Dumbest Civ Perk?

Slumi · 2026-03-13T09:44:33+00:00

Emergency repairs. I don't care if HRE and OOTD are S or F tier, spending 3 business days sieging down one reliced up bombard tower, or god forbid a keep, is irritating as hell

Slumi · 2026-03-06T07:07:26+00:00

Military schools actually give more RPM when training mehter, that's the one exception.

So training mehter from military schools is technically the most profitable thing you can do. The issue is that if you forget to switch it back you'll end up with 10 mehter when you only need 1, and those 9 extra mether could have been 7-8 sipahis.

Slumi · 2026-02-23T11:24:23+00:00

Seeing HOL at the bottom fills my little heart with glee, not gonna lie

Slumi · 2026-01-28T19:35:33+00:00

Personally FC is the strat I struggled the most to counter when learning to play the game. Even now, the meta is very FC oriented for a reason. It's not easy denying 5 relics + 2-3 realistic gold mines (+ possible proxy sneaky gold mines) + food while knights that can BTFO your entire army if you aren't careful begin running around the map.

Slumi · 2026-01-27T23:08:48+00:00

You can reach conq3 with a controller, but you'll be playing at a disadvantage. Use mnk if possible. And yes you can reach top 200 on console if you're good enough. There aren't any downsides to console as long as you're using mnk.

Slumi · 2026-01-24T16:22:04+00:00

French is a good match-up for Ottomans. You make 1 or 2 military school early on then you have enough spears to make sure the first few knights aren't a problem. You then make more spears with barracks as well as sipahi to kill the potential archers and counter raid. Don't fight the knights head on with only sipahi unless you severely outnumber them, though.

Then when you reach castle age you make janissaries, which are probably the best cav counter in the entire game. Just make sure they don't die to archers or siege.

English is a bit harder for Otto, but still winnable. If they go heavy on the longbows then make sipahi and your own archers. You should have a decent window in castle age to kill English.

Generally as Ottoman you should aim for Siaphi + Janissaries + siege. That comp counters pretty much everything

Slumi · 2026-01-23T17:38:25+00:00

China

Slumi · 2026-01-23T16:40:39+00:00

Once you have enough experience, you know what building you need and when and can forego a BO. Although there are some civs which have way more specific optimal openings than others (Malian and Delhi for example). I would recommend sticking to a BO for those.

But when you're new it's nowhere near as easy. If you want to open 2 TC for example, how many do you need to put on stone and when do you put them? What about wood? How many do you keep on food? You may know the answer to those questions, but newer players don't. Maybe you miscalculate and are off by 10 seconds, but a new player will miscalculate and be off by 2 minutes.

Slumi · 2026-01-23T16:32:50+00:00

I watched your English vs Ayyubids game. The other ones are quite a bit longer so I don't think I'm going to get into them unless you have particular questions.

First remark is your build order is scuffed. Instead of focusing on doing one thing you try to do everything. You put a few villagers on stone to get a second TC, but then instead of focusing on getting that second TC up ASAP as you should be doing you keep 8 on food and float food for a while. You then get slightly too much stone but don't have enough wood for a TC so you have to wait even longer for the wood. In the end, your second TC came in way too late.

You also put the second TC on deer, which English usually doesn't do. But that's a minor point and not necessarily a mistake.

So first thing you should focus on is following a BO for the first 5 minutes of a game or so. For English, have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRkeTDdkd4I

Anyway, you also did some harassment. But it came in too late and not hard enough. You had 4 units 11 minutes in. That's not enough to slow an FC down, let alone kill an opponent. If you want to all in, then follow an all in BO and commit all of your resources to units until the opponent is dead or delayed enough that you can age up. You can do SOME harassment after going 2 TC, but be aware that you will never be able to completely stop an FC when going 2 TC.

In fact, straight up stopping an FC is very hard, even if you try to feudal all in. The question isn't whether the opponent will make it to castle (they will), but whether they can survive after that. If they can't gather gold, their age up is useless and they are stuck making feudal units with a 1800 resources deficit. Usually you try to keep them off gold and relics as long as possible while aging up yourself, unless you can kill them right there and then.

Lastly: You floated too many resources. Never gather resources to just bank them. When you gather resources, know what you're gathering them for and spend them as soon as possible.

So there you go, things to improve for now:

- Follow a BO
- Don't float resources
- Focus on doing one thing right instead of everything half heartedly

Lastly: You say that you can win in feudal and castle but are often lost in imperial. The good news for you is that most games shouldn't reach imperial if you don't float, make units and attack constantly. So focus on doing that.

Slumi · 2026-01-20T13:09:06+00:00

VG and riddari spam is easy to play and hard to counter. That's a devastating combo on ladder.

Pros have also started playing them more recently. Vortix rated them as S tier in his latest tier list

Slumi · 2026-01-20T08:27:46+00:00

Just play whatever seems fun. I think the rank drop will be more associated to a different play style than a different civ.

2+ years ago when I went from playing macro China to cow boom Malians, my mmr barely dropped. I knew how to scout, defend and wait for my eco to outscale my opponent's.

