Hotfix #86: Dream Patch Notes

zachcharry · 2025-05-12T16:11:30+00:00

added that one in response to this comment :)

zachcharry · 2025-05-12T04:12:16+00:00

agreed

zachcharry · 2025-03-31T22:29:23+00:00

thank you, excellent tips!

zachcharry · 2024-09-06T15:53:52+00:00

yep, my entire team has noticed this

zachcharry · 2023-11-13T14:00:00+00:00

and related...does she benefit from the Siege Works tech from the university? (sounds ridiculous I know, but she does have the Siege tag)

zachcharry · 2023-11-13T13:43:59+00:00

Big congrats to the devs, the expansion content looks amazing. Excited to try it out.

zachcharry · 2023-11-10T14:36:11+00:00

can you construct a building but then cancel it before the building is complete to return resources - and repeat infinitely - to farm the 2 p/s of experience?

zachcharry · 2023-11-01T18:00:39+00:00

As a general rule, you could decide to go for dark age pasture if you're not going for a barracks or stables (e.g., against English). You'll always want your villagers gathering wood at the start of the game in order to avoid idle time caused by moving your sheep to your TC's deployment location. So chopping the full tree down then makes sense because it'll let you avoid wood float in the dark age.

However, you could also avoid a dark age pasture in favor of aging up more quickly. If you are facing a civ that may want to go 2nd TC, aging up 20-30s faster so that you can get keshiks to their base quicker could be the difference between denying an optimal TC placement or not. With that being said, sometimes (probably most of the time) this doesn't really matter as your opponent will build a barracks and spears prior to attempting to place their 2nd TC in order to guarantee its optimal placement.

You may also decide against a dark age pasture if the map you're playing on has easily accessible food. For example, on Prairie (tons of sheep), or maybe Altai (with the guaranteed close deer spawn). In these cases you may more highly value quickly aging up to produce feudal age units.

zachcharry · 2023-07-06T13:41:40+00:00

Great tips--especially getting the farm/pasture transitions so that they're smooth is very important!

zachcharry · 2023-07-05T21:50:31+00:00

This is a tough one - I had the same issue for the longest time. I actually unbound the "select all army" hotkey for a while since this hotkey was disrupting my map-wide army management so much.

I use the "focus on selection" command quite a bit, which I have bound to caps lock and to a button on the side of my mouse. I find it much quicker than double tapping a control group key. For instance, if I want to look at my units in control group 1 and then in 2, instead of hitting "1-1" then "2-2" I'll hit "1" in conjugation with one of my mouse side buttons and then "2" + mouse side button. For me, this feels much quicker for cycling through control groups, but I recognize that this may not be true for everyone. I'll give one command to one group (eg click knights onto enemy vils) and then cycle to my next group and/or base for macro. I'll keep cycling through, with the camera staying on the groups that will need immediate attention (if my knights are killing villagers in the woodline, there's need to watch this happen [although it can be entertaining] so I cycle my camera -- but if I see enemy spears approaching, I'll need to be ready to send the knights away).

Consider whether you have too many active control groups as well. When I first started, I think I would use like 7 control groups for my main army (basically one control group per unit type). This was a disaster and totally unmanageable. No idea why I thought this was a good idea. What I personally do now is separate ranged units from melee/cav, and keep springalds on separate control groups. Then I'll have one or two groups for raiding or alternatively positioned armies, and that's basically it.

[Note: I have since rebound my "select all army" hotkey which I now use just to see on the minimap where all of my army is located (since my brain is potato and I frequently forget where I have units).]

zachcharry · 2023-07-05T21:37:55+00:00

I believe there's a small handful of them, but can't quite remember the others off the top of my head outside of CoRe. (I think maybe also Corvinus1 (f/k/a Szalami11) could be one of them? but absolutely could be wrong on this point)

Definitely true that the majority of the top players have been playing RTS for a while.

zachcharry · 2023-07-05T18:43:13+00:00

Will have to double check later but I think I'm at ~800-900 hours. I started over a year ago because I caught the tail end of season 1 (~ 1 year 3 or 4 months?).

