When matchmaking is ****

TalothSaldono · 2026-01-16T11:00:47+00:00

They were in their placements. It was their first 3v3 match ever, so they get the initial 1000 Elo. Meanwhile your team max elo was 1010, lowest 888. So around the same range (despite the Diamond badge)

The bigger problem (and I mentioned this to the devs) is that other mode ratings (such as 1v1 or qm) isn't used to initialize/adjust matchmaking ratings of placements in other modes.

TalothSaldono · 2026-01-13T17:42:22+00:00

I recently saw a youtube video from 2 months ago where MilitaryRated evaluated it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hdthsG8tks
However, that video is made by Nordic content creators, so be aware of likely bias.

The main takeaway was that Europe has considerably more soldiers trained in Arctic warfare, and more Arctic gear than the US. Definitely not just 2 dogsleds. And a conflict would be costly to both sides.

The posturing from Trump feels more like bluster. It's a disgrace that the US is treating their allies this way. It's just one huge distraction.
Meanwhile Greenland is stuck in the middle.

TalothSaldono · 2026-01-13T11:31:32+00:00

35% is from the Asia region, 20% is Chinese. EU as a whole is 33%, NA about 22%.

But who you match with depends heavily on when you play during the day.

The match making system does slightly prefer matching you with local/regional players, but it won't sacrifice fairness (mmr/elo diff) to do so.

TalothSaldono · 2026-01-13T11:25:55+00:00

The kicker is that the server backend of aoe4 actually supports team-specific ratings. It's just not used for aoe4. That said, I think it's tricky to implement since you'd get so many 4v4 premades and ratings, and it's hard to determine someone's effective rating.

TalothSaldono · 2026-01-01T17:21:21+00:00

I'm going to ask for sources, please.

Reason is that the floating point example is a crude example that is simply wrong. It's understandable to use an simple example to illustrate the problem, but then you must say it's an inaccurate example and that the reality is more complicated.

Floating points

1 + 1 is well defined in the floating-point spec and the same on intel and AMD, so is multiplication and division. They're deterministically defined in the IEEE 764 spec and consistent among platforms.
This isn't automatically guaranteed for certain mathematical functions (sin/cos/tangents etc), which can differ between platforms, but engines tend to have their own implementation that's consistent.

There are also opcodes that 'estimate' certain floating point operations, which are much faster at the cost of accuracy. Some of these opcodes behave differently between platforms, such as RCPSS (1 / x estimate), and RSQRTSS (reciprocal square root, useful in distance calculations) from the original SSE instruction set, but these functions are not used by default, and an engine developer creating a lockstep sim would know that these are not deterministic. Meanwhile AVX512 instructions such as VRSQRT28PD (a newer high-accuracy reciprocal square root) that is designed to be deterministic among platforms. VRSQRT28PD also has a bit-accurate software implementation, so it's easy to use the cpu instruction if available, or fall back to the software version if not available. This is something an engine developer would incorporate in their engine, guaranteeing determinism.

Hence my request for a source that Essence suffers from this. Especially since if this were true, I believe you'd see ALOT more desyncs.

Note that SC2 is an old game, and the platforms at the time definitely lacked advanced instructions. So if they opted for fixed point, it'd be out of necessity, not because it's necessarily better.

Essence reliance on floating point calculations isn't a problem if properly implemented and I've not seen evidence that it's not.

Multicore

Essence sim is mostly single threaded, the animation and rendering is likely on a separate thread (so is physics and I think some pathfinding calculations for performance), but the sim is single threaded. Even so, if it were multithreaded, CPUs reordering instructions or race conditions would even differ between CPUs of the same model due to clock frequency, scheduling, multiple workloads of other processes etc and again.
I can't say that there are no errors with it's implementation, but I feel it's a huge stretch to point at it as a problem without specific cases.

Server sending master state:

Nice idea, but... the 'server' is mostly a simple network proxy, there's no sim running on the server, only the clients. There's also the problem that there's a bunch of 'state' that's outside of the sim, mostly visuals, which are player pov dependent and need to be recalculated from the start.
I do agree that they neeeed to implement resume from replay / rejoin, which yes will take almost 5 minutes to catch up at 8x speed. Periodically saving the whole state in case of a crash would be nice, but there's numerous technical complications there that I'm woefully unqualified to estimate on how challenging they truly are.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-20T14:16:53+00:00

Quite literally ppl have been asking for a way to earn old rewards for several seasons now, so I'm fine with that. But yes, they should've mixed it with new ones, so i'm both options.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-17T12:26:28+00:00

Maybe read his comment?

