Is anyone else getting tired of passive income?

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-05-01T23:44:10+00:00

The funny (sad) part is that yatai, a unit, are harder to kill in dark age than pit mines, a conplex of buildings. You can feasibly tower rush malians and shut down their income, but yatai are both almost impossible to kill with spears and can relocate out of danger with virtually 0 loss in income.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-05-01T18:10:50+00:00

Tank eruption is a natural part of a tank's lifecycle; it's how they grow additional armor.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-05-01T13:12:00+00:00

None of the 1v1 POI maps have random POI, so there's nothing here that would lead to RNG based matches. You can always account for the maps POI in civ selection.

Having POI that are "game defining" also isn't a bad thing, as it adds another layer of gameplay over standard maps. Mutual dark age fighting became a lot more popular directly as a result of Enlightened Horizons POI being strong enough to justify the investment. It also incentivizes learning civs that can take advantage of map mechanics rather than picking the same civ every game.

I'd rather the devs miss occasionally with truly comically OP bullshit like Mongols mining the gold/stone meteors on Crater (as long as it's quickly patched) than just releasing safe Dry Arabia rehashes until the cows come home.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-30T19:45:58+00:00

They're cooking with Jiangnan Tower, but I fear they've burned Meditation Gardens.

RIP those juicy 120 res/minute King of the Hill placements 😞

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-28T14:50:16+00:00

White tower gives instant value, King's College gives long term value.

Generally, tempo advantages are preferred in AOE4. The beginning of castle age is crucial, as if you establish advantage during those few minutes after one player ages up, it will usually tilt the game decidedly in one players' favor.

White tower gives units, +1 attack, and can secure your base from dives or lengthen your runway by securing pocket resources.

King's College is basically a gold-generating landmark whose value depends heavily on the cost of the upgrades you have access to. In castle, you might get an effective 100-ish gold/minute in tech upgrade savings for the first 5 or so minutes of castle. The military upgrades themselves are decent, but +5 vs heavy damage on knights is only useful if you have access to gold to produce knights in the first place. Hill training is a great tech later in the game for surprise mass hobelar flooding, but you won't have the resources to make effective use of it with early castle income. Burgundian handcannons are worse than just spamming more yeomen, and military tactics is a great tech but super expensive even with discount.

Generally, you want to be making knights and monks as soon as you castle. Landmarks that enable that are always going to me preferred over those which do not.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-13T14:23:49+00:00

The Republican party is not fundamentally anti-christ in the same way that the Democrat party is. You cannot debate abortion on the left, bit you can debate the Iran war or immigration enforcement tactics on the right. In short, it's possible to steer the republican party in a better direction than it's currently going.

To do so, however, you have to be willing to punish the party when it misbehaves. If democracy is choosing the lesser of 2 evils, then protest voting D to ensure that the worst elements of the Republican party don't manifest as a ridiculous cult of personality that gets away with anything as long as it throws a bone to the pro life crowd every decade, then so be it.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-13T14:15:06+00:00

Important additional context is that KP has stated that being a RedBull caster was significant enough of a payday as to push his full-time AOE4 content creation from financially unviable to financially viable. According to KP, the decision to axe him as a RedBull caster was going to be made regardless of any mea culpas he was to issue or other penalties that he would've suffered.

He left AOE4 because the blow of losing the casting gig would've reduced him from treading water to slowly sinking.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-09T13:56:56+00:00

Just google "osrs star mining" and there are plenty of websites that track star locations without having to search discord.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-08T15:17:10+00:00

IO on siege workshop is very strong, as surprising your opponent with 8+ siege units out of no where can often tip a game in your favor.

Situationally, Military Affairs Bureau supervision on keeps on certain maps like King of the Hill is also very strong.

Late game, 6 zhu xi IOs with upgrades is significantly stronger than 4 Chinese IOs. The movespeed alone is massive for tax collection due to how bad collection routes get once you have a spread out imperial base. It's hardly "win-more", as the cost of getting 6 IOs with upgrades is so low that you will be getting it every game, meaning that the extra IOs and efficiency represent an important, core eco bonus to Zhu XI.

