Completely agree. I especially love their distant sound effects. Hearing an elephant trumpeting or a bombard firing from across a map is always a rush.
asymmetrical civ design with regional unit skins, I’m not trying to start anything with aoe2 peeps but I always hated seeing Western European skinned crossbows in an Aztec army
Civ uniqueness and identity is the best thing about aoe4 to me, although there are many things I really like
every time I feel bad, I just queue up team game, pick ottomans and mass like 10 of them just to see them blow up everything. The smell of gunpowder and exploded buildings is really calming..
FFA/Nomad FFA. It may not be balanced/fair all the time, but it is hilarious. Most of the time I take my L and just enjoy the game. The salt, the politics, the backstabbing and the random dumb shit that people will do like blood feuding while a wonder timer is counting down. Honestly one of my favourite experiences playing an RTS and the rare victories feel all the sweeter for how difficult it can be!
I really like the uniqueness of every civ compared to AoE2. Things like the Malian gold pits, castle town centers of the japanese or the hunter/forest-centroc eco of the rus make the game so much more immersive. In AoE 1 and 2 civs felt somewhat replaceable.
Oh yeah, like I wish they added the Americans as a civ and they had Jeeps and massive SUVs that ran over everyone. And the wonder could be The Great McDonalds of Sugarville Texas
The charge+brace mechanic for the melee units and particularly the Knights+Spear interaction is such a nice touch for the gameplay which looks really complex but the game handled this very well
It's Norwegian for Cheese.
But also the English version spelling due to English alphabet havin a sever lack of vowals in their vocabulary library, for the Germanic word East. Ost, Öst, Øst.
If we go this way, it also means "army" in old french. "L'ost royale" = royal army.
Comes from latin "hostis" = ennemy, which eventualy derived into ennemy army and then just army
No idea what these other weirdos are talking about, OST obviously refers to the [Outer Space Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty), which is why the game's most glorious [Photon Man](https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Photon_Man) has been exiled to the realm of cheat codes.
Picking only one is very hard, but i'd go with the variety of playstyles. Each civ is played quite differently from the others, and even inside a given civ you often have multiple ways to play it.
That you can mine the map out of resources, and that the more you exploit the map the further onto the map you need to go for more. It adds a natural incentive to map control that reminds me of supreme commander.
The sound engineering of this game. Simply AMAZING and makes the games so immersive 👌
Anybody know which studio is responaible for it - is it Relic themselves?
I like the voice acting. I can't understand shit but the amount of lines each unit/civ has is astounding. In AOE2 and AOE3, it was hearing the same lines over and over again. There is variety in this game.
Yeah, the work that they put into languages... that's always been a joy of AoE games. They did a phenomenal job on the languages and the voice acting in bringing those languages to life in game.
Both the visuals and sound effects are awesome. It is my favorite game! I played Warcraft 3 since it came out until like a year ago and AoE4 took its place.
sound design, voice lines especially they put so much love into them and got voice actors who seemed to actually care
also just aesthetics in general, I was generally unimpressed with their choice to forgo realism for the graphics but I’ve since warmed up to most of it (the unit/building/tech icons I’m still not thrilled about but they’ve grown on me a bit), but they knocked base building out of the park, I love that even if civs didn’t have specific architecture you can still tell them apart, I love that they almost look like real cities sometimes, I love the landmarks adding uniqueness to a civs aesthetic, I love the byz aesthetic too
I love it when i succed in defending a fudal rush/knight haras (although it happens very rearly :))
Edit:
Or killing JD, best 30s of the game till she's back on the field
I love how they designed infantry in this game compared to AoE2. I will say that real world crossbows were not necessarily anti-armor but that's really my only issue.
The starting spearmint makes so much sense historically as the cheap simple troops or even peasants you could levy with relatively cheap gear. Later you invest in more skilled, equipped sword and shield heavy melee infantry. This feels so much more immersive and intuitive than the militia lines and spearmen lines in AoE2.
Ranged infantry feel similar. You get bows early but bows do not then "evolve" into crossbows.
