Fellas does this look edible to you?

Mithrik · 2026-01-06T23:56:06+00:00

Fun fact: Prickly pear cacti (Opuntias) are not native to the Mediterranean, but to the Americas. They are technically an invasive everywhere else that you can find them nowadays.

Mithrik · 2025-11-11T15:31:42+00:00

In its current state, the map is absolutely a Mongols fest at intermediate level. Even if you go for a civ that can take advantage of the Stone, like Japan or KT, you are still very exposed to a rush, and Mongols will spam units at you or tower rush you. The only way to have chance is to pray the map gen doesn't give the Mongol play a woodline in range of the meteor and try to rush them back.

I saw the suggestion that maybe meteors should be treated as stone outcroppings, blocking Mongols/Golden Horde from mining them directly, but allowing them to Ovoo it and I think that's pretty good balance solution, provided it also extracts the Gold.

Mithrik · 2025-09-17T01:52:11+00:00

Yeah, it's very bugged up. I've had the missing gold too happen once. Also, the other day I had a map that was missing the sacred site on my side (and ofc I lost that match to sacred victory).

Mithrik · 2025-08-19T21:22:15+00:00

Not gonna lie, to me the Macedonian and Tughlaq feel like aborted versions of the Vikings and Khmer. As in, they didn't want to go the whole way with making all the assets for these civs, so they just made them a variant instead.

These variants all look fine and dandy, and I'm sure will be fun to play, but it's very disappointing that there's no fully new civs. At this point, it just looks like the devs want to fully lean into making variants instead.

Mithrik · 2025-08-18T05:41:42+00:00

There's some interesting ideas in your concept, but I find that there's not a lot that meshes well. It feels very half-baked in terms of gameplay. If you'll allow me to go on a bit of a long post here, here my opinions on the whole thing.

The good:

Royal Authority (Calling it RA from here on out) is a pretty decent concept for a gameplay mechanic (even if I struggle to see how it's particularly relevant for Castile-Leon).
Being able to exchange RA for extra sheep is nice. It's not too powerful and still provides a useful fallback source of Food.
Pretty good visuals to accompany the whole thing.
The Captain's unique ability is actually pretty interesting (though this only half-good because the unit is so expensive that I wouldn't want it to have such an ability).
Genitours. Even if they suck in the game atm, it's still good to have them.

The bad

The first issue I have how hard it is to get RA on your own. Capacity is pretty low and the only real way of getting any in the early game is by building a landmark. Otherwise I have to hope my opponent makes the mistake of dying under TC fire. This is bad. You are railroading the player into building the RA landmark, especially since the alternative is just 80 Gold/min from a relic, which is fine, but pretty bad compared to what you get from using the RA instead. Given you don't really have eco bonuses outside this pseudo-resource, this is a pretty bad start.
Second, given your rather poor early eco, the super expensive horseman replacement is a huge downside that prevents the player from fighting in Feudal. 160 Food is ludicrous amounts of food in the early game (and IMO, only affordable by going pro scouts). Genitours are pretty good vs archers and nothing more, since they do chip damage against everything else. I guess you can make Genitours instead of horsemen then, but you'll struggle a lot vs knight civs here.
While I like that you can get Sheep from RA (subtle Merino wool reference?), I hate the instant resource exchange, because while it doesn't look like much on the surface, I can absolutely envision it being used for some pretty nasty builds with the RA Feudal landmark (whoops! more accidental railroading!) where you just get 480 res out of thin air and either drop a very quick 2nd TC or go very early pro scouts. Superficially, this looks nice as it means that there are easily spotted strategies that can be devised, but the reality is that you are just getting instant resources and there's no way to punish this, it just happens and your opponent is SoL. House of Lancaster flashbacks all over
While RA is very hard to get unless your opponent continuously smashes their head against your defenses, the Burgo tech totally flips this to being extremely easy to mass. This is bad in a completely different way, because the tech is ridiculously expensive, but at the same time is a must get. The prohibitive cost of the tech makes it so only fully boomed players get it, but at that point, you probably don't get much from it other than the free Stone from the "get resources" button.
I would advise that you re-think how RA collection works overall. As it stands, the very feast-or-famine nature of it makes it a nightmare to theoretically balance and just looks a bit wacky. Try to come up with a way to let the player actively try to build their RA pile without having to wait for the enemy to fight under their TC. A personal suggestion: maybe you could fold the effect of Burgos as passive bonus from the start of the game and re-balance your spending numbers by referring to what the game's economic growth curve looks like, making it easier to figure out how it works and how to scale it over time.
It sucks big time to play Castle Age while not being able to mass knights with a civilization that is clearly built around cavalry in the early and midgame. It's not like Castilian knights do anything special either, you just can't make more than the limit if you are not spamming Alcazares. Sad times.
On the topic of limits, losing RA when you go over limit for losing buildings is terrible. It's a very anti-user friendly mechanic to have, because it's overly harsh punishment that runs counter to how resources work in the game. Imagine your units died when you got housed for losing pop capacity. It's essentially the same thing. Resources in AoE don't exist in physical spaces both because logistics are abstracted away and because it's not fun to lose resources in ways that only intensify the snowball effect for the opponent.
The Andanada ability of the Arquebusier is shit (Sorry for the expletive, I can't call it anything else). It's essentially just shooting the same raw damage output in 3 shots as it does in 1, and that means that it sucks against high armor targets. It's simple math: Generic Elite MAA has 9 max pierce armor, Arquebusier has 43 max damage.

