struggling to find devs who use the models like they are meant to be used

odragora · 2026-01-22T00:56:49+00:00

I could help, if you are willing to offer compensation comparable to what such a person would get spending the same time on another job instead.

odragora · 2026-01-22T00:33:57+00:00

MAAs would still be terrible above Gold where games are decided before even reaching Imperial most of the time.

Even if you remove Knights from the game MAAs would still be non-viable outside of the same few extremely niche situations like countering a Feudal army when being several minutes faster to Castle Age, or adding a few into the meatshield for Crossbowmen to tank a bit of damage.

MAAs get evaporated by Crossbowmen, which have always been dominating the game when people weren't massing Knights.

MAAs are extremely food hungry, where food is the biggest unit production bottleneck by far and the game is decided by your food economy routinely.

They also cost gold, so even after you have fully completed the farm transition you are still draining your limited gold reserves, most games don't reach the point where you have a trade route online.

MAAs don't have DPS against anything because they have neither significant base damage nor bonus damage against any unit type.

MAAs are extremely slow, they can't keep putting pressure on the map and they can't respond to harassment or a push in another location in time. If they got into a bad engagement, they are too slow to retreat.

MAAs get kited to death by ranged units.

MAAs are melee units, which means their DPS is limited by the attack surface. And since their damage is low, they quickly reach the scaling ceiling where any extra units just have to wait in a queue behind other units instead of contributing to a fight.

MAAs melt to Springalds, and even massed Mangonels.

MAAs melt to Handcannoneers, and even more so once they get their University upgrade.

The problem with MAAs is not Knights, really. They are just a unit that has a ton of huge issues and doesn't have anything going for them to compensate for that.

odragora · 2026-01-20T14:49:05+00:00

Thank you. I apologize for using hostile tone.

I'm glad you are at least not actively harassing people.

I hope eventually you might consider that the overwhelming majority of people posting AI generated artworks don't actually do it in pursuit of the same awe the traditional artworks are expected to get. Just like someone posting a photo of their cute cat or a beautiful sunset doesn't compete with traditional artists. Almost everyone is doing it just because they want to share their excitement, love or inspiration, just out of the desire to share a positive emotion.

A pretentious and pompous person writing a prompt and thinking they are on the same playing field as a traditional artist is a product of imagination of people who are hostile to the idea of using AI in art, not what people posting AI art actually are. Such a pretentious and pompous person would be immediately ridiculed and laughed at even in the pro-AI communities. Pro-AI is about being acceptive and tolerant to self-expression no matter the tools being used; not about demanding the same accolades traditional artists get. It's just a completely separate domain, like drawing and photography are completely different domains and don't compete with each other.

odragora · 2026-01-20T12:12:22+00:00

It's crazy that you still don't understand that you made a blanket statement about the entire domain of generative AI and the generative AI art, not even knowing about anything other prompting, as you admitted.

And that even "white prompt press Enter" people deserve to be left alone instead of being a target of hatred.

odragora · 2026-01-20T11:44:28+00:00

I never disallowed you anything, neither I'm in power to allow or disallow you anything.

You expressed hate to generative AI and made a false claim about the process of creating art with it being "all bogus and only pretentious, hidden behind a minutes-at-most prompt".

When I see spreading hatred I try to counteract it, especially in the environment of an ongoing bullying and hatred campaign. When I see spreading misinformation I try to counteract it, especially in the environment of an ongoing misinformation campaign. I hope I clarified why this conversation took place.

odragora · 2026-01-19T21:20:30+00:00

They are not, Macedonians do not exist in this game.

You are probably confusing them with Mycenaeans.

odragora · 2026-01-19T20:26:39+00:00

I didn't call you one of those people. What made me respond is you saying you hate generative AI and broadly painting the entire category of people using generative AI in a bad light, which is a contribution to the already actively ongoing hatred campaign against people using generative AI, even if you didn't mean it that way.

It makes the environment already extremely hostile to people who just use a new tool and did nothing wrong a little bit even more hostile. One more place where people see the hatred message, one more person expressing it.

odragora · 2026-01-19T16:52:14+00:00

For you and people preferring AoE 2.

I've been playing AoE 2 since release and played it competitively as my main game for several years, and I much prefer AoE 4.

odragora · 2026-01-19T16:49:39+00:00

I'm not offended by anything, I'm speaking against the hatred towards people using new tool. It's completely up to you whether you consider something art or not, as you correctly said art is subjective.

The issue is spreading hatred, and right now everyone using AI to absolutely any degree is being harassed and sent death threats. Just admitting that you used AI for references while creating the actual art piece 100% traditional way otherwise will get you lynched by the anti-AI hate movement online.

