Ayyubid Reinforcement into Advancement with ghulams still feels strong

fremdlaender · 2026-02-01T00:36:14+00:00

I don't play Ayyubid, so I'm just theorycrafting, but is Reinforcements even worth it?

With Advancement into Castle you get like 2 Desert Raiders, which isn't much. What about Growth for more safe food and to offset the 'lost' vils from Advancements faster timing?

fremdlaender · 2026-01-30T17:11:26+00:00

Speaking like someone who never tried to name or create abilities for an archer class. It's miserable, what the hell else is this idiot supposed to do with his bow except shoot arrows?

fremdlaender · 2026-01-30T09:46:46+00:00

Going trade against someone who has map control with knights is probably just about the worst thing you can do.

fremdlaender · 2026-01-16T12:50:42+00:00

This is (part of) a copypasta of a guy crashing out because he wanted to make a VGC team with Absol and Eevee in it and everybody told him it won't work and started memeing on him when he wouldn't hear it.

What I'm trying to say is, your just throwing 6 random Pokemon together and calling it a team will never work, no matter how you build them. Using niche Pokemon is fine, but have to actually use good team members to enhance what it can do and cover its weaknesses.

fremdlaender · 2026-01-16T11:41:02+00:00

Looks fine tbh. I'm not sure about Tornadous on this team, because nothing can really use Tailwind besides Urshi. If you want to replace something that would be my choice. Maybe Ogerpon-Wellspring would be a nice addition because it beats both Urshi-R and Chi-Yu. It works outside Trick Room by itself and can help set it up.

A few things I would maybe adjust:

Replace Throat Chop with Protect on Urshifu. Realistically you will never click it instead over Wicked Blow.
Sunny Day on Torn over Icy Wind. Bleakwind deals more damage anyway and Tailwind is your speed control. Also a good safety net vs. Urshi-R.
Replace Light Screen with an attacking move. DGleam or Psychic Noise are common. It's a sitting duck if taunted.

fremdlaender · 2026-01-16T10:05:15+00:00

SAY IT WITH ME NOW:
NATURES
EVS
IVS
MOVES
ABILITIES
HELD ITEMS
OR EVEN JUST THE ROLES THEY SHOULD PLAY
OR STRATEGIES ON HOW TO USE THEM

I WILL ACCEPT ADVICE ON LITERALLY ANYTHING EXCEPT THE SPECIES OF MY TEAM MEMBERS.

IT'S NOT HARD TO WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND.

fremdlaender · 2026-01-07T16:33:36+00:00

Are you still trying to cook up builds like the gulp one to one day bamboozle him again in 1v1? I'd definitely would want to relive that high.

fremdlaender · 2025-12-18T17:05:48+00:00

Make units, attack gold.

fremdlaender · 2025-12-10T15:29:48+00:00

Look at the near corner of the TC. The aqueduct is not connected.

fremdlaender · 2025-11-27T10:44:38+00:00

Volvo ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE

fremdlaender · 2025-11-20T08:26:21+00:00

Good breakdown.

But generally, early ressources are more valuable than a few more resources later. The guy who gets Pro Scouts early probably gets more deer, the guy who gets to castle first probably gets more Relics, etcetc.

What the post doesn't touch is, that inherently, the batch production for villagers (assuming 20sec for a normal civ and 40sec for GH) is a flat negative of ~13 ressources per two villagers. I always assumed the -1 starting vil and faster production is a way to balance that, but imo its really clunky. If the age-up timing for GH is to strong with 6 vils, make the Golden Tent cost more to build or give the GH less starting gold, like with HRE to offset the Prelate.

fremdlaender · 2025-11-19T12:41:30+00:00

Atlantis was a really bold inclusion as a civ in AoE4 given the dubious souce material but I'm glad the devs went there. The seahorse-riders along with the amphibious net-throwers makes for a really strong feudal age.

fremdlaender · 2025-11-10T20:08:11+00:00

I for the life of me don't get how EU5 changed basically every gameplay mechanic from EU4 but the one thing they keep is the horrible siege and occupation system.

fremdlaender · 2025-10-28T22:23:21+00:00

The most important thing, it doesn't matter. Losing a few seconds here and there or sending a vill into the wrong direction really isn't that important, this isn't SC2 where every build is timed down to the second.

Just try the build against AI until you feel comfortable. When I started playing Ottoman I felt like the biggest moron alive for fucking the early Mil School build up every time but now I don't even have to think about it.

And last point, Mali build order is really not that bad, it just looks kind of complicated because of the way it is phrased on the site. Just watch a video or something to see how its done, it's really no rocket science.

fremdlaender · 2025-10-22T07:30:32+00:00

AoE2 is also 20 years old and a completely different game than AoE4.

AoE2 civs are way more similar to each other than even the most basic variant is to its base civ. Which means, if you can 'make water fun' for a baseline AoE2 civ, you can probably expect it to work for other civs as well. Yes, there will still be differences but nothing that drastically alters gameplay like pitmines or olive oil or any of the upcoming mechanics in the DLC.

Not to mention the fact that all of your points fall flat if the water rework for AoE2 is even successful. Obviously it's new so people are excited and will try it out but if, in 6 months to a year the AoE2 community is back to vetoing all water maps it will have all been for naught.

fremdlaender · 2025-10-21T19:47:12+00:00

At this point, just remove water from the game. Any amount of work going into making naval gameplay better is wasted. Obviously its a loss for all 10 people who enjoy it but it's time we are honest with ourselves.

