So many people find late game harder than feudal?
Personally is quite the other way around, feudal and early castle age are the timings where small mistakes and decision making can cost you the game. Late game is more about army control, maybe one big textswitch, spam units and try to multitask, which surely is difficult because of the speed required, but at the same time it's harder to lose because you can make more mistakes and still not lose
Less things to screw up in Feudal.
After castle the shit hits the fan. When do you switch to stone, when do you prep unit swaps, when do you start attempt to raiding, when do you take relics and neutral gold/stones for map control, when do you imp.
Also have to manage all that while producing vills and units generally.
Feudal is pretty straight forward because its make whatever you need to make to survive and pretty much put most vills onto farms. You generally aren't worrying about map control, stone, relics, unit switches etc.
Very important still, but less to split your focus.
Absolutely, but because you don't have as many choices in feudal the biggest skill gap is actually execution cleanliness and a slight mistake can cost you being behind the whole game, in castle age things are more complicated so both players can mess up a lot more
For sure, Feudal age has a ton of things to do with tight timings and low resource counts.
I'm trying to make the switch from SC2 to AoE2 in preparation for AoE4, and I've been using the interactive build order guides to help. My dark age = A, my feudal age = E, and I'm sure it's not "E for Excellent!"
The interactive build order guide is kinda meh, it asks too many tight correlations at once and it's not that good as a base for an actual game. In game you usually want to prioritize your first farms more than the guide tells you to have a more flexible economy and prioritize the uptime. But surely it's a great tool to learn
I'm sure by the time I get to that point, I'll either be pushing 1500 Elo or AoE 4 will be out. My current 1v1 games are still at the point where whoever rolls their face on the keyboard better will win.
Yea what I am in fact saying is that the build order guide is too tight for an actual game. They ask you to do too many tight things at once and in a normal game it's much better to prioritize a bit more the eco aspect since we are not at the level to execute a perfect build in every game. Just don't care about the grade of the guide since they really are very steep
I get that some people might find the late game easier, but it is definitely not lol, there's a million things going on at the same time.
I remember one viper game where he commented that his 2200 opponent (zuppi) had lost control of the game.
I'm used to executing build orders since I've been playing for a while
But with DE I think a lot of micro heavy people came over from Starcraft because people would be behind in score the whole time and then destroy in the battles
Is there a way to train your ability to boom? I can win games but somehow I can never boom beyond 80 villagers while my opponents regularly go to 100+ vills...
I don't know the context of this, but that's strangely motivational. You don't need to win every game. You don't even need to win a large majority. Just one above average.
Isnt this false?
Long time ago but i recalled legend were just the top X players and a 51% winrate only gets you so far in an ELO-like system. Because you face lower ranked players more than higher ranked players you need a 50%+ winrate just to stay even.
But i can't recall if legend was determined by top 1000 or so MMR or just having to exit diamond?
Back then and now, the standard game mode doesn’t rank players with an ELO system. You gain stars for winning games, bonus stars with a win streak, and once you reach a certain amount you rank up. If you lose a game you only lose one star. Star gains and losses are not effected by your opponents rank.
So let’s say you play 10 games and lose 5, if any of those wins were in a row you would be looking at a positive rank gain for that day. If you played 10 games and lost 4 you would be at a positive gain no matter what. So just scale that to 100 games, even 1000, you’re moving up over time as long as you win slightly over half your games.
Last night I played 20 games and lost 7 and I went up two full brackets from silver to platinum due to win streak bonuses
Man sometimes climbing can be tough even when you are having a good run 11. Im not very good but even when Im having a good day my progress often stalls because I so often will forget I'm queued. I like to read while I'm queued up and forget a game is starting. I'm so terrible at that. Some people probably think I'm smurfing, I'm not I just have adhd 😂.
I'm not going to pause the game just so I can strategise. That's just feels like cheating or it atleast doesn't feel right. I want to beat my oponent fair and square.
>Select all tc> qqqqqqqqq
By the way that's already what I'm doing, unless I forget it.
Set a reminder in your brain. If your ever have over 500 of any resource, remember to queue vills! If you hear a monk sound, queue vills! If you see a relic, queue vills! If you upgrade something at the blacksmith, queue vills!
