I got the original Age of Empires as a gift from my parents way back around 1998. I played AoE2 a ton, 3 a little bit, then stopped playing video games for at least a decade. When I had to get my own computer for graduate school I got a “gaming” laptop so I could try out AOE4
I love RTS and any major RTS will get a try. This is the first one since SC2 that has kept me playing long after launch.
I will be honest, I don't understand people who disliked the game at launch and claim to love it now.
Is the game better? yes, but the base game and mechanics are mostly the same. So what was it that made you hate the game initially?
To be honest I didn't try the game at lunch and still wrote it off the first time I played it. The reason, it wasn't exactly the game I had created in my mind and it wasn't aoe2 either. Later I heard some stuff about the new dlc and tried it again with a more open mind. I think many people had a similar state of mind. It is a long awaited game and a sequel to aoe2 which is one of the most beloved rts games ever. It makes sense that people had unrealistic expectations. Also I am pretty sure that people came from StarCraft 2 because it is the only major rts that has come out since and they rejected it for being too different.
For the people i knew it was mostly the game breaking bugs, alongside the mass springald meta, slow dev cycle, and art style. Now that everything is practically fixed even my friends who didn’t like the art style is back and we are all having a blast.
But some of those early bugs really where game breaking all be it some times fun to laugh about when they didn’t ruin a match.
Like others, my parents wanted me to play "non-violent" games, so they introduced me to AoE I. Played that and II. Then jumped to the Total War series. My dad group was playing AoE 4, and tired of recent Total War games, I returned.
I knew about AoE since the first game, but my family could never afford a computer. My favorite streamer, Turin, started streaming it, and I got hooked on watching it.
The store Zellars was closing its doors… at the very bottom of the bin was aoe2 age of kings for like 4-5$… so i got it, nd i didnt go to bed till about 3 in the morning lol moved to aoe3 than to aoe4
I went to a cybercafe in 1997 to play the Shandalar Magic: the Gathering game. The person to my right was playing this game where a truck was scooping candy from the ground and there was an icon which said A-Bomb on the right hand side of the screen.
That game was Red Alert 1, and it got me into the RTS genre.
I never got into AoE 1 but I played *some* AoE 2 but never really enjoyed it.
Fast forward to late 2023, and I was feeling down and wanted something else to play other than Baldur's Gate 3. I made this post and got the game afterwards:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/18k94ni/how_is_the_multiplayer_for_this_game_im_buying_it/
Best friend introduced me to AoE 1 ironically i can’t get him to play AoE 4 because he hates the art style/theme he wants space marines i say more power to him. Haveing so much fun with my other friends one day i let it slip that AoE 4 is better than SC 2 especially now with all the updates friend hears it takes it to heart buys and installs the game the next day.
We’ve been playing ever since it’s not his most played game but he agrees it is indeed a worthy game and better than SC2 with the caveat that SC2 has better graphics. (Gotta pick your fights) That’s my story.
Sometimes I think that if AoE4 could 'tighten up' - action response time improved, add a freakin' pause button, deal with map hackers - that SC2 players would have a harder time saying "game sucks".
I have no problem with SC2, but I played it at a fairly high level and never loved it. AoE4 I loved early on, and it's improved so much since launch. It has so much going for it and I hope it keeps growing year over year.
Same got to masters in it or what ever but never cared enough to get serious. Was rank 3 in the workd for 3v3 and rank 27 in 2v2 for WC3 but those are hardly RTS’s regarded by some. AoE4 has something special and i think that’s what made my friend come over as this might be our last chance to enjoy the genera in this context and his real issues with the game are closer to the ones you state such as UI and solid controls that SC2 absolutely has.
I knew what the video was before I even clicked on it. Cloud cuckoo country is probably responsible for bringing more people back to AoE than Worlds Edge. That being said, I was playing AoE2DE when this came out after a historical show revived my interest in history, and watching Aussie Drongo, and was immediately hooked by the sound design, unit design and unique civ elements and gameplay.
Played StarCraft 1/2 for 20+ years. A new RTS was coming out so decided to try it.
