What are we classifying as a low player count?
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“Low” is doing a lot of work in that statement.
As i’ve said 12-15k players is not a low number IMO.
Most players won’t even notice the difference in queue times and match quality.
I haven’t seen many posts complaining about those aspects here.
I don’t think this should be Aoe IV’s permanent state however.
Hopefully updates improve things.
if it was only 20% drop from 20k to 12k - OK, but it was 70k into 12k.
it’s ded for 60k who tried or was playing for awhile.
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Its dead if you aren’t able to play online or there isn’t content/updates in months.
Otherwise its just complaining about big numbers that don’t actually affect you.
i’m one of 60k. So it’s affect me. also it’s affect my ability to watch aoe4 games on twich because streamers are leaving.
Let’s dive into definition of ded.
- Is aoe3 ded or alive? - For me it’s ded. But one would say it recieve patches/updates etc.
- is W3 ded or alive? - For me it’s ded. I wont be able to fight against noobs, because low amount of players play for 10 years. Very hard to start to play as a new player.
- Is sc2 without patches ded? - For me - not. Pro players struggling, but noobs are fine.
It’s my definition of ded. You can have yours.
But as some one posted above - low number of players - huge risk to stop developing game. Noone wants to loose money.
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As I’ve replied to you before.
So yes, it does matter to a lot of people actually.
I think it’s mostly lack of polish that makes the game feel 1-dimensional. A lot of that falls under bugs and balance issues, but some of it is design. Many games feel largely the same. There’s seems to be less apparent variety in the way matches play out than AoE2, for example. For most civ/map combinations, there are clearly only 1 or 2 things they’re going to do.
Naval balance overall is atrocious. You just can’t play Delhi or Abbasid on water maps. Their ships are so unbelievably awful compared to the other civs it’s not even remotely competitive. If you can’t succeed with a transport ship drop rush, you’re out.
Half the landmarks either don’t work or might as well not work. They’re not compelling. You have a few civs with several good landmarks, but on most civs you only ever pick one at each age.
Allies can’t connect walls. All you can hope for in team games is some conveniently located terrain feature you can both wall to.
Abbasid is massively disadvantaged with landmarks being a win condition. Clearly that wasn’t thought out. I think most people just dislike the simplicity of landmark sniping in general. Personally, I think all TCs (including Delhi keeps with the vill upgrade) should count as landmarks, and newly built TCs should have similar capability to the starting TC. Obviously landmarks were introduced to stop AoE2-type running all over the map and dragging out the game forever, but they also completely remove any possibility of losing your core base and recovering (particularly in team games), which is a regular occurrence in most RTS-type games.
Delhi dominate on hybrid maps and are garbage on land maps. How do you balance that? Fundamentally their eco and military bonuses don’t stack up with the other civs on land maps, so they fall behind. I personally think dome of faith needs to provide an additional eco bonus and tower of victory needs to allow immediate capture of sacred sites rather than that being part of the sanctity tech, along with other tower of victory adjustments, but any improvements there will just make them MORE dominant on hybrid maps. How do you balance Delhi on hybrid maps without just taking away the fishing ship arrows (the major reason for their dominance), which I don’t think anyone actually wants to do? Especially when their actual warships and dock research times clearly need buffs for true water maps? It’s a major design challenge that hasn’t been worked out. Maybe they need to get their first mosque for free instead of starting with +100 wood. That would slow down their initial dock. Maybe they should require manual switching between fishing and fighting, rather that doing both automatically? I’m not entirely sure, but something clearly needs to be done.
I could go on and on and on. The point is it’s frustrating as a player to sit here and realize I could dream up ideas that would significantly improve huge portions of the game in about a week of full time development, but the Dev team hasn’t done this in many months? Not to say all my ideas are the best ideas, there are infinite potential ways to design the game, but it’s pretty easy for someone with a reasonable understanding of the high level competitive scene to come up with something that would be a positive change. Obviously implementation is an issue, but most of that stuff is just tweaking numbers.
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Except this isn’t the current consensus on Delhi at all since the patch - they’re quite strong on land maps as well now.
They are leaving bcos the mayority of the people (especially from aoe2) only play custom scenarios and campaigns ( and Aoe2 and 3 campaigns are way better). The game is fun yes but after some time playing ranked or casual games you get bored.
There are MS store purchases and game pass players as well. And I think it was mentioned that the game is going to be released on Xbox console. There was also an article about how MS has found strategy games are actually really popular on game pass, much more than you’d expect from their popularity in a wider sense. So I don’t think there is any danger of development stopping, they want to have the most modern version of AoE possible, and AoE 4 is the best platform to build upon. It’s just going to take a long time, people need to reset their expectations to timescales of several years from now for the game to become good. IMO we’re talking about a year from launch just for it to get to where it should have been at launch, never mind beyond there. It does depend a bit on what can be achieved with mods. If mods allow things like hotkeys and global build queue to be sorted out as well, maybe the community can advance the game quicker than the roadmap.
so what? Firstly, no one know how shares are distributed between games. (can approximate on aoeiv net, but my approximation = num of xbox players are low)
Secondly, what’s your argument?
Mine: Low numbers == lost support → situation even worse. (you arguing with smth else)
But if after Spring update or N4C the numbers still go down(as fast as in November/December).
They can keep it as “PR example that MS did support game, but that’s the best option”.
aoe2 is ded by your definition , there are streamers but the player base is low , thats what you are saying?
39711 1vs1
64648 TGs
172525 unranked
calibrated + played at least 1 game in last month.
Any other questions?
I would say that age 2 lets you play “also” custom maps.