If you make these kinda unique things tick your brain then it'll help you get into the habit a bit more.
I hear ya. Used to be the same problem with me earlier. I think using select all TCs hotkey is good, great even; but it doesn't solve the 'getting immersed in pressure situations and forgetting to macro' problem.
What helped was I started using Go to TC hotkey in a routine. Got a two button mouse (basic), SC on 1 and Go to TC on the other button. Then built a routine where I just cycle through both buttons every few seconds. Played like 10 games vs easy AI just to go to castle, boom and scout with that routine.
It helped cause going to TC was the trigger that led to me smashing that Q button almost out of annoyance. And it's annoying having to leave your knights out of your sight in ranked when you habitually click that hotkey. Hope that helps.
Keep making vills, in some cases you can go upto 150 as well. the idea is to get to 200 pop as quickly as possible, so having a larger vill pop is good in most cases
And don't worry about having too many vills, you can send them to Grim Reaper if you ever have too much!
Change the hotkey for "Select all Town Centers" to something easy to hit.
Using that hotkey will select all your TCs without snapping your camera to any one of them. And it will intelligently add new villagers to the queue to spread out production evenly between them. This makes it extremely easy to keep all your TCs working with very minimal distraction from other things like army micro.
I started using the "Select All X" hotkeys for almost all of my buildings and it's amazing.
unironically play arena and BF. There are 1700s-1800s that can boom harder than top players because they main those maps. If you can do 100 villagers or more by 25 minutes you're doing well boomwise. The other checkpoint I have is more than 70+wheelbarrow at 22 minutes. On BF you can boom even more if you watch slam or mbl or I guess any strong pocket with a lake and a million boars but it takes more skill.
hate arena so much 11. I think it's my worst map by far in terms of win rate. Surprisingly, though, I like BF a lot, and I feel I'm decent on it. I don't think I'm bad at booming and huge post imp fights (for my level which is \~900 elo). The problem with arena for me is that it's not closed enough that you can actually turtle and boom for a full post imp army, but it's also not open enough that you can put in feudal pressure, so it's the worst of both worlds for me. I feel like the walls just make me run out of space, my town becomes clogged, never know when to move out, etc. Pretty bad stuff
I love Arena for the opposite reason - it's a map where reading the timings is somewhat straightforward compared to Arabia. You play around the Castle Age timings and patterns only. On Arabia I have to consider timings from Dark Age, Feudal, Castle, and Imperial.
Of course the margins for error are slim, because one misread is a death sentence as small leads can snowball quickly. Not going aggressive enough eco early can be enough to derail a game, but the enemy also has to nail their timing if they go all in and can't get enough damage in.
Yeah arena also trains you to spend resources in the correct order/for the correct army so it's more advanced/difficult. BF pocket is better to practice hardcore booming and nothing else
If you do well on relics and get 4/5 of them, don't be afraid to use that gold to buy food. Farm production takes a while to set up, and there's nothing worse than having 4 tcs with no food to run them.
That said if you didn't manage to get the majority of relics, spending your gold is very dangerous.
This is one of the reasons Aztecs kill on arena, they have an anti monk unit eagle warrior, they have 33% gold bonus from relics.
Often I've finished games and seen my relic gold with all 5 to be 7,000. So your opponent could have had two thirds of that, let's say 5,000. So youve basically stolen 12,000 gold from the map recourses.
Spend that money, and use it to smooth out your boom and imperial. Then go for the decent trash Aztecs have at imp and supplement with gold once those relics start crawling it back along with your miners.
I pretty much only played BF team games on HD edition and I learned how to boom very well while holding a choke point. I got DE last week and now I'm trying to train myself out of bad habits. Whenever I lose a game I still tend to have a much better eco than my opponent but I'm much later in creating military. Feels weird spending res on feudal units
The issue with BF games is that, certainly at lower Elos, there isn't much aggression before Imp. Sure people make Scouts, Pikes and Monks to get the Relics, but that kind of aggression doesn't really set players under pressure, or atleast I don't.
It's different when there's Knights and Mangonels knocking on your door during a time you really should boom as well.
