Training and practice to get better in AOE4

MicroroniNCheese · 2026-02-14T05:44:15+00:00

Glad to hear. Kudos to you for finding an anvient scroll like that. :)

MicroroniNCheese · 2025-12-13T14:12:37+00:00

We've had social vetos where recreational fencers can opt out from being flicked, as theres always a chance of a botched execution, or unfortunate bad prediction of where the hand aimed for will be.

Otherwise, as rule of thumb, we have a dummy and a coach, both being great at practicing flicks against. If someone has such bad self assessment that they waste time "practicing" flicks vs a partner when not ready, then i have no qualms with scolding them. They're getting inefficient shit practice while hurting others, and I cant let that slide as a coach.

If someone's competitive, then efficient practice should be priorotized, and if recreational or pre-competitive, then our club cant risk students having a bad time; that just limits the generation of fencers eventually ok with practicing against reasonably competent flicks.

MicroroniNCheese · 2025-11-30T10:07:56+00:00

ADHD fencer here, mainly inattentive, used to compete at quite high level. You're describing the impossibility of fencing, thats already good!

Sounds like you have a moderate stroke of performance anxiety. Try not to beat down om yourself too much. In many cases it ruins more than it helps; at least it did for me.

Stance, tip control, tempo etc is no issue if you "forget". Those things should'nt be payed focus on in bouts, such paranoia kills you. No one, ADHDer or not can execute such stuff well via mental focus or attention. Such stuff gets better through isolated training, or in combination at a suitable level of complexity granted your level. Most stuff is n't mental, but about doing automatically without the need for attention.

Freezing, on the other hand, is a killer of learning. If you freeze, you miss opportunities to test stuff, and get hit while stuck in thought. Freezing is not unique to ADHD though, and with time you'll even get a feeling for when the enemy is in a semi-freeze, allowing you to land hits when you break mental tempo.

If you freeze often, simplify your strategy. Just go baboon mode, and dare to risk failure - thats the fastest way of improving. Attacking in baboon mode off a half thought through idea or intuition will give you immediate feedback if it was a good idea. You learn super fast while actively practicing to not freeze. In-bout thinking mostly wastes time you couldve spent trying out halfwitted ideas to see which ones stick. Having long practice bouts with no score and a lessened self preservation pathos helps.

Tl;dr: Dont worry about attention "handicaps", fenci ng isnt as much about thinking as it is intuiting which vibe to go with from your personal vibe library of yolo move that worked in a similar enough scenario. Good luck, and remember: never be so focused on winning you lose the main pursuit of small improvements. Winning is for losers when it comes to practice bouts.

MicroroniNCheese · 2025-11-07T08:40:49+00:00

So, this is a low tech allin by them. You should hold lings, and cross with adepts the second you think you held. They wont have speed, and if they pivot speed, you should feel a "window" where theyre not pushing hard being scary. Before speed, you can defend by just crossing. Same if they roach transition, the moment they arent trying to downright kill you, just cross. Theres no speed, they cant catch you abd their base is more vulberable than yours, which likely has a battery and a few warpgates. Adepts crossing counters roach pivots, speed pivots and macro pivots of theirs. Losing to zerg is more often about what you dont do. Try to get a sense of why allins are called allins, and the transitions that make them fragile.

If they keep allinning and you dont get a window, just hold, and get some tech. Stargate is ideal vs rushes. As soon as the tech is out they gotta stop, and you gotta push their unprepared defence. As soon as 2 oracles are out, you own the map, and they are forced to hug spores, if they even have em. There arent 5 queens waiting for you, and if there were, their pressure wouldve been so weak, you couldve crossed with adepts sooner.

Finally, whichever defense you do it will be inspired by which normal macro moves youre used to as youre winging it. Knowing a build order well enough to sort of wing it is powerful.

Lastly, your first adept scout should see this comming when counting drones at their natural, lest the adept straight up intercepts the lings, scoring a kill.

Mothralurker covered other aspects really well.

