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Age of Empires 4 announced, made by Relic (Dawn of War/Homeworld/Company of Heroes)

Sibylus

Banned
Unit Queue stacking is something I'd like to see back from III. Fewer macro buildings required, faster into the action.

And ditch gatherers not having to return resources to a gather point. Made the econ less interesting, particularly for raiding.
 

TVexperto

Member
Man this announcement makes me want to play Strategy Games right now. What are good strategy games that recently came out like this?
 

sibarraz

Banned
Will AOE 2 include all the HD campaigns?

If these versions will have the upgraded graphics, I hope that they give better production values to the campaigns of the HD expansions, who still felt like lesser versions of the originals
 
I hope this is able to run on a toaster. I keep putting off upgrading my pc.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vga-charts-viii,1184-5.html


Age 3 crushed gpu's. I hope this one does too. But probably wont. Wish it would though. Like the old days.

Man this announcement makes me want to play Strategy Games right now. What are good strategy games that recently came out like this?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0RWiFkalk

Not recent, but Rise of Nations has you covered. The extreme quality of that game is insane, i always feel a bit overwhelmed whenever i think about this game, because the quality is so to the extreme, its so monumentally good - goosebumps. This game was robbed on metacritic so hard, its should be at COH/Civ 4 levels. It was robbed by some ... uninteligent reviewers who had greatness in front of their eyes and lookes sideways. They missed the forrest for the other hundred forrests.

Aditionally, you can play Cossacks 3 for a recent game like Age.
 

DaciaJC

Gold Member
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vga-charts-viii,1184-5.html


Age 3 crushed gpu's. I hope this one does too. But probably wont. Wish it would though. Like the old days.

I remember spending most of my time playing Age3 on a prebuilt with an iGPU. Lowest possible settings, framerate in the 30s if I was lucky, but I still had a blast. Years later when I had the money to build my own rig and could max out the game at ~200 fps, it was like

ONBrjOG.gif
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
I think expectations are different these days. This isn't likely to crush GPUs because an RTS doesn't need that kind of horsepower to look good anymore, and people expect games to run well on their 2-3 year old midrange GPU. Durante has pointed out how developers are sometimes hesitant to "futureproof" their games by putting in advanced graphical features that today's GPUs can't handle well since people will throw games on max settings, whine about poor optimization, and open the door for some negative word of mouth.
 
It's astonishing to me that, given all the angst about the lack of Xbox exclusives, Microsoft aren't bringing this to the XB1 in some capacity.
 

Proelite

Member
Relic got something right with their company of heroes and the recent dawn of war series. It's that teams win or lose together. Players should not be individually be eliminated from match. I can challenge anyone to give me a reason why such a mechanism makes sense in matches that are longer than a few minutes.

In order to make win or lose together work well there needs to be two mechanics:

Mechanics A: Team victory conditions that are non-tedious and well defined. For AOE 3, I can see these victory conditions that works with the existing gameplay in the series.

1. First team to build a wonder than last for 1000 years.
2. All teams starts with wonder(s). First team to destroy the other team's wonders wins.
3. First team to occupy a territory for x amount of time.

Mechanics B: No players can be eliminated from a game.

Ways to achieve this..
1. Make starting town centers invulnerable.
2. Defeated players can recover from villagers that are brought off the map.
3. Have wonders capable of training villagers.

There is a special victory condition that requires that following mechanics.
1. Victory condition is the elimination of all town center(s).
2. Players can share the usage of town centers, if not, town centers can be fixed/rebuilt without the players own villagers.
It'll probably causes long and tedious matches unless players are limited to having one town center each.
 
"Relic got something right with their company of heroes and the recent dawn of war series. It's that teams win or lose together. Players should not be individually be eliminated from match. I can challenge anyone to give me a reason why such a mechanism makes sense in matches that are longer than a few minutes."


You haven't supplied a reason why such a mechanism doesn't make sense.
 