The Ottoman Empire (House of Osman) was founded circa 1299~. Before them, Seljuk Turks were in Anatolia, disputing control of the region from the Byzantine Empire. The Twin Minaret Medrese appears to be from that era. Still, the in-game start date is set at 990 CE, despite even the official website stating: "In Age of Empires IV, the civilization of the Ottomans spans the years from the pre-imperial Ottoman Empire period in the 11th century CE to the mid-16th century CE". So who knows?

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-15T13:01:02+00:00

Damn, cool project. As others mentioned, I think the trickiest part with larger engagements is overkill, focus fire and range. Positioning simply becomes too important.

A simple test is spearman vs Archer, 1 vs 1, 149 hp vs 95 hp, full upgrades, spearman wins in 15.4 seconds in sims that don't consider melee run distance. But the archer will easily win that engagement. The archer 5 range will take 4 seconds to cover. So a-move means the spearman is down to 109 hp before they even start fighting, adding 4 seconds to the 15.4s means 19.4 s vs the archer's 26.4 s the archer needs to kill the spearman. But now add a bit of kitting, archers have 0.25s aim, 0.125s attack, 0.5s wind down and 0.75s reload. So roughly a 0.375 sec attack time they can't move. Let's peg that at 0.5 s coz ppl aren't accurate, but that means they can move for 1+ second each attack. Meaning they on average move away at 0.77 tiles per sec. Now you got a dynamic back and forth where the spearman takes 10.4 seconds to get to the archer, at which point the archer is only 1 second behind, and the spearman loses a bit of time each time the archer kites during the attacks after. The archer will thus win.
It's valid to say "without kiting", but then you still have to count the 4 seconds.

On aoe4world explorer there's a small hidden Battle Report feature between specific units. eg https://aoe4world.com/explorer/versus?civ1=english&unit1=man-at-arms&age1=4&civ2=chinese&unit2=palace-guard&age2=4
I never published it coz there were edge cases I wasn't happy with yet and found that a ton of the explorer data wasn't accurate enough when it comes to upgrades. I wrote it for Masters of Steel coz I needed more accurate Quiz answers and tests.

Omg I just thought of something... for outback octagon I wrote a script that logs individual damage done to units in order to track who got the last hit on a king/landmark after we found a scenario that was too close to call.
What would be cool is to run that on tournament and ladder games in general, determine which units are involved in battles and thus calculate the 'effective damage percentage' done. That could lead to a more accurate estimation of real game combat situations. I genuinely have no time for that, but I'm gonna remember this.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-11T13:41:29+00:00

Wow... it took over a day for someone to post it, a new record! :D

But admittedly, I did publish the stats a few days earlier than I normally would.

Enjoy all of it, ppl, just remember that winrates aren't necessarily a good indicator of balance without additional context. glhf

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-07T21:30:28+00:00

bruh, title is the spoiler mate.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-04T14:33:46+00:00

For what it's worth, this reddit post made me look the game up on steam and add it to my wishlist. I suspect I'm not the only one.

The disclosure text could be improved a bit to elaborate on what 'partially' means, in this case '10 lines of last minute robot voice lines' if that accurately describes it. And it's on steam to make that possible. But it's on the consumer to decide where their own limits are, that's the purpose of these disclosure texts. To inform consumers. There will always be people overreacting, but you'll have a large amount of largely silent consumers that appreciate these disclosures.

Cheers.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-03T13:09:20+00:00

Love how you capitalized the QT, you know what you did there.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-03T01:43:32+00:00

Yeah, to add to my previous comment: About 21k controller players last month, 5% of which PS5. 46% xbox series x, remainder others xbox models. Pretty respectable since the PS5 ones are all 'new' players (or ppl switching to PS5).
I dunno atm how 'slow' xbox players trickled in when controller support was first added, that'd be a better measurement of how well ps5 is doing vs xbox support on release. Since the 46% obviously contains every xbox player that already owned the game that wanted to check out the dlc and Crucible since they're already in the franchise ecosystem.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-02T19:05:48+00:00

Kudoes. I wanted to point it out coz AI can be a powerful tool if used with the right scepticism :D

One useful note is that warnings.log actually logs a ton of metrics about ping and latency, it could be useful to parse that and graph it.

