bugs during the tournament ranging from visual glitches to game breaking.
2.Terrible pathing issues. There where several moments during pro-games in which rams took 1 minute to move back and forth in between units never attacking the intended building. Got to babysit rams huh?
3.There are insane amounts of map screws. Yesterday the aoe4 20k tournament showed how bad the game really is. The map-generator put the trader behind a giant forest and chokepoint. Themistaa was screwed like hell in that game, because he couldn’t trade. Besides that misplaced gold mines dictate the entire game so players where forced to build 1 or 2 towers on them, while the other player didn’t have to do that and was ahead.
4.The game is mindless spamming of OP units like knights/lancers and Maa+springalds. Quote during the tournament: “the knights are completely overwhelming the spearman”. “The infantry- springald build without needing siege workshop is very OP”.
5.The game isn’t balanced between civs and between unit types at all. Mongols had ± 90% winrate during the 20K tournament.
6.The 20k tournament showed a complete lack in strategies per civ. Most civs and map based strategies are already set in stone, because of the lack of legit alternative choices. At least aoe3 had about 10 legit builds / strategies per civ with the card system.
7.Some units can not be distinguished from eachother because they look the same: Zhuge nu and crossbows or fishing ships and exploding ships.
8.HRE and chinese never saw play in a single game during tournament.
9.The observer UI is completely ridiculous. We need to have the following observer UI:
Viper: total pop || army resource value|| current resource || income per resource|| Total income|| resources lost||
Instead the casters needed to click and calculate all the time to even show the most basic information. Also units lost is useless stat compared to resources lost. Some units cost 800+ resources.
10.There where server issues during the tournament.
11.Relic already has announced their next game: company of heroes3, it is a total â– â– â– â– you towards aoe4 fans, why not give aoe4 a bit more marketing time for longevity huh?
12.Aoe 4 engine looks far worse then RTS games from 10 years ago.
13.Even the aoe forum is old garbage.
I have played aoe games for about 22 years together with a friend. Now we don’t care about aoe4, because of the bugs and exploits and disbalance monobattles etc. We prefer Linewar, which is an indi RTS -4x strategy game made by 2 developers. Why? Much more unit diversity, much more interesting opening prep and much more interesting strategies, unit combinations etc. And they are only getting started in alpha fase. These indi-devs have much more love for the game they are making, while aoe4 is just sucking out the nostalgia like hell for 60 dollars.
All that for AOE4 with lack of depth, lack of special unit types, lack of special researches, AOE4 is just a completely dumbed down game with tons of fake choices that aren’t choices at all. Most builds are already set in stone. Like mongols 3 melee cav unit types in the stable and only 1 sees play in endgame. Completely stupid design.
Viper said after the tournament he won, he disliked the mapscrews and will be playing AOE2 tournament next not knowing how to distribute his time between games, basically implying that aoe4 is a ■■■■■■■joke of an “esport” and he knows it (of course he wouldn’t say that).