Sibylus

Banned
AoE is already pseudo "win together or lose together" on account of the ease of spreading out your builders (and who doesn't rebuild behind an ally if they're about to lose their last TCs?). Unlike CoH, the entire map has to be controlled to conclusively knock someone out in AoE because the entire map is buildable and builders are cheap and plentiful. Forcing team eliminations to knock a player out would push matches to absurd lengths (even with the proposed mechanics). One TC? A slow macro game slows down even further, because you only have one source of builders that can't tech an Age up at the same time, and once you mine out your start location your game plan basically slows to a crawl. Random maps worsen that effect.
 

Heartfyre

Member
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vga-charts-viii,1184-5.html


Age 3 crushed gpu's. I hope this one does too. But probably wont. Wish it would though. Like the old days.

My best friend's GPU literally caught fire while he was playing AoE3. We still laugh about it today.

Considering it played Halo: Combat Evolved at ~15FPS, I was always amazed AoE3 ran at all.

I've been putting off building a new PC for years, but I've decided I'm doing it in the run-up to this game's release. Bring me home, Age of Empires.
 

Sibylus

Banned
The compulsory Wonder w/ builders enabled also makes early game rushes and pushes virtually pointless with a slim, if non-existent, chance of eliminating a player. Two effective TCs from start with the ensuing builder spam is very hard to push into.
 

Pinktaco

Member
... But I want coh3.
How big are relic? I mean.. Could they be making both this, coh3 and d
DLC/stuff for DoW3?

They have recently been doing what looks like pre development research stuff in regards to coh3 <.<
 

IpKaiFung

Member
... But I want coh3.
How big are relic? I mean.. Could they be making both this, coh3 and d
DLC/stuff for DoW3?

They have recently been doing what looks like pre development research stuff in regards to coh3 <.<

They weren't able to balance CoH2 MP and work on Ardennes Assault Campaign at the same time and as soon as DoW3 production geared up they abandoned CoH2.

They have a lot of staff (150 -200 last time I looked) but most of their staff seems to comprise of HR, accountants, lawyers and managers. They only have a handful of programmers and they need all of them to work on one game.
 

Proelite

Member
The compulsory Wonder w/ builders enabled also makes early game rushes and pushes virtually pointless with a slim, if non-existent, chance of eliminating a player. Two effective TCs from start with the ensuing builder spam is very hard to push into.

What do you think about the option of handing over villagers and possibly buildings to your allies permanently? You can already send tributes to your allies. It's way better than the complicated conditions that I have before. It makes sense in a real world way, it makes sense via AOE lore (conversion), it works in all game types and modes, and can be easily turned off as an option.

In a team game if one of your allies lost all production buildings and villagers, you can volunteer to bring him back into the game via a donation of villagers and/production buildings, unless he sucks of course. :p
 

Sibylus

Banned
What do you think about the option of handing over villagers and possibly buildings to your allies permanently? You can already send tributes to your allies. It's way better than the complicated conditions that I have before. It makes sense in a real world way, it makes sense via AOE lore (conversion), it works in all game types and modes, and can be easily turned off as an option.

In a team game if one of your allies lost all production buildings and villagers, you can volunteer to bring him back into the game via a donation of villagers and/production buildings, unless he sucks of course. :p

It's an interesting idea, but it has immense abuse potential. One player feeds a teammate an early barracks or two and resources? You have insane rush timings you can open up with that. Probably best locked behind a lategame tech.
 
They weren't able to balance CoH2 MP and work on Ardennes Assault Campaign at the same time and as soon as DoW3 production geared up they abandoned CoH2.

They have a lot of staff (150 -200 last time I looked) but most of their staff seems to comprise of HR, accountants, lawyers and managers. They only have a handful of programmers and they need all of them to work on one game.

So true. Perhaps 10 of HR staff were doing UI, it could explain why it is so bad despite the overwhelming amount of manpower at Relic.

I have no idea how they took 5 years to build the barebones DoW3, it had only a few balance and skin patches. New elite units or factions are unlikely to come out. Even Halo Wars 2 had multiple content patches and only a portion of CA was working on it...
 