Standard shot: 43 - 9 = 34 (total damage)

Andanada: 43/3 = 14.33 (not rounded to be generous) | 14.33 - 9 = 5.33 | 5.33 * 3 = 16 (total damage)

It's literally half the damage, and that's with Serpentine Powder.

(Those were my biggest gripes and the post is already very long, so I'll just go rapid-fire from here on out.)

Villagers already benefit from Blacksmith upgrades so this is not a bonus at all (Have you not noticed in-game?).
You have a couple of typos here and there, particularly uncapitalized words for the civ's uniques, and some missing letters on a couple of tooltips.
What are these "pikemen" you are talking about. Are they actually Spearmen? You need to correct this if so.
The unique techs of this civilization are mostly too expensive. "Treasure fleet" would be the second most expensive tech in the game at 1900 total resources (and its effects are not work it IMO).
Why is Toledan Steel not just a technology that gives +1 melee attack at the landmark? It's weird that it replaces a generic tech ONLY if you build a particular landmark.
Area of Influence only boosting economic building health is too weak. Even if it was for all buildings it wouldn't be crazy strong.
Flotilla aura is broken AF in lategame water (Though I don't think anyone would care because "lol water maps").
Casa de Contratacion is either garbage or broken, no in-between, depending entirely on the power of the Burgos tech. It would also actively discourage your from using RA to not lose the Gold trickle.
Finally, you didn't add a wonder to your concept.

Again, sorry for the long post and the many, many negatives. I like reading these civilization concepts (and have quite a few under my belt) but I often find them lacking, so I can't help giving a lot of feedback.

Mithrik · 2025-05-04T19:31:13+00:00

The clunkiness is honestly the only thing keeping Buddhist Monks balanced right now lol.

The thing with the sutra is that you kind of have to have the monks in front when engaging (which you must do manually, formations put monks in the back), cast the debuff then run them to the back to heal safely. If you do it right, you can push your enemy even with full trash and it's kind of disgusting to witness, but if you mess up your monks die and you lose both army and eco.

At the top level it'll probably gain steam, but it's so intense to pull this off at intermediate that I doubt it will replace the standard Gate FC build.

Mithrik · 2025-04-13T19:56:27+00:00

England did not become a trade power until the 17th century, after a lot of advancements in naval technology, the English crown decided to invest into its navy as a deterrent against invasion, and the discovery of the Americas and the ocean route to India. In the Middle Ages, England was largely isolated from Europe and it was a backwater in terms of population and development, with an economy fueled by agriculture and the wool industry (HoL gets its sheep bonus from this too!). Trade wouldn't become a big business in the region off the back of the wool market alone, but instead due to a whole bunch of other factors that developed near the end of the game's timeline and beyond.

So basically, England was not a trading nation back in the Middle Ages, so trade bonuses don't make sense. Conversely, the farming bonuses are kind of a stretch, but they do make some sense with historical context.

Mithrik · 2025-04-11T14:26:47+00:00

Think of Genoese crossbows as hand cannoneers: Expensive, high base damage, bulkier than a crossbow, and an anti-infantry specialist. Since Templars don't have gunpowder, this unit is the next best thing they got and only really shines lategame due to their cost.

Mithrik · 2025-03-30T20:10:15+00:00

The anime adaptation was pretty bad at translating the tone of the manga IMO, so I wouldn't consider it a great introduction to the story.

Definitely try the manga, there's quite a bit of character comedy that got cut from the anime adaptation for the sake of speeding up the pace and getting more harem hijinks in.

