Age of Empires IV features two new launch civilizations, a newly revealed campaign, naval combat, and Joan of Arc.

The teams at both Relic and World's Edge have shared that players will have the choice of the English, Mongols, Chinese and Delhi Sultanate at launch, and two more civilizations have been revealed: the Abbasid Dynasty and the French.

The Abbasid Dynasty's focus on technology, powered by their unique landmark, the House of Wisdom, will allow players to choose unique upgrade opportunities. Their unique units include Camel Archers and Riders.

The French were revealed alongside the 100 Years War campaign, allowing players to place themselves in the battles fought between the English and French in the 14th and 15th centuries. The French thrive in trade, with the Chamber of Commerce and Royal Institute landmarks helping strengthen a player's late game. Royal Knights are one of the civilization's special units with a fearsome charge ability.

Making a heroic appearance in the trailer is French heroine and icon Joan of Arc. Teenage Joan rallied her country and led armies into battle against the occupying English.

Taking the battle to the water adds a whole new dimension to player strategy and adds new meaning to "sink or swim"!

With updated controls, intuitive UI and a fresh approach to the campaign, Age of Empires IV is the most accessible Age of Empires game yet while taking everything fans love about the franchise to the next level.

The first major update of 2022 brings Ranked Seasons, the Content Editor beta (and Mods!), Seasonal Events, Major Balance changes, as well as a ton of quality-of-life changes to Age of Empires IV!

With the Season One Update, it’ll come with a whole host of balance and quality-of-life changes, including global build queue, hotkey improvements, and more.

Season One 

We’re viewing Season One as a cause for celebration, as it’s an entry-point for our modding community, as well as an opportunity for those of you looking to take part in some friendly competition to do your thing and climb the 1v1 Ranked Seasons ladder. We’re working on some fun surprises to ensure there are new challenges to face and rewards to earn regardless of your playstyle, but we don’t want to spoil too much too quickly.

Instead, we did want to provide a quick overview of features and balance improvements coming with Season One:

Features 

• The Age of Empires IV Content Editor (Beta) and mods. We’re excited to kick off this new journey and allow creators to make and share their own content with the wider community! The Content Editor is a robust tool, and we’ve seen from you all in the past that the sky’s the limit with modding. Alongside the editor, we’ll be introducing a number of in-house mods and tutorials to get you all started. Though the Content Editor is launching as a Beta, it will remain persistently available following the start of Season One, and we’ll be looking to build relationships with our modding community to better guide the future of the tool alongside the game.  
• The 1v1 Ranked Ladder. You can read about this game mode, the tiers, and more here. We’d also like to thank those of you who participated in the preview of this feature back in January. We’ve made some small tweaks to the system – including refining our map pool list and making the Tier numbers and images align more intuitively.  
• Hotkey improvements. We know responsive and editable hotkeys with a range of uses are important to Age players, and we know that many of you are eager to see a fully remappable input system similar to what’s offered in other titles; we truly appreciate that you’ve continued to emphasize to us the importance of this feature. Fully remappable inputs require substantial development time across the board, and while we’re not there just yet, we expect to introduce fully remappable inputs in Season Two. In the meantime, Season One brings with it the following notable improvements to the hotkey system: 
  
  • Additional categories within the hotkey menu have been added that will enable players to quickly navigate between various functions and update input speeds. 
  • We’ve added the ability to rebind hotkeys to Mouse 3, 4, and 5. 
  • Quickly toggle on or off Control Group exclusivity, or use any number of new hotkeys to add or remove a unit from a Control Group.  
  • Players will be able to bind other commands to the “ALT” and “Shift” keys. 
  • New Global Hotkeys enable players to quickly find idle villagers, cycle through structures, and much more. 

• Quality of Life improvements such as Global Build Queue, the Patrol move, a civ randomizer selection within the lobby and full post-match map reveal.  
• MegaRandom comes to Age of Empires IV, as do in-house created mods, a new Art of War challenge, difficulty tuning across a variety of campaign missions, and more!

Balance

We’ve got some exciting balance changes planned for the Abbasid Dynasty, Chinese, and Holy Roman Empire civilizations in particular – you can read more about those plans in our recent Patch Notes here along with some details on how we’re planning to approach 1v1 map balance.

Key Features:

• Stunning 4K visual fidelity
• Eight diverse civilizations, including the Mongols and Chinese, along with naval gameplay support
• Four campaigns with thirty-five missions spanning 500 years of history
• Cooperate or spectate with up to seven of your friends in PVP and PVE multiplayer modes
• Best-in-class game and platform services, including a World Editor in early 2022, tutorials and a story mode to help onboard new RTS players

Age of Empires IV is available on PC (Steam) for $59.99.