Age of Empires IV — Stress Test 1st Match Review

I’m a huge fan of the Age of Empires series. I have all the versions of the game and play AOE2 with my kids almost every weekend. You can imagine how excited I was that AOE4 is coming out. Age of Empires IV had a technical stress today. Basically, anyone can play it for free so I decided to give a shot. My first match Age of Empires IV was a 2 humans vs 2 AI (intermediate). We lost, but here’s what I learned so far:

1. It seems like only scouts can get sheep. A sheep will automatically follow a scout at great speed. Once you’ve acquired a sheep, you can have it stop following the scout but it will move much slower. If a sheep follows a scout, more can join until you’ve got a whole train of sheep following a scout. Sheep stealing is hilarious and fun.

2. The way to advance from age to age is by building landmarks and building wings within those landmarks. This was very confusing and resulted in us not advancing to Feudal age until very late. By the time we advanced, the AI was already in Imperial age. We got whomped to say the least!

3. You can win a game by destroying all of the opponent’s landmarks, capturing a sacred site for like 10 minutes or building a wonder. All my villagers were wiped out and my town center, yet the game continued until the sacred site capture expired.