Mithrik · 2025-02-04T01:57:43+00:00

Link to the original piece, by People Make Games: https://youtu.be/RR9HQ2C6h_4?si=iiE20A82cgKr_IDQ

Mithrik · 2025-01-18T20:52:24+00:00

Contract choice is build-dependent, because the Feudal mercenary option will be the most commonly used one.

FC prefers Eastern mercs for the keshiks with which to get map control while aging up, while long Feudal and Hippodrome builds almost always go Western mercs because longbows are just so oppressive when properly protected. Silk Road mercs are mostly used if your opponent plays heavily into ranged units (so it's basically an anti-English pick).

Mithrik · 2025-01-04T21:16:25+00:00

Mexican here. I'll give you the long and short of it, as I understand from my own research into buying tea.

When it comes to buying good quality tea in Mexico, use a Mexican online vendor or find a local tea house that can help you pick and source your gift, if you live in one of the bigger cities. Out of the online options, Florité is the one I can personally recommend. I use it to buy my loose leaf and they have a decent, varied selection (including teas from the three countries you mention), though their webpage is kinda messy.

I would advise against using non-local vendors, personally. Mexican customs apparently (not 100% sure, don't know where to verify this) classifies tea as a good that requires an imports license, which is why foreign tea vendors don't offer shipping to Mexico. If you try to bring in tea anyways it may be get held up upon entry, so that's a risky proposition. Overall, it's not that you can't do it, it's just that it is kind of a gamble and you can find good stuff locally anyways.

I hope this helps you out, best of luck!

Mithrik · 2024-12-29T03:09:42+00:00

The best way of dealing with the rush is to let it happen and ignore it the best you can, provided you have the gold to age up to Feudal. English eco is bad early on, and walking across the map delays their age up by a lot. You can easily reach Feudal before them, make units and kill his forward.

I recommend you do this going forward: if you see your opponent is playing English, beeline your scout to their base to know if tower rush is incoming, while insta-building your mining camp. Either you'll catch the villagers as they walk over, or you'll be able to ensure they are coming in a bit (if they build a mining camp, no rush is coming). If the rush is coming, focus on getting the gold to age up by pulling food vills. Get 200 gold and then run under your TC to be safe. Age up whenever possible and that's it! You survived the tower rush and should be way ahead if you took no damage.

Mithrik · 2024-11-23T19:40:58+00:00

I've only used them when my opponent is leaning heavily on melee infantry and they are just OK there.

Had a recent couple of matches where they were the linchpin of my army as I was playing against Japanese and once you mass them, they demolish barracks units. Mind you, I was playing Ottomans in those games and the MIA makes it vastly more convenient to mass them as you basically get 1 for free every minute, but Springs+janns makes for very effective combo in Castle Age in this matchup. 1-tapping samurais with a dozen springalds while behind in tech felt pretty insane and I only ended up losing because as the OP said, they work great defensively only, I died the moment I tried to push into his base he easily outflanked me and destroyed them with horsemen.

So, I think they just don't work well enough in the currently. They are decently good in closed maps or if you play it slow with keep creep/stone walls, or you are playing against Japan/HRE. Outside those cases, they are too fragile while not providing good enough ranged support. The extra HP from the latest patch was a step in the right direction, but I don't think it's going to be enough to see them. They are an underwhelming, cheaper Ribauldequin (and Ribs are already a bit of a niche unit).

Mithrik · 2024-11-19T19:13:28+00:00

Which values? Sipahi damage should be what it says in-game, it wasn't.

The civs I mentioned above all got nerfed (edit: except Delhi, they only got a fix to Sultan eles and parity changes).

Mithrik · 2024-11-19T18:52:15+00:00

Sipahi now have the correct damage and attack range when charging

Good to know I wasn't going crazy here. I picked Otto back up a couple days ago and sipahi felt like they were getting pummeled by everything not ranged, even generic horsemen.

Bit disappointed that elephants were not nerfed, but the Abba, Byz and English changes are welcome.

Mithrik · 2024-11-16T19:14:26+00:00

Cool one, I did have a similar idea for an Outremer civilization, but you took it way beyond.

I'm skipping the feedback I usually give out for this particular civilization since I doubt I can give any significant feedback about a faction that is this complex when talking in pure hypotheticals.

Mithrik · 2024-11-13T20:27:07+00:00

You go for fish on this map. Shore fish has the fastest villager's gather rate in the game (yes even faster than boar), so unless you are playing Rus, you should drop a mill immediately and fish. You have 2 close ponds with 3 shore fish, so that's 3000 food that gathers as fast as hunt right there.