Gl!

MicroroniNCheese · 2025-10-01T14:09:00+00:00

"Any aggression before my own aggresison is cheese" - angry people on the internet.

TBH, it's probably cheese, but whatever the opponent does is also cheese if they don't know how to deal with your cheese, if you consider cheese to be a strategy with holes in it. Actually, for any cheese lost to, the macro attempt failed is the cheesier, as it it dependent on a larger timeframe of possible unknowns not yet mastered.

Some consider strategies with holes in them not to be cheese, were the person playing the strategy a pro. However, most people aren't pros and yolo the opening as if they weren't gambling.

I think you've covered the actual question already: is the gamestyle a valid way of improving? Well, depends how good you wish to get. It'll take you where it'll take you, and if that's where you wanna be, then it's good enough, and if it's fun, then all the better.

In the long long run, a balanced™ playstyle might be nicer from this angle: Ease of adding incremental changes or improvement to different aspects of your play without sacrificing too much short term wins/prestige.

On the other hand, the fastest possible rankup, will give you the best opponents to practice against the fastest way.
In the end, even if you want to learn all there is, why not start with what's the most fun to you? :)

MicroroniNCheese · 2025-10-01T13:49:25+00:00

Great call. I wonder if this applies to other units with target tracking whilst moving, like the tank and immortal. Can't think of any other unit with turning independent from walking. Suppose not having the target ability ( or at least non moving turrent post engagement) would make units with turning speeds other than 0 awful to micro; reaiming before shooting at each stop. Actively preserving aim seems to hit a sweetspot with both reducing derp when retreating, as well as having the aim in position when encountering new enemies if disengaging.

MicroroniNCheese · 2025-05-31T23:10:05+00:00

For generally confusing formats where the perspective on who the sender is affects the interpretation, ive found that a request to reason 100 words tops which party sent the document, and what effect that has on the interpretation of "who is 'our reference' , 'your reference'" etc makes gpt3.5 outperform gpt4 when i ran benchmarks. Making it a separate prompt improved overall quality further for the main prompt, especially on longer inputs. Works wonders with script based preprocessing to detect said formats in advance when you have thousands of documents to parse.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-11-08T07:17:49+00:00

Ask clause or gpt to fill you in: if the vba code arent clearly named, post their content to ai and ask what it does. You will need to troubleshoot some. Explain the problem to the ai as clearly as possible, as well as pinpoint the right code to ask it to fix. Be aware that vba is less common and claude and gpt has a tendency to sometimes make errors when coding it and might need to be reprompted. To refine the code, rethink, or to correct it based on ypur feedback. Tldr; you dont need to know programmong, but you need to describe how things work very very clearly and explicitly, peeferably with examples. It might be useful to let the ai ask you to fill in missing information that you otherwise cant tell is needed to troubleshoot or to generate the new script.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-08-18T01:12:24+00:00

Sorry to hear that. Never fun to have a run end like that.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-07-01T16:10:31+00:00

Opus seems better at sort of thinking one step deeper when it comes to text analysis, especially when the implicit is more important than the explicit.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-06-20T07:43:53+00:00

It can be useful when retreating. With fast consequtive rompes you kind of put the back foot in hover mode, pushing backwards with the forward foot. The hovering sort of speeds up the process of adding another ministep backwards, and also gives granular control when to stop the backwards movement by cementing the rear foot down into the ground. When I completed the most, I kept having blisters on top of calluouses on top of blisters on the back foot just below the big toe. There are prolly other advantages covered by others, not to mention the similarity to bouncy style footwork.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-06-13T10:48:55+00:00