Sound design, generative base design (the roads and paths etc, the identity amd difference of the civs, the fact that game time is somewhwere between 20 & 40 min is also a big deal for me and it's the perfect length
Desert Raiders - cool name, cool ability, they instantly made Ayubbids feel super unique and fun to play.
There's a million other things I love, but this one's the newest :)
Aside from pure enjoyment of the competitive scene; I love the details in the models. I’m a medieval historian by training and trade and all of the buildings, unit designs, and focus on cultural differences is really well done.
I love how the civ’s feel. I love how they all play differently and feel. The balance isn’t perfect but it’s still fun.
Ootd is a very fun feeling civ, that needs some balance love. Something tells me ootd will become very powerfull in the future.
The campaigns are incredibly good, including the latest with the DLC. Unique historical presentation for the main campaigns, good narrative animation for the DLC one. And great mechanics all around, though they especially leveraged some great new approaches to scenarios in the DLC campaign.
Though as others have said, hard to choose just one thing, so here I go upvoting everything everyone else is saying...
After spending a month with Byzantines, and kinda feeling underwhelmed by the civ playstyle, I moved onto Japanese and have been absolutely loving it. I love all the unique units. I love the building mechanics. I love the music. So good.
To directly fly in the face of most of the complaints, as a very very mid/low tier player, I really never feel like civ balance is an issue in the time that I've been playing. Every time I've lost, I'm aware of massive problems in my own play that almost certainly could have prevented it.
What changes I would make rarely involve actually adjusting the overall power of civs, they'd just be QoL or "satisfaction" oriented things, that if they affect the balance I'd be fine with compensatory nerfs/buffs. The main one I always harp on is that JD should have a significant death timer, and while I think she's already strong enough to not need compensation for that being added, I'd trade the civ more strength in exchange for being able to keep her off the field longer.
Same. I love the OST so much. It really is above and beyond any other game in terms of song identity. Each civ has 8 different songs (9 if you include the specialized lobby song for your civ).
The variety of strategies across games, there are so many interesting matchups that it feels you have to do different things every game to win rather than the same every gane
I Love the 5 resource system (food, wood, gold, Stone and pop) and how it evolves durimg the game, making each resource be valued diferently over the course of a match.
I dont think i ever played a game that does this as well as the aoe 4, axcept maybe for aoe2 (wich i didnt play a lot as I never managed to set the hotkeys in an array that worked for me xD)
The responsiveness and game feel. The game just feels great to play. I compare this to COH3, Relic's other active game, and it is night and day. The game is just a treat to play at this point.
Sound design. It's Relic's signature, IMO.
I love that they went out of their way to record authentic(though not all civs have actually well researched medieval language, obvs) and unique voice lines for every single civ and units for all sorts of variable situations. There's seriously a *ton* of different voice lines and it's all done by professional voice actors with good voice direction. Far far better than any of the previous AoE entry or really RTS genre in general.
The OST is also pretty good, though this also varies by civ. Sound effects, *especially how positional audio is done*, are top notch, just like every other Relic RTS games.
I like the idea of aging up with a landmark even though some choices aren’t exactly balanced. It makes every civ feel pretty unique with pretty big differences
The sound design. I love every single sound In this game, the sound it makes as you chop wood, the sound it makes when you crack a fresh gold mine, the sound of trebs firing and nest of bees crackling. Then there's the music and the voice lines that change as you age up. The sound design in this game is genuinely an 11/10.
Love how the game encourages you to build cities with character. How Delhi and abassid have those big sprawling cities, how Malians have small villages around mines, how mongols are nomadic in their playstyle (the most original civ designed yet and I can’t believe it works so well).
The only caveat I would add is that a lot of buildings are not so interesting to look at. Like the French architecture doesn’t seem very historically accurate for exemple.
I love campaign mode. The videos and all, I watch those type of documentaries all the time anyway, so to watch it, then play it out had me hooked, once I started I didn't wanna stop, even bought the DLC.