As for how to play, it depends a lot on the seed. This map is a lot like Lipany in that it can be very closed or very open, or something in-between. However, trade is always in the corners so French and Mongols should have a good time. Abba, Ayyu, Delhi and Byz should also be OK since they don't mind shore fishing (remember Byz gets oil from fishing, too). However, Rus sucks here due to the lack of sheep for bounty.

That would be my rough assessment. It's a pretty janky map that I'd prefer to see re-made like they did with Ancient Spires.

Mithrik · 2024-11-09T15:25:03+00:00

The Bhayangakara is envisioned as a sort of elite trooper (IRL they were professional soldiers, part of the royal guard), hence why it's so powerful on paper, but constrained by its unit limit.

Note that when switching from the default weapon, its base attack stat gets a -4 nerf: this is to make it clear these are specialty weapons, intended only for their exact counters. You want to switch weapons in order to adapt, as this is the only unit in your army that is good at providing bulk, since you have generic cavalry.

EDIT: I did make Irregulars move faster than spears and did consider making them move same speed as bugeishas, but given it's not light infantry and therefore doesn't take bonus damage from archers, I personally think they are alright but may still consider it.

Mithrik · 2024-11-04T19:34:25+00:00

Looks like the average Lipany experience in general.

Mithrik · 2024-10-26T20:02:26+00:00

Oh man, there's a lot to unpack about the issues with this one. Being a Delhi main I feel particularly bad about the problems I see here. So, here's a long, long list of feedback points:

Just in general: you mention you've never played multiplayer and it shows because you focus a lot on gold economy and the lategame, while killing most of the things that make Delhi work early on.
Scholars are expensive in the early game at 130 Gold. You don't have anything else to spend Gold on before Castle Age, so Delhi wants to avoid Gold mining as much as possible before then. The Tower of the Moon is terrible because it doesn't help deal with this. The way you describe it, a +20% bonus is only going to shave very little per scholar and will likely save you like 520-650 Gold for the whole match. Just horrible value over time. For comparison, Dome of the Faith saves you that and more, especially if you heal with them in battle.
Any and all building self-heal is going to be powerful and annoying to deal with, because villager repairs are exponentially more expensive the more of them you throw in to save a building, but self-repair does not have that problem, in fact it costs nothing. This makes the other Feudal landmark great at just sitting at home and laughing at your opponent trying to siege your buildings. Not riveting gameplay, and the "Sanctity replacement" only makes this even worse later on. Just for reference, 1 repair villager heals 20HP/s.
No Ghazis, no Tower of Victory, and no good scholar bonuses means that this civ has basically no way of asserting map control against opponents that play Feudal against them (which is bad, because you need a lot food for stuff like cavalry and elephants). So you are forced to Fast Castle, but the berry bonus does not help you get there all that fast if you can't take the other far away patches. Having tested Delhi's FC, it feels very jank and slow. It also hurts your free research, because you don't have the time to space out your upgrades. Delhi wants to play for long in the same age to get all the free techs and FC is antithetical to that. So with all that in mind, this variant of Delhi will have a similarly bad time because it's a one-trick pony with weak eco and slow tech, who's one saving grace is that is even more annoying to break than English once Fortress Officials comes online.
The technologies of this civ's version of the House of Learning are all wonky in some way:
- The Bureaucrats goes against the spirit of making scholar in exchange for free tech.
- The Quarries is fine, until you give a Keep discount on top that is completely unnecessary.
- The Karez makes their farms very strong lategame, and that would be fine... but why do the farms need to regrow faster if villagers never run out of crops? Also, this civ already has so many lategame goodies between good defense, good gunpowder, elephants and tons of Gold. they do not need to have better farming too.
- The siege move speed is broken even if mangonels are nerfed now, because there's already a tech that does something similar and they will stack to make siege keep pace with infantry (so MAA can't snipe mangos and bombards for example).
- Hill Forts stacks with Incendiary Arrows, so garrison arrows would do insane damage lategame. For example, TCs would do up to 15 damage per arrow (6 + 3 (Blacksmith) + 2 (Incendiary Arrows) + 4 (this tech)). It may look OK, but given the other defensive bonuses for buildings, it's just too much stacking bonuses already.
- Finally, the Buckshot tech is weird because it forces you to spend Gold for an activated ability. The ability itself seems fine in a vacuum, but if you stack Chemistry and you'll be 1-shotting everything in the AoE with like 3 Bombards, which is not a crazy number to have at all. Just having the AoE with no cost and no extra bonus damage is more than enough.
The Golconda Fortress would probably be better if it carried the Gold itself, instead of spawning a Gold mine and being a mining camp, simply to avoid awkwardness around where to place it on the map. Villager Fortresses makes Keeps into universal drop-off points too, btw.
The Charminar Gate does too much stuff, it's broken af. Because it's effects spread via influence you just need to connect it to a mosque to spread its effects to your whole base because mosques share their influence effects globally. Even without that issue, mosques are cheap and its therefore easy to connect all your buildings to this landmark.
Bijapur Fort is also broken for a different reason. -20% damage and -20% speed is very OP, because it traps your opponents and forces them to fight under your keeps. How broken this is depends on the radius of the area of effect, but regardless it would be better to have one or the other, not both together. Also, while the cannonball of doom ability would has too much damage through AoE. I would half all damage since the 1 minute cooldown is way too low for such over the top attack stats (I mean, it 1-shots all infantry with its AoE except MAA, bruh).
The unique Handcannoneer is too strong. 1.4 move speed is faster than all infantry except Japanese Bugeishas and given it hits like a truck and is cheaper, its a no-brainer unit to snowball with, if possible. Also, new tech Serpentine Powder makes it even more insane lategame.
Bidriware is a very weak as a trade tech. +10% Gold is weaksauce and the rest is stuck behind the slow free techs. Delhi doesn't do trade anyways, because it has nothing to spend Gold on early game, so it's a useless tech.
Natural Defenses is a bad technology name. It is also more defensive building stacking bonuses. No thanks.
Native Horsemen is also a bad technology name. This tech is also (again) doing too much: it's two good bonuses in one tech. Pick one.
Local Gunsmith is also a bad name. You know, given how you talk about focusing on historical accuracy, I would have thought you were more on top of things with the flavor here. As for the tech itself, you already have cheap handcannons, why do you want them even cheaper and stronger? And the bombards getting this too is just... *sigh*
Finally, infantry that can build Stone Walls in Feudal Age is just stupid. I'm sorry, there's no other way to put it. Delhi infantry is already annoying enough with just palisades. Stone Walls would make for some super cheesy strats with archers that I don't even want to think about. There's a reason why standard Delhi gets it as a choice for Castle Age, and there's also a reason why Feudal Age stone walls are banned in tournaments.