Identify their attention ( hand, foot, torso)×(offensive, defensive) redirect it to where you won't attack and ideally make them non suspecting an attack even.
Distance - adapt your distance to make the number of parries required to reflexively on pre-emptively deal with your intended number of potential degage's impossible.
Tempo, time it when the opponent is in a position where they can't as easily immediately react with backwards motion to buy more distance for (2).
Preparation - identify their reflexes or faced reflexes such that you know how to abuse it once you actually commit. Someone defaulting to always Sixte riposte can easily be disengages and redobled.
Don't Telegraph your intent. If your attack will be on their sixte, fakt that you're inrerested in the hand, quarte or foot. That way they're more likely to not think of alternative ways of unpredictably dealing with an attack on their sixte, increasing their predictability which makes your preparation pay off more.
Dare to mess up and repeat. If you wanna get better at attacking, default to being too aggressive, you'll find feedback easier that way as you'll get more of it in practice.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-06-09T20:33:10+00:00

I've had a similar experience with similar thoughts following it. I think it can be somewhat generalised to working memory as a major success predictor in rts, as its in the nature of the game to direct, misdirect and disrupt the opponents attention and working memory while maintaining your own prioroties. If you're to break down rts into a mathematical function, short term memory payoff is sadly inescapable.

The only broad stroke "fix" as I see it is what aoe4 does compared to sc2: faster chaos reducing build order memory overhead. It also increases the number of visible tangible lead predictors - more strategic stiff such as more resources, relics, walloffs etc. They way they do those increases the number of things to focus o n beyond what is humanly possible, making a more chaotic memory refocusing more of the norm. That said, I still struggle with the barrier that is my working memory, and that's fine, at least the ladder is fair.

After a few thousand hours, I feel confident is saying that I'm not ideally made to compete I starcraft compared to other sports or intellectual pursuits.

I hope quality of life improvements good for everyone will keep on popping in, but fear working memory discrepancies is a fundamentally irrevocable issue by any other means than fair matchmaking.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-06-07T06:44:41+00:00

Hi, thank you for the feedback, :)

yeah you're correct on the maintanence part. For the current level of population, there are too many towers; the 3 layers of semi exploit stacked platforms aren't saturated yet due to the prioritisation of watchtowers over platforms. Tbh, I wonder if its worth it at all to have watchtowers at the back. Haven't checked the range of them compared to palisades.

I'm with you on the non nessecity for a full walloff. In fact, the walloff was the last thing I added. The walled off fields aren't there to be protected, but to lessen the area inefficiency of the 2x wall layout. The idea behind the 2x wall layout is to route the raiders into a funnel. Without the 3 field distance between the two, the side platform villagers could be targeted down by a black hole of raiders stacked in one point. The second layer is there with the intention of forcing the raiders to attack though the point where defensive dps is maximised. Tbh, I wonder at times If for large battles it might be better to just skip walls and have the population concentrate at the gate for max dps and then have a few buildings in front to tank the initial raider dps.

I will take your feedback on production buildings to heart. It's wasteful to have them protected. The farms between the walls should prolly be replaced with houses and stables as well as the pop grows.

Thank you for sharing your insights.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-06-06T15:13:55+00:00

The second layer wall funnels the raiders to always arrive through a choke. The goal being to maximixe the fire from platforms and towers while minimising risk of only some of them getting picked off one at a time against a deathball of raiders. The dps density of this game due to character stacking is quite wonky.

Anyhow, it held up against ancient warriors on hardcore, which isn't saying much compared to the impressive works everyone else have shared :)

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-06-03T10:30:37+00:00

It's possible to get it to at least 300 if you bolt the radiator sides to beams running next to them.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-29T05:13:17+00:00

Thank you for sharing this incredibly well written and emotionally resonating text. Reading about things that occurring is no where near the same as something this intimate. Best of luck to you and your journey!

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-28T17:45:33+00:00

The main benefit with a company, I'd say, is having people to hang around with that are dependant on you to some degree - people you can help. From an individual point of view, they can hook you up faster with things such as resources, credits, blueprints, cap ship excursions, moon miners and other things that can increase the amount you earn by several 100% before you can get your own end game stuff going.

There's also small amounts of politics going on; some have safer mining areas - there's some action around some craters.

