Age of Empires 4 has had little good news lately: Declining player numbers thwart hope for real-time strategy and major streamers and YouTubers bail out. The game is not alone in this, because many service games are in crisis:
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Battlefield 2042, Age of Empires 4 and the Service Game Crisis
The developers are trying to counteract this with updates and to respond to player requests. According to their own statements, the developers are also reacting to community feedback with the latest patch, the most important details and the entire patch notes can be found here.
Maps and Walls – This is changing
Maps
Age of Empires 4 recently focused on the multiplayer components of the strategy game with the introduction of rankings and seasons. This time it’s about them Selection of maps in team battles. While previously team sizes were tied to specific map formats, you can now choose how big your battlefield should be:
- In custom matches, you can now play 4v4 on large maps and 3v3 on medium maps.
- Huge maps remain available, so you can still fight in teams of four on the largest maps.
- The configurations for quick matches have been changed: 2v2 is now played on small maps, 3v3 on medium maps and 4v4 on large maps.
Furthermore, some maps were revised and changed, for example on Altai you will now find several dense forests so that you do not run out of wood in the Imperial Age. On the Warring Islands map, on the other hand, the spawn points have been changed when playing with unbalanced teams (e.g. 4v2v1v1).
The developers are also tackling problems that strategy expert Rainer Hauser identified in his article. You can find out what Age of Empires still has to do to save it:
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What Age of Empires 4 needs to change to not go under in 2022
Balancing
A lot is happening again with the balance, here the stone walls were targeted:
- Stone walls being built can be attacked by all units.
- The special ability of Chinese civilization
Additional Materials
has been adjusted: reduced range from 12.5 to 4 tiles, also no longer stacks on individual wall segments. In return, the ability repairs all wall segments in range.
Furthermore, with the patch for Age of Empires 4, the AI of the Mongols was improved and other bug fixes found their way into the game. As usual, on page 2 of this article we list the full patch notes.