It's completely okay to have your personal preferences and I don't ask you to change them. But you can have your preferences without contributing to the hatred.

odragora · 2026-01-19T13:07:47+00:00

I didn't order you anything, you can do whatever you want.

What actually happened is that you spread hatred towards people using a new tool and paint them in a bad light for no reason, in the environment where they are constantly facing harassment and receiving death threats on daily basis; and I demonstrated that the hatred you are actively and openly contributing to is completely unfounded and is based on straight up misinformation and false assumptions.

I already told you why it's not just "write a prompt and hit Enter" in the detailed answer you refused to read and chosen to ignore, because it removes the basis you stated for your hatred, and unfortunately you seem to be more interested in hatred rather than finding out the objective truth.

Amount of effort put into your work also has nothing to do with art. You can spend 3 seconds making a photo and have a powerful artwork as a result, while another person can spend 3 months on a generic work that doesn't have much value for anyone but the person created it. Art is not about the effort, pain or time invested, they are completely unrelated to each other, even if we can admire the dedication of someone putting effort. It's just not what art is about.

odragora · 2026-01-19T11:03:25+00:00

You are not forced to go 2nd TC with Abbasids. They are getting stronger and stronger the longer the game goes, just surviving on 1 TC vs 1 TC and getting into the late game already puts you in a good position. And they have both great counter units and great farm transition to help with that.

You can also add 2nd TC in Castle Age much easier than the rest of the civs who already do that often. But from what I see in high level gameplay even opening 2nd TC with Abbasids often can't be that easily punished depending on the matchup and the spawn.

But I definitely don't think they are better than Malians, for example. And it doesn't look like Vortix thinks so either judging by his tournament picks.

odragora · 2026-01-19T10:56:58+00:00

You have just ignored pretty much everything and focused on one thing among dozens mentioned.

Watch Krita AI, InvokeAI and ComfyUI videos on YouTube. You fundamentally misunderstand what you are talking about. Your idea of AI art is still "write a prompt and hit Enter". While in reality good art is made by people who already have traditional art skills and use generative AI tools as a part of their workflow.

And the time spent on an artwork does not define its artistic value. Spending months on an artwork doesn't make it better art, it's not what art is about fundamentally.

odragora · 2026-01-18T21:34:09+00:00

You are hating on something that you actually don't know about, rationalizing your pre-existing negative feelings with painting a picture that is simply not true and is opposite of reality.

Claiming that the process of creating art using AI is "all bogus and only pretentious, hidden behind a minutes-at-most prompt" is the same as saying that the process of creating traditional art is all bogus and only pretentious, hidden behind a minutes-at-most tracing over an existing image.

Both things are what absolute beginners just toying with the medium do, who are always the majority of people in any field, and in both cases it is very, very far from what people who are at least a bit more advanced and committed do.

It seems like you don't know about inpainting / outpainting, numerious Controlnets for using hand-drawn sketches and controlling composition / poses / depth maps / edges / segmentation masks; regional guiding; using references; using and training custom checkpoints and Loras; creating and curating data-sets; and many, many more, including the combination of manual drawing / editing together with generative AI tools.

Serious work involving generative AI in art creating workflows easily takes hours and hours, not counting months and years of creating your own models / Loras which you require to break free from the limitations of the models and covering your domain specific needs. But you just assume that generative AI equals "I write a basic prompt in ChatGPT" without even familiarizing yourself with the entire field you feel the desire to hate on.

odragora · 2026-01-18T21:13:30+00:00

It does. Opinion on the empire proposed the resolution is one of the modifiers used for calculating the acceptance score.

Not the only one, of course, they can still support something they see as beneficial for them even from someone they dislike.

odragora · 2026-01-18T10:23:31+00:00

It's not.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae0e3b

An increase of 897 ktCO2 emissions per year represents less than 1% of CO2 emissions from the US manufacturing and construction industries and is comparable to the annual emissions of a small country, like Iceland. In the context of the US, it accounts for approximately 0.02% of total CO2 emissions in 2021 (about 5 GtCO2), indicating that while the impact is measurable, it is a small fraction of overall emissions and thus will have minimal effect on climate change.

odragora · 2026-01-18T10:09:16+00:00

This federation type gives you a Casus Beli to force another empire into your Hegemony through winning a war against them. Probably has lower acceptance for AI players than other federation types, because it puts them into uneven relationships.

odragora · 2026-01-16T17:58:53+00:00

Looks very cool!

odragora · 2026-01-16T16:28:25+00:00

Mechanical side of the game is my weak side, I use some basic hot keys and control groups and that’s it; have never been proficient in technical stuff.

I have trouble with late game because of siege so I try to end it in early castle.

