Let's count all the features AoE4 lacks that are alrady in 10+ year old games.

[Al_Ka_Pwn]

Smart selection- In Rise of Nations if workers and military units are both selected in the same lasso the game will simply not select the workers, where if a lasso is dragged around only workers then the workers will be selected. Contrast to AoE4 where if you try to change this in the options you will no longer be able to lasso workers at all.

Auto Repair- In Warcraft 3 you could right click on the repair icon and workers would automatically repair.

Lack of Follow Command - this is in so many RTS games

Lack of Team colors

Lack of Patrol command

Random Civilization- in just about every RTS game ever you could choose to go a random civilization.

Zooming out- In Rise of Nations you could zoom the camera out to almost 3x the level you can in this game.

Shift Click Orders from current task - In almost every RTS game ever made, if while a worker is doing a task, and you hold down shift and give them an order they will stop farming/gathering wood/ mining gold/ and go and do that task. In AoE4 if you issue an order while holding shift, the worker won’t stop what they’re doing, because of the stupid way shift click works in AoE4 they will finish mining all the gold or chopping all the wood, or farming forever, before doing the next task. So every time you issue an order you have to first have to click them off of the task and then hold down shift.

Idle worker shift click- In Rise of Nations, WC3, SC2, and many other RTS games if you hold shift while clicking on the idle worker button you will select ALL idle workers. In AoE 4 this doesn’t work, you have to like a freaking octopus hold down shift AND period to select all idle workers. You could also select all idle workers by double tapping period in RoN. Another feature that is missing

Assigning Hotkeys- A feature present in just about every other RTS game made after 1994.

Defensive Stance- In almost every other RTS game ever made you could set units to defensive stance, AoE4 only has hold ground which is lost upon giving a move order.

Walling off with buildings- Every single building in the game will always automatically make enough space for units to move between them, so it’s impossible to use buildings to help create wall offs like in other games.

Decorative Roads from caravans- A nice touch in Rise of Nations was that the path a trader took would create a little road to give you the feeling of it being a civilization.

Infinite Build- Rise of Nations had the ability to right click on a unit in the production building, so that it would continue to build as resources allowed.

Shift Click pick up and Drop off - In Warcraft 3 if you shift click orders to a hero to pick up an item, move somewhere and then give it to another hero, he will be capable of doing that, in AoE4 if you tell a scout or priest to move somewhere, pick up a relic or deer and then drop it off somewhere, they won’t actually drop it off because they’re not holding the object when you give the drop off order, they’ll just stand next to the monastery or TC holding their deer and relics like big dumb morons.

Attack Move Heal- In Freaking Starcraft 1, medics would heal any injured units on the way point to an attack move order, priests and prelates when given an attack move order will walk to the location given, and only after they’ve finished moving will they begin to heal usually meaning they just get slaughtered on the walk over. This one of the least excusable things b/c freaking Starcraft 1 a 20 year old game managed to not ■■■■ this up.

Town Center targeting- In literally every major RTS game where you could have a main base that could attack, like the city in Rise of Nations or the Necropolis in WC3 you could choose to target what it attacks. The fact that the game asks you for so much micro for so many piddly things but this is where it decides to automate things for you is peak laziness and sloppiness.

Town Bell/One Click Garrison. - Every age game and Rise of Nations and Warcraft 3 had a bell you could ring to either make villagers seek shelter, or in WC3’s case take up arms as militia. In AoE4 you have to click on villagers individually, or doubleclick to select all on screen and then press G so they’ll seek shelter. In age of mythology there was an option for one click garrison, I can’t tell you how many times I have lost villagers by right clicking and telling them to go to the TC only to watch in horror as they start repairing it and getting murdered.

Flags at target location- in Age of Mythology when you give a unit a movement order a small flag will appear at the target location when you have that unit selected to let you know that is the unit’s target destination, AoE4 has no marker. A little gold thing pops up and disappears.

