Hi guys, what is your opinion about weather in the game? Wouldn’t it be awesome to atack during a thundersorm, or to hide using fog as a tool, or even just to have the cicle of day/night, would you like it?
What about the rotation of building? During the gameplay I really wanted to turn some buildings, but I couldn’t. For you guys it would be good?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to play it again next month
Not in normal random maps.
Maybe in special maps that have it as a special feature. Or in scenarios anyway.
Night seems to be annoying. It’s either to dark to be playable or it will be to bright and not look like night.
Could be very interesting if they implement it in the campaigns.
I think they already have this for naval warfare?
On land we have forests that your units can hide in.
In campaigns sure. Or possibly specific maps having a feature like that, although even then probably just for custom games. Having weather effects all the time in multiplayer sounds extremely annoying.
Having weather in ranked and multiplayer, will be a nice thing to had.
Players will need to adapt and use their creativity.
-Army will colide in the midle of the fog, not ready to a figth.
-Enemy will set up siege weapon at nigth, and start the invasion at day, when every one sigth comme normal. (Or risk a nigth attack, has you attack from the shadow of the fire arrows)
-At nigth, use wood to torch a ligth, for extra sigth, but allowing enemy units to see your at extra range the torched unit.
-Winter that comme, unable to gather food, excep from hunting, if there is something to hunt left.
-Snow that slow down units, and stall siege weapons.
-Ice river crossing.
-Set enemy forest on fire, when there is a dry season.
-Spring is here, new tree grow where old one have fallen and animal reproduction.
-The land become mud in rain, you will not be able to evade arrow or siege weapons, whit your knigth or units, has slow has they can move.
WOULD
It’s not happening in this game but it would be nice for an AoE5
Only as a permanent map modifier, so the entire map is raining, foggy etc.
This way you don’t have to pray to RNG that the storm will not ruin your engagements but rather have to come up with a different strategy for the same map (so you are maybe tempted to try another civ on arabia for example).
Also, terrain modifiers would be interesting, so you will try to avoid muddy terrain etc.
No, it hurts readability.
I see two possible stories to explain the lack of building rotation:
The developers conducted a deep study of the evolution of this franchise and discovered that rotation of buildings first appeared in AoE3 and was carried forward into AoEO. Then they determined that despite the obvious advantages and improvements a small Quality of Life detail like this provides, they concluded that AoE2 is a superior game, didnt have building rotation, and, therefore, neither should AoE4.
The developers didn’t really look at any of our games other than AoE2 and we just kinda get what we get.
In the meanwhile, I look forward to a forum lecture about how many players AoE2 has these days and how its lack of building rotation is the cause of AoE2’s huge success, particularly when compared to AoE3 and AoEO. Ideally this will come from someone who has no experience playing a game that allows for this feature.
Not only rotation is removed, but also we’re back to Age of Kings design of unit training, where in order to be competitive in anything other than standard AI skirmish you have to spam military production buildings all over the place, since batch training is almost absent. It wouldn’t be a tragedy on its own, but IV’s camera, building scale etc. just make it worse.
It’s the most basic feature yet it greatly enhances fun for solo players that just like designing and building settlements. It’s like going back to the era where computer mouse had no scroll wheel, nor technology of LMB-dragging was discovered.
As far as I’m concerned AoEIII did not offer an out of the box feature to rotate buildings on launch. Mods took care of it. But in any case it doesn’t seem fair when we do comparisons with the launch state of these old games. It’s there in the Definitive Edition and if improvements were later on realized - whether in 2007’s expansions or 2020’s DE- I don’t why shouldn’t we count them as part of the game’s legacy as well and expect AoEIV take them into account and incorporate them.
Yes. Had to edit gamey.con file to enable it 
The oldest mod file I could find on my current PC ( from building_rotator_for_tad for 1.03) is from march 2008.
Scrolling was possible with mouse wheel or arrow key.
Perhaps it first appeared in AoE3 officially in the Definitive Edition. We’ve been rotating buildings in AoEO since 2011.
Or they just thought there was no point in having rotating buildings. If all the buildings are squares what’s the point? If we had different shaped buildings, or orientation had some function purpose then I’d definitely complain about lack of rotation (although we’d probably have rotation in that scenario).
You know walls are not build on a square grid, right? How one is ment to save space and place a building near angled wall without rotation?
There are many types of natural obstacles that obsure building area, and rotaiton allows to reclaim at least some of that space.
It’s not my fault they decided to use just squares for building, that made the whole process shallow. And making everything shallow and streamlined seems to be #1 design priority.
Everything to push this game into obscurity 5 months after release.
In your experience playing Age of Empires Online and AoE3 DE, have you found this feature to be meaningless or even harmful?
Harmful no. Meaningless, yeah pretty much. I’ve only played a little AoEO though so I can’t even say for sure if there is a non square building that I don’t remember.
Yeah I do, but buildings are. So any building rotation would have to be in increments of 90 degrees which means rotating to place near walls makes no difference.
So dramatic.
Buildings are but that’s a bad design decision and I’m talking about enabling rotation that fixes this issue.
“So any building rotation would have to be in increments of 90 degrees”
What? Why? Walls are not build only with 90 or even 45’ angles. What you said doesn’t make sense. Have you played AoE III:DE at all?
And that still leaves natural obstacles that can’t be played around- lake shorelines, mountains, dense forests, not depleted resources.
It’s not dramatic. It’s a simple prediction by somebody that has seen many RTS games in past 25 years (edit- 27. Counting from WarCraft, wasn’t the first I’ve played but I don’t have time to research what was). Without depth there’s nothing to master, to keep discovering, to challenge in the long run.
Soon enough Steamdb charts will tell us the full picture.
Ah so what you actually want is to throw out the building grid. You hadn’t said that. With the grid rotations can only be 90 degrees.
I have some, and the original. It’s a fine game but I find too many things about it annoying to play for long. The lack of a grid being one of them, but far from the worst.
It’s a bit dramatic. I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they make such comments. Especially when they are almost always because the game doesn’t meet some very specific expectation that particular person has (I’d also have a hard time taking someone seriously if they were already claiming this is going to be the best game ever made). I think hyperbole is best used very sparingly. And it’s not like you’ve already explored all the depths of the game in the couple weeks you’ve had to play.
There was one benefit to non-rotatable buildings, and that was easily identifiable buildings from the outline alone. Despite the architectural differences, the buildings always maintained the same framework that you could always identify them at a glance from. Rotating buildings ‘could’ mess with that if by rotating buildings you obscure or otherwise realign the silhouette.
That being said, it was also a limitation reason for AoE2 since it was not a 3D game. Age of Mythology used the freeform building system to good effect, with full rotation and free placed buildings (except farms and TCs).
Honestly, I imagine this was a decision based around this: they intended buildings to not create makeshift walls, and building rotations would make it more problematic to maintain the free movement around the buildings.
Personally, I’d rather be lumped with a grid system to maintain the free movement aspect over freedom to rotate and it being used to cheese unit pathing. AoE3’s walls with deleted pillar pieces is infuriating to handle pathing, as its technically pathable but nothing will willingly path through them unless it was part of a unit maintaining its formation, but they will still try to path through it as if it was open, essentially making a “trap” path for units.