No mods on age 4 is a big loss. No custom maps, NO Age of Empires 4 MOBA (I know there will be one. I am sure.)
Just to point out a simple thing. Fishing is OP. Deep Fish spawn is bugged. The result? Ancient Sprite.
If there were custom maps, passionate modders would create balanced maps. And a simple fraction of what it is wrong and could improved.
Remember, it is a 60$ game. It is understable that many players have high expectations.
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According to whom?
And don’t say Szalami. Other than the compound of defender stuff, Szalami isn’t doing anything that other civs can’t do. He’s just doing it BETTER with Delhi than other civs do because Delhi has no other choices. I’m a fan, but he’s overcoming the civ’s disadvantages on land maps, not exploiting their unique strengths.
Just numerically, Delhi is clearly disadvantaged in Feudal age compared to other civs, and that snowballs. Most people who try to argue otherwise go “Delhi gets all these free techs! Free eco techs the other civs usually don’t even research!” Rubbish. What’s that worth? A few minutes after getting to Feudal Delhi gets a roughly 15% increase in gather rate. Hurray. And you’re still spending gold on scholars. The cost savings on military techs in later ages is significant. Free professional scouts is significant if you happen to be doing that. The savings on Dark and Feudal techs aren’t worth as much as the other civs’ bonuses are.
HRE gets 40% in dark age, plus 300g relics (way easier to control than Delhi 200g sacred sites), uber cheap and fast vill boom in imp, etc. Abba gets 10% (that scales later) just for building 10 buildings, AND can get 50% off vills AND still have access to those same eco upgrades (and later can get them for a 30% discount). Rus bounty and hunting cabins. French faster vills. Chinese?! Need I go on?
Only early military bonus Delhi gets is footsoldiers build palisades. That’s actually quite useful, but they’re not longbows. They’re not Royal Knights. Doesn’t hold up to early gold units.
Delhi are less bad at land maps than they were before. If your opponent isn’t good at booming and applying pressure simultaneously, you can win. It’s not that you CAN’T win on land maps with Delhi. But without fishing, Delhi eco is objectively worse than virtually every other civ in the game. In mid-late Castle age they get access to some strong military units. But their Feudal is garbage, and strong players won’t let you get past that on open maps. There’s nothing they do in Feudal (other than grab sacred sites a few minutes after age up) that other civs can’t do better. Delhi are starting out behind in Feudal and hoping survive long enough to catch up for a window of military strength (they’ll still be behind in eco) in mid-late castle before a deadband in early imp waiting on techs to come in.
Even Beasty’s tier list video agrees with my above assessment, and you can search my history to find that I’ve been making that argument since not long after the game came out.
Based on this: Delhi Sultanate – Civilizations – AoE4 World
Are you implying AoE2 was cheaper? You know these free samples were just a demo right? I remember this distinctly, you couldn’t get beyond Castle Age for instance and had only two civs to play.
Sorry mate, AoE2 was significantly more expensive than AoE4 on release when you account for inflation.
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Interesting. I would not have guessed win rates that high on the more open land maps. My suspicion is it will settle down in the coming weeks.
Some of that may be meta dependent. If you look only at elo > 1600, Delhi has a really high win rate against Rus. That’s probably because tower elephants hard counter the horse archers most players are still trying to do, and regular archers do alright as well (plus horsemen buff gives Delhi another option). I still think Rus will be a stronger civ when the meta adapts to the changes. Right now Rus is losing across the board, despite there being no reason on paper they shouldn’t be able to excel with some of the same strategies other Civs use.
I may be wrong. It may be that compound of the defender is so strong that their stone wall/tower rushes are dominating because most opponents don’t understand how weak Delhi are in Feudal. But if that’s the case it needs to be nerfed. That shouldn’t be their reason for a high win rate. I can’t think of any other reason why Delhi would beat HRE when HRE have blatantly better eco bonuses, and better infantry. Delhi get the edge on knights/lancers from honed blades, but those aren’t especially cost effective against HRE infantry.
We’re still a long way from a settled meta on this game. Right now I would guess the patch benefited current Delhi meta and hindered the meta from many of the other civs. Due to pace of adaptation, real Civ strength (all civs, not just Delhi) may not be readily visible outside of tournaments at all before the Feb patch and subsequent Spring update shake things up further. I also expect the Feb patch to effectively nerf elephants due to the animation cancel changes (which I definitely support). Although without animation canceling we may find the elephants need a buff. I’m not sure we’ve seen elephants in a balanced meta yet - about the time springalds got nerfed and elephants became viable, animation cancelling took off and their intended damaged when through the roof.
Personally, I think almost any other civ can 2 TC into Castle (or otherwise fast castle) and straight out boom Delhi (because Delhi Feudal aggression is quite weak) as long as you don’t let Delhi stone wall tower you or get a sacred site victory in the process.
My theory-craft guess is that Delhi has a very strong Castle Age timing (earlier sacred site control with double the gold income, no gold spent on research upgrades, double production of military gold units with scholars garrisoned, etc.) that was hindered by bugs. With the recent patch fixing those while nerfing Rus and to a lesser extent, Mongols, they’re able to shine more. Their stone tower rush also seems to catch a lot of people off-guard. I agree that the meta is a long way from settled though - Delhi going from perceived bottom tier to strong tier within the span of a single patch being a prime example.
My argument is that you don’t know the number of players to know how low it is. It seems very unlikely to me that they will stop developing the game. They have published a roadmap, and it is clear their plan is for a very slow pace of development. I doubt that is going to change, no matter how many people tell them it’s too slow.