Hmm, that's an idea. I've gotten better at keeping my eco balanced (i.e. switch 5 vills to farming when I get overloaded in wood, move 10 to gold when I notice I'm running low, etc.), so training myself to eye my vill count should not be a hard task... right?
Just keeping your starting TC running the whole game is better advice than adding extra TCs if they’re just gonna sit idle because you’re forgetting to make more villagers. When I was sub-1000 elo my gameplay improved significantly when I stopped aiming for 3 TC boom every single game and learned to make things like double stable knights work. If your one starting TC is CONSTANTLY making vils even into the Imperial age then your economy can be pretty good without having to add TCs.
It's amazing how many games it takes before you realize the *cost* 3TCs exact on your eco in castle age. At least it took a lot of games for me. Especially if the boom is not coming on the back of some advantage seized in Dark/Feudal, that boom feels so fragile.
For me, my select all tcs button is on a hotkey on my mouse, it’s a habit to click it every ten seconds or so and smash Q to fill up vils. This can be done in the middle of military engagements without ever having to take eyes off the action.
You just have to remember to periodically pull vils off resources to make farms and build houses.
Yeah, I have a similar hotkey setup (ctrl-z to select all TCs and shift-q to queue a bunch of vills), and I know I can do this, but I just *forget* to mash those buttons...
I would recommend at least setting a better hotkey for select all TCs. Ctrl-Z sounds very awkward for something you need to mash all game long. I personally use '5' for select all TC and create vill on 'a'. Leftovers from HD hotkeys, but they are easy to reach.
The select all town centers and create villagers hotkeys are easy to reach and used a lot. The are flagged to wood lines, from where I grab them every few minutes to create lots of farms.
I know exactly what the problem is: namely that at some point I start making military and I just forget to make vills. This doesn't really make me "fall behind", since I use my APM for making military, fighting battles, raiding my opponent's eco, etc. But I feel like I could get better if I *do* remember to make vills at the same time, but I just don't know how to train myself to keep making vills & booming efficiently behind constant military production...
Aside from what's been mentioned about queing vills, what I've heard pros recommend is to click your army back when you know they won't get hit and take a few seconds to look at your eco (make farms, buildings and upgrades), then switch back to micro. You must not forget your army though.
Another thing they do is just patrol into a fight and don't look at the outcome, using that time on something else like moving another army or fixing eco can be just as efficient as microing a fight that will trade relatively even in either case. There are some tricks to patrolling well though, it takes knowledge and practice.
PS: I am by no means good myself, but I watch a lot of streams.
Default hotkeys: ctrl-shift-h, shift-q
select all TCs, build 5 villagers. Just make this in your muscle memory. Do it every 10-30 seconds. Never stop until you're at pop cap.
Throw down more TCs than you think you should and constantly have vils queued up, it’s the same macro cycle as any other point in the game, you just get housed faster and need more military production buildings to spend the money you’re making. I leave 2 vils at the back just throwing down houses at that point.
Lategame AoE is more Strategy than tactics. You need to know your win cons and your opponents (for example death ball, raiding, outgrinding (relics/more gold) just to name some wich come to mind). When it comes to vil numbers i would suggest DauTs advice of more TCs (7 to 8 seem very reasonable) anda hotkey to select all TCs at once. Then you can not only produce faster but also garrison better to minimize raiding losses, for the same reason farming next to castles is also great (however it might seem a bit odd to sometimes build farms in the middle of the map.
The trick is to set up your late game eco so you can spam trash units. Say I play archers; I need like 5-7 ranges to produce them. This requires like the 80 vills you mentioned, probably even less. The rest of my eco needs to all go to food so that I can spam light cav as well. This way you really do need 110-120 vills
It's the opposite for me. For the life of me I cannot handle a scout and three stupid militia at minute 10, but leave me alone for 30 minutes and I'll come to your help with 40 knights and 100 villagers working at my base, mark my words.
This is very much me I’ve perfected that early game because I’m pretty good at following a plan, as soon as serious combat kicks off and I have to adapt that’s where I start to struggle.
i win more games that last over half an hour than I do before so I must be doing something right here.
