Earlier this month, I played through the Yue Fei’s Legacy DLC for Age of Empires IV. I’ve had a lot of criticism for AoE4’s direction since launch and had all but lost hope for the game, but I enjoyed this DLC quite a bit.

The campaign starts out a bit slow, but halfway through it really turns around. That fits narratively; you start out with Song China on the backfoot, and only later they begin to push back against the Jin. The mission design reflects this.

I feel like the latter missions of the campaign are built with a real understanding of why we play these kind of games: Big maps, big armies, big fights. There’s enough twists to each mission to keep them feeling fresh, but they don’t stray too far from the core Age of Empires gameplay.

I particularly enjoyed the Siege of De’an mission. I’m not generally a huge fan of gunpowder units in these games, but nests of bees are super fun, and there are few things in life more satisfying than an RTS mission where waves of enemies slowly march into your heavily fortified chokepoints. It’s simple, but it works, damn it.

I didn’t find the story quite as compelling as Sultans Ascend’s, but it’s still pretty solid. I like the animated cutscenes, and the addition of in-mission dialogue is welcome. Overall, a very solid campaign.

This was my first time picking up AoE4 in quite a while, and I was immediately struck by just how good the game feels to play. It’s a shame it’s languished for so long with content droughts and mismanagement because the actual nuts and bolts of the game are truly stellar. The sound design, the feel of how units control… it’s so much better than the other AoE games on that level.

After everyone had fully convinced themselves that the Jin Dynasty was a truly new civilization, it turns out they are classed as a variant of the Chinese after all, but as probably the world’s biggest hater of variant civilizations… I’m okay with this one.

The Jin address pretty much all of my complaints with variants. They’re a major polity and ethnic group, not just a minor faction like Order of the Dragon or some weird fan fic like whatever Zhu Xi’s Legacy is supposed to be. They have very distinct mechanics from their base civilization without feeling too weird or out there. They’re basically a new civilization that just happens to share a few assets with the Chinese.

They’re the first variant I’ve actually played, and they’re pretty fun. They’ve got some strategic diversity with strong support for both cavalry and gunpowder. They feel like the launch civilizations; different enough to be interesting, but familiar enough to be easy to learn.

If all variants were like this, I wouldn’t have developed such a disdain for the concept.

Yue Fei’s Legacy also came with further tweaks to the skirmish AI, something that has been an ongoing struggle since launch. I decided to give it yet another try, and after five years, I would say it’s finally in a functional state.

The AI is definitely still a bit janky. It macros pretty well, but it has a tendency to just wander its army around the map seemingly at random. I’ve seen it retreat from fights it was winning. But if you crank it up to “hardest,” it’s good enough to actually get some decent enjoyment out of.

I ended up sinking quite a few hours into skirmishes over a couple weeks. I started out doing 1v1s, but I’ve been finding 2v2 with an AI ally can make for some very fun, protracted brawls. It’s right at the sweet spot of difficulty where I usually win, but it’s not a 100% certainty (I just got my ass beaten in by the French while playing some Abbasids earlier today).

My most memorial match to date was one where the opponents ganged up on my ally early in the game, crippling their economy to the point they never made it out of the Feudal Age the entire game. This left me playing effectively 1v2.

The timeline really tells a story.

Not only did I almost lose, I almost lost in every possible way you can lose. I was brought to the brink of defeat militarily several times. The enemy AI got within striking distance of sacred victories on more than one occasion. One opponent got within literal seconds of a wonder victory before I managed to carve my way through their base and snipe the wonder.

Eventually, I stabilized enough to build a proper death ball and start snowballing. I was playing as Delhi Sultanate (probably my favourite AoE4 civ), and it turns out there aren’t many problems twenty elephants can’t solve. I managed to eek out a sacred victory; by that point one opponent had been all but annihilated, but the other was still putting up a non-trivial resistance. A landmark victory would have been possible, but sacred happened first.

I still think there’s a lot of room for improvement in AoE4’s skirmishes and single-player experience in general, but things are a lot better now than they have been in the past. I do want to try the Crucible as well, but it doesn’t seem like enough content to justify the price of the DLC considering it otherwise only includes variant civilizations that mostly don’t interest me. Hopefully a large enough discount will come someday.

I think it’s a bit too early to declare this the start of a redemption arc for AoE4, but Yue Fei’s Legacy is definitely a solid step in the right direction after a lot of floundering.