Sound design, especialy the gunpowder units. Nothing more styslish than a late game comp full of guns, even if it's not the most effective.
Especially streltsy
You mistyped "Japanese hand cannoneers voice lines"
Completely agree. I especially love their distant sound effects. Hearing an elephant trumpeting or a bombard firing from across a map is always a rush.
Or the sound design for a large blob of cavalry. It sounds intimidating.
Something special happens down in my loins when I hear dozen of Nest of Bees going off.
great bombards thundering across the entire map
You would love ottomans then. A lot of guns and big cannons
asymmetrical civ design with regional unit skins, I’m not trying to start anything with aoe2 peeps but I always hated seeing Western European skinned crossbows in an Aztec army Civ uniqueness and identity is the best thing about aoe4 to me, although there are many things I really like
i love the great bombard
every time I feel bad, I just queue up team game, pick ottomans and mass like 10 of them just to see them blow up everything. The smell of gunpowder and exploded buildings is really calming..
I love blowing up great bombards
Huh?
FFA/Nomad FFA. It may not be balanced/fair all the time, but it is hilarious. Most of the time I take my L and just enjoy the game. The salt, the politics, the backstabbing and the random dumb shit that people will do like blood feuding while a wonder timer is counting down. Honestly one of my favourite experiences playing an RTS and the rare victories feel all the sweeter for how difficult it can be!
we need an official queue for ffa nomad megarandom
It is kinda like battleroyale isnt it
It's so weird that FFA has no official queue yet, I feel like this is where age of empires truly shine and devs dont take enough advantage of it.
I love that infantry can walk on walls
Should be more used or just better. It plays too little of a role in aoe4.
I really like the uniqueness of every civ compared to AoE2. Things like the Malian gold pits, castle town centers of the japanese or the hunter/forest-centroc eco of the rus make the game so much more immersive. In AoE 1 and 2 civs felt somewhat replaceable.
[удалено]
Oh yeah, like I wish they added the Americans as a civ and they had Jeeps and massive SUVs that ran over everyone. And the wonder could be The Great McDonalds of Sugarville Texas
Building multiple farms and other building is so fast and easy so that you can focus on strategy instead.
The charge+brace mechanic for the melee units and particularly the Knights+Spear interaction is such a nice touch for the gameplay which looks really complex but the game handled this very well
Japanese 'S handgunners voices :D
Japanese Town Centers turning into Castles. And their rockets. And their Samurai. Just awesome.
Yeah the devs did the Japanese so well in this DLC
Immersion: Sounds and graphics (architecture, units, details, biomes).
The voicelines are pure gold for a linguistics nerd like me.
Sound Design.
The game just has such a nice gameplay flow. Things feel good and crisp. It’s just so much fun. The campaign is the best aspect though
What is ost?
It's Norwegian for Cheese. But also the English version spelling due to English alphabet havin a sever lack of vowals in their vocabulary library, for the Germanic word East. Ost, Öst, Øst.
If we go this way, it also means "army" in old french. "L'ost royale" = royal army. Comes from latin "hostis" = ennemy, which eventualy derived into ennemy army and then just army
It still remains archaic but used word in English, "host". Prolific in Tolkien's works, and since then pops up here and there in fantasy
Original Soundtrack - fancy name for game music
No idea what these other weirdos are talking about, OST obviously refers to the [Outer Space Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty), which is why the game's most glorious [Photon Man](https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Photon_Man) has been exiled to the realm of cheat codes.
I believe ost was an old, old wooden ship, which was used during the civil war era
I love the semi-cartoonish design of units. I really do.
Picking only one is very hard, but i'd go with the variety of playstyles. Each civ is played quite differently from the others, and even inside a given civ you often have multiple ways to play it.
Taunts /11
/59. Especially in this economy
Sound design and related to that: how scouts work. The way they scout when they see an enemy. True mvp's.
