Age of empires 4 - The Best Unique Units Tier List
Credit by Aussie_Drongo
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No idea why Arbaletier is ranked this low. Just from a raw stats standpoint, having access to +5 melee and ranged armor is absurdly strong. Compare this to the English MAA upgrade, which adds only +2 armor for each. And Men At arms are slow melee units for a reason. Archers are supposed to counter Crossbowmen, but French get to ignore the counter system because their special units are just way too good. Same with Knights of course. They can just heal up in Age 2 and trade favourably against Spearmen until you get an overwhelming mass of Knights.
Nest of Bees is a terrible unit, everyone agrees on that. Its bugged in several ways. Its a worse Mangonel. It doesn’t deal the damage according to its tooltip. I cannot fire while standing in water. It misses most of its attacks. Just 2 Mangonels is enough to oneshot a group of Archers but Nest of Bees cannot do this.
Imperial Officials and Tax in general needs a big overhaul to make it more user-friendly. They devs cannot possibly intend for users to manually micro their Officials just to get them to work properly. The cooldown on buildings, not being able to drop off ressources at Keeps to gather Tax from your frontline mining camps and production buildings is a huge oversight.
Thankfully, we have already given plenty of feedback to fix the Official Tax collection with easy changes. Simply by being able to drop off Tax at Keeps, lowering the cooldown when collecting Tax from one building and adding an upgrade to make supervised buildings automatically add tax as gold to your ressources.
Also, being able to build Imperial officials from the Imperial Academy at a reduced cost should be a thing. Delhi get to build Scholars from their Landmark at a reduced cost, but for some reason Chinese do not get this option for Imperial Officials. No one builds Scholars from the TC instead of Villagers, but Chinese are forced to because they have no other choice for some reason.
The Palace Guars is another weird example. Whenever I see Chinese special units I ask myself: Why do Chinese get huge drawbacks on their units, but other civs just gets stronger special units? Like French for example. Their special units are literally just better than what everyone else gets. But for the Chinese, thats not the case. This is extreme power creep and thats not fine if its not the same for everyone.
Zhuge Nu gets outranged by Archers and has less movement speed than Archers. Enough said. This unit is overpriced and useless against everyone who can micro. No reason to ever build this unit, you are just giving your opponent the option to kill your units for free. And it doesn’t offer an answer against armored units either. Since Chinese players easily lose the game in Age 2 due to their inability to deal with armored units effectively, you should never build these.
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Arbaletier not only requires micro to get the ranged armor, but also doesn’t work if you move the unit, which makes it pretty situational. Most of the A tier units have huge game impact, while arbaletier is basically just a crossbowman in a lot of situations and isn’t meaningfully tankier against it’s major counter right now which is mangos. At high level deploying pavise and standing there is usually not viable. Also one could argue the melee armor is a tech and like calling the HRE maa unique.
Imperial officials are A tier because they are so good even without using the tax collection ability (which needs some bugfixes and QOL buffs tbh). The extra resources
Imo the French cannon should be moved down the tier list. Having 2/3 the HP of a regular cannon is very not worth it it the current siege heavy meta.
China have more bad unique units.
I need New Patch .
Now . I play S or A tier for 1vs1 players.
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And? Longbowmen have constant healing which requires micro aswell but allows them to win any engagement against other Archers. They are S tier for good reason.
The +5 melee armor is not situational at all, its effective all the time.
French pay 20% less on units from Stables and Archery ranged if they are placed around a Castle. Keep my post in mind. Once people understand the game better they will realize how +5/5 at 20% reduced cost are S tier.
I like the palace guards. Having the speed to actually get into a fight is refreshing for an MAA, and with supervise you can pump these out. Maybe they seem better than they are, because the Chinese have no real options until castle, but I like them. I just wish that you got access to them either when reaching the Song Dynasty OR when reaching castle, whichever happens first.
Palace Guards lose to every other MAA in the game, even for civs which have no unique upgrade for their MAA.
But here is another thing thats unfair: The Chinese get a +30 HP upgrade for their Palace guards. Its an upgrade for their unique unit. Just like upgrades for Longbowmen, for French Arbaletier, for English Men At Arms. Delhi gets +3 Attack in Age 3, same as the Forced March. So Delhi MAA have +3 more attack and get to run 100% faster. They are better Palace Guards without even being a unique unit.
But instead of unlocking this upgrade in Age 3 just like when everyone else gets it, the +30 HP upgrade is locked behind Age IV.
Again, we see the same trend. If its unique and it belongs to Chinese, there must a a drawback of some sort. No idea why. Other civs are just better than Chinese. Their unique units don’t get drawbacks.
Chu ku nu and nest of bees are the units that trash the Chinese early game. Palace guard is fine. Fire lancer is great, given its price, though Yuan dynasty is expensive. Grenadier is amazing.
Imperial official tax thing seems largely irrelevant, unfortunately, but they are very obviously worth training just for supervise alone.
That’s a lot of unique units, which is something you kinda just ignore. Imagine they were all amazing.
No reason to talk about Fire Lancers or Grenadiers since those Dynasties are too expensive anyway. In a competitive game there is no way your opponent will let you make another Age III or Age IV Landmark without punishing you. You are better off just collecting stone to make a Castle and secure a location or make Springalds or anything else.
Then Chinese would no longer be bottom tier and we might even see them used in later stages of tournaments. That would be desirable.
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It’s more that the pavise locks the unit in place which makes it very situational. Longbows can just camp like 10 different areas and walk around, not to mention pavise doesn’t work vs micro’d longbows or when they have mangos because moving the unit removes the pavise and is on a 30 second cd. It’s hard to consider if upgrades are actually part of the UU or not, cause otherwise you could start putting Abbasid spearman and HRE MAA as unique units, because the extra melee armor isn’t really part of the unit.
The reason arb is b tier is in most situations, it’s hard to notice them be better than crossbows in game because usually your xbows are dying to mangonels or archer micro, and pavise makes all your units standstill which is usually a bad thing in those cases. Arbs are only noticeably better in situations where you should be building different units, and tbh it’s usually less of a gamechanger than A tier UU’s.
The fire lancer and grenadier are insanely good, it’s just really expensive to get there but they are viable in team games. (Fire lancer maybe in slower 1v1 games).
Well, if you’re going to fix the tax system and/or make dynasties cheaper, then we would have to consider them.
I am aware that people are using Fire Lancers to snipe Landmarks and Grenadiers seem to perform very well if only you can get to them without losing the game. However, changing too many things at once when balancing a game is a bad idea. So once the Chinese tax system is in a better place and the Dynasty system is in a better place and Chinese has gotten buffs to their underwhelming Landmarks, then we can take a look at Fire Lancer and Grenadier and change them if neccesary.
Longbowmen are S tier because they are so much better than regular archers and have a huge impact on feudal age. Also Pavise on arbs is much worse than it looks since it doesn’t stack with armor upgrades (it sets ranged armor to 5) so it’s really +2-3 armor assuming you are using the blacksmith properly.
Also similar to strelets, crossbows main counter right now is mangonels which arbs aren’t meaningfully better against and they have the same issue that siege is super strong right now which makes them less good. If mangos get nerfed and/or abbasids/mongols can’t build them in the field they probably bump up to A tier. (and as he mentioned in video strelets would go to S)
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