Deep Diving The New Age of Empires IV Expansion News

The Sultans Ascend promises to be Age 4's biggest expansion yet

Relic recently published some good details around their upcoming expansion pack to Age of Empires IV, The Sultans Ascend. I’m pretty hyped for it! Nowadays, competitive Age 4 is where I spend the vast majority of my limited gaming time, including a recent grind to top 200. I figured I’d take a look at Relic’s “deep dive” into the new content and add my thoughts and commentary on what’s coming up.

A New 8-Mission Campaign

Age IV launched with 4 mainline campaigns, consisting of 35 total missions. The Sultans Ascend adds on another 8-mission campaign, expanding the single-player campaign content by 23%. Not bad!

One thing I’ll say is that, in contrast with Age of Empires II, I don’t think Age 4’s campaigns are in a place where the developers can expand on them by just doing more of the same. The game’s launch campaigns, while fun and showcasing good creativity, are a little hit or miss, and from my perspective tough to justify replaying. I offered a few thoughts a while back on how Relic could take new campaigns in a better direction.

I’d love to see Sultans break the mold here. Solid, creative new missions would go a long way in satisfying the campaign crowd’s thirst for good new content. I’ve also repeatedly observed that well-done DLC content can help players gloss over flaws in the original game, and sometimes even see the original content in a new and better light. (I first noticed this back with the first DLC of Dark Souls II). A great new campaign would shift conversations about the campaign to start with, “check out the DLC campaign, it’s the best one”, instead of a rehash of what players may not have liked about the initial launch. And that, by itself, would be a step forward for the game.

Japanese and Byzantines, Ottomans and Malians

Sultans introduces two brand new civilizations, the Japanese and the Byzantines. This got me thinking about the Ottomans and the Malians - the last new civilizations Relic brought in - and how their design philosophy played out.

To be honest, I’m a little conflicted. I wrote back in January that because Age 4 launched with a relatively unfinished asymmetric civ design implementation, bringing in two new highly asymmetric civs went a long way in improving the overall gameplay and bringing it closer to the original creative vision (at least, as far as I can guess as to what that vision was). Both the Ottomans and the Malians feel fresh. For competitive players in particular, they offer a compelling new perspective on the gameplay.

But… I’m not yet convinced about their depth. And I say this knowing full well that I’m still learning the game and putzing around low Conqueror III, so I’ll try to be careful not to get over my skis.

Let’s start with the Malians. They’ve landed in a weird spot where they can essentially turtle and boom at the same time, thanks to the power of their cattle ranches. And just to be transparent, my bias here is that I find turtling in general to be pretty annoying. It’s particularly aggravating in this case, where it’s challenging to punish the Malian player for playing in this way.

I would guess that this will be nerfed eventually. But I think the larger problem is that the mechanic as-designed just doesn’t fit well into a competitive game. Non-punishable free resources that sit next to your landmark town center starting from minute 5? Absent a bigger re-implementation - like making the cattle attackable but offering the Malian player tools to keep them safe, similar to villagers - I feel like this will be tuned into little more than a small gimmick, similar to how Delhi’s identity around sacred sites was nerfed into the equivalent of a minor economic bonus.

And if Pit Mines are a minor economic bonus and cattle ranches are a minor economic bonus, what is Malians’ identity? Whether you’re doing a standard two TC or you’re going with one of the old school Warrior Scouts into fast Farimba Garrison builds, Malians too often play out like yet another generic heavy cav + archer civ. I do think the lack of crossbows and the inclusion of Musofadis and Javelin Throwers are all good ideas with a lot of potential, but I think they need more tuning to play a larger role in the meta. Like, how much depth can we extract from Musofadi stealth when it’s meta to bring a scout with your army and build outposts around the map as you transition into the late-game? I mean it’s definitely a thing that they could make happen; I just think Malians need more time to bake before they’re in a good spot, design-wise. But I feel like that’s going to be a tall order when the developers are in the process of adding six new civs.

Then there’s the Ottomans. The civ’s identity revolves around free units (via military schools and landmarks) and large numbers of units (via production bonuses and a unit composition emphasis on the cheap Sipahi), which is balanced through a lack of meaningful early game economic bonuses. (The second age landmarks aren’t bad though.) This has translated into a meta that leans pretty narrowly into either 1-TC all-ins in late Feudal, or a turtle strategy into a gigantic blob of free units in the late game. The latter was recently buttressed with a Giant Bombard buff.

I feel like Ottoman gameplay is very hot or cold; it doesn’t feel scalable or flexible the way some of the better designed launch civilizations do. The repeated Sipahi nerfs make me worry that the civ is trending toward the same rat hole as Delhi - a design that doesn’t fit well with the overall gameplay and one that’s hard to fix because it’s essentially the civ’s identity, so the developers nerf it into the ground and sort of abandon it. (3 free scholars in Madrasas? Come on, man!) And I think the challenge is very much baked in, too: free units rarely seem to ever work out as a first-class design feature in competitive RTS games, particularly in titles where trading efficiently matters a lot more than just “building more stuff”. And Age 4 is one of those games where building the right stuff is super important.

I think the developers need to ensure that the unique design characteristics of the Japanese and Byzantines fit properly with the actual gameplay of Age 4, and aren’t just gimmicks that will run their course after a few months. And I think a good source of ideas here is asymmetry in unit compositions; I think the developers are on the right track with the new unique units they gave to the Ottomans and Malians. Age 4 is a very unit-composition dependent game - you’re constantly scouting and countering your opponent, to the point where you can’t really just “do your own thing” because the counters are too hard and you won’t trade efficiently. Leaning into new ideas and complexity there could be a source of deeper asymmetry that will stand the test of time.