Aggro Leashes- In every game from AoM to WC3 if you aggro’d neutral entities they would leave you alone after you went far enough away. In AoE4 wolves will chase you literally forever, which is annoying if you don’t see them,and just means the game has more tedium where you want to aggro wolves with scouts and lead them to your TC so they’ll die and won’t bother you instead of them guarding locations that you want to clear out with a soldier.

Auto Explore- In Rise of Nations if you so chose you had the option of having scouts explore automatically.

Game Pause- In MP if you disconnect the game doesn’t pause, when you reconnect it just speeds up to catch up to where you are, also if you need to do anything for a moment you can’t pause. Every online MP game has this.

Advanced Siege Formations- In Rise of Nations if you held down Alt while you had a siege unit with a group of units, they would form a box around the siege units and hold ground while the siege units attack, compare to AoE4 where the hold ground command resets after giving a movement order, and formations are wonky at best and scouts or other cavalry always are able to run through and just burn down your siege units.

Upgrading wooden walls to stone walls- In age of mythology you could upgrade wooden walls into stone walls, compare to AoE 4 where you have to manually delete any wooden wall sections that are in the way of your stone wall and then rebuild the entire stone wall. It’s incredibly finnicky and intuitive on top of how buggy and finnicky stone walls already are.

Currently AoE 4 sits at a rating of 81 on Metacritic, which is a B-, and it is quite frankly a rating it deserves, AoE 4 is lucky it is the only big name RTS game in town, because it fails to even be the same quality as games more than a decade old in the same genre despite having the financial backing of one of the richest companies to have ever existed in earth’s history. They could not even beat the critical acclaim of AoE 3 from 2005 despite having 2 decades of experience to fall back on. What an absolute sham that they ask 60 dollars for this game.

[Thunder]

Al_Ka_Pwn님이 먼저 게시:

lynpinette님이 먼저 게시:

Yes! Then DO NOT PRESS SHIFT when you click. How is this an in game problem?


In game, select a villager that is mining gold, DO NOT hold down shift, while NOT holding shift tell them to build 1 house than hold press shift while you click the next 2, they WILL leave the gold and NOT just sit there mining leaving the houses unbuilt.

Yeah you have to click once without holding shift to get them to leave, then you have to hold shift and click again to get them to build. There's literally no reason it should be this way, and it's not that way in any RTS game ever really. It just adds an extra layer of finnickyness where if you press shift too soon your houses will never get built.

No, you do not need to hold shift and click again for them to build. You only need to click again for the next 2 houses (which you need to do even if holding shift). 3 clicks total either way and 1 less shift. THERE ARE NO EXTRA CLICKS OR EXTRA TIME.

I listed a bunch of in game examples of "reasons" it should not be that way.

[Thunder]

Al_Ka_Pwn님이 먼저 게시:

There's literally no reason it should be this way,

From my previous post:

"What if your vill is building a house then a couple seconds later you decide you want a 2nd house, or realise you do not have a blacksmith? or decide you need another barracks? And you want that villager to do those things when it is done with the house? You select him while building and shift click the orders. Or you just want him to go back to mining gold after he builds? You shift click the command to him. A villager is fixing a wall and then you want him to garrison in the tower there after he is done? Again shift click.... the enemy comes before he finishes fixing the wall and you want to garrison right away(or even just run away and chop wood or something)? you can click instead of shift clicking.

My favourite example of something I do all the time is when you have villagers mining gold or stone, you can select them and shift click them to build a mining camp at another resource spot or even just go chop wood when the mine runs out. Makes sure you do not run out of resources and saves a lot of idle time when you have a lot of villagers on a resource and are busy in a big push late in the game."

I could list more example of "literal" reasons if you really want.

If shift clicking interrupts/stops what your villager is currently doing, how would you queue an order for him to do something without stopping his current task?

Removing the option to decide between queuing an order and having it followed instantly is not adding a feature to the game, it is subtraction.

[Thunder]

Sorry, I will move on from this thread now because I doubt I will ever agree that not pressing shift once creates extra clicks or takes extra time and you will never agree that having the option to send a villager to do something instantly or queue the order is actually a good thing.

