I don’t understand why they did this – slate is hard to transport and only found in a few regions of England and Wales, so wasn’t widely used during the AoE4 time period. From Feudal Age onwards, they mostly have dark slate roofs, which (in part thanks to the graphical style) are barely distinguishable from the lead roof of the Wonder and some other Landmarks. Second, the architectural style of the other English buildings. In contrast, the other Age games have a very crisp/sharp graphical style, so making things stand out is comparatively easy. Consequently it’s hard to make anything stand out. AoE4’s graphics have a sort of vague quality to them – everything is hazy and a bit blurred. I think there are (at least) two other factors contributing to the Wonder looking underwhelming.įirst, the graphic style. Instead of focusing on putting archers on walls, people search for free spot to erect another mil production building. When you’re in imperial age you have a billion military production buildings all over the map, it’s a mess! It’s completely impossible due to map size, building scale and no batch training to secure your town with walls. What’s worse- it stands completely opposite to some design shown in promo materials, where settlements are protected by walls.

You end up with the entire screen (zoom!) covered in the same looking (no rotation :P) archery ranges, barracks etc. on the other they go back to 90s when batch training wasn’t really a thing in RTS games and you had to brute force training large number of units.

It’s not a problem to tweak training times and cost of buildings to balance that change.Īt one hand they want to super speed up feudal with fast sheep, more starting vills etc. Feels clumsy and oldschool but in a bad way. It’s cleaner and less busy to look at when you have 2-3 stables, instead of 7. And it’s made worse by the decision to rely on multiple military production buildings due to cutting batch training mechanics as a base for every civ.

Age of empires age of wonders 4