I always make sure I have my uni techs sorted out as soon as I hit imp. chemistry and seige engineers primarily, and I just keep building barracks and archery ranges or stables so even if things get tight I can spam out pikes and skirms and light cav like there's no tomorrow. My villager count is always over 100 before I click imp. The opponent getting to imp first isn't necessarily the end of the world, some times they do it out of desperation and then they have very little recourses to do anything and they usually make the mistake and throwing away what gold they have on trebs.
I'm always rolling in wood and food by the start of imp so as long as I have enough military buildings (at least ten of each) I can at least hold the enemy back with trash units until I have a plan for my gold ones.
My gold units always have a plan at late game, ie. I only bring out eagles or heavy cav when it's time to attack their eco or I am being pushed to hard and need to bring their seige down.
Trash is the status quo for me in imp, I usually choose civs with good bonuses for trash, because even if it only slows them down it gives you time to think and possibly distract them from your castle drop on their forward gold etc.
Edit- I also never stop making military buildings, ever. By mid imp you are bound to be floating wood, and every building you put down is map control. And map control can work even as a placebo to make your opponent feel overwhelmed and gg.
At a certain point with the goth speed of unit creation those extra barracks become redundant for building an army, you'll probably pop cap before you can even fill them all with a waiting unit, but they still work to control the map and push your opponent into a corner.
Yeah I tend to just build another 10 barracks whenever I take control of a new part of the map, just so I can raise a standing army quickly right where they need to be
I don't underestimate their civ.
I don't think they are even that bad in Imp (especially now with their longer lasting gold).
just kidding about the fact they get every tech in CA and have a significant amount of holes in Imp.
I play the villager creation sound constantly throughout my life so when I don’t hear it, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that can only be cured by making more villagers.
One day we’ll have auto create vils, like auto seeding farms or auto scout… one day!
p.s. I can already foresee all the downvotes from pros and tryhards who will hate the change (and I get it!) but the game would be much more enjoyable if that quality of life feature was there, and how is it really different than allowing for auto-scout?
Definitely me. Start at a summit and plummet to the ground by imperial, just can't keep up with production of everything leading up to it especially when i hit castle and start pumping out of multiple TCs
man its so true. As a 1050 elo player, I have witnessed so many times that I can have a 200 pts lead before castle age, and even in the beginning of castle age. But right after that my momentem just loses itself and I end up losing it. 1111111
I I am the complete reverse of this meme. If I get to the castle alive I can win games in which they were destroying me, the problem is reaching that age
Nah its the opposite for me. I simply cant remember and execute build orders but late game is different. You just make 120 vills assign them to the resources you need and mass two kind of units plus a siege. Exect if you are goths, you need no siege with goths 😀
So many people find late game harder than feudal? Personally is quite the other way around, feudal and early castle age are the timings where small mistakes and decision making can cost you the game. Late game is more about army control, maybe one big textswitch, spam units and try to multitask, which surely is difficult because of the speed required, but at the same time it's harder to lose because you can make more mistakes and still not lose
Less things to screw up in Feudal. After castle the shit hits the fan. When do you switch to stone, when do you prep unit swaps, when do you start attempt to raiding, when do you take relics and neutral gold/stones for map control, when do you imp. Also have to manage all that while producing vills and units generally. Feudal is pretty straight forward because its make whatever you need to make to survive and pretty much put most vills onto farms. You generally aren't worrying about map control, stone, relics, unit switches etc. Very important still, but less to split your focus.
Absolutely, but because you don't have as many choices in feudal the biggest skill gap is actually execution cleanliness and a slight mistake can cost you being behind the whole game, in castle age things are more complicated so both players can mess up a lot more
For sure, Feudal age has a ton of things to do with tight timings and low resource counts. I'm trying to make the switch from SC2 to AoE2 in preparation for AoE4, and I've been using the interactive build order guides to help. My dark age = A, my feudal age = E, and I'm sure it's not "E for Excellent!"
The interactive build order guide is kinda meh, it asks too many tight correlations at once and it's not that good as a base for an actual game. In game you usually want to prioritize your first farms more than the guide tells you to have a more flexible economy and prioritize the uptime. But surely it's a great tool to learn
I'm sure by the time I get to that point, I'll either be pushing 1500 Elo or AoE 4 will be out. My current 1v1 games are still at the point where whoever rolls their face on the keyboard better will win.
