Infantry
Speaking of balance issues, rifle-equipped infantry have such a huge advantage over melee units that they are almost useless. Even elite Swiss mercenaries available only via expeditions to their hometown tend to curl up in front of a line of musketeers. True, this is why people still don’t fight with the sword in real life, but what’s the point of having more than a hundred distinct units if a quarter of them are practically useless? This is especially evident with the campaign-only Boneguard Swordsman unit, which is devastating in early missions, where the player’s ability to train gunpowder units is limited but becomes ridiculously ineffective once the handicap is removed.
Artificial intelligence
None of this is helped by the fact that the AI is somehow less intelligent than the previous installment. While I understand that it is difficult to program a computer to use a long-term strategy, AI fails to grasp simple concepts such as using ships to move troops across bodies of water. More than once, I’ve seen an AI player spawn on an island and sit there training a vast army that they never get to use, their idle ships in the harbor. While the AI in Age of Empires was never perfect, in previous games it was at least able to move its unit around the map.
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