How Relic Can Improve New Age of Empires IV Campaigns
My two cents on how to change things up from the launch missions
I spent a good amount of time with Age of Empires IV’s campaigns when the game first came out. You can watch my full thoughts here, but the TL;DW is that while the production values and storytelling were really solid, I felt that the gameplay missed the mark. And that’s always been a bit bittersweet to me. I look back fondly on the campaigns - waking up on cold December mornings, space heater at my feet, brilliant soundtrack in my ears - but they’re not really in a state where I want to boot them up and play through them again.
Relic recently announced The Sultans Ascend, the biggest expansion yet to Age of Empires IV. And while that announcement doesn’t formally declare that new campaigns will be on offer, I’m going to assume that they are, partly based on the emphasis on “biggest expansion”, and partly because the launch emphasizes “[immersion] in the rich history of the Middle East”.
New civs for the ranked ladder are great, but I wouldn’t exactly call competitive play a rich historical experience.
Anyway, I wanted to revisit the Age of Empires IV launch campaigns, and talk about how I think Relic should pivot with this upcoming expansion. It’s always been clear to me that a lot of time and energy and love went into Age 4’s campaigns. I mean, I repeat myself, but the production values in the animation and video work, the care and consideration of shooting on-location, the epic soundtrack and voice-over narration - it’s all around great stuff. I’d love to see the gameplay on the same level.
Scale and Restraint
A good number of Age 4 campaign missions are too big. Let me highlight a few examples to illustrate:
Rise of Moscow #2 (Tribute) - Clear five settlements and six bandit camps
Mongol Empire #2 (The Great Wall) - Clear three bandit camps on opposite sides of a gigantic map
Normans #8 (The Siege of Dover) - Clear four French reinforcement groups
Rise of Moscow #5 (Fall of the Novgorod Republic) - Clear four towns
Each of these missions has an interesting premise - a single unifying creative idea - but it gets drowned out by too much repetitive gameplay.
My personal thought is that it’s good to showcase different variations of an idea to plumb as much depth out of the gameplay as possible; but it’s not good to simply repeat the same idea multiple times without changing much, as Age 4 does. This just makes missions feel padded and overly lengthy, which is a shame in light of how interesting these missions are when you consider their ideas purely on paper.
Take Tribute. As implemented, the mission is just more and more of the same, building multiple trade routes across an oversized map. I think a simpler approach would be to condense it into establishing single trade route, creating a focus on a single stretch of gameplay. I’d then expand on this in different phases: setting up the trade, defending it, expanding that single trade route to a new (further) location, and defending waves in two places. I think the finale could potentially be setting up a second trade route and defending both routes simultaneously.
Map variation would go a long way in helping this feel fresh, too. Part of the problem with Tribute and other overscaled missions is that the maps are too similar, both to each other and within themselves. I don’t think you can get away with SpeedTree-esque map design in campaign missions. Pairing a new variation on a creative idea with a new map feature - cliffs or water or choke points or whatever - helps keep the gameplay varied, and tampers down a sense of repetition or overscaling.
Pacing and Macromanagement
I wrote a longer piece on pacing a couple weeks back. The thing I want to emphasize for Age 4 specifically is that the base building (or “empire building”, I suppose, given the franchise) in the launch missions doesn’t always slot in neatly with the rest of the gameplay. The most notable example of this is an over-prevalence of “build-up-and-win”-type missions, in which the player macros up in a similar-to-before-looking base for 15 or so minutes before A-moving across the map. I included this picture in my initial review to highlight the same-y-ness of the base layouts:
But I don’t think it’s just build-up-and-win that creates problems. I think the main thing I want to note about pacing is that if a mission’s creative idea doesn’t necessitate macromanagement, then shoe-horning it in - such as, infamously, in Normans #6 - can act as a drag on the pacing. The creative vision gets lost in the hum-drum of base building, even in scenarios that ostensibly start the player with a functioning town and economy.
I feel that Mongols #5 (The Battle of Leignitz) is a good example of this issue in action. Here you have a fairly solid premise of whittling down the opposing Polish army with raids and mangudai. (I get that the mission has scripting problems, but let’s set that aside for a second). Unfortunately, the player doesn’t get to fully immerse themselves in the action because they’re too busy macroing. In a mission where you don’t even get a proper base!
I think stuff like this could be restructured to put more focus on the interesting creative ideas by ramping down cycles dedicated to base building and macromanagement, which would go a long way in making the pacing smoother and more natural. For this mission specifically, you could either just start the player with a sufficiently reasonable army, or you could give them some toggles (similar to some of the French missions and the Malian mastery mission) to automatically deliver units on a regular basis. Players could then focus all their attention on micromanagement and mobility.