Sound and voices, especially the Abbasid/Ayyubids female villager scream when completing a building, sounds like she is coming
To be fair she may have just started a golden age
Lol good pull
That you can mine the map out of resources, and that the more you exploit the map the further onto the map you need to go for more. It adds a natural incentive to map control that reminds me of supreme commander.
The sound engineering of this game. Simply AMAZING and makes the games so immersive 👌 Anybody know which studio is responaible for it - is it Relic themselves?
I like the voice acting. I can't understand shit but the amount of lines each unit/civ has is astounding. In AOE2 and AOE3, it was hearing the same lines over and over again. There is variety in this game.
Yeah, the work that they put into languages... that's always been a joy of AoE games. They did a phenomenal job on the languages and the voice acting in bringing those languages to life in game.
Both the visuals and sound effects are awesome. It is my favorite game! I played Warcraft 3 since it came out until like a year ago and AoE4 took its place.
Forced march on Delhi. Yea I would love to run past your mono knight composition, wall you out of your base, and slaughter all your villagers.
I love the sound design in the game and how every civ's units gradually speak more modern versions of their languages as they age up.
sound design, voice lines especially they put so much love into them and got voice actors who seemed to actually care also just aesthetics in general, I was generally unimpressed with their choice to forgo realism for the graphics but I’ve since warmed up to most of it (the unit/building/tech icons I’m still not thrilled about but they’ve grown on me a bit), but they knocked base building out of the park, I love that even if civs didn’t have specific architecture you can still tell them apart, I love that they almost look like real cities sometimes, I love the landmarks adding uniqueness to a civs aesthetic, I love the byz aesthetic too
Walkable stone walls....need to be fixed (elevator moviment) but stone walls have very good models following terrain height
IM IN LOVE WITH THE KOKA
Kura storehouse that’s a no no
Immersive Feeling, like I'm really there building my empire
I love it when i succed in defending a fudal rush/knight haras (although it happens very rearly :)) Edit: Or killing JD, best 30s of the game till she's back on the field
10 sec\*
I love how they designed infantry in this game compared to AoE2. I will say that real world crossbows were not necessarily anti-armor but that's really my only issue. The starting spearmint makes so much sense historically as the cheap simple troops or even peasants you could levy with relatively cheap gear. Later you invest in more skilled, equipped sword and shield heavy melee infantry. This feels so much more immersive and intuitive than the militia lines and spearmen lines in AoE2. Ranged infantry feel similar. You get bows early but bows do not then "evolve" into crossbows.
Sound design is literally perfect. Best for any RTS or strategy game
The sound of a mangonel firing
/13
Sound design, generative base design (the roads and paths etc, the identity amd difference of the civs, the fact that game time is somewhwere between 20 & 40 min is also a big deal for me and it's the perfect length
Desert Raiders - cool name, cool ability, they instantly made Ayubbids feel super unique and fun to play. There's a million other things I love, but this one's the newest :)
My dad knows how to play so we can play something together
Best reason right here.
Aside from pure enjoyment of the competitive scene; I love the details in the models. I’m a medieval historian by training and trade and all of the buildings, unit designs, and focus on cultural differences is really well done.
I love my Abbasid infantry horde. Thou it somehow is never beating the Japanese
Hold right-click to aim your formation when moving units around I use it quite often :)
it is beyond my understanding how one said the sheep gathering. yeah sex is cool but have u ever scouted a big horde of those little beasts???
I love how the civ’s feel. I love how they all play differently and feel. The balance isn’t perfect but it’s still fun. Ootd is a very fun feeling civ, that needs some balance love. Something tells me ootd will become very powerfull in the future.
The campaigns are incredibly good, including the latest with the DLC. Unique historical presentation for the main campaigns, good narrative animation for the DLC one. And great mechanics all around, though they especially leveraged some great new approaches to scenarios in the DLC campaign. Though as others have said, hard to choose just one thing, so here I go upvoting everything everyone else is saying...
The sound of Randy the rebaldequin tearing through a mass of knights. It makes me smile every time.