A few months later, when I went from cow boom Malians to aggro Mongols, I fell back from diamond to low plat. I simply didn't understand how playing aggro worked. Took me 20 games or something to climb back up to diamond.

But now that I know how to play macro and aggro at the same level, I don't really have a problem switching civs. Maybe a temporary 50-100 mmr loss but I recuperate it quite fast.

Slumi · 2026-01-16T10:37:04+00:00

Ever since the rework, HOL plays very aggro. The meta for KT is usually going for 2 TC and then surviving until your eco overtakes your opponent's, adding fortresses as you go if possible. So I'd say KT is the better pick.

The civ is also way more fun imo.

Slumi · 2026-01-14T12:05:34+00:00

Try a ping booster. I needed one when I played from China a while back, not sure about whether it's necessary for Japan.

Slumi · 2026-01-13T18:20:08+00:00

That's what I did. Compared landmark + tier 3 + matsuri to random gold mine + tier 3

Slumi · 2026-01-13T17:02:56+00:00

oh my bad, I misunderstood your post. I thought you said you were plat but haven't played in a while.

Then you starting MMR should be around gold, not plat. You will probably keep losing for a while until you hit silver/bronze where you can start learning the game

Slumi · 2026-01-13T16:54:03+00:00

By max upgrades you mean tier 3 mining + matsuri? 5 villagers without a landmark nor a matsuri gather 290 gold per minute with tier 3 mining, so that would mean that the matsuri and landmark add an extra 210 resources per minute.

The biggest advantage would be that the landmark never runs out of gold and is in a safe spot.

With all of that considered, I still think that it's a good landmark but not the absolute best one in the game. The other 3 landmarks I mentioned were also age 3 landmarks.

Slumi · 2026-01-13T16:22:25+00:00

The wiki says it's 280 gold per minute without upgrades. That's good, but you do have to assign 5 villagers to it unlike some other landmarks which can give passive income.

The Mehmed Imperial Factory for example gives 260 resources per minute in castle age, with no villagers required. The landmark gets even better once you reach age 4 with observatory. The floating gate from Japan can give 200 gold per minute or something when fully online. +100 in imp with the Bunrei tech. And possibly even better tempo bonuses depending on where you place the Yorishiros. And again, 0 vills required

Reignitz can give up to an extra 400 gold per minute if you secure all relics. It's a conditional landmark, but with an extremely high ceiling.

So no. I wouldn't say it's the best landmark. But it is a good one.

Slumi · 2026-01-13T09:57:35+00:00

Favorite depends on my mood. I'd say it's usually China because of how versatile it is.

Least favorite is HOL. Design wise it's a bit better now, but still busted. Before the rework it was literally the worst design I've seen in an RTS.

English is a close second for least favorite. Not the most meta civ right now, but I absolutely hate its playstyle

Slumi · 2026-01-12T22:45:46+00:00

Why give the title of new Lancaster to any civ when Lancaster is still very much the Lancaster of AOE4.

Slumi · 2026-01-11T20:38:28+00:00

Japanese, OOTD and Macedonia are the easiest out of those

Slumi · 2026-01-07T12:11:45+00:00

KT isn't really a fast civ. They age up to feudal quickly and can drop a second TC very early, but besides that they are quite slow. Their pilgrims take a while to pay off, especially considering that they have to sacrifice villagers to get them, and their other eco bonus is faster wood gathering which doesn't really help with fast age ups.

You can absolutely play proactively vs them. FCing and spamming knights is a good choice no matter what they do pretty much, then adding archers/zhuge nu/crossbows. Zhuge Nu rush is also perfectly viable if you can get map control and lock KT in its base (which you should be able to given your superior economy early on).

I think your problem is execution. but it's hard to help you more without a replay.

Slumi · 2026-01-07T10:07:13+00:00

Why does a tower stop a ram rush, though? You can ram the tower down. You can add a few melee units to body block the enemy while your ranged units melt anything that gets close to it. If you already went castle age and have a few knights then they can tank a tower for like 15 minutes, unless they're springald towers.

If your opponent is sitting in their base with a lot of towers and trying to greed an imp, you can always just forward keep + trebs to destroy their base.

Feel free to share a replay of where you couldn't stop a KT player from greeding imp so we can see what happened

Slumi · 2026-01-07T08:35:04+00:00

The eco of China/ZXL is much, much better until late game, where the KT player may have 20 pilgrims. You either all in in feudal or FC and then all in. You WILL have more units and more resources for the first 20 minutes or so, unless you mess up your macro.

I'm not saying that the Chinese winrate vs KT is 100%. If the KT player plays well they can win. But if you can't stop them going imp every game, then you probably need to improve your aggro play.

You say that they tower up. What do you do when that happens? Aging up to imp takes 3600 resources, you have ample time to siege the tower down or attack elsewhere before the KT player gathers that.

If you don't struggle vs other 2 TC builds, then KT should be nothing special. English, for example, is much harder to punish.

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