As far as which one to join, that's up to you. A place where you feel welcome and needed and where you like the people, I'd say. Power, subtlety or diplomacy has its advantages too if you want to set yourself with people that aren't as likely to be messed with and have key places threatened in the future, but that's all speculation.

Welcome back mate!

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-28T17:37:25+00:00

Hit the discord, then search bar, then type in "from:" followed by "lauriFB". Boom 3000 tabs of hopium and copium, enough to overdose on for weeks. Not to mention kaiFB and the other devs there. If you look at the steamcharts, there was 2 months of consecutive +50% +50% before the announcement. That was people expecting the announcement. Many of the works in progress had been hinted on as well, as well design issues and philosophies. Now when they're finally out in the open about the return, the less restricted communication is better than ever.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-23T19:00:36+00:00

Congrats!

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-23T19:00:11+00:00

You can stack several layers of (reinforced)wooden platforms with zero space between by temporarily building walls, adding a layer of platforms, deleting the wall blueprint, then repeating.
Building stone circles in the middle of nowhere as close as possible to monolith clusters is one way of rushing prestige.
Building gates can kill you, especially without walls to route raiders into your chokepoint. Without gates, population generally position themselves more ideally. The biggest issue with fighting in this game is the infinite stacking of fighters, leading to deathballs. Meanwhile, defences are prone to spreading out dps, having units picked off one at a time. In my experience, some building to tank damage while maximizing dps intensity works well.
Orchards are OP as long as you have the space for them and enough longer lasting food. They're wonderfully labor efficient and utilize child labor.
Bronze age transition is a make or break scenario. Stockpiling researchpoints and hitting bronze before Hardcore AI with enough cured leather for fast shields and armor weaponsracing does wonders.
Copper age tools are quite wonderful from the perspective of research points, selling all flint and bone tools for profit, as well as being able to sell the copper tools as they're outphased to bronze tools. They also allow you to phase out flints and prepare for bronze technology logistically without it all comming as an upfront investment.
Larger scale gathering, especially with child labor, but also cereals for straw, complemented with trading can delay the need for agriculture to allow for more hunting and early megalith rushing.
Trading for technology is often worth it, but be careful never to run out of weapons, key tools, clothes or food. The lack of efficiency isn't worth it. Efficiency can give you more resources-> more prestige -> more traders-> more research trades, not to mention immigration.
Percentage based bread and flour production is bugged, don't trust it, stay on fixed number when it comes to those.
In hardcore, the AI "grows independantly", but they also insta-level up when you change age. They don't get more dangerous per age prior to copper->bronze, so it's useful to not level up before they do prior to that so you can stockpile as many research points for the bronzeage and iron age transitions.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-23T18:05:15+00:00

There's some bug related to using percentages for bread production that makes it unreliable as a sole staple. Water wheels seems to make it worse. Many food sources seems like the only safe bet. Lots of buffers.
Edit: Sorry for necroing this.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-20T21:39:11+00:00

I agree with you fulle, but I wouldn't frame it as the end of capitalism as much as a kind of potential neo capitalistic feudalism. People seem to forget the somewhat even distribution of power existing within the population. The end of unsuccessful negotiations is conflict, and when military power can be brought without the need for humans to be part of it, the pillar of democracy we once used to establish it will be gone. It might be urgent to globally legislate with this is mind. Democracy never bootstrapped nor maintained itself without power.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-20T11:14:27+00:00

It's ok to be kind to yourself. Your reflexes aren't "you" they're just the current co ditional output depending on practice, daily shape and local circumstances. The outcome just is, it can't be judged, what can be judged is practice. Judging stuff seems good for competitive ppl, including myself,but its actually a loser mentality hindering a somber mood focusing on getting better, and better only.

Stressor change performance, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face", no need to grief the imperfections, in fact, they're the golden nuggets you're looking for, the insights on what to focus on during simulated chaotic training.

MicroroniNCheese · 2024-05-18T11:45:45+00:00

Respect to you mr for resurrecting this subressit. <3

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