SC2 devs eventually went kinda crazy with flashy units, despite the repercussions on balance.
AoE4 has the opposite problem. Their units are extremely bland, but at least they are balancing.
After having played AOE4 non-stop since release my opinion of the game continues to grow. The game is a masterpiece - it fun, varied and with tons of depth. Playing Mongol feels completely different than playing Chinese which is completely different from playing English.
In many ways it a superior version of Age of Empires 2 with more action and more differences between the civs.
Yes there several bugs but they are getting patched and so far I have not had a single opponent that abused any bug.
Plus all the rage and stress you feel while playing SC2 is completely gone. In AOE4 even losing is fun, which it never was in SC2.
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What a charmed life you’ve led then. Most of the opponents I faced canceled walls for 4k stone repeatedly then built walls of castles; turned the game into a complete joke.
Then the patch notes where they basically deleted Delhi and left most of resource manip bugs in place. They also STILL haven’t fixed map gen resource disparity, 1:4 games, in my experience, are still won at 0:00 because one person spawned with resources and the other is missing critical ones. Then just…gutting horsemen. Yeah cool, +1 armor and…-20% hp…so they still get killed by archers at the exact same speed but they’re also now just weaker against everything else.
Game had issues and the Devs, in classic RTS style, have found ways to somehow make it worse.
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Strange, do you play team or 1v1? I have played almost only 1v1 and there almost no one uses bugs. I suspect cheaters like team games better.
1v1 mostly. I’ve played a couple team games but it’s never my favorite in RTS. Even if I’m just the tragically unlucky one, infinite resource glitches should be top priority. I’m glad they fixed the wall bug, but there’s still others
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I agree with most of what you said, but I still feel pretty salty losing in AoE4.
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Saltyness is all about mindset and the way you play the game,not the game itself. You can get salty even with the most wholesome and chill games. If you are a competitive player you will get mad every time you lose because you wanted to be better and win. If you are playing casually 4fun,then winning or losing really dont matters. And then there is the unhealthy saltyness,getting mad at the game,and the worst case,getting mad at the enemy .
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Worst case is getting mad at your chair and performing aviKungfu on it.
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Now yo mention it,Avilo had a toy bear and he used to beat it all the time.
Poor bear. 
20 chars
For AoE4 patch updates, do I have to actively download anything or will it download on its own?
Mine went auto, but I own the game through gamepass (sick deal on PC if you haven’t tried it, 9 bucks a month and you get hundreds of games, halo, aoe4, forza, etc.)
RN, I’m currently fighting the urge to use the new bug to crush people in 1v1s and make a name for myself as a cheese bully. But I’m having fun playing legit, I haven’t done that to anyone… YET.
(If you aren’t aware, you can bug the game as Abbas to give your spearmen infinite range on their attacks/torches, so you can win the game without leaving your base, and super early. There is no real way to counter it)
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But remember. The Amazing Magestic AoE4 devs thought it was much more important to reduce Horseman HP than correct unbeatable bugs and resource spawns.
And people think this game is gonna replace any RTS anywhere XD
They made over 100 patch updates this week. They aren’t perfect, but I haven’t seen this type of commitment for an RTS in ages.
Recent patch was a good step, fixed some gamebreaking bugs, and finally water vs french is playable (-4 armour nerf = lodya ships deal 30 instead of 10 per shot). Although now mangonels are even stronger and springalds untouched, also agree the horsemen nerf seems a bit over the top alongside those spearmen buffs.
The copium is strong in these ones
There will be another patch next week to fix more bugs and to nerf springalds.
Springalds will be improved vs siege units but nerfed vs everything else. I think that is a good change since it both ends mass springalds and prevent mass mangonels from being too strong.
I dont know man, over 100 updates in a single patch is pretty impressive. It should have been done in beta, no doubt. However, AoE4 developers obviously didn’t think it would gain as much esport traction as it did, but they are handling it adequately for the time being.
They really aren’t handling it adequately.
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You don’t make balance adjustments while there are massive bugs. Why? Because those bugs prevent you from getting a baseline look at how the game functions. If you don’t have a baseline, you can’t know how unit interactions will actually occur in an exploit free, bug free environment. If you don’t know that, you cannot make informed decisions on balance changes. Therefore, they did the logical equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the patch and seeing what sticks. If you’re applauding that, then there is no saving you.
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Many of their adjustments make no sense. Why was Delhi nerfed to nothing? Why increase horseman armor so they can combat ranged units more effectively…then nerf their HP so that they’re not actually any better against ranged units and are now just worse against everything else. Was the Roman repair ability actually busted? Maybe if you have stone exploit but it (the repair ability) was already a pretty limited use resource and if the stone exploit is gone, who cares?
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They addressed some map spawn issues, but have communicated nothing that they will address resource disparity spawn issues. Like yeah cool I don’t have to worry about trees clogging the only paths to the other half of the map but I have no stone and no gold so that doesn’t really matter.
I could go on but it’s just absolutely ridiculous to me. It’s releasing a product, getting reports back from consumers that there are utterly MASSIVE bugs that prevent the product from functioning as expected, and the company comes back with 1 bug fix and a UI layout change. No one that matters cares about the layout right now, they want the product to work as advertised first.
All RTS games do this. I’m not sure what is going on behind the scenes. Some bugs may be harder to fix than others, and ignoring balance patches altogether while fixing bugs may be too long.
I think their adjustments are on the right path. Maybe not perfect, and criticism is always good. Monthly changes are a sure fire way that they will hit the nail on the head eventually.
I just think one step at a time is a fine way to start balancing and fixing all the issues.
You’re right in that they should have fixed a lot of things in beta. It’s a lesson to them and any RTS dev team out there that they should have things far more under control than Aoe4 did on release, but lucky for AoE4 there is time to fix things and they appear to be doing just that. If the next patch to fixing bugs was in February, then I think that would be a problem. Hopefully another one this month or early January.
I see no reason to hate the game or it’s design…yet.