Keeping your settlement ticking over is just as important to success as it is to keep a strong military, so it shouldn't be ignored.Р”Р„ll in all, there are 8 factions to choose from, some with more interesting playstyles than others. This means you have to pick a building which will benefit you most in the long run. This gives you a choice of special buildings to advance to that age, with each building giving a unique bonus such as healing units or applying a buff to gold generation from buildings.

You can also move to a new age once you meet the resource requirements. The way some resources are gathered changes with each faction, for example gold is collected through an Imperial Officer with the Chinese as opposed to mining gold. This is usually includes collecting resources, constructing buildings which allow you to recruit an army, upgrading your soldiers and upgrading your resource gathering. On top of the combat comes the base building. It's only a minor nuisance but it feels like an overlooked detail. But, instead of killing them, when you destroy a wall, they just teleport to the ground unharmed. In most RTS games, it would make sense to focus your siege weapons on areas of the wall with units on top to wipe them out. However, there were some aspects of the game which bugged me, with one issue sticking out involving archers on top of defensive walls. This leads to genuine tactical thinking and makes you weigh up the pros and cons of each action at a moment's notice. An example of this was during a campaign mission, I set up a defensive position on a hill but the enemy flanked me. This is in part due to the surprisingly smart enemy AI, especially on higher difficulty settings. There was something about the game that kept pulling me in. If I left a battle unfinished, I would spend my time away from the game thinking about manoeuvres and strategies I could use to win. 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.Р”Вespite 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.Р”В«eyond 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 iv review