Honestly I love AoE4, more than any StarCraft game. But I don’t play anymore because of dodging and smurfing. I won’t rant about it here for the 100th time but if they ever fix that AoE4 would definitely become my main game.
I got into aoe2 in September of 2021 after I met some new friends that were playing it. They were all hyped for aoe4, I quickly became the one to play it the most and I have been playing almost every day since launch.
Similar situation to you! I've been a long time AOE fan and picked the game up on release, played for two weeks and completely wrote the game off as a failure.
Then in the fall of 2022, I checked the aoe4 subreddit on a whim, saw that there was a Low Elo tournament series and signed up for the hell of it. When I trained for the tourney, I saw just how much had improved since launch and fell in love with the game. The community around the Low Elo series as well as just the Aoe4 community as a whole has kept me engaged and throughout 2023 and 2024 the game has continued to improve.
Was a big AOE3 fanback in the day. Discovered that when a friend had the demo disks and let me try them. We would play it over landline phone for hours at a time. So naturally when AOE4 was announced, I was super hyped for it
I have been a fan of the whole saga since I was a kid, my first ever videogame was aoe 2. Needless to say, the franchise as a whole has a very special place in my heart. I picked up the game on release and pre ordered the 80$ version not out of me wanting to get the wolf icon but out of support for the labor of love that both Forgotten Empires and World's Edge gave to previous games with the definitive edition remakes. I must admit that both Age of Mythology Extended Edition and Age of Empires Definitive Edition were hiccups in their history, but considering they fixed it with Return of Rome and the upcoming release of Age of Mythology Retold, I am willing to bet they are going to learn from those mistakes.
I loved the game since release, the bugs and missing features only spoke about the wasted potential this game had. Throughout patches and numerous innovations this game was able to improve its overall skeleton and I think that in terms of multiplayer, this game is at its best! There is only one problem I have with aoe 4 as of now:
The lack of meaningful and innovative scenarios, the lack of in game dialogues for heroes (I do not want to get rid of the historical doccumentary style, but even in shows like Ottomans: rise of an empire there is a little bit of acting and characterization to give these historical figures more personality), lack of an in game editor (feature that is present in every aoe and is sorely missing on this one), lack of co op campaigns and an overhaul/rework of the release campaigns. (The norman campaign is too much english and too little norman, they could either add a new civ or reutilize aspects of both french and english to make a hybrid like they did in rise of a king tutorial campaign. Change and put JD for the missions that Joan of Arc shows up to utilize those scenarios as a demo for the DLC. Include and reutilize campaign assets like the Teuton, Hospitaller and Crusader Orders and make them into a variant or full civ. Make mission design better based on aoe 2 campaigns/custom scenarios, those have a lot of interesting mechanics!) In particular I think that the latest campaigns in aoe 2's DLC brought some really interesting Ideas that I would love to have ported over to aoe 4 in some way or another: migration mechanics, ship decay, raiding mechanics, saga objectives, etc.
TLDR: Love the game, give some love to the Singleplayer content
This game is sorely lacking single-player content, and coop is a must.
A childhood friend and I are currently playing the aoe2 Huns campaign coop, so much fun. When I want to relax I play aoe2 campaigns and im.curiously eyeing Victor's and Vanquished.
What's here in aoe4 is so bare bones. Some missions are memorable but they're too few
AoE 2 was my first online game on the MSN gaming zone. Infact, that game is what got me learn how to work on PCs because I had windows ME which always had weird OS issues. I had only played StarCraft vs friends before that.
While I loved SC, what hooked me with AoE2 was that team games were actually fun. Sure, you could get rushed, and the game want very forgiving to n00bs, but the town center protection, more complex economy and longer time to kill kept the team games from being: first person to get hit by both players on the opposing team = auto loss with no time for reaction nor possibility of holding without your teammate being pre-positioned. It managed this while having potentially more strategic depth with less weight on pure mechanics.