I guess I’ll add one final thing, which is to say that I’m supportive of the ongoing design direction against turtling, as evidenced by recent Keep nerfs, repair nerfs, and Red Palace nerfs. Turtling (and late game in general) are areas where Age 4 could use more development, from my perspective, and it would be a shame to see any of the new civs reverse the current direction of leaning away from overly defensive gameplay.

Variant Civilizations

If you’ve been following the community discussion on Reddit, you’re probably aware that a disproportionate amount of feedback has been aimed at the nomenclature of the four new “variant” civilizations. I think not everyone is aligned on what a variant civilization is, exactly, so I’ve pasted in the definition for your convenience:

A Variant Civilization is a modified version of a classic civilization that you already know and love from the core game. They offer new gameplay elements and strategies, while keeping the familiarity and identity of the classic civilization intact. Variant civilizations are not designed to replace the classic civ they are derived from but instead provide an alternative way to play.

Personally, I don’t have an opinion on the names of the variant civs. I will say that I empathize with folks who do take issue with the naming, because the developers explicitly mention “[capturing] the history of civilizations” in their rationale for rolling out variant civs. There’s a funny dynamic on the Internet in which people both complain and complain-about-complaining too easily. If the developers cite history in their launch announcement, players have a right to complain about the historical frame of the naming.

Relic also cites a desire to experiment with new gameplay mechanics. They’ve so far named two specific examples - the hero-centric gameplay of the French variant civ (Jeanne d’Arc) and the “low cognitive load” of Order of the Dragon.

First impressions, I think this is great. I’ve spoken several times before about how I think Age 4’s strength - the reason it’s still going strong, the reason I’m still playing it - is its creative vision, regardless of whatever implementation issues it may have. Pushing further in this direction to further flesh out that creative vision is the right move in my mind. Long-lived live service games should bias toward taking risks and optimize for the best long-term gameplay, and that’s worth quirks in the meta in the short-term.

I am a little leery of the two specific mechanics they’ve pulled up, though. Way back when, I expressed disagreement with the overall trend line of StarCraft II’s co-op, and one of the things I mentioned is that the commanders released post-revamp seemed to be overtuned without strong trade-offs; they were too new player friendly, to the point of worsening the gameplay. So the idea of supporting “low cognitive load” - both explicitly for the Order of the Dragon, and implicitly by centering gameplay on a hero unit - makes me a little worried.

The thing I want to emphasize here is that different mechanics affect different parts of the ladder differently. Back when I published my co-op article, I spoke with one of the developers about my concerns, and one of the sticking points of our discussion was that it’s unfair to label Tychus or Zeratul (post-revamp commanders) as overtuned because Abathur in the hands of an expert was a stronger commander. And the thing I couldn’t convince them of is that the problem is not whether adding easy-mode mechanics breaks the meta for high-level players; it’s what it does for the average player, who now has to contend with other players controlling a commander that is relatively much easier to play.

In the case of StarCraft II’s co-op, that meant players solo’ing the entire map without giving you a chance to take an engagement went from a once in a blue moon bummer to something that happened much more frequently - the new commanders were so damn easy that anyone could do it. And that kind of sucked, and for me personally made me less likely to boot up the game mode and solo queue.

I’m sure the “low cognitive load” of any new variant civilizations will have minimal impact at my level, where players have enough APM and game understanding that what really matters is the skill ceiling, not the skill floor. But the ladder is an ecosystem, and everyone should care about what’s happening on other rungs, even if we’re not personally affected. And the challenge I see is that making particular individual civilizations easier than others will make the competitive experience feel unfair to folks at lower or mid-levels.

I mean, seeing is believing, and I’m willing to give Relic the chance to show what they’ve been imagining. Maybe the lack of cognitive load is replaced by something else, for instance. But I feel like the best accessibility features touch the gameplay as a whole; they’re not relegated to individual civilizations. Ensemble tried to make a lower skill floor civilization in the form of The Atlanteans back when The Titans came out, and personally I feel that didn’t work out very well - their ease of gameplay just made them broken from a balance standpoint.

The last thing I’ll say here is that I think Relic left out one of the bigger reasons for building out “variant” civilizations - it’s lower cost to piggyback off the design of existing civilizations than it is to build brand new ones. You can re-use assets, units, design directions; everything, really. I’m sympathetic to this approach because I think Age players have gotten a little too accustomed to the new civilization release cadence of Age of Empires II, where a new civilization can be created pretty fast just by modifying the tech tree in a new and interesting way, thinking up some interesting bonuses and unique techs, and adding a new unique unit. (Granted, sometimes new civilizations come with a new family of skins, which is more work.) It’s not that simple in the more asymmetric Age 4 and I feel like variant civs is a reasonable way to thread the needle of player expectations in this franchise.

Final Thoughts

There’s a few other tidbits in the announcement, including a deep dive into Jeanne d’Arc, new maps, new biomes, and new unlockable rewards. It’s all good stuff, but my thoughts around all that are still baking. I will say that while I enjoy Age 4’s existing progression mechanics and unlockables, it would be nice to see the developers move to more substantial rewards, like announcer packs. Done right, this could also be a reasonable path toward long-term monetization.

Until next time!
brownbear

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