I'm all for conspiracies, but I would guess that most of us here will stick with aoe2 regardless, and the people that would be turned off enough to switch games AND have a good enough PC to play 4 probably aren't paying close enough attention to balance to care that much.I wonder if the devs discuss purposefully making this game unattractive to its playerbase to make age4 more appealing. I'm not saying they do, but I don't think it's far fetched to imagine they do. Corporations have done far worse for money.