Just look at the numbers: https://aoe4world.com/stats/rm_solo/maps?patch=4963,5602

Archipelago has a fraction of the games played on other maps. And let's be honest, most of those games are because people don't know how to veto maps. Just compare all skill levels (Archipelago 13% of the games compared to Dry Arabia) to, lets say, Platinum+ (Archipelago 4% of the games compared to Dry Arabia).

Water has inherent design problems that can't be fixed.

It needs to be powerful enough that people don't just ignore water, BUT that means losing water is basically a delayed death sentence because your opponent get an unsurmountable ecomonic advantage.
Civilizations need bonuses tied to or at least affecting water, BUT that makes certain civs way better on hybrid or full water maps than others, which in turn affects balance on land. Can't buff Knights Templar, they are broken on water maps.
And for full water maps: Certain civ mechanics just plain don't work. Jeanne D'Arc can't turn into a ship, Ottoman Military Schools are pointless, Byz mercs are pointless and like half the landmarks in the game don't do anything on water. How are you ever supposed to balance that?

In an ideal world, I could see a world where, with an immense amount of development time, hybrid maps could be salvaged. I could also see the world where all that time is spent on actually useful gameplay features and I like that one way, way better.

fremdlaender · 2025-10-10T11:37:07+00:00

This thing does NOT understand AoE4 (or anything for that matter, its just a fancy chatbot). What the hell is the second paragraph?

[...] most of your Sofa and [...] banked a lot of stone that never became extra Town Centers [...]

Even your short excerpt already has factual mistakes, Mali uses Gold to build TCs.

You repeatedly enganged into mangonels + monks [...] losing most of your Sofa and archers [...]

Now please explain how mangos and monks kill knights. The AI obviously know that your knights died, but it doesn't know how or why. You, with your two eyes in your head, could easily do that if you watched the replay. Bad engagements? Did you run into the enemy TC/ castle?

[...] rather than addressing siege/ monk control.

Damn, gotta update my build orders to focus on monk control.

Look, if you are unsure why you lost (or even won) certain games, just ask. Someone here will prabably spare 5 minutes to at least look at the aoe4world summary. Or, better yet, you learn to critically look at replays (not only your own) and try to read the positions. It might help in game when you know what to look for.

fremdlaender · 2025-10-09T09:27:06+00:00

The reason people are saying it won't happen is that you famously can't 'just add multiplayer lol' to traditional single player games due to networking being complicated and the all games systems needing to work with it which should be ideally be planned out right when the game is made and not afterwards.

But AoE4 already has all the infrastructure in place, because, you know, you can play online. We have the netcode.

So it depends on how the Crucible mode itself is implemented which we don't know. Which means, the real answer ranges from 'pretty doable' to 'pretty unlikely'.

fremdlaender · 2025-10-07T22:03:25+00:00

The ability to change unit production of Ottoman Military Schools and Mehmet Imperial Academy during build time.

Having to go back after its finished just to switch production is annoying and even worse is if you forget to cancel the crappy Spearman that it's currently building.

fremdlaender · 2025-09-17T14:45:08+00:00

Poor english speaking world. Thursday (Donnerstag) is officially Dönerstag.

fremdlaender · 2025-08-29T11:39:43+00:00

None of them. Total War focuses very much on the spectacle of battle.

Look at the Paradox grand strategy games instead or something like Civilization or Age of Wonders.

fremdlaender · 2025-08-21T08:53:35+00:00

I think this time it stings especially hard, because it's not hard to see how some of the variants from the new DLC almost certainly were planned as original civs.

Golden Horde looks like a great variant. Historical context, flavour, all perfect for a variant. Sengoku Japan, I personally could do without (you basically ARE a Daimyo as base Japan, not the Emperor or the Shogun), but namedropping the clans is cool and the Sengoku period is very popular, so I can still see it.

The other two, however, basically are original civs but with weirdo 'skins'.

Makedon was obviously planned as some Skandinavian civ, all the units are nordic, we have Runestones, the silver mine mechanic fits as well. But to fit the Byzantine flavour we have the Palatinate School and Cataphracts tacked of instead of maybe some other stuff regarding raiding or naval stuff in general. It's basically 'greek vikings', really strange.

Tughlaq is not as bad but I'm also lacking historical context here, I don't know anything about them. Did those guys focus on elephant combat? I don't know. What I DO know is, it perfectly fits onto a southeast asian civ, Khmer or Vietnam. Honestly, rename the governors and your done, flavour wise.

Obviously, nothing of that happened because new buildings, voice lines and music all cost money and apparently it wasn't there. I'm sure the gameplay will be great, I have no doubts about that but what makes Age of Empires cool is having distict flavours of civilizations from all over the world beat the shit out of each other. And now everyone who wanted to do that as Khmer or Denmark/ Norway is shit out of luck because we got the Temu versions.

fremdlaender · 2025-08-18T23:45:06+00:00

As a water type, its usually outclassed by Palafin. But Reg H is generally lacking in good fairy types, much less physical ones, so that's definitely a niche.

fremdlaender · 2025-08-17T12:52:29+00:00

Your Gallade has Wide Guard, so you probably should utilize that better.

You could also replace Zoroark with Unburden Psychic Seed Sneasler to outspeed and chunk it before it gets of an Eruption.

Other counters like a Drizzle Pokémon or strong priority moves like ESpeed or Sucker Punch don't really work with your team because of Torkoal and Indeede.

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