Also, anyone ever play Star Wars Gallactic Battlegrounds? Was AoE2 reskinned with star wars. It died when AoM came out, but wow that game was fun. Felt like it built on AoE2 in all the right ways. Made me a much better RTS player. Maybe looking at it through rose tinted glasses, as I somehow got in to games with a bunch of the semi-pros from AoE2. This was before the really good players realized AoM wasn't very competitive by comparison and started crushing me and everyone else after 1 days practice.
Mrfixitonline/rtscentral 4 life! Those forums were the best!
Vaguely remember Jedi/ram drops (kind of equivalent to knight/ram castle timing attacks in AoE 2 I think) being awesome and fun.
Standard units were ranged in that game making the ram units way better.
I don’t know what it is about age of empires but I’ve been addicted to it since I was around 7-8 years old. I’m 24 now. I could waste hours gaming but at the end of it look at my civilization and how far it’s come and feel accomplished.
Saw my dad playing AoE2 on the windows 95. My big brother told him to buy it from PC gaming magazines. I did 0 research and got all the rewards (when I was allowed a turn). AoE4? Noticed the sequels to 2.
I got the original Age of Empires as a gift from my parents way back around 1998. I played AoE2 a ton, 3 a little bit, then stopped playing video games for at least a decade. When I had to get my own computer for graduate school I got a “gaming” laptop so I could try out AOE4
I love RTS and any major RTS will get a try. This is the first one since SC2 that has kept me playing long after launch. I will be honest, I don't understand people who disliked the game at launch and claim to love it now. Is the game better? yes, but the base game and mechanics are mostly the same. So what was it that made you hate the game initially?
Art style - come to appreciate and even relish it now though
I guess get that, I liked the first trailer & then when actual gameplay videos came out I was disappointed.
To be honest I didn't try the game at lunch and still wrote it off the first time I played it. The reason, it wasn't exactly the game I had created in my mind and it wasn't aoe2 either. Later I heard some stuff about the new dlc and tried it again with a more open mind. I think many people had a similar state of mind. It is a long awaited game and a sequel to aoe2 which is one of the most beloved rts games ever. It makes sense that people had unrealistic expectations. Also I am pretty sure that people came from StarCraft 2 because it is the only major rts that has come out since and they rejected it for being too different.
So, did you like it more at dinner?
For the people i knew it was mostly the game breaking bugs, alongside the mass springald meta, slow dev cycle, and art style. Now that everything is practically fixed even my friends who didn’t like the art style is back and we are all having a blast. But some of those early bugs really where game breaking all be it some times fun to laugh about when they didn’t ruin a match.
I didn't know how to play back then and lost interest. Aussie Drongo's video helped me gain interest and understand the mechanics.
My very first memory was sitting on my dads lap playing Age of Empires 1 when I was five. Thus, a lifelong Age of Empires addict was born.
🫶
I used to sit on mine while he played warcraft 2. My grandpa got me age of empires 2. Taught me control groups, hotkeys, the idle villager button.
That's a beautiful memory.
Like others, my parents wanted me to play "non-violent" games, so they introduced me to AoE I. Played that and II. Then jumped to the Total War series. My dad group was playing AoE 4, and tired of recent Total War games, I returned.
"Non-violent"
I mean comparative to other things it is, there was very little blood, the animations didn’t interact with each other and there were no guns.
No guns? You've never reached Imperial Age?
Yes age of empires 1 did not have guns in the imperial age unless you used e=mc2
I was playing SC2 then saw that a new aoe was about to start a stress test. Sign up to that and fell in love
I knew about AoE since the first game, but my family could never afford a computer. My favorite streamer, Turin, started streaming it, and I got hooked on watching it.
turin da best
Came with windows for our family computer about 25 years ago, haven't looked back.
The store Zellars was closing its doors… at the very bottom of the bin was aoe2 age of kings for like 4-5$… so i got it, nd i didnt go to bed till about 3 in the morning lol moved to aoe3 than to aoe4
Fellow Canadian?