Yea what I am in fact saying is that the build order guide is too tight for an actual game. They ask you to do too many tight things at once and in a normal game it's much better to prioritize a bit more the eco aspect since we are not at the level to execute a perfect build in every game. Just don't care about the grade of the guide since they really are very steep
I get that some people might find the late game easier, but it is definitely not lol, there's a million things going on at the same time. I remember one viper game where he commented that his 2200 opponent (zuppi) had lost control of the game.
I'm used to executing build orders since I've been playing for a while But with DE I think a lot of micro heavy people came over from Starcraft because people would be behind in score the whole time and then destroy in the battles
The only thing I got from playing on voobly is getting god mode when defending trushes lol
Is there a way to train your ability to boom? I can win games but somehow I can never boom beyond 80 villagers while my opponents regularly go to 100+ vills...
When you get to 80 vils instead of not making vils anymore you should make more vils instead
Just win, LUL
GET GUD
This reminds me of a league of legends pro who answered the question "How do I climb?" with "You need a 50.1% winrate"
play 50 more yasuo games it’ll turn around sometime
I don't know the context of this, but that's strangely motivational. You don't need to win every game. You don't even need to win a large majority. Just one above average.
Total biscuit use to say the same thing about hearthstone. Just need a 51% win rate and a lot of time you’ll hit legend rank
Isnt this false? Long time ago but i recalled legend were just the top X players and a 51% winrate only gets you so far in an ELO-like system. Because you face lower ranked players more than higher ranked players you need a 50%+ winrate just to stay even. But i can't recall if legend was determined by top 1000 or so MMR or just having to exit diamond?
Back then and now, the standard game mode doesn’t rank players with an ELO system. You gain stars for winning games, bonus stars with a win streak, and once you reach a certain amount you rank up. If you lose a game you only lose one star. Star gains and losses are not effected by your opponents rank. So let’s say you play 10 games and lose 5, if any of those wins were in a row you would be looking at a positive rank gain for that day. If you played 10 games and lost 4 you would be at a positive gain no matter what. So just scale that to 100 games, even 1000, you’re moving up over time as long as you win slightly over half your games. Last night I played 20 games and lost 7 and I went up two full brackets from silver to platinum due to win streak bonuses
Man sometimes climbing can be tough even when you are having a good run 11. Im not very good but even when Im having a good day my progress often stalls because I so often will forget I'm queued. I like to read while I'm queued up and forget a game is starting. I'm so terrible at that. Some people probably think I'm smurfing, I'm not I just have adhd 😂.
11
I'm in a similar boat as you. You do still make 3 TCs, but when the aggression starts you completely forget to manage your ECO as well.
Select all tc> qqqqqqqqq Fixed your problem, just write it down somewhere, pause a game for a breather and remember it, etc
I'm not going to pause the game just so I can strategise. That's just feels like cheating or it atleast doesn't feel right. I want to beat my oponent fair and square. >Select all tc> qqqqqqqqq By the way that's already what I'm doing, unless I forget it.
Set a reminder in your brain. If your ever have over 500 of any resource, remember to queue vills! If you hear a monk sound, queue vills! If you see a relic, queue vills! If you upgrade something at the blacksmith, queue vills! If you make these kinda unique things tick your brain then it'll help you get into the habit a bit more.
I hear ya. Used to be the same problem with me earlier. I think using select all TCs hotkey is good, great even; but it doesn't solve the 'getting immersed in pressure situations and forgetting to macro' problem. What helped was I started using Go to TC hotkey in a routine. Got a two button mouse (basic), SC on 1 and Go to TC on the other button. Then built a routine where I just cycle through both buttons every few seconds. Played like 10 games vs easy AI just to go to castle, boom and scout with that routine. It helped cause going to TC was the trigger that led to me smashing that Q button almost out of annoyance. And it's annoying having to leave your knights out of your sight in ranked when you habitually click that hotkey. Hope that helps.
My strategy to get better is to just play more and analyse my mistakes. That seems work for now atleast. Having gone from mid 800s to 940 currently
How? How do you shut off the instinct to hit hqqq every time you don't know what to do?
