Byzantine's builds may be mechanically wierd, but its a cookiecutter civ

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

After 100 games with Byz i have found that the civ is in fact, Balanced. Well, kinda…

The most glaring issue isn’t it’s complexity in use, but it’s lack of tactical variety.

After getting used to an effective way to open, every match up ramped up nearly the same way, against every civ (except a mirror).

Even with proper use, Byz will be a very predictable civ. The meta against byz will be to simply force them to spend on defense. That’s it. But even still, china and ottomans put Byz on the offense (litterally MUST be aggressive).

The only fun of the civ is the abilities of the units, but over time, people will find this mechanically complex civ to be rather dull in strategic variety.

2

The mercenaries seem to be quite hard to balance, I’ve had success going spearmen and longbows but the fact the mercs are batch trained is quite inconvenient to start with. The abilities need looking into though, shield wall is fine but the others seem useless for the most part and too much of a trade off.

1 Like
3

The problem of byzantine is its expensive unit costs. You cannot organize an effective attack unless your eco is much good. If you squeeze your eco, you would soon find yourself left behind like mon gos