The interface in this game is superb!

Here's hoping GW's swirling the drain...

EA killed it like they do all their games .. by buying the IP and trying to make games... that's the failure, they can't make games

Ew crowder

What can one even say to this other than: lmao

The showcase video for their physics engine sold me on the game a few months back. It's sort of a fascinating look at an alternate timeline, where RTS continued down the CnC Tiberian Sun evolutionary path rather than the WC3 RTS-RPG route. I just played through the Red Alert 2 campaigns earlier this year, so I'm primed for this.

Oof yeah, I hate when they do that. I quite like the fact that in aoe4, rams can't even target units. So that particular pathing problem can't occur.

Though this is annoying when I play Byzantines and use the cheirosiphon, their unique ram variant that spits fire, since the fire will damage units that happen to get into its range, but I can't actually target units with it...

Thanks! I enjoy going back to comments I wrote months ago when someone replies. The new updates have still not yet covered up my terrible skill, just last week I caught my siege ram pursuing a lone villager instead of buildings after checking production (my fault for ordering it in a separate direction than the rest of my forces)

Whoa, I'm just going through trying to clear out my over 70 old inbox notifications, and I just noticed. Happy cake day!

But yeah, I just got out of a gaming sesh playing 2v2s with a friend in aoe4. The amount of times I got completely destroyed cos the other guy was microing effectively while I had cavalry just getting stomped on by archers... Not a good time for my army.

They could improve the pathfinding logic, for sure. (In the broader sense of "pathfinding", which includes actual pathfinding, formation logic, and targeting decisions.) Regrouping has been a huge problem in aoe2 for a long time, and in both 2 and 4 I frequently run into situations where my units are attacking what is obviously not the optimal target (e.g. non-siege targeting buildings rather than the nearby units). But most of the time, when I lose, it's not because of that. It's because I'm just worse at that than my opponent is. Good unit control and positioning is one of the critical skills to being good at rts.

Hera talks about how aoe2 seems to be borrowing more from other games in the franchise, which he doesn't like because it takes away from the identity of the game. I've noticed the same trend, but personally I'm all for it. There are many things aoe2 has been doing lately that I'm less of a fan of, but this is one thing I've been loving.

Grubby has been slowly learning aoe2, rising to a 1400 player now. Still a long way to go before he's a serious competitor, but it'll be interesting to see the 1v7 Hera does against Grubby and some other "Dota" players. (I assume Grubby has been a Dota player, though he's mainly known for Warcraft. They seemed to joke at the idea that it was a 1v7 against Dota players, but I'm not entirely up on the context.) At 1400 he's still way behind the 1900s Hera apparently recently beat in a 1v7, and it sounds like the other Dota players are taking it less seriously than Grubby is. Still, he seemed to have a much more positive take on the direction of the game, and it was interesting to hear an outsider's perspective. Very interesting.

I played this once like 15 years ago, and then again for the first time since then last year.

To be honest, it did not feel great. Readability, UX, and game design all felt far too poor for me to want to continue on after my first game.

It really is pretty great how much support it's been getting even after all these years.

The headline items:

• Complete rework of naval gameplay, introducing the new Hulk-line ship to counter fire ships and relegating fire ships to a more utilitarian function. Also moving all ships to the first page of the dock, by moving some techs out of the dock and into the university.
• Voice chat feature in multiplayer lobbies. Enabled by default.
• Waypoint & gather point flags are unique to each civ now
• Big hotkey changes which might reset some existing hotkeys to default

Some other points I thought were worth mentioning:

• Fixed an issue where units with a ranged charge attack could fire instantly when ungarrisoning from a siege weapon.
• Siege tower base movement speed increase, no longer gains speed with garrisoned infantry, also HP reduction
• Fire lancer cost increase, train time increase

These combined are a great way to nerf the fire lancer + siege tower play that was so bad they had to ban siege towers entirely from the Wololo qualification ladder

• Inca campaign changes to make use of newer units
• Big changes to Inca civ to make use of newer units & buildings
• Spanish missionaries can now carry relics, but have speed reduction while doing so
• Various other civ changes, especially relating to new units
• Added some gorgeous-looking new terrains, including Terrace Cliff for the Incan theme
• New multiplayer servers in Texas and Chile, to improve latency for Central and South American players
• More alleged pathfinding improvements

The game that keeps on giving

Way to miss the point entirely.