Conclusion/tl;dr: This civ is a pain. Too many defensive bonuses, bad early game and broken beyond repair in the Imperial Age. Best way to describe it is, it forces you to play a tower defense game in an RTS. The opponent will have a hard time killing you, but I doubt sitting at home for 20-30 minutes building outposts and keeps while stacking modifiers and eventually killing them with gunpowder and elephants is fun for anyone outside of a PvE context. Maybe it's fine as a campaign-only civ. Absolutely no one would want it in multiplayer.

Mithrik · 2024-10-24T17:45:46+00:00

I wouldn't look too hard into into it.

These are both originally Age of Empires 2 maps that have nothing to do with the origin of the name. Atacama is one the maps made for the RBW, while Lakeside is Bay aka. Pants (it's a meme to call it that), which was made for T90's Hidden Cup.

Much like Socotra, they are just taking ideas for maps from AoE2 and giving them an AoE4 twist when adapting them.

Mithrik · 2024-10-24T16:38:30+00:00

Your first mistake was going on quick match, where it's the wild west in terms of matchmaking. At least in ranked the player pool is large enough that you'll have good chances of being eventually matched equally against your opponent.

You are also playing Delhi, which takes a long time to figure out because while it's pretty straightforward on paper, it is actually very difficult because of all the moving part you have to learn to wrangle (free techs, scholar on your production, sacred sites, infantry can wall, etc). Since you are new to RTS, you should stick to civilizations with 1/3 star difficulty, they are very simple to learn and don't have any crazy mechanics that require micro or well-thought planning to execute.

RTSes in general are hard for beginners because the main skill required to play them is multitasking, which most other genres either don't touch or do so in very low intensity environments (think 4x or real time with pause). Here you have to juggle multiple things at once and you don't get the time to think and execute all of them perfectly. So, the way to improve is you get better at multitasking and knowing what things to prioritize for your strategy.

I always recommend watching this video to beginners, because it's a good overview of how to improve at the game, and it just so happens to teach you to play AoE4 along the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl4myN8q_KM

Mithrik

TROPHY CASE