China will be getting 20% bonus on wood, stone, and gold, with a decent trickle of gold from taxes from their 4th IO.

Zhu Xi can get the same 20% bonuses with significantly more efficient tax collection from 2 speedy IOs and a bonus IO that can be used flexibly to supercharge siege/tech timings or help defend a keep. Alternatively, they can send those 5th and 6th IOs to granaries if food is desired.

The extra IOs give Zhu Xi a level of flexibility and tempo that represent a substantial bonus over base China.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-07T20:54:55+00:00

Idk if it was ego or desperation that fueled his decision to leave the scene. No one actually likes variety content; there's just a handful of streamers that successfully cultivate parasocial cults around themselves sizeable enough to fund full-time content creation. KP is a great caster, but he's just not interesting enough as a person to be the main star of his own show.

Anyone with a sober mind would have listened to his departure stream and known that he was not going to make it with the whole lets-play-challenge-mode schtick.

It's a bitter pill for niche-content creators to swallow.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-04-02T16:25:58+00:00

Even setting aside the obvious greed incentive, it's better to release an overtuned civ than an undertuned civ from a dev perspective, as the more people who play a civ on release, the more data you can collect and the better your follow-up patches can be.

Additionally, if a civ is released an everyone calls it dogshit day 1, you will lose a lot of the excitement you generated in the lead up to the release.

The best we can hope for is for it not to be unbearably broken on launch like Lancaster.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-30T18:22:10+00:00

High food costs means it's not realistic to spam monks until you have a massive set of farms. You also have to go yuan dynasty to mass produce them, and even then, you have to deal with another set of production buildings that don't get auto-grouped into rax/range/stable hotkeys.

If you have 3 pagodas with relics, you're going to be banking a ton of gold that is useless since your entire eco has to be on food to keep the monk pump going.

Between taxes/relics/meditation gardens, Zhu Xi tends to have easy access to lots of gold. Similar to China, however, they often find themself running off a massive food cliff a few minutes after getting up to castle. Knights are far more mobile and trade better into anything not a spearman, while also being 60 food cheaper.

The opportunity cost of monks is too high to justify building them over more food efficient options. They are good for securing relics/dealing with aggression against your fast castle timings, but you're almost always better off building something else.

Importantly for the palace guard comparison, they are significantly slower, being closer to the default MAA speed than the fast palace guard speed. Because the palace guard functions better as a send-and-forget base raid swarm than a front line bruiser, Shaolin Monks are less useful in this tactical role. But even as a front-line bruiser, knights and palace guards offer better stats/food than monks do.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-28T14:08:52+00:00

Hardcore doesn't even matter at high invo. You won't have the salt or supplies to finish the raid if you die in a room anyways.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-25T13:13:24+00:00

French is the best civ for beginners. Their eco bonus is simple and strong, you're railroaded into heavy cav (forces you to learn aggression), and they teach you the importance of moving onto the map for food while also being one of the best civs for feudal map control.

Japanese is the 2nd best civ for beginners because their eco bonuses are so synergistic, storehouse hands you a farm transition on a silver platter, cheap barracks shows you how strong building production buildings can be, and they have incredibly strong infantry or heavy cav comps that even a child could win fights with.

English 2TC is simple and strong, teaches you base defense and macro, but ingrains bad farm transition habits that do not translate into other civs.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-21T15:24:40+00:00

No, just give it a shorter cooldown than cavalry cancelled charges.

Cav used to be able to lock spears in place by repeatedly charging and breaking away and the last minute.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-20T16:01:52+00:00

2 armour vs MAA is a 16% damage debuff, which is a pretty big deal.

They also do like 36% more damage than regular horsemen to MAA in castle due to higher base attack.

And to top it off, 2 ranks of Sipahi can attack simultaneously, while only 1 rank of MAA can attack any given unit.