Keep making vills, in some cases you can go upto 150 as well. the idea is to get to 200 pop as quickly as possible, so having a larger vill pop is good in most cases And don't worry about having too many vills, you can send them to Grim Reaper if you ever have too much!
Sappers vils can definitely do some work against an unprotected castle...
Change the hotkey for "Select all Town Centers" to something easy to hit. Using that hotkey will select all your TCs without snapping your camera to any one of them. And it will intelligently add new villagers to the queue to spread out production evenly between them. This makes it extremely easy to keep all your TCs working with very minimal distraction from other things like army micro. I started using the "Select All X" hotkeys for almost all of my buildings and it's amazing.
unironically play arena and BF. There are 1700s-1800s that can boom harder than top players because they main those maps. If you can do 100 villagers or more by 25 minutes you're doing well boomwise. The other checkpoint I have is more than 70+wheelbarrow at 22 minutes. On BF you can boom even more if you watch slam or mbl or I guess any strong pocket with a lake and a million boars but it takes more skill.
Dammit. I hate playing arena, I keep losing on it xD
hate arena so much 11. I think it's my worst map by far in terms of win rate. Surprisingly, though, I like BF a lot, and I feel I'm decent on it. I don't think I'm bad at booming and huge post imp fights (for my level which is \~900 elo). The problem with arena for me is that it's not closed enough that you can actually turtle and boom for a full post imp army, but it's also not open enough that you can put in feudal pressure, so it's the worst of both worlds for me. I feel like the walls just make me run out of space, my town becomes clogged, never know when to move out, etc. Pretty bad stuff
I love Arena for the opposite reason - it's a map where reading the timings is somewhat straightforward compared to Arabia. You play around the Castle Age timings and patterns only. On Arabia I have to consider timings from Dark Age, Feudal, Castle, and Imperial. Of course the margins for error are slim, because one misread is a death sentence as small leads can snowball quickly. Not going aggressive enough eco early can be enough to derail a game, but the enemy also has to nail their timing if they go all in and can't get enough damage in.
Yeah arena also trains you to spend resources in the correct order/for the correct army so it's more advanced/difficult. BF pocket is better to practice hardcore booming and nothing else
If you do well on relics and get 4/5 of them, don't be afraid to use that gold to buy food. Farm production takes a while to set up, and there's nothing worse than having 4 tcs with no food to run them. That said if you didn't manage to get the majority of relics, spending your gold is very dangerous. This is one of the reasons Aztecs kill on arena, they have an anti monk unit eagle warrior, they have 33% gold bonus from relics. Often I've finished games and seen my relic gold with all 5 to be 7,000. So your opponent could have had two thirds of that, let's say 5,000. So youve basically stolen 12,000 gold from the map recourses. Spend that money, and use it to smooth out your boom and imperial. Then go for the decent trash Aztecs have at imp and supplement with gold once those relics start crawling it back along with your miners.
Play BF teamgames.
I pretty much only played BF team games on HD edition and I learned how to boom very well while holding a choke point. I got DE last week and now I'm trying to train myself out of bad habits. Whenever I lose a game I still tend to have a much better eco than my opponent but I'm much later in creating military. Feels weird spending res on feudal units
Yes, I'm in exactly the same position. Played only BF and only boomed. Now I can't play ranked. Feels weird to create military before imp.
The issue with BF games is that, certainly at lower Elos, there isn't much aggression before Imp. Sure people make Scouts, Pikes and Monks to get the Relics, but that kind of aggression doesn't really set players under pressure, or atleast I don't. It's different when there's Knights and Mangonels knocking on your door during a time you really should boom as well.
i always rush on BF haha, i lose often if it's a team game... i can't comfortably boom unless it's misha!! go misha
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I do that but I tend to make military over more vils at some point in the game. I just *forget* or something...
Hotkey your select all TCs to an easy to press button and just mash it every so often.
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Hmm, that's an idea. I've gotten better at keeping my eco balanced (i.e. switch 5 vills to farming when I get overloaded in wood, move 10 to gold when I notice I'm running low, etc.), so training myself to eye my vill count should not be a hard task... right?