This is the most vanilla shit. Better headline

Aoe4 prudes force commentator to quit over your momma joke

Like I said, if it was only the first one I'd have said it's a non-issue and should just be brushed off.

But he doubled and tripled down, taking it from a simple one-off "yo mumma" joke into some rather gratuitously explicit sexual comments. That's not a benign yo mumma joke anymore.

Besides that, the video does briefly suggest that according to some people, this is the latest in a line of sketchy behaviour.

It would have been so easy for him to apologise. Once he realised his behaviour was upsetting people, it really doesn't matter what else there is going on around it. The appropriate thing to do would be to apologise and reflect. And if he'd done that, this whole thing would probably not have gone any further. It would all have blown over in a week. His decision not to apologise is reminiscent of some centrist comedians who, when challenged about some problematic content of their work, decide to double down by swinging hard to the right. I don't know enough about the situation or the people involved outside of what's shown in this video to be able to say that that is what's happened, but at least on the surface, it kinda looks frighteningly similar.

Do people take momma jokes seriously? Cause I sure don't. If this is all that was said and there's not further context missing.... it's kinda funny.

TL;DW is: he made these distasteful jokes in Twitch chat on one of the biggest tournament streams where he was a host:

The joke was kinda distasteful at first, but easy to shrug off IMO. But then he doubles down with a bunch more increasingly distasteful jokes that become harder to ignore.

He could so easily have apologised and I suspect everyone would have moved on. That would have been the end of it. But for some reason he has steadfastly refused to do so.

He initially received a 90 day suspension from Microsoft for this, later reduced down to 30 days. And he was removed from casting the Red Bull Wololo: Londinium tournament in April. In retaliation, he announced he's cancelling his weekly tournament and pulling out of aoe4 entirely.

IMO, it says a lot about the guy's character that he refuses to make a simple apology here. There's just no reason not to.

It's Retold, the remaster that came out late 2024.

I'm playing as the major god Demeter, the fourth major Greek god that was just released this week. A fourth Norse major god, Freyr, was also released alongside the initial release of Retold.

Those weird green units are Eidolons, resurrected units as a result of Persephone's god power, Persephone being one of Demeter's Mythic Age minor god options.

Which AoM version is that it looks clean as fuck.

The report in question.

Honestly I wouldn't normally share this here, but I'm reporting the bug to the devs on the official forums, and their forums aren't letting me upload the screenshot. So I figured I'd share it here and embed it using this site's URL instead, and share it with the good people of !rts while I'm at it.

It's so great to finally see a legacy RTS franchise other than Age doing so well on the remaster front. I never really got in to the 2D Stronghold games. To me, 3D is kinda essential to the experience in that franchise in a way it isn't for Age, but maybe that's mostly influenced by my nostalgia being for Legends, rather than Crusader or 2.

Still, it's obvious a lot of people disagree with me, and Firefly is doing such an amazing job reviving the franchise.

Fixed a few out-of-sync situations that could occur during gameplay and replays

Really excellent. Replays going out of sync has been an ongoing issue and it's so bad for trying to learn from your games.

Slightly Reduced Villager Train Times

Sounds pretty good to me

Kronos: Timeshift duration of Temples increased from 20 seconds → 40 seconds.

Oof. That's a huge nerf to the Kronos rush. Especially the semi-fast Heroic variant where you transport in, get a small number of units to attack, and transport back out to get up to Heroic.

Amount of XP required per tier for Bushido changed

Interesting changes. The nerfs are probably warranted, but making the last tier come earlier is an interesting counterbalance to that.

New Moon (God Power): Can now only research up to 3 free technologies per cast, prioritizing the most expensive ones.

A really disappointing nerf to one of the most interesting technologies. But admittedly it was an extremely strong power.

IMO it would have been better to slow down how quickly it acts a bit, and to increase its recast cost.