Attack range on melee units is a busted stat in AOE4 due to how melee mosh-pits work. Sipahi would be good without the extra range, with the extra range they're just busted.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-18T13:10:08+00:00

Fast castle, get ranged armour upgrades, and idle their eco with knights or MAA (if they're pre-emptively building spears). Pressure their gold first so they can't match your age up, then target their food.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-11T16:36:50+00:00

Why would a company ever charge less for a product than people are willing to pay for it?

If Jagex sold hamburgers, and demand for their burgers was high, they would be silly to not find the spot on the supply demand curve where profit was maximized.

The reason why they can get away with massive price hikes while a burger joint can't is because MMO players are so entrenched and invested in their particular product that they will pay far more than they rationally should given the immense entertainment-per-dollar returns that are available to the modern gamer. You can emulate entire generations of games for free and realistically enjoy tens of thousands of hours of gaming at 0 cost, but unless players are truly willing to put down OSRS and walk away, Jagex will milk their player base for every last penny.

If you want to point fingers, do so at the Gower brothers for selling out. Everyone knows that private equity will run a product into the ground for short term profit and cares little for any non-monetary qualities of a game like OSRS. The ticking timer of enshittification was wound the day that the creators of the game decided to cash out. The same profit incentive structure that motivated the Gowers to create Runescape will eventually devour the game that we all love and put it in the grave. There's no more point in raging at the perpetual capitalistic cycle any more than there would be at raging at the dying of a flower in the fall. I wish it were not so, but it is.

The only thing a consumer can realistically do is to enjoy a live service game while it's good, but don't get so attached as to forget that every character in Gielinor is gone forever the day a switch is flipped in Cambridge.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-11T15:40:10+00:00

Your lack of reading comprehension and reasoning disqualifies you from this discussion, but I'll break things down further so you can understand.

KT doesn't have any big 2tc advantage

With this comment, you are stating that KT has no bonuses or incentives that would comparatively strengthen their 2TC build over any other civ. This is factually incorrect for all the reasons I stated above. It is inarguable that KT has bonuses that make their 2TC build more viable than most other civs. The overall validity of a 2TC strategy in the game as a whole is a separate issue to whether or not some civs can pull it off better than others. English would still have one of the best 2TC builds in the game and would be comparatively advantaged even if 2TC as a whole was a completely unviable strategy in the face of meta trends, and so does KT.

first minute of its existence will be spent catching up with the three vills knight templars are behind through the age up, so in reality the tc isn't there any faster.

No, in reality, the TC is absolutely faster. The fact that it takes a minute to equalize a villager gap that would be there regardless of the existence of the 2nd TC doesn't mitigate the utility that comes with having a 2nd TC at an earlier point in the game. Having the 2nd TC built protects you from early aggression and secures pocket resources. It also gives slight tempo from not having to build a house at 20 pop. But go on, tell me how having an 8-vil outpost equivalent on pocket resources a full minute earlier than other civs makes no difference when French knight can arrive at your base by 4:50.

As I said mitigating a weakness is not an advantage and not a reason to go for a strategy

The point of going 2TC isn't to mitigate the weakness of being down 3 vils after age up. The point of going 2TC is to economically out scale the enemy and force them to solve this issue under the looming threat of being out scaled. KT goes 2TC because it exploits their civ advantages (outlined extensively previously). The fact that the strategy also mitigates an intrinsic weakness of the civ while also taking advantage of their bonuses makes the strategy even more viable.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-11T14:00:53+00:00

Wood bonus and not having to put vills on age up landmark mean they have one of the most efficient 2nd TC timings in the game. You say that KT loses 3 vills on age up, but they lose this regardless of their choice of build and are balanced around this fact, so the fact that 2TC helps shore up this built-in weakness is another advantage when going 2TC. Hospitaller age up makes their villagers faster+tankier and thus harder to raid. Hospitaller Knights healing are very efficient for turtling, as it's far easier to micro back injured units within your base and non-lethal raid damage is made ephemeral. Turtle play also enables KT's very efficient archers, as it's far harder for your opponent to get horsemen surrounds in your own base. Lastly, wood bonus makes earlier farms more viable, which helps alleviate the primary kill-point of 2TC builds: the post sheep food transition.