The larger point I think that’s worth making is that Age 4 is a faster-paced experience than prior Age games - and I think it’s worth proactively leaning into that in the campaign design. Reducing the role of macromanagement in favor of more aggressive action in-the-field, at least some of the time, could go a long way in improving the pacing of individual missions, because it feels better aligned with the game’s design philosophy.
Intended Gameplay vs. Gameplay In-Practice
My broader critique of Age 4 at launch was not so much that it lacked interesting ideas, but rather that those ideas weren’t fully realized. The execution didn’t quite rise to the level of the creation vision:
I get that Age 4 used a brand new engine, and that this comes with growing pains. The thing I want to highlight for the benefit of future campaigns is that if a particular trigger doesn’t seem to reliably work, then simplifying it and reconfiguring missions to accommodate that is better than just leaving a bad set of triggers in the game, at least from my perspective. And to do that, I think you need to playtest differently.
I know, I know - anytime a player raises a quality issue with a game and blames playtesting, developers like to bounce it back by noting that it was probably caught during QA, but the team didn’t have enough time to prioritize the issue. And that’s fair enough. But I do think there’s a gap between how missions were conceived and how they actually play out in-practice, and I wonder if there’s some improvement that could be made to the prioritization scheme.
For example, Mongols #7 calls for the player to setup base encampments in a circle around an opposing base. This mostly means waiting around for a long period of time while your buildings move from point A to point B. The waiting is really boring, especially if you fail the mission and need to restart. I think the idea was to convey the coolness of Mongol mobility in sieging a town, but the way it works out, it just turns it into a chore.
Now, I’m guessing this scenario was playtested thoroughly. But I wonder whether there was a disconnect between what playtesters were experiencing, and what the true intent of the level was. It feels to me like there was a conversation that may not have happened - “hey, we’re needing to spend a lot of time moving buildings around just to get going, is that the intention?”
Unit leashing behavior is another example that comes to mind, for example in Mongols #5 and Hundred Years War #3. I mean, it’s OK that the AI can be cheesed - that would be possible no matter what. Rather, I want to highlight that these missions feature so many enemy units and attack waves that they seem intentionally balanced around players abusing the enemy AI in order to clear them. It makes me wonder whether there was a disconnect between the experience the level designers were trying to convey, and the practical reality in which playtesters were actually approaching these missions.
“We need to put more units in here, because we found it’s so easy to cheese in playtesting. But before we act on that feedback, is that aligned with the intended design of this level? Would another change work better, like a re-configured map layout or a change to pre-scheduled attack waves?”
The reason I think conversations like this are essential is that some of these issues are straight-forward to fix. Mongols #7, for example, could be swapped to trigger in buildings near each encampment instead of all together in the northeast corner. Hundred Years War #3 could feature lighter-weight raids at the start or provide the player with more starting units to clear encampments. I don’t think these are time-consuming fixes; but they do require a conversation that’s higher-level than, “does this scenario have bugs?”
I think the concrete suggestion I would make would be for level designers to make it clear to the teams of folks that work on this stuff what exact creative idea they’re trying to get across, and make sure they’re hearing feedback if that’s not how missions are playing out.
Keep It Creative
With the benefit of hindsight and rewatching my old VODs, I’m more and more impressed by the creativity underlying the Age 4 campaigns; their issues really come down to execution. Whether it’s whittling down the Polish army, crossing a fortified river bank, surrounding a town, defending a castle that’s under siege, setting up a trade route - there’s quite a lot of decent ideas in these missions. They might feel uncreative because they’re padded or repetitive or overscaled or poorly paced, but that doesn’t make the underlying ideas bad ones.
Tribute, for example, is a mission that bugs me due to how it’s overscaled. It’s a mess managing your units on its gigantic map. But when I pause to think about it, I’ve been asking for more missions around secondary economic mechanics like trading for years. The idea is a good one! The problem is implementation.
I think a lot of that comes down to the developers biting off a bit more than they could chew with Age 4’s initial launch. And I think The Sultans Ascend is a fantastic opportunity to course correct and ship something closer to their desired vision - even if that means scaling the vision back a bit to accommodate what’s actually possible, like simplifying triggers or making missions more compact or eliminating mission components like base building.
Age 4 has always felt to me like a labor love from the developers. I’d really love for Relic to take the gameplay to the next level to better reflect that. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they put together!
Until next time,
brownbear
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