[Al_Ka_Pwn]

lynpinette님이 먼저 게시:

Al_Ka_Pwn님이 먼저 게시:

There's literally no reason it should be this way,

From my previous post:

"What if your vill is building a house then a couple seconds later you decide you want a 2nd house, or realise you do not have a blacksmith? or decide you need another barracks? And you want that villager to do those things when it is done with the house? You select him while building and shift click the orders. Or you just want him to go back to mining gold after he builds? You shift click the command to him. A villager is fixing a wall and then you want him to garrison in the tower there after he is done? Again shift click.... the enemy comes before he finishes fixing the wall and you want to garrison right away(or even just run away and chop wood or something)? you can click instead of shift clicking.

My favourite example of something I do all the time is when you have villagers mining gold or stone, you can select them and shift click them to build a mining camp at another resource spot or even just go chop wood when the mine runs out. Makes sure you do not run out of resources and saves a lot of idle time when you have a lot of villagers on a resource and are busy in a big push late in the game."

I could list more example of "literal" reasons if you really want.

If shift clicking interrupts/stops what your villager is currently doing, how would you queue an order for him to do something without stopping his current task?

So on your first example it wouldn't be relevant b/c villagers would only leave tasks like harvesting, they would not leave building tasks, those are considered a priority task. that tasks or prioritized, and tasks like building something are a higher priority than mining.

and not to be rude but I am assuming you don't play at a very high level online. If you're doing 300 APM, and you are being attacked and you need to build a bunch of houses, when you give the order to build those houses, you give all those orders as almost one fluid motion like a pianist hitting piano keys, and you're doing it very quickly. In other games you are 100% positive your houses are going to be built because you see their outline, as soon as the outline is down workers are going to go build them, there is a visual indication, but with AoE4's system there is no visual indicator if by mistake you accidently pressed the shift key pressing it a milisecond too early. So the only way to very quickly visualy be sure you don't make a mistake is to do an extra click to get workers off of resources and then shift click, this is why I say it requires an extra click.

Having your guys run out of gold on a gold mine is realistically not a big concern to anyone because it 1. doesn't happen that often throughout the course of a match compared to building buildings, and 2. you will immediately know from the idle worker alert in the bottom left.

Accidently not building a key building because you presssed shift a milisecond too early while zooming around at around 300 APM is a far great detriment and concern than having your guys hop off of gold a bit faster.

[Thunder]

Al_Ka_Pwn님이 먼저 게시:

Accidently not building a key building because you presssed shift a milisecond too early while zooming around

Okay, "pressed shift a milisecond too early" is something I can agree with you on.

[Moringa]

Al_Ka_Pwn님이 먼저 게시:

Smart selection- In Rise of Nations if workers and military units are both selected in the same lasso the game will simply not select the workers, where if a lasso is dragged around only workers then the workers will be selected. Contrast to AoE4 where if you try to change this in the options you will no longer be able to lasso workers at all.

Auto Repair- In Warcraft 3 you could right click on the repair icon and workers would automatically repair.

Lack of Follow Command - this is in so many RTS games

Lack of Team colors

Lack of Patrol command

Random Civilization- in just about every RTS game ever you could choose to go a random civilization.

Zooming out- In Rise of Nations you could zoom the camera out to almost 3x the level you can in this game.

Shift Click Orders from current task - In almost every RTS game ever made, if while a worker is doing a task, and you hold down shift and give them an order they will stop farming/gathering wood/ mining gold/ and go and do that task. In AoE4 if you issue an order while holding shift, the worker won’t stop what they’re doing, because of the stupid way shift click works in AoE4 they will finish mining all the gold or chopping all the wood, or farming forever, before doing the next task. So every time you issue an order you have to first have to click them off of the task and then hold down shift.

Idle worker shift click- In Rise of Nations, WC3, SC2, and many other RTS games if you hold shift while clicking on the idle worker button you will select ALL idle workers. In AoE 4 this doesn’t work, you have to like a freaking octopus hold down shift AND period to select all idle workers. You could also select all idle workers by double tapping period in RoN. Another feature that is missing

Assigning Hotkeys- A feature present in just about every other RTS game made after 1994.