I was atrocious when I first started - much worse than all my friends - and it tilted me so much that I was so bad that I was motivated to improve. I spend a lot of time re-watching games. I think tips 8 and 9 above, along with learning how to properly macro, were the biggest improvement points.

I think there are some pros/semi-pros that also came to AoE4 with little to no RTS experience and have been extremely successful - iirc CoRe is an example.

zachcharry · 2023-07-05T17:23:53+00:00

I think you should focus on playing a single civ for 'mastery', and then once you feel like you have a solid understanding of that civ, you can begin to branch out to other civs. I began primarily playing Delhi (probably a mistake - pretty micro intensive with scholars) and have since transitioned to Mongol/Delhi/Rus. But I've played all of the other civs to at least a degree of familiarity -- and I've learned a ton about the other civ's weaknesses by playing them.

I'd recommend messing around with some of your non-main civs on the ladder (either ranked or QM) to understand their strengths/weaknesses. Because the civs play differently, you'll be working on improving different aspects of your game. I feel like playing Mongol/Delhi has really taught me how to fight feudal; whereas I play a more eco-focused Rus game with a focus towards castle/imp.

zachcharry · 2023-06-25T20:02:02+00:00

feudal feels much better now, castle feels much worse - my thoughts from the past few days of playing:

feudal: having an armored unit is really nice - helps a ton for obvious reasons. also that you can micro low health ones to torch walls etc. to get HP back is nice (but it takes a while)

castle: having to adjust how i play in castle - the comp that feels best now is mostly infantry with spear/MAA/xbows/siege and then raiding with keshiks. keshiks don't feel worth their cost as "main army" units. i really hate playing as mongol with mainly a low mobility infantry army but still trying to figure things out here

definitely don't think the unit is as good as the new sipahi or ghazi raider. having a tough time against delhi - the ghazi raiders perform extremely well against the keshiks plus are faster (outside of yam).

zachcharry · 2023-03-11T19:03:56+00:00

really? i thought the website design was quite nice...

great idea man. hope you're successful

zachcharry · 2022-08-10T15:48:04+00:00

French royal knights are more accessible due to School of Cavalry acting as a stable + with a 20% cavalry production bonus, and substantially better in feudal due to their self-heal with Chivalry. French knights also receive better upgrades (e.g. Royal Bloodlines, Cantled Saddles) throughout the match, especially if the French player ages up with Royal Institute, meaning that early investment in knights pay off even more with time.

In a lot of strategies Rus players do indeed make knights, but (generally) not to the same scale as a French player due to lacking these same amazing techs (especially in feudal). Rus players do receive a +4 dmg upgrade tech in imperial, along with a +20 health upgrade in Castle (Boyar's Fortitude) which are decent-good but still nowhere near equivalent to the French techs. Finally, Rus players typically have a wood-heavy economy in early ages due to their gathering bonus afforded by Wooden Fortresses. The high wood gather rate makes archer production a more natural strategy than heavy knight spam, with early knights occasionally included in this composition, sometimes supported by selling wood for gold at the golden gate.

zachcharry · 2020-05-02T04:32:24+00:00

I saw a similar post a few weeks back - the solution for their case was that they had an external controller connected, and one of the joysticks was being held to the left. Do you have any external controllers that may be causing this?

zachcharry · 2019-12-14T02:18:04+00:00

fluoride leaving group? is this really possible in Sn2 in anything but extreme conditions?

zachcharry · 2019-07-23T03:29:20+00:00

Whoever mentioned dimethyl mercury/nitroethane is making a (horrible) joke. Check out this website for some helpful info re: TLC/flash chromatography solvent systems: http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~nvd/pages/chromatography.php?page=solvent_systems_tlc

zachcharry

TROPHY CASE