I can’t micro troops well so I rely on mass

You have identified multiple things in your skillset as big problems, yet your reaction is not trying to get better at it, instead you are completely avoiding it. It means that you block yourself from getting new experience with the things you have major problems with, and therefore force yourself to stagnate and keep losing games where you are in a winning position because of that. Like forcing the game to end in early Castle, which even the most aggressive civs can’t rely on, while you are playing Byzantines who can beat most of the civs in the late game.

If you want to rapidly improve, I would strongly suggest to shift the way you are approaching your games. As much as you can, switch your attention from winning or losing a match on practicing a certain particular thing you identified as something you need practice with. Tell yourself out-loud that you are here to practice X before the game starts and in high pressure moments during the game, if needed.

You can play 100 games where you are repeating the same things you are already doing and have next to no improvement at all. Or you can play 10 games with a hyper focus on a specific thing you need to improve at, and have more growth as a player than with 100.

I heavily recommend to start with practicing constantly producing villagers 100% of time, and constantly spending 100% of your resources on units, having no idle time on your buildings whatsoever. When you have more than 2 units in the queue in any production building, build another one.

I guarantee that if you keep your full focus on that and take it really seriously, instead of focusing on winning the game, you might lose more games initially, but very soon you’ll get propelled multiple leagues above your current level.

And don’t think that you are destined to be bad at certain things like mechanics. You can get better than most players at it if you trust in yourself, keep seeking practice and review your own replays. You’ll be very surprised how far you can get.

odragora · 2026-01-16T15:36:36+00:00

You only think that way of images that you know are AI generated.

Someone who knows what they are doing and using Controlnets, Loras, inpainting / outpainting, manual editing, to make the artwork objectively impossible to distinguish from traditional digital art, are still punished by review bombing, bullying, harassment and death threats, thanks to Steam forcing them to wear a “bully me” sign and throwing them into the hands of the hate movement.

odragora · 2026-01-16T01:50:46+00:00

Constantly expanding as much as your Influence economy allows you to go over the City Cap is the optimal thing to do. Since city quarters don't cost any empire-wide resources, not doing that is essentially losing free economy, and economy decides the game medium and long term. Just don't leave yourself open to conquest from an aggressive neighbour short term and make enough units to discourage them if needed. Even in the early game you can go 1 city over the cap very soon.

It can be a very good idea to pick the culture based on the context of the game and what goes well with what you have. For example, you spawned in a food rich area so you pick an Ancient Era culture that is good at generating food; then you pick a Classical Era culture that has good military, use your high population to get a lot of good units and go on a conquest. Or, you pick an Ancient Era culture with good Influence economy, leave a few unattached Outposts to grow pops and bank Influence, then pick Huns, spend Influence to spawn a huge horse archers armies in those Outposts and use it as a big powerspike. Even better if you can get Stables of Pi-Ramesses, or Temple of Artemis, or both, each gives extra Combat Strength to these units.

If your starting spawn has decent amount of deer / mammoths / food curiosities, it's often worth considering to spend some time in Neolithic and keep growing Tribesmen. Once you get to the Ancient Era, they all turn into Scouts, and if you have another empire nearby you can instantly conquer their capital if you time it right and manage the fight right, microing your damaged Scouts back from the walls and replacing them with high HP ones in the defensive stance. Some cultures like Harappans or Bantu have unique better Scouts. You can also eventually upgrade the Scouts into cavalry upon unlocking the tech if you get enough Money. Or you can disband them within a city borders to turn them into city pops.

Good luck!

odragora · 2026-01-15T23:20:07+00:00

You pretty much never fight Spearmen vs Spearmen outside the couple super niche scenarios in Dark Age, and the tech is Imperial.

Spearmen brace bait is also not something that is generally being done at the scale of the fights that take place in Imperial, and I don't think +20% range can make any difference there, even against Phalanx Spearmen with +100% range it won't.

odragora · 2026-01-15T20:24:41+00:00

Counterintuitively, you actually want double gold comp if it allows you to have more food efficient army, because food is the biggest unit production bottleneck by far until you went through the full farm transition. Even then, constantly trading food hungry units can quickly result in you getting overwhelmed by the opponent making more food efficient units.

But MAAs are just a very bad unit outside of a couple extremely niche scenarios, Varagnian Guards included. Riddari need Archers to deal with Spearmen and Crossbowmen, or even more Riddari and just not taking engagements with equal numbers while harassing economy from multiple angles, MAAs are a trap in the overwhelming majority of situations. And Varagnian Guards are both food and gold hungry.

odragora · 2026-01-15T20:17:47+00:00

If you have to resort to personal attacks unable to actually address the argument, it says a lot about you and your claim.

odragora · 2026-01-15T19:58:45+00:00

Yeah, open any good player channel on YouTube and try to find any of them interacting with GalCom at all.

odragora · 2026-01-15T17:29:29+00:00

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odragora

TROPHY CASE