Age of Empires IV: The revival that respected the original

Relic Entertainment released Age of Empires IV on 28 October 2021, and the fact that it exists at all was never a sure thing. Age of Empires III (2005) had pushed the series into a Colonial-era setting with home-city card decks and a different economic model, and Microsoft’s own Age of Empires Online (2011) experiment folded within two years. A decade separated Age of Empires III’s last expansion from Age of Empires IV’s release, and the series spent most of that decade looking like a franchise waiting for someone to decide it was worth reviving. Relic — the studio behind Company of Heroes and Homeworld, not the original Ensemble Studios team that made Age of Empires II, which had been folded into Microsoft and dissolved by 2009 — took on the job, and the choice that mattered most wasn’t a mechanic. It was a return to the medieval historical setting Age of Empires II made famous, after Age of Empires III’s Colonial detour.

Civilizations built around a real asymmetry

Age of Empires IV launched with eight civilizations — the English, French, Holy Roman Empire, Rus, Mongols, Chinese, Delhi Sultanate, and Abbasid Dynasty — and later expansions added the Byzantines, Japanese, Ottomans, Zhu Xi’s Legacy factions, and Ayyubids among others. What matters is how differently each civilization is actually built rather than how many there are. The Chinese have a dynasty system that lets a player choose a research path through the game rather than a fixed tech tree, trading flexibility for a slower start. The Mongols can pack up and relocate their entire base, making them the only civilization in the game without a truly fixed home. The Delhi Sultanate researches technology for free over time simply by having scholars stationed in buildings, removing the resource cost that governs every other civilization’s tech choices.

This is a more aggressive asymmetry than even Age of Empires II’s civilization bonuses attempt, because Age of Empires II’s civilizations still share the same fundamental rules — same ages, same resource types, same building logic — with bonuses layered on top. Age of Empires IV’s civilizations sometimes break the shared ruleset outright, which raises the design stakes considerably: a civilization that plays by fundamentally different rules can end up feeling unfair rather than distinct if the underlying balance isn’t watched closely, and Relic has had to walk that line through several years of post-launch patches.

The English and French landmark system deserves a mention too, because it replaces the fixed wonder-building of earlier Age of Empires games with a genuine branching choice at every age-up: instead of one obligatory Town Centre-style structure, each civilization picks between two or three landmark buildings per age, each granting a distinct bonus and unlocking different units or technologies. Choosing the White Tower over the Council Hall as the English commits an entire game plan toward archer-focused aggression or toward an economic and defensive posture, a genuinely consequential decision rather than a cosmetic one, and that choice happens fresh every age-up, meaning a single match can see a player pivot strategy three or four times based on what the opponent’s scouting reveals.

Siege warfare gets its weight back

The single biggest thing Age of Empires IV does better than its own genre ancestors is siege combat. Trebuchets and mangonels in Age of Empires IV have genuine arc physics and splash damage that punishes clustering, and stone walls actually function as a real obstacle rather than a speed bump — a walled town in Age of Empires IV can hold off an army many times its size if the besieging player doesn’t bring the right siege composition, in a way that rewards the same kind of fortification thinking that made mediaeval warfare what it actually was. It’s the clearest evidence in the game that Relic’s team studied actual military history rather than just genre convention when building the combat systems, and it gives Age of Empires IV’s late game a texture — protracted sieges, actual breach points, garrison decisions — that most modern RTS games skip in favour of faster, more spectacle-driven combat.

Fire also behaves as a genuine tactical tool rather than a cosmetic effect: flaming projectiles and torch-wielding units can set wooden structures alight, and a burning building continues taking damage after the attacking unit has moved on, which means a raid on an undefended economy can do lingering damage well past the moment the raiding force retreats. Combined with the game’s willingness to let stone walls hold under a genuinely under-resourced siege, the result is a combat model where fortification and demolition read as opposite ends of the same coherent system, rather than two separate mechanics bolted together for variety.

The visual style argument, settled sensibly

Age of Empires IV drew an unusual amount of pre-release criticism over its art style, which leaned toward a more painterly, slightly cartoonish look than the gritty realism of the 2017 announcement trailer had promised. Relic’s actual justification, borne out by three years of play, holds up: a real-time strategy game where dozens of units cluster on screen at once needs silhouette clarity above photorealism, and Age of Empires IV’s units read at a glance in a way a grittier, more textured art style would muddy at the zoom level most matches are actually played at. It’s the same lesson StarCraft II learned with its own stylised-over-realistic unit design, and Age of Empires IV arrived at the same conclusion independently, for the same functional reason.