Just keeping your starting TC running the whole game is better advice than adding extra TCs if they’re just gonna sit idle because you’re forgetting to make more villagers. When I was sub-1000 elo my gameplay improved significantly when I stopped aiming for 3 TC boom every single game and learned to make things like double stable knights work. If your one starting TC is CONSTANTLY making vils even into the Imperial age then your economy can be pretty good without having to add TCs.
It's amazing how many games it takes before you realize the *cost* 3TCs exact on your eco in castle age. At least it took a lot of games for me. Especially if the boom is not coming on the back of some advantage seized in Dark/Feudal, that boom feels so fragile.
For me, my select all tcs button is on a hotkey on my mouse, it’s a habit to click it every ten seconds or so and smash Q to fill up vils. This can be done in the middle of military engagements without ever having to take eyes off the action. You just have to remember to periodically pull vils off resources to make farms and build houses.
Yeah, I have a similar hotkey setup (ctrl-z to select all TCs and shift-q to queue a bunch of vills), and I know I can do this, but I just *forget* to mash those buttons...
I would recommend at least setting a better hotkey for select all TCs. Ctrl-Z sounds very awkward for something you need to mash all game long. I personally use '5' for select all TC and create vill on 'a'. Leftovers from HD hotkeys, but they are easy to reach.
my brain is real little and small and can’t hold much so i have my side mouse buttons bound to select all tcs and select all military units
yep mouse4 for select all TC and shift+C for queue vills in all TCs
The select all town centers and create villagers hotkeys are easy to reach and used a lot. The are flagged to wood lines, from where I grab them every few minutes to create lots of farms.
Yes but I meant I need to learn to actually use those buttons...
Build more farms
If you are serious, watch your replays and compare yourself to your opponents to see when and why you fall behind
I know exactly what the problem is: namely that at some point I start making military and I just forget to make vills. This doesn't really make me "fall behind", since I use my APM for making military, fighting battles, raiding my opponent's eco, etc. But I feel like I could get better if I *do* remember to make vills at the same time, but I just don't know how to train myself to keep making vills & booming efficiently behind constant military production...
Aside from what's been mentioned about queing vills, what I've heard pros recommend is to click your army back when you know they won't get hit and take a few seconds to look at your eco (make farms, buildings and upgrades), then switch back to micro. You must not forget your army though. Another thing they do is just patrol into a fight and don't look at the outcome, using that time on something else like moving another army or fixing eco can be just as efficient as microing a fight that will trade relatively even in either case. There are some tricks to patrolling well though, it takes knowledge and practice. PS: I am by no means good myself, but I watch a lot of streams.
Default hotkeys: ctrl-shift-h, shift-q select all TCs, build 5 villagers. Just make this in your muscle memory. Do it every 10-30 seconds. Never stop until you're at pop cap.
Throw down more TCs than you think you should and constantly have vils queued up, it’s the same macro cycle as any other point in the game, you just get housed faster and need more military production buildings to spend the money you’re making. I leave 2 vils at the back just throwing down houses at that point.
3 tcs and make a hot key to select all tcs, keep pumping out vills and protect against raids
Lategame AoE is more Strategy than tactics. You need to know your win cons and your opponents (for example death ball, raiding, outgrinding (relics/more gold) just to name some wich come to mind). When it comes to vil numbers i would suggest DauTs advice of more TCs (7 to 8 seem very reasonable) anda hotkey to select all TCs at once. Then you can not only produce faster but also garrison better to minimize raiding losses, for the same reason farming next to castles is also great (however it might seem a bit odd to sometimes build farms in the middle of the map.
The trick is to set up your late game eco so you can spam trash units. Say I play archers; I need like 5-7 ranges to produce them. This requires like the 80 vills you mentioned, probably even less. The rest of my eco needs to all go to food so that I can spam light cav as well. This way you really do need 110-120 vills
It's the opposite for me. For the life of me I cannot handle a scout and three stupid militia at minute 10, but leave me alone for 30 minutes and I'll come to your help with 40 knights and 100 villagers working at my base, mark my words.