Defensive Stance- In almost every other RTS game ever made you could set units to defensive stance, AoE4 only has hold ground which is lost upon giving a move order.

Walling off with buildings- Every single building in the game will always automatically make enough space for units to move between them, so it’s impossible to use buildings to help create wall offs like in other games.

Decorative Roads from caravans- A nice touch in Rise of Nations was that the path a trader took would create a little road to give you the feeling of it being a civilization.

Infinite Build- Rise of Nations had the ability to right click on a unit in the production building, so that it would continue to build as resources allowed.

Shift Click pick up and Drop off - In Warcraft 3 if you shift click orders to a hero to pick up an item, move somewhere and then give it to another hero, he will be capable of doing that, in AoE4 if you tell a scout or priest to move somewhere, pick up a relic or deer and then drop it off somewhere, they won’t actually drop it off because they’re not holding the object when you give the drop off order, they’ll just stand next to the monastery or TC holding their deer and relics like big dumb morons.

Attack Move Heal- In Freaking Starcraft 1, medics would heal any injured units on the way point to an attack move order, priests and prelates when given an attack move order will walk to the location given, and only after they’ve finished moving will they begin to heal usually meaning they just get slaughtered on the walk over. This one of the least excusable things b/c freaking Starcraft 1 a 20 year old game managed to not ■■■■ this up.

Town Center targeting- In literally every major RTS game where you could have a main base that could attack, like the city in Rise of Nations or the Necropolis in WC3 you could choose to target what it attacks. The fact that the game asks you for so much micro for so many piddly things but this is where it decides to automate things for you is peak laziness and sloppiness.

Town Bell/One Click Garrison. - Every age game and Rise of Nations and Warcraft 3 had a bell you could ring to either make villagers seek shelter, or in WC3’s case take up arms as militia. In AoE4 you have to click on villagers individually, or doubleclick to select all on screen and then press G so they’ll seek shelter. In age of mythology there was an option for one click garrison, I can’t tell you how many times I have lost villagers by right clicking and telling them to go to the TC only to watch in horror as they start repairing it and getting murdered.

Flags at target location- in Age of Mythology when you give a unit a movement order a small flag will appear at the target location when you have that unit selected to let you know that is the unit’s target destination, AoE4 has no marker. A little gold thing pops up and disappears.

Aggro Leashes- In every game from AoM to WC3 if you aggro’d neutral entities they would leave you alone after you went far enough away. In AoE4 wolves will chase you literally forever, which is annoying if you don’t see them,and just means the game has more tedium where you want to aggro wolves with scouts and lead them to your TC so they’ll die and won’t bother you instead of them guarding locations that you want to clear out with a soldier.

Auto Explore- In Rise of Nations if you so chose you had the option of having scouts explore automatically.

Game Pause- In MP if you disconnect the game doesn’t pause, when you reconnect it just speeds up to catch up to where you are, also if you need to do anything for a moment you can’t pause. Every online MP game has this.

Advanced Siege Formations- In Rise of Nations if you held down Alt while you had a siege unit with a group of units, they would form a box around the siege units and hold ground while the siege units attack, compare to AoE4 where the hold ground command resets after giving a movement order, and formations are wonky at best and scouts or other cavalry always are able to run through and just burn down your siege units.

Upgrading wooden walls to stone walls- In age of mythology you could upgrade wooden walls into stone walls, compare to AoE 4 where you have to manually delete any wooden wall sections that are in the way of your stone wall and then rebuild the entire stone wall. It’s incredibly finnicky and intuitive on top of how buggy and finnicky stone walls already are.

Currently AoE 4 sits at a rating of 81 on Metacritic, which is a B-, and it is quite frankly a rating it deserves, AoE 4 is lucky it is the only big name RTS game in town, because it fails to even be the same quality as games more than a decade old in the same genre despite having the financial backing of one of the richest companies to have ever existed in earth’s history. They could not even beat the critical acclaim of AoE 3 from 2005 despite having 2 decades of experience to fall back on. What an absolute sham that they ask 60 dollars for this game.