Hope the excitement in this thread leads to sales if it's a good game. DoW3 gave me the impression there is only a small market for RTS these days, shame as it's a good game.
 
It's astonishing to me that, given all the angst about the lack of Xbox exclusives, Microsoft aren't bringing this to the XB1 in some capacity.

What, playing Age of Empires with a controller?! That's a good joke.

Along with DOW1, the Relic that developed those no longer exists. All of their talent has moved on which is why you we get a massive failure like Dawn of War III

Would not get your hopes up for this

Have you actually played DoW3 or is this the echo chamber of bad opinion about the game when it's actually pretty good in mp? Only problem I have is its light on content, but the Necron expansion should help (hopefully add another race as well when they do it).
 

IpKaiFung

Member
I can't sugar coat it, DoW3's MP is bad. The fact that no one is sticking around to play the game is evidence enough.

I have to wait ages for a game and then its always the same people, this is not a good sign of a healthy multiplayer focused game.
 

K.Jack

Knowledge is power, guard it well
With Relic at the helm, expectations should be rock bottom, until they prove otherwise.

DoW3 was that bad.
 

frontovik

Banned
Sorry to see that the staff responsible for vanilla CoH and Dawn of War (Relic's masterpieces) have since moved on..

Frankly, I don't trust the current team to do Age of Empires justice.
 
i read something about dow3 being mostly made by some THQ dev studio that went bankrupt and got acquired by sega, not by the studio that made dawn of war 1 & company of heroes

might have been a nonsense rumor. idk
 

DocSeuss

Member
I wrote about how Age of Empires works and what I'd like to see in Age of Empires 4 for Kotaku this week. Dunno if I'm allowed to link my own stuff, but it seems relevant to discussions about Relic and Dawn of War 3. Relic hasn't made a single RTS like Age of Empires before. I think it's really down to whether they do their own thing or if they try to follow the Age mold. I'm really worried they'll go with the conventional wisdom of "RTSes need to speed up" that has killed most major RTSes. Sure, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 were fast RTSes, but their audiences were considerably smaller than Age of Empires, precisely because fewer people wanna play faster RTSes.

i read something about dow3 being mostly made by some THQ dev studio that went bankrupt and got acquired by sega, not by the studio that made dawn of war 1 & company of heroes

might have been a nonsense rumor. idk

... it's the same studio
 
i read something about dow3 being mostly made by some THQ dev studio that went bankrupt and got acquired by sega, not by the studio that made dawn of war 1 & company of heroes

might have been a nonsense rumor. idk

Most Relic veterans escaped to Blizzard either after CoH or DoW2. Relic is but a shell of its former self. Have no trust in them either after Dawn of War 3.
 

IpKaiFung

Member
Fighting asms every game is super varied and deep or getting your expensive units one shot at the click of a mouse is super satisfying.

However as the player numbers illustrate very few people who picked it up think its worth investing time into.

I was hoping that they learned lessons fron the bad CoH2 launch but this game turns out to be even worse!
 

Aangster

Member
Here's why I don't have much faith in Relic delivering the goods

snipdow3.png

Why not post a pic of current CoH 2 numbers? It's still going strong despite the recent stoppage of significant patch support that's persisted over four years, both games share at least 109 staff. That's a poor simplification of what went wrong with DoW3, especially since it's definitely not the singleplayer nor multiplayer game fans wanted.

If anything, the concern should be how Microsoft approaches the project's management, controls + defines it's direction, and how closely the design sticks to AoE's mechanics + pacing. The onus is on Microsoft to deliver, especially since they chose a dev team that's never done anything similar to AoE's approach to RTS.

The gall of fucking Phil Spencer to appear in the 'History of Age of Empires' video in spite of his role in killing Ensemble shouldn't be lost on anyone.
 

zoukka

Member
Fighting asms every game is super varied and deep or getting your expensive units one shot at the click of a mouse is super satisfying.

I see you haven't played the game a lot. Check out some pro replays or casts and see what the matches look like when you don't lose your army to a single hero ability :b
 
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