During more hectic periods, I had to chase units around the map, moving the camera with the arrow keys to find them, instead of being able to see zoom out to see them all at once.ĭespite these issues, I still found the gameplay surprisingly entertaining.

It should be a bit more flexible as you can't zoom out very far which did cause me some frustration when I wanted to survey the situation. They always have problems on bottlenecks like a bridge or the terrain where they get easily stuck, which will weaken you in combat. This can be particularly frustrating if you have idle villagers as you have to neglect your army to put them to work, which usually comes at the cost of your soldiers.īeyond that, there is a problem with the AI path finding, which can be unintentionally hilarious. This means every battle needs to be micromanaged which can take away from the base building. This leads to an issue where that solider may die and so you'll have plenty of units standing around doing nothing because they didn't get involved in the fight. Another issue is that if you right click to attack an enemy, your units will only focus on the one soldier you've selected. Despite orders to attack archers, they always ran into infantry and sustained heavy losses.

This issue presented itself most with cavalry. While helpful, it doesn't allow for any finesse. Selecting an attacking stance essentially means your selected units will attack any enemy forces in their way. When it comes to attacking enemy units, it's normally wise to select an attacking stance and to select an area for them to move to, as long as they pass the required enemy unit. The gameplay requires micromanagement of your troops and villages. Heroes also have special abilities to give an advantage to your units in the heat of battle, such as William the Conqueror who can increase the attack speed of allied units within radius of him. Some units within certain factions have special abilities to counteract this balance, ie English archers can use Palings (wooden stakes) to defend their position from a cavalry charge. Spears beat cavalry, cavalry beat archers and archers beat infantry is the combat in its simplest form. It retains the same foundations of base building and rock, paper, scissors combat. The simple answer is that AoE IV retains the old Age of Empires formula.

Age of empires 2 ai