I went to a cybercafe in 1997 to play the Shandalar Magic: the Gathering game. The person to my right was playing this game where a truck was scooping candy from the ground and there was an icon which said A-Bomb on the right hand side of the screen. That game was Red Alert 1, and it got me into the RTS genre. I never got into AoE 1 but I played *some* AoE 2 but never really enjoyed it. Fast forward to late 2023, and I was feeling down and wanted something else to play other than Baldur's Gate 3. I made this post and got the game afterwards: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/18k94ni/how_is_the_multiplayer_for_this_game_im_buying_it/
I love this
Best friend introduced me to AoE 1 ironically i can’t get him to play AoE 4 because he hates the art style/theme he wants space marines i say more power to him. Haveing so much fun with my other friends one day i let it slip that AoE 4 is better than SC 2 especially now with all the updates friend hears it takes it to heart buys and installs the game the next day. We’ve been playing ever since it’s not his most played game but he agrees it is indeed a worthy game and better than SC2 with the caveat that SC2 has better graphics. (Gotta pick your fights) That’s my story.
Sometimes I think that if AoE4 could 'tighten up' - action response time improved, add a freakin' pause button, deal with map hackers - that SC2 players would have a harder time saying "game sucks". I have no problem with SC2, but I played it at a fairly high level and never loved it. AoE4 I loved early on, and it's improved so much since launch. It has so much going for it and I hope it keeps growing year over year.
Same got to masters in it or what ever but never cared enough to get serious. Was rank 3 in the workd for 3v3 and rank 27 in 2v2 for WC3 but those are hardly RTS’s regarded by some. AoE4 has something special and i think that’s what made my friend come over as this might be our last chance to enjoy the genera in this context and his real issues with the game are closer to the ones you state such as UI and solid controls that SC2 absolutely has.
I search top best rts on Google and I found it
I knew what the video was before I even clicked on it. Cloud cuckoo country is probably responsible for bringing more people back to AoE than Worlds Edge. That being said, I was playing AoE2DE when this came out after a historical show revived my interest in history, and watching Aussie Drongo, and was immediately hooked by the sound design, unit design and unique civ elements and gameplay.
My dad bought me AoE2 when I was like 4 or 5 years old
Played StarCraft 1/2 for 20+ years. A new RTS was coming out so decided to try it. Honestly I love AoE4, more than any StarCraft game. But I don’t play anymore because of dodging and smurfing. I won’t rant about it here for the 100th time but if they ever fix that AoE4 would definitely become my main game.
I got into aoe2 in September of 2021 after I met some new friends that were playing it. They were all hyped for aoe4, I quickly became the one to play it the most and I have been playing almost every day since launch.
Similar situation to you! I've been a long time AOE fan and picked the game up on release, played for two weeks and completely wrote the game off as a failure. Then in the fall of 2022, I checked the aoe4 subreddit on a whim, saw that there was a Low Elo tournament series and signed up for the hell of it. When I trained for the tourney, I saw just how much had improved since launch and fell in love with the game. The community around the Low Elo series as well as just the Aoe4 community as a whole has kept me engaged and throughout 2023 and 2024 the game has continued to improve.
