A chill guide to the playing against the easy AI as the Delhi Sultanate.
Hi, I’ve seen a couple post here and on other forums about people having difficulty with the east AI’s spearman rush so I’ve made a guide to help anyone that is looking to play aoe4 as a relaxed base building game. This strategy does not always prevent you from being rushed but it should help you survive the dark age and feudal age relatively stress free. If this guide is popular I might write more for other civilizations. *1
Surviving the early game
Set your town center’s gather point on a berry bush
- Queue up 4 villagers
With your starting villagers:
- 4 villagers build a house, and then a mill next to your berry bushes.*2
- 1 villager builds a lumber camp next to a forest
- 1 villager builds a mine next to a gold vein
Once the first 4 villagers are built set your town centers gather point on a tree near your lumber-camp
- Queue up 3 villagers
Once those 3 villagers are built set your town centers gather point towards the front of your base.
- Queue up 3 villagers
- Use them to build a barracks and then a house
- Once the house and barracks are finished building, send mine the gold vein next to your mining camp.
- Set your barracks gather point to a position that will the units you create quickly respond to any attacks
- Queue up 4 spearmen
With the 4 villagers mining gold, build a landmark to advance to the feudal age
- Set your town centers gather point to a tree near your lumber camp
- Create 4 villagers. At this point you will probably be low on food and need to wait to queue up all 4.
Once these villagers are finished building (you should have 8 villagers gathering wood) set your town center gather point on a berry bush
- Queue up 4 villagers
Once your feudal age landmark is complete take the 4 villagers that built it and build the following:
- 2 houses
- 1 stable
- 1 archery range
- Make sure your archery range, stable, and archery range all have their gather points set to the same place so that you can find your army easily.
- Send the villagers you used to build them to wood.
Once these buildings are built, create the following units
- 4 horsemen
- 4 archers
- 4 more spearmen for a total of 8.
- 6 more villagers (send them to gold)
Research the spearman upgrade at the barracks.
Once your berry bushes have all been gathered, use the villagers that were gathering berries to build farms around your town center
Transitioning into the mid game
- Build new houses as needed
- Keep building more villagers
- Replace any military units you lose in a fight
- Build more military units to discourage the AI from attacking you *3
- If you have 20 or more units build a blacksmith and research the technologies there to improve your units.
- (Delhi specific): before advancing to the caste age build 1-2 mosques and 3-6 scholars to speed up your research time. If you chose the dome of faith landmark make sure to build them there since they will be cheaper than if you build them in a mosque.
Castle age recommendations
- Make sure to upgrade your horsemen, archers, and spearmen to their veteran counterparts at your stable, archery range, and barracks respectively.
- Build at least 2 more stables, barracks, and archery ranges so that you can quickly replace the units you lose
- Go back to the blacksmith and research the castle age techs there to improve your units
- (Delhi specific): Build a second blacksmith to research all the castle age blacksmith techs sooner.
- (Delhi specific): research efficient production at a mosque to enable your scholars to garrison in barracks, stables, and archery ranges to double the speed that building produces units and researches technologies
- Build a siege workshop
- mangonels are good against massed units
- springalds are good at sniping siege weapons from a distance
- trebuchets are good at destroying town centers and keeps.
*1 Other civilizations will not have enough wood to build a lumber camp, a mill and a mining camp at the start of the game. Everyone except for the Abbasids will also run out of food from berry bushes earlier.
*2 If you build your mill too close to the berry bushes it will destroy them so make sure to place it close to but not on top of the berry bushes.
*3 Make sure to keep a mix of spearmen, archers, and horsemen in you army as if you build only one unit the AI will build units that counter it.