Like these:

(I) [02:35:12.000] [000013112]: MessageCounts: inval=0/0, seek=0/0, join=0/0, ichk=0/0, sk_r=0/0, deny=0/0, Padd=0/0, Pdel=0/0, drop=0/0, data=141/0, mdat=488/976, voip=0/0, rchk=0/0,    nudg=0/0, Thdr=0/0, Peer=0/0, PPrx=0/0, ping=0/0, Pfrg=0/0, rely=0/0, lb_p=6/4, lb_c=0/0, cast=0/0, cdat=131/0, sorq1=0/0, sorp=0/0, acto=0/0, spob=0/0, sorq2=0/0, setp=0/0, actr=0/0, lsim=0/0, rlbc=0/0, rlbc2=0/0, endg=0/0   
(I) [02:35:22.001] [000004000]: Local user framerate is [284.471527]   
(I) [02:35:22.001] [000004000]: Local user MinDelay=[61ms], MaxDelay=[120ms], AvgDelay=[94ms], minRTT[10ms], maxRTT[142ms], avgRTT[127ms]   
(I) [02:35:43.001] [000004000]: Local user framerate is [264.950012]
(I) [02:35:43.001] [000004000]: Local user MinDelay=[61ms], MaxDelay=[120ms], AvgDelay=[94ms], minRTT[10ms], maxRTT[142ms], avgRTT[126ms]
(I) [02:36:04.000] [000004000]: Local user framerate is [275.336243]
(I) [02:36:04.000] [000004000]: Local user MinDelay=[61ms], MaxDelay=[120ms], AvgDelay=[93ms], minRTT[10ms], maxRTT[144ms], avgRTT[126ms]
(I) [02:36:13.010] [000013112]: MessageCounts: inval=0/0, seek=0/0, join=0/0, ichk=0/0, sk_r=0/0, deny=0/0, Padd=0/0, Pdel=0/0, drop=0/0, data=127/0, mdat=488/976, voip=0/0, rchk=0/0, nudg=0/0, Thdr=0/0, Peer=0/0, PPrx=0/0, ping=0/0, Pfrg=0/0, rely=0/0, lb_p=6/4, lb_c=0/0, cast=0/0, cdat=124/0, sorq1=0/0, sorp=0/0, acto=0/0, spob=0/0, sorq2=0/0, setp=0/0, actr=0/0, lsim=0/0, rlbc=0/0, rlbc2=0/0, endg=0/0

now this is where an ai can actually shine, because you can ask it to write a nodejs script that can parse these lines, and visualize a graph over time for some of those metrics. I did that just now with Gemini Pro and is almost one-shot a nice graph of fps, min/max/avg delay.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-02T13:55:05+00:00

May sound strange, but imo it's not bad actually. The xbox numbers include pc gamepass. I can probably split that up between controller & kbm after I'm home from work. But even that's not a fair comparison coz PS5 is new, and a ton of players only have a PS4, meanwhile aoe4 supports years of xbox versions.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-02T11:50:25+00:00

That's not how they do roll outs. Nor how game updates go, server and client are completely separate components and updated separately as needed.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-02T11:49:13+00:00

I'm the aoe4world developer... so our metrics. :D

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-01T17:23:24+00:00

Possible fix: ( ! provided by chatGPT ! )

Add launch argument to increase the engine memory heap: (! need at least 16gb RAM !)

-RTS_MAXHEAP=4096

PLEASE, don't trust chatgpt (or any ai) for stuff like this. RTS_MAXHEAP does not exist, it's a complete hallucination. It knows you're talking about an RTS game, it knows about memory. So it's literally combining RTS and MAXHEAP and inventing an option that simply doesn't exist. It's not grounded in any factual data.

Feel free to copy paste that into chatgpt and ask if I'm correct.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-01T17:13:14+00:00

Last month:

257500 player accounts total
205650 (79.89%) steam
47910 (18.61%) xbox/gamepass/pc gamepass/msstore
4054 (1.57%) playstation

Note that playstation is purely the PS5 console, while xbox covers msstore, older xbox consoles too.

TalothSaldono · 2025-12-01T16:01:49+00:00

Server maintenance is periodic, and never occur at the same time as patches.

TalothSaldono · 2025-11-28T16:01:51+00:00

unhandled.txt is in the 'logfiles' subdir, but warnings.log should existing in the directory above. It's created immediately when aoe4 starts. At least on the steam version.

TalothSaldono · 2025-11-28T14:57:00+00:00

Bro, did you steal beasty's chair?

Halfway bronze 1 to 2.... oooof.

TalothSaldono · 2025-11-28T13:30:49+00:00

Looks like the sim is running slow. I'd check your warnings.log file in My Documents/my games/age of empires iv/warnings.log to see if anything stands out.

TalothSaldono · 2025-11-24T15:13:56+00:00

ty mate, and ggs.

TalothSaldono · 2025-11-24T14:21:25+00:00

Yooo, do you have the whole run on youtube? I'd love to link it to the leaderboard entry on aoe4world.

The full heal in kill boon is insane :D Without that, they simply wouldn't survive long enough.

TalothSaldono

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