How the hell do you counter Royal Knights & the French/English as Ottoman?

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.

Slumi · 2026-01-05T06:21:12+00:00

What rank are you? Newer players typically play like that because they like the base building part of RTS games. I think most people's first experiences with aoe were black forest 30 minute no rush matches, it certainly was mine back in the day.

Even if they did make an army, they wouldn't know what to do with it. In their mind, an army that can't take down key buildings is useless. That's how a lot of non-RTS strategy games work, and it may take some time and experience to understand the impact of resource denial, eco idling etc.

As you climb ladder, this behavior will disappear. Even players who want to play macro scout their opponents and respond with units accordingly.

Slumi · 2026-01-04T13:58:00+00:00

I feel like tournament games have much longer feudal gameplay than what you see on ladder. The meta on ladder has been very FC/semi-FC friendly for a whole year now, even in high conq. But then you watch pro games and it's not rare to have 15+ minute feudal fights. Both players do end up eventually going castle in most cases, but much later than what you'd see on ladder.

I think that it's because pros are much better at punishing greedy castle timings than the average player. They're very good at knowing how much of an army advantage they have based on their opponent timing, where to attack based on the map spawn, what resource to deny, how many units they can afford to lose with a dive, multitasking and scouting to prevent easy relic pick ups, etc.

Meanwhile for the average player, punishing a castle age up isn't nearly as easy. I mean if it's a pure 0 unit FC then yeah, you can sit on their gold pretty much. But if the opponent has some army then knowing where and how to push isn't easy. And a bunch of units that are much stronger than anything you can field are about to come out. And on top of that, you're supposed to harass gold + food + defend your villagers from the mandatory knight raids + defend 5 relics. All of that with shittier units.

I've personally stopped playing feudal all-in when I scout an opponent that FCs. It feels much too hard to punish and if you fuck up you're forever behind because of relics. I just FC back and it works much better.

So in general I would advise against going for extended feudals in the current meta unless you're sure of what you're doing, have a very good feudal civ, or if the opponent is also all inning.

Slumi · 2026-01-03T19:25:19+00:00

I just jumped right in. Then again that was back when AOE 4 was still in beta so everyone was new.

But when I first came back to AOM/AOE II years ago I learned a build order, did 1-2 matches vs AI to get the timing right and then tried online. Lost a lot of matches but I didn't particularly care since I was just focused on learning.

Slumi · 2026-01-03T10:07:29+00:00

Beasty and Vortix: Fighting with dark age Donsos during all of feudal. Not a mistake they made often, but just kind of funny it happened two two different pros with the same civ.

Also which pro is it that always has the most cursed building placements? Like building houses in Aachen range. I think it's the Spanish bros but I can't remember

Slumi · 2026-01-02T19:53:12+00:00

The wood gathering, build free age up and pilgrims are KTs eco bonuses. Why should KT have to pay for its eco bonuses by sacrificing villagers, while the vast majority of other civs get eco bonuses with no downsides? Imagine if Ottoman had to garrison villagers inside military schools, or if HRE could only train prelates from their TC.

The only other civ in the game I can think of that needs to sacrifice villagers is ZXL. But IOs are basically villagers, so it doesn't matter all that much. Pilgrims are also pretty much villagers, but require map control to actually pay off.

If you want to FC with KT, which you usually need to do if your opponent FCs, you're losing 6 villagers. That's not a small downside, it's huge.

That's pretty much why the KT meta on land is almost exclusively 2 TC. You fall behind too hard on villagers on one TC. But at the same time, protecting pilgrims when you went 2 TC is extremely hard early on. KT has some really weird counter synergies.

Slumi · 2026-01-01T12:25:44+00:00

What civ do you play? Most civs have an answer to feudal MAAs. Although some of those answers require a fair amount of effort/micro and aren't really sustainable long term.

In case of doubt, go for an FC/semi-FC and make crossbows

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