The documentary layer

Age of Empires IV shipped with an unusual feature for the genre: full historical documentary segments narrated between campaign missions, produced with actual historians on camera discussing the real events the mission is based on. It’s a strange thing to find bolted onto an RTS campaign, and it works better than it has any right to, because it gives context to decisions the mission itself simplifies for playability — a siege that takes forty real minutes to resolve historically compressed into a fifteen-minute mission benefits enormously from a historian explaining what the compression left out.

Expansions widen the map rather than the mechanics

Relic’s post-launch support has followed a consistent pattern: the Anniversary Edition update in October 2023 added the Byzantines and Japanese alongside a visual and performance overhaul, and the Knights of Cross and Rose expansion later added the Order of the Ascension faction alongside the Ottomans and Zhu Xi’s Legacy content, expanding both the historical scope and the civilization roster without touching the core age-up and villager systems that anchor the game. That restraint mirrors the approach the Definitive Edition team took with Age of Empires II — new content arrives through public beta testing before it reaches the live game, specifically so a new civilization doesn’t blindside a competitive scene that’s built years of practised knowledge around the existing roster.

The Japanese civilization is a useful example of how Relic keeps finding new mechanical space within an established ruleset: rather than a flat bonus package, it introduces a Castle system built around emplacements that project defensive power onto surrounding land tiles, giving the civilization a genuinely different relationship to territory than the direct-control armies most other factions rely on. It’s a smaller, more contained kind of novelty than the base game’s Mongol relocation trick, but it shows Relic is still finding fresh angles on the shared ruleset years after launch rather than just re-skinning existing bonus templates onto new civilization names.

A competitive scene still finding its shape

Age of Empires IV’s esports scene has grown steadily rather than exploding, and that’s arguably appropriate for a game competing directly with a twenty-five-year-old sibling that already has an entrenched professional circuit. Several top Age of Empires II professionals crossed over to play Age of Empires IV competitively, bringing an audience with them, and tournament organisers have increasingly run the two games alongside each other on the same broadcast weekends rather than treating them as rival products competing for the same attention. That coexistence says something about how differently the two games actually play despite the shared DNA — a spectator can watch an Age of Empires II villager rush and an Age of Empires IV siege-focused Holy Roman Empire game back to back without either feeling redundant against the other.

Where the revival still feels careful rather than bold

The honest critique of Age of Empires IV, three years into its post-launch life, is that it plays a shade too safely with the template Age of Empires II established. The core economy loop — villagers, four resources, an age-up clock — is close enough to its predecessor that a longtime Age of Empires II player can sit down and be competitive within an hour, which is a deliberate design choice and a commercially sound one, but it also means Age of Empires IV hasn’t yet produced a single mechanic as genuinely novel as villager-based economic micro was in 1999. The civilization asymmetries are the game’s real innovation, and everything else is a careful, well-executed refinement of a quarter-century-old formula rather than a reinvention of it.

That’s a defensible trade-off rather than a flaw. A studio reviving a beloved series after a decade of missteps has every reason to prioritise feeling right over feeling new, and Age of Empires IV’s active tournament scene and steady post-launch civilization additions suggest Relic judged that trade-off correctly. The game is available on PC and, notably, launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass — a distribution choice that gave it a far larger install base at launch than a traditional RTS release would typically see.

Spoilers below

The campaign content worth knowing before playing: the Hundred Years War campaign follows both English and French perspectives across separate mission chains rather than picking a single hero to root for throughout, and the closing missions deliberately avoid framing either side’s eventual outcome as a clean triumph — the campaign’s final documentary segment spends as much time on the war’s civilian cost as on any battlefield resolution. The Mongol Empire campaign’s structure is worth flagging too: several missions end on a Mongol victory that the following mission’s documentary segment immediately complicates with the human cost of the conquest just completed, a deliberate structural choice that keeps the campaign from reading as straightforward triumphalism about a historical empire built substantially through conquest and destruction.