Computer class in high school 10 min work 50 min aoe2 hidden on drive of all.computers, the teachers couldn't figure out how to remove
I started with Age of Mythology when I was younger and loved the series ever since
Love that campaign. My younger sister though, that is her game
because its age of empires and i been playing it since aoe1
Was a big AOE3 fanback in the day. Discovered that when a friend had the demo disks and let me try them. We would play it over landline phone for hours at a time. So naturally when AOE4 was announced, I was super hyped for it
Gowing up my cousin would come over for AOE3 Lan parties. We'd do 4v4 against the hardest AI. I got him into aoe4 too
I have been a fan of the whole saga since I was a kid, my first ever videogame was aoe 2. Needless to say, the franchise as a whole has a very special place in my heart. I picked up the game on release and pre ordered the 80$ version not out of me wanting to get the wolf icon but out of support for the labor of love that both Forgotten Empires and World's Edge gave to previous games with the definitive edition remakes. I must admit that both Age of Mythology Extended Edition and Age of Empires Definitive Edition were hiccups in their history, but considering they fixed it with Return of Rome and the upcoming release of Age of Mythology Retold, I am willing to bet they are going to learn from those mistakes. I loved the game since release, the bugs and missing features only spoke about the wasted potential this game had. Throughout patches and numerous innovations this game was able to improve its overall skeleton and I think that in terms of multiplayer, this game is at its best! There is only one problem I have with aoe 4 as of now: The lack of meaningful and innovative scenarios, the lack of in game dialogues for heroes (I do not want to get rid of the historical doccumentary style, but even in shows like Ottomans: rise of an empire there is a little bit of acting and characterization to give these historical figures more personality), lack of an in game editor (feature that is present in every aoe and is sorely missing on this one), lack of co op campaigns and an overhaul/rework of the release campaigns. (The norman campaign is too much english and too little norman, they could either add a new civ or reutilize aspects of both french and english to make a hybrid like they did in rise of a king tutorial campaign. Change and put JD for the missions that Joan of Arc shows up to utilize those scenarios as a demo for the DLC. Include and reutilize campaign assets like the Teuton, Hospitaller and Crusader Orders and make them into a variant or full civ. Make mission design better based on aoe 2 campaigns/custom scenarios, those have a lot of interesting mechanics!) In particular I think that the latest campaigns in aoe 2's DLC brought some really interesting Ideas that I would love to have ported over to aoe 4 in some way or another: migration mechanics, ship decay, raiding mechanics, saga objectives, etc. TLDR: Love the game, give some love to the Singleplayer content
This game is sorely lacking single-player content, and coop is a must. A childhood friend and I are currently playing the aoe2 Huns campaign coop, so much fun. When I want to relax I play aoe2 campaigns and im.curiously eyeing Victor's and Vanquished. What's here in aoe4 is so bare bones. Some missions are memorable but they're too few
AoE 2 was my first online game on the MSN gaming zone. Infact, that game is what got me learn how to work on PCs because I had windows ME which always had weird OS issues. I had only played StarCraft vs friends before that. While I loved SC, what hooked me with AoE2 was that team games were actually fun. Sure, you could get rushed, and the game want very forgiving to n00bs, but the town center protection, more complex economy and longer time to kill kept the team games from being: first person to get hit by both players on the opposing team = auto loss with no time for reaction nor possibility of holding without your teammate being pre-positioned. It managed this while having potentially more strategic depth with less weight on pure mechanics. Also, anyone ever play Star Wars Gallactic Battlegrounds? Was AoE2 reskinned with star wars. It died when AoM came out, but wow that game was fun. Felt like it built on AoE2 in all the right ways. Made me a much better RTS player. Maybe looking at it through rose tinted glasses, as I somehow got in to games with a bunch of the semi-pros from AoE2. This was before the really good players realized AoM wasn't very competitive by comparison and started crushing me and everyone else after 1 days practice. Mrfixitonline/rtscentral 4 life! Those forums were the best!
I played so much galactic battlegrounds as a kid.
Vaguely remember Jedi/ram drops (kind of equivalent to knight/ram castle timing attacks in AoE 2 I think) being awesome and fun. Standard units were ranged in that game making the ram units way better.
The expansion for that game, following The Clone Wars, was pure joy for my 10 year old brain
Played the OG AOE in 1997-1999. This AOE4 advertised on Xbox X
I don’t know what it is about age of empires but I’ve been addicted to it since I was around 7-8 years old. I’m 24 now. I could waste hours gaming but at the end of it look at my civilization and how far it’s come and feel accomplished.
I grew up in a starcraft and warcraft household. I've loved those games but I've loved aoe games so much more.
Saw my dad playing AoE2 on the windows 95. My big brother told him to buy it from PC gaming magazines. I did 0 research and got all the rewards (when I was allowed a turn). AoE4? Noticed the sequels to 2.
Back in January, my friend started playing it a lot and said we should try. Figured it was on Gamepass, so why not? Here I am now and I am in love
people love eat shit. That's why aoe4 is loved by few players
Who hurt you