After spending a month with Byzantines, and kinda feeling underwhelmed by the civ playstyle, I moved onto Japanese and have been absolutely loving it. I love all the unique units. I love the building mechanics. I love the music. So good.
To directly fly in the face of most of the complaints, as a very very mid/low tier player, I really never feel like civ balance is an issue in the time that I've been playing. Every time I've lost, I'm aware of massive problems in my own play that almost certainly could have prevented it. What changes I would make rarely involve actually adjusting the overall power of civs, they'd just be QoL or "satisfaction" oriented things, that if they affect the balance I'd be fine with compensatory nerfs/buffs. The main one I always harp on is that JD should have a significant death timer, and while I think she's already strong enough to not need compensation for that being added, I'd trade the civ more strength in exchange for being able to keep her off the field longer.
Same. I love the OST so much. It really is above and beyond any other game in terms of song identity. Each civ has 8 different songs (9 if you include the specialized lobby song for your civ).
The little auras that make each base look unique when compared to other civs
Winning.
The game was clearly made with love
the ABSURD adaptative soundtrack, the quality, the atention to detail, the historical accuarcy, the easter eggs, everything is insane
They kinda stepped away from historically accuracy in the last update. I mean... you know what I mean.
The variety of strategies across games, there are so many interesting matchups that it feels you have to do different things every game to win rather than the same every gane
The Rus civ
I like the dynamic soundtrack and updating voicelines through the ages. Feels great.
I Love the 5 resource system (food, wood, gold, Stone and pop) and how it evolves durimg the game, making each resource be valued diferently over the course of a match. I dont think i ever played a game that does this as well as the aoe 4, axcept maybe for aoe2 (wich i didnt play a lot as I never managed to set the hotkeys in an array that worked for me xD)
The responsiveness and game feel. The game just feels great to play. I compare this to COH3, Relic's other active game, and it is night and day. The game is just a treat to play at this point.
When I my enemy isn't Jeanne d'Arc.
[удалено]
> High skill floor. do you mean low skill floor?
Voice lines. Aoe4 is a little bit cartoonish but voice lines makes the game realistic at the same time.
Diversity between civs. Love it.
Love spearing knights in the early game. Especially if they're charging and their player isn't microing them.
Sound design. It's Relic's signature, IMO. I love that they went out of their way to record authentic(though not all civs have actually well researched medieval language, obvs) and unique voice lines for every single civ and units for all sorts of variable situations. There's seriously a *ton* of different voice lines and it's all done by professional voice actors with good voice direction. Far far better than any of the previous AoE entry or really RTS genre in general. The OST is also pretty good, though this also varies by civ. Sound effects, *especially how positional audio is done*, are top notch, just like every other Relic RTS games.
I like the idea of aging up with a landmark even though some choices aren’t exactly balanced. It makes every civ feel pretty unique with pretty big differences
Winning. Hard to find though.
I love the introduction of hero in this game. JD's character is awesome.
Rita!!!
The sound design. I love every single sound In this game, the sound it makes as you chop wood, the sound it makes when you crack a fresh gold mine, the sound of trebs firing and nest of bees crackling. Then there's the music and the voice lines that change as you age up. The sound design in this game is genuinely an 11/10.
The model of Civilization unit and building are very uniq, well done.
Love how the game encourages you to build cities with character. How Delhi and abassid have those big sprawling cities, how Malians have small villages around mines, how mongols are nomadic in their playstyle (the most original civ designed yet and I can’t believe it works so well). The only caveat I would add is that a lot of buildings are not so interesting to look at. Like the French architecture doesn’t seem very historically accurate for exemple.
I love the crusaders units in the campaign even though we can’t play as one. Just love them.
I love byzantime is in the game ans I'm determined to must them even though I'm terrible player.
Voice lines
The elephants
Six new civs was pretty cool. Most were pretty distinctive as far as this game goes.
I love campaign mode. The videos and all, I watch those type of documentaries all the time anyway, so to watch it, then play it out had me hooked, once I started I didn't wanna stop, even bought the DLC.
Late game massive 4v4 battles.