AoE4 at ZLAN: great idea, terrible execution
There’s a French event happening this weekend called the ZLAN, a LAN organized by one of the biggest French content creators and event organizers: Zerator.
This year, Age of Empires IV is included, and when I heard about it, I was really excited to see AoE on such a big event. But honestly, the format and rules they chose are terrible.
First, there are 100 duos (so 200 players total). The format is FFA, but teammates are not even in the same game. Every 5 minutes, players have to stand up and switch seats with their teammate. That part is fine I guess—ZLAN is known for chaotic rules—but the second rule completely ruins it:
At 45 minutes, the game just ends, and the player with the highest score wins.
This completely kills the whole point of FFA. Everyone just camps and masses units to inflate their score, without ever attacking each other, since there’s absolutely no reason to attack—it would just make you lose score. Even more, it’s well known in Age of Empires that you should never rely on score, because it doesn’t really mean much.
Obviously, Chinese players had an advantage since they can build 6 landmarks, which boosts their score even more.
Later in the event, when fewer players remained, it switched to 2v2 Nomad—but with the same time limit and score-based win condition. These ended up being some of the least interesting AoE games I’ve ever seen.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse about the event, I just came out of it pretty disappointed .AoE4 format turned FFA into a passive score-farming simulator...