Age of Empires 4 Feedback: This observation is from the posts of gameplay footage released thus far. The buildings in the cities you show in your promotional material seem to be incredibly spread out. Were ancient cities really this carefree and abundant in space? It just looks silly and also very impractical in terms of drop off points and defending quickly from one side to the other. Is there a reason behind this decision? Are the buildings unable to be built closer together? Is it to show the roads and pretty doodads between the buildings? Is it for visibility perhaps? I highly recommend looking at pictures of ancient cities for example: from Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.jp/pin/545850417319802700/)
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Maybe you should play some game City Building not play RTS AOE series. Have you ever play these AOE game before? 
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I imagine the buildings in the promotional medias would look a lot less spread out if you could zoom out as far as your example image does. 
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you are 100 percent correct â the buildings in the publicly revealed images are far more spread out than any other age game. I believe this is because they often have building footprints a fair amount larger than the building itself, so there is built in space between the buildings for units to move.
I agree that it looks bad. It also appears to affect the ability to see enough things on the screen. We also can no longer make walls with buildings, which seems very much part of the Age formula, at least to little old me.
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I for once like the decision that buildings cannot be used as wall substitute anymore.
I know itâs been in AOE from the beginning but simple repeated appearance does not make it any less wrong. We have walls to wall ourselves in.
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For me, they know people like to build cities, so they are giving that eye candy aspect to this to casual players.
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I love the new procedurally generated roads and think the cities look great.
And what is with all the AOE4 pig-piling? My God people just will not stop about âthis is terribleâ and âthis is wrongâ. Itâs getting old. After playing the beta I can see why theyâre doing certain things and it all makes sense to me. Theyâve had five years to figure out what theyâre doing, weâre not going to have another DOW3 here.
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a) yes
b) itâs because of a scale (footprint) of the models
c) camera makes it worse
d) itâs worsened because of âroleplayingâ design of these settlements, handcrafted for trailers, to appear more atmospheric and believable, not just as a functional âmessâ
e) yes 
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Medieval (or build over them) settlements were tight inside, to reduce amount of wall that have to be manned during defence (also repaired and build ofc).
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@DeicticPrince42 Yeah this exactly. They just got some guy to build a âniceâ looking city so they could use it for the trailers. It probably doesnât reflect how real players would build their city. To be fair they may have also been spacing the building out so they would be easier to read.
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Thats City of Bern 
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Due to NDA I canât say I was playing, but IF I would play in reality it wouldnât be any real pain in the butts. Before their scale (that could be adjusted ~10%) Iâd put general camera, so players have to edge/MMB-pan less. Because managing camera just to move from TC to market or blacksmith is just boring busy work and has nothing to do with strategy or skill. Unless itâs a way to force players to use hotkeys to select buildings.
Iâve also played the beta, but NDA, so yea. Based on promotional material alone, it looks silly. Being that spread out is just excessive!
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Seriously love the medieval city pictures you shared! I hope youâre right and theyâre just spreading them out to try to make it look âepicâ rather than remotely realistic. (It does make me question whether the person who is in charge knows what it is like to play the game though. Like, you want to maximize your space use, your city planning and not have long distances between places that need defending!)
The editor wont be nearly as fun to make imaginary medieval cities with everything so weirdly spread out.
Exactly my fear
I made this little campaign recently (in age of empires 2 DE) where you defend a city and yes, some of the buildings wouldnât be possible to be placed like this in an actual game, but it just looks so⊠medieval! 
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But do you think it IS eye candy? I think itâs kind of uglier spread out.
Itâs ugly suburban sprawl ugly.
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They are spread out in the trailers to purposefully generate maximum amounts of the roads and beautification eye candy.
The buildings can be built much closer to each other than what they have been placed in the trailers - simply look carefully at building footprints and how they align to a grid. Then you can see how many empty squares have been put between the buildings.
The buildings can be placed a lot closer, they obviously just want to show off as much of the roads n hedges in crap as possible, because its a fun new feature. Do not expect ingame cities to look like that unless you also place your buildings far apart.
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