Age of Empires IV Has a Ton of Potential

Coming back after a year-long break, I'm impressed by how far the game has come - and left wondering how far it'll go

About a year ago I published a fairly negative review of Age of Empires IV. After playing through all the campaigns and grinding two accounts to top 200 on the competitive ladder, I was disappointed by what I felt was a lackluster and unfinished product. I put the game down in early 2022, promising to revisit it in the future, hoping the developers would patch things up.

Recently I did just that, grinding the ol’ brownbear into Conqueror, exploring some of the new casual content, and watching a lot of streams. And I had a lot of fun! Age 4 has made a ton of progress over the past year. I’ve always felt like its core issue was not the lack of a solid creative base, but a more straight-forward execution miss - the game was simply not finished when it was released. And these past few weeks have really validated that for me.

The Good

First, I think a bunch of core stuff from the initial launch - second age town centers and rams, sacred sites to reward map control, a lot of the early game civilizational asymmetry, the jockeying around relics - continues to be solid. I made a post on Reddit to see what other people thought, and a lot of the top comments related to stuff that’s been in there since launch - the strategic variance offered by the landmark system, the sound design, the readability of unit design, etc.

Second, I think the devs have made some real improvements. Click targeting is much better. There’s a ranked ladder with leagues, map vetoes, the stuff you’d expect. The new civilizations, the Malians and the Ottomans, feature very unique mechanics and units, helping shore up the asymmetric design. Also, a side-effect of the meta shifting towards defensive macro builds is that we get to see more of what makes civilizations unique in the third and fourth ages. I think the landmark revamp will help with this, too.

The main change I dislike is the naval rework that scrapped a lot of what made civilizations unique on the water. The developers mentioned that this is a foundational measure, to get things back on track before re-introducing more asymmetricity; I hope they stick to that plan. While naval combat was poorly balanced at launch, I thought it was one of the most creative parts of the game and one of the areas in the Age formula where the developers really tried to take things to the next level. It had a ton of potential! I worry that Relic will just give up here.

I really think this game has the potential to be really big - even bigger than Age of Empires II. The speed factor is underrated, from my perspective - I think a lot of players really like the faster startup experience compared to other Age titles. Economic factors of streaming aside aside, I also think there are genuine player preference reasons underlying why most Age of Empires II pros returned to that game, whereas many of the StarCraft II transplants stuck with Age 4. When everything goes right, it’s a fast and exciting game.

The Meh

I don’t get the pacing in this game. Pacing here just refers to the rhythm of the game from start to finish, and in this piece I’m referring specifically to the pacing in competitive multiplayer.

A feeling I get quite a lot in Age of Empires IV is the sense of waiting for things to happen. The start of the game is one example. I feel that there needs to be something more here, to maintain the pacing and keep the skill ceiling high. For several civilizations - like French, English, Malians, and Abbasid - there’s just not enough things to do. It’s boring and feels overly streamlined.

Sometimes, this issue continues into the Feudal Age. This can be a beautiful tug-of-war, if both players choose to play aggressively, but the modern meta leans heavily on passive two town center or fast tech play. This can produce a lull where an aggressive player can’t find damage, but the defensive player isn’t doing much beyond producing villagers. In the worst case, the first several minutes of the game - or more! - are just jockeying back and forth without anything real happening.

Once the late game gets going, the pace is pretty good; I think there are some balancing issues around static defense but nothing that can’t be fixed by a patch. But the game leading up to this point is still too boring, consisting of little more than macro’ing up and keeping tabs on my opponent. Personally, it feels like a faster-paced version of the Arena experience in Age of Empires II.

For me, this is an important area in terms of convincing me to play this game consistently; when my average ranked game is mostly just waiting around, I’d rather play something else.

Age of Empires II offers a helpful example: with the inclusion of auto-scout, the skill floor in the Dark Age is reasonable. But the skill ceiling is very high - on the mechanics side there’s sheep scouting, luring deer, battling the other scout over high ground, etc. And on the strategy side there’s deciding where to take your first lumber camp, figuring out how to play your match-up and your starting base, adjusting as you scout your opponents’s opener, and so on. It’s a slow burn that continuously ramps up; Age of Empires IV could learn a lot from that game’s pacing design.

The Ruh-Roh

The largest issue for me is the gameplay design around skill expression. I feel that this remains one of the biggest core design issues in the game.

For example, there’s a lot of risk and not a lot of reward in committing to real aggression at many points in the game. Static defense and defender’s advantage - town centers in particular - are very strong. Many map layouts also feature (huge amounts of) resources that are very close to the starting TC that are straight-forward to defend.

This would be a mostly superficial balance complaint if booming was a deep and compelling experience. But it doesn’t feel that way. Many of the factors that make it interesting in Age of Empires II were streamlined in the jump to Age of Empires IV. It’s much easier mechanically (both economically and in terms of managing defense), it’s less thoughtful in terms of base design and layout, and strategically it’s less varied (in part due to a larger design problem wherein you’re much less committed to a tech path than you were in Age 2).

In layman’s terms - it’s boring.

I feel like the developers’ original plan was to streamline old mechanics to make the game faster-paced and exciting (great) while simultaneously adding new mechanics that paired well with the new gameplay design. For example, in pre-release interviews, I got the sense that unit abilities were intended to fill the gap of more classic micro - unfortunately, these were not comprehensively implemented. I also feel like hybrid maps, especially fighting simultaneously on water and land, were intended to play a larger role in the meta. But map vetoes and the naval rework threw a wrench in that.

Skill expression feels like a place where Age of Empires IV remains incomplete. I’d love for the developers to prioritize this area and create more compelling ways for players to showcase their skill, whether it’s in the unit control, the technology tree traversals, the sharpness of builds, etc. This could definitely include pulling some old plans off the shelf and implementing them.

The Casual Side

Competitive multiplayer aside, I also did a short dive into the casual options that are available.

First, there’s still no co-op. It’s hard to believe, but the revolution in real-time strategy that was co-op is more than seven years old. It’s high time for the developers to bring this over to Age of Empires IV; even Age of Empires II has cooperative campaigns. It’s also a reasonable path to long-term monetization, which I think is helpful for the game’s longevity.

Second, the single player AI is still not very good, even after the update. I get that the developers are actively working on this, but I’d prefer the developers focus more on genuine gameplay improvements rather than having the hardest AI cheat on resources. And to be clear it’s not either/or for me; I’m fine with the latter as long as they do more for the former. I feel that there must be something about Age 4’s engine that makes it difficult to write a reasonable AI, because it was straight-forward to do so in Age of Empires II (they even wrote a book about it).

Third, I’d like to see more investment into custom scenarios. I love that the developers revamped the mod browser. That said, I was really surprised that I couldn’t get a full game of Castle Blood going. I get that this is a smaller community, but the game is still averaging several thousand concurrent players. I’d probably de-prioritize the “Recent Events” tab in favor of curated custom scenario recommendations (like, say, Castle Blood). I’d also add something similar to the “Autojoin” feature in StarCraft II, which tries to unify lobbies for a single scenario and significantly reduces wait times.

Final Thoughts

I’m really glad I took the time to revisit Age of Empires IV. I’ve had a blast these past few weeks; I really think this game has so much potential. It doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s 2-3x more popular than AoM or Age3; but on the same note, I’m also not surprised that it hasn’t caught up to Age of Empires II yet. I feel that there are some gaps in the current gameplay loop that have me going back to other games. I also think the casual side of the game is less figured out than it needs to be in order for the game to be more successful.

I’m excited to keep an eye on this title!

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.