Some of this points I can agree with (random civ, assign hotkeys better, game pause, flags for waypoints - btw. they will patch this) and I would add stuff like a better UI and better stats overview for your win/loss percentage with each civ. The rest is just totally subjective and not necessarily an auto include just because other games in the same genre do it. It's like saying starcraft had medivecs, why don't we have medivecs in aoe4?

Seriously a lot of your points would just completely change the game balance (zooming out, upgrade walls, trader roads) and other things are choices the devs did on purpose (no auto scout, tc can't target units). I don't see why you would think it's the holy law of rts games to have all the features you mentioned. It seems more those are features YOU wanted. Other people didn't want them so now what?

[Now I Know This Girl]

Agree

[ARCAGNELL0]

Another thing I remember from an RTS called Earth 2160 was the ability to get units immediately join an army group as they spawned from their production buildings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFRFovFHCzY

It's a very wierd 2006 RTS, it's also dirt cheap on steam if you want to get some nostalgia. I think it's a whole two Euros.

Oh and the Original SoundTrack is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ymD8Czrwo

I reckon it would be incredibly useful in AO4 aswell, altough Age Of Empires being a very purist RTS and not really being into making something automated to get that little bit of extra micro out the game might get in the way of implementing that.

[aflashman]

Rise of Nations also has nuclear weapons. So I put it to the Devs, why is there no option to build nuclear weapons in AoE4?

[ARCAGNELL0]

aflashman님이 먼저 게시:

Rise of Nations also has nuclear weapons. So I put it to the Devs, why is there no option to build nuclear weapons in AoE4?

We got tactical nukes in AOE4 already, you just have to play with the Rus and use their demolition ships that can level entire armies and oneshot 12 tier 3 combat ships in formation ith a single detonation.

[-Dare Devil/x/]

ARCAGNELL0님이 먼저 게시:

aflashman님이 먼저 게시:

Rise of Nations also has nuclear weapons. So I put it to the Devs, why is there no option to build nuclear weapons in AoE4?

We got tactical nukes in AOE4 already, you just have to play with the Rus and use their demolition ships that can level entire armies and oneshot 12 tier 3 combat ships in formation ith a single detonation.

-Hahahahah. For now!!! Next week no more tactical nukes!

[ARCAGNELL0]

-Dare Devil/x/님이 먼저 게시:

ARCAGNELL0님이 먼저 게시:

We got tactical nukes in AOE4 already, you just have to play with the Rus and use their demolition ships that can level entire armies and oneshot 12 tier 3 combat ships in formation ith a single detonation.

-Hahahahah. For now!!! Next week no more tactical nukes!

Praise be! I'm really looking forward to the patch next week.

Especially the Zhuge-Nu price reduction, as a China main. I wonder if you're going to stop at 100 resources from the current 120 or if you're going to test making it REALLY competitive with something like 90 or even 80. It could even hold up in imperial once you get the Spirit Way and becomes even cheaper.

As a sidenote, is it just me or does the fact the dynasty display moving to the side in the future is more or less an accurate rapresentation of the current Chinese play, 100% ignoring dynasties since they're too expensive for what they offer? It did get a chuckle out of me.

[Despiser]

What is truly remarkable here is such a heated debate over an average rts game.

[craigroaring]

When choosing enemy civ in single player skirmish, I'd like to have random civ option instead of having to choose.

[🫐ĿᐄṾᐄṆↁ3☈🫐]

I'm waiting for a bunch of Microsoft/Relic apologists to make ALL the excuses for them. Bring out your shiny horses and polish that armour, get ready to defend your king(Xbox).

Op makes EXCELLENT points and anyone trying to brush them off is obviously smoking the bad stuff. Seriously this game is made by potatoes FOR potatoes.

Come on, where are you all? come Stan for your lame game. come tell us how it's going to be fixed in 6 months for the low price of USD$34 for the next 'expansion' that is in reality actually just the rest of the game.

/sad