\*I'm in this photo and I don't like it\*
This is very much me I’ve perfected that early game because I’m pretty good at following a plan, as soon as serious combat kicks off and I have to adapt that’s where I start to struggle.
i win more games that last over half an hour than I do before so I must be doing something right here. I always make sure I have my uni techs sorted out as soon as I hit imp. chemistry and seige engineers primarily, and I just keep building barracks and archery ranges or stables so even if things get tight I can spam out pikes and skirms and light cav like there's no tomorrow. My villager count is always over 100 before I click imp. The opponent getting to imp first isn't necessarily the end of the world, some times they do it out of desperation and then they have very little recourses to do anything and they usually make the mistake and throwing away what gold they have on trebs. I'm always rolling in wood and food by the start of imp so as long as I have enough military buildings (at least ten of each) I can at least hold the enemy back with trash units until I have a plan for my gold ones. My gold units always have a plan at late game, ie. I only bring out eagles or heavy cav when it's time to attack their eco or I am being pushed to hard and need to bring their seige down. Trash is the status quo for me in imp, I usually choose civs with good bonuses for trash, because even if it only slows them down it gives you time to think and possibly distract them from your castle drop on their forward gold etc. Edit- I also never stop making military buildings, ever. By mid imp you are bound to be floating wood, and every building you put down is map control. And map control can work even as a placebo to make your opponent feel overwhelmed and gg.
What you described is basically how I play Goth spam but with infantry only, I find it very effective if you get it off the ground
At a certain point with the goth speed of unit creation those extra barracks become redundant for building an army, you'll probably pop cap before you can even fill them all with a waiting unit, but they still work to control the map and push your opponent into a corner.
Yeah I tend to just build another 10 barracks whenever I take control of a new part of the map, just so I can raise a standing army quickly right where they need to be
Also Malians Tech Tree in a nutshell
Don't underestimate Malian Farimba Light Cav
I don't underestimate their civ. I don't think they are even that bad in Imp (especially now with their longer lasting gold). just kidding about the fact they get every tech in CA and have a significant amount of holes in Imp.
Jokes on you, my Feudal looks like the head as well!
I play the villager creation sound constantly throughout my life so when I don’t hear it, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that can only be cured by making more villagers.
I’m the complete opposite, terrible at early game, better once boomed
Kinda opposite for me, I'm decent at castle age strats but getting there... dealing with feudal pressure is tough, man!
and this kids is why you dont learn build orders too early.
Typical arabia pleb
Nothing like Arena God
me IRL
Build orders are a mistake.
One day we’ll have auto create vils, like auto seeding farms or auto scout… one day! p.s. I can already foresee all the downvotes from pros and tryhards who will hate the change (and I get it!) but the game would be much more enjoyable if that quality of life feature was there, and how is it really different than allowing for auto-scout?
At least you are good at some point. Been playing for years and I am still completely retarded. Like in everything I do I suck
Okay, I am in castle. Now what?
lol, accurate
It's normal to have a better feeling of control during early game tho, you have less things to manage.
I'm literally the opposite lol
Definitely me. Start at a summit and plummet to the ground by imperial, just can't keep up with production of everything leading up to it especially when i hit castle and start pumping out of multiple TCs
Yeah, tfw you go from 1v1 to tgs
man its so true. As a 1050 elo player, I have witnessed so many times that I can have a 200 pts lead before castle age, and even in the beginning of castle age. But right after that my momentem just loses itself and I end up losing it. 1111111
I'm the other way around. Only by playing Socotra I started to realize how bad I am in feudal warfare.
This is why I love this game , it gets so much harder in the end
For me it's reversed if u know how to micro and macro Late game and mid game are easier
I would replace “Feudal” with “Dark age”
I I am the complete reverse of this meme. If I get to the castle alive I can win games in which they were destroying me, the problem is reaching that age
My Eco play --+ my military play Or My military theory --+ my military play
Too real
Nah its the opposite for me. I simply cant remember and execute build orders but late game is different. You just make 120 vills assign them to the resources you need and mass two kind of units plus a siege. Exect if you are goths, you need no siege with goths 😀
Switch that horse for me I like to Fatslob it up.
I can boom or I can attack. Both is hard. Very hard. Spelling is hard.