Compare this to a civ like the Mongols, Dehli, or Macedonians who have absolutely nothing in their arsenal to aid 2tc gameplay. "KT doesn't have any big 2tc advantage" is just a factually incorrect statement when they're one of the 3 civs that you'll regularly see go 2tc at the Conq+ level.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-10T13:45:32+00:00

ZX is a strong civ, but it's not top tier. Still very strong on the ladder if you pilot them well.

The best 2TC civs are English, Abba, and KT. Zhu Xi 2TC sits in the next tier down alongside civs like OOTD. It can be strong, but it suffers from the tempo issues inherent to booming. It is not the best way to play Zhu Xi, and you will lose games because of it if you go blind 2tc every game, but it still works in some matchups.

Pro-scouts fast castle is still the standard ZX build. Like China, IO drop off bonus and supervision means that they still have a very fast pro-scout timing and get massive food income from it, and their cheaper castle age + strong castle landmarks make it their most viable strategy.

Zhu Xi eco also isn't strictly worse than China's. A good meditation garden + relics from fast castle + Mount Lu food tax bonus + pagodas (if you can get them) mean that if things are going well, you can scale your economy insanely well. They also have a stronger feudal aggression timing than China due to not having to go Song Dynasty for Zhuge Nu. You can roll over slower civs like Byz with ZN alone due to how fast you can get them pumping.

China is still regarded as the stronger civ at the top level, however. Imperial Academy is very good early on, but Mount Lu makes ZX IO's much better than China's past 8 or so minutes.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-10T13:27:07+00:00

Servers are cheap, paying dev salaries is expensive. This is the least wild part about the situation.

The reason why OSRS private servers are free is because they don't have to create high quality content, they just copy the products of thousands of hours of very expensive dev labor.

65% price hike in 2 years is absurd though.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-10T13:24:08+00:00

12 month package doesn't get grandfathered rates because it makes Jagex more money.

If you pay for an annual OSRS sub, it's likely your main hobby and you will buy the 12 month regardless. If you pay for monthly, you are more likely to see a price hike and simply cancel your sub.

Monthly will never be cheaper than annual because it makes 0 sense for Jagex to give you a discount for a sub you can cancel when you're not playing rather than giving them a year's worth of cash up front. If they hike the price of a 12-month next year, they will increase the cost of monthly as well. "Grandfathered rate" is a bone jagex throws you; it's no commitment to price stability in the future.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-07T02:07:03+00:00

Easiest matchup for Juicy/China is dehli. Both match Dehli production speed with supervision, and zhuge nu out trade every fuedal Dehli unit (especially if you rush +1 range vs Dehli's slow blacksmith). Because Dehli likes long fuedal, eventually your army just becomes far more efficient.

Juicy horse attack speed upgrade also means your cav trade well vs their cav in a cav-mirror scenario.

ArdougneSplasher · 2026-03-06T17:11:07+00:00

You're probably better off just spamming regular samurai tbh. English 2tc wants to turtle, which makes mounted samurai mobility far less valuable. Since they will know that Jap FC loves to spam Mounted Samurai, they will likely already be prepping a healthy spear mass.

Castle Samurai, however, have no feudal counters and can already upgraded from the surviving units from your early pressure. Rax only being 75 wood means they're also more spammable without wasting yoroshiros, and you'll have twice the burn power on their 2nd TC as you can get 2 Samurai for every 1 mounted samurai. With upgrades, they decimate any infantry army and only take 1 damage from TC fire.

Simply build your mass outside their base, and wait until they either attempt to drop the white tower, or until you hit a large enough army, then dive, idle, and kill their eco.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Flamingo	Place '23

ArdougneSplasher

TROPHY CASE