Age of Empires 4: How to Rotate Buildings

Wondering how to rotate buildings in Age of Empires 4? You’re not alone. 

Building placement in Age of Empires 4 is as important to your overall strategy as the build order of your military units. But sometimes, overall strategy doesn’t exactly matter, and you may want to build your base in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing. If so, you may be wondering how to rotate buildings in AoE 4.

While Age of Empires 4 adds a few new visual accents to buildings, such as adding roads and paths to structures placed close together and automatically leveling terrain after placement, there aren’t any other customization options or ways to rotate buildings before or after villagers put brick to mortar.

In short, you cannot rotate buildings to customize their placement.

This is similar to how Age of Empires 2 handles building construction. There isn’t a grid here, but every structure faces a predetermined direction that cannot be changed before or after placement. It’s a regression from Age of Empires 3, which allows you to rotate buildings in any direction, including diagonally, by holding Shift and scrolling the mouse wheel up or down. 

Technically, it doesn’t matter that you can’t rotate buildings in Age of Empires 4 since any defensive structure, such as a Guard Tower or Keep, can fire projectiles in any direction so long as there isn’t a mountain in the way.

There are also spaces between every construction that allow units to move between them. For example, a House won’t block the path between it and a Market if their build borders touch. Likewise, building two Barracks, Archery Ranges, etc., on top of each other won’t affect how units naturally exit. 

Regardless, not being able to rotate buildings in Age of Empires 4 is somewhat disappointing for those of us (including myself) who angst over exact building placement and rage against blocky base aesthetics. I want my Mill facing a specific way, thank you! Hopefully, the functionality will arrive in a future update alongside a map or scenario editor.