HRE age up too fast

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

Hello, I come here to ask how you will beat this strategy.

I played on Nagari last day, 2v2, Abbasid (me) and English in our side, vs french+HRE on the other.

Since HRE gets the prelate at the start, their age up to feudal is the fastest of all, and we tried to fight for the lake but you know, it’s impossible to fight a french in feudal in water, so we lost the lake.

I’ve tried to wall up with palisades the relics to delay HRE to collect them, and tried to raid his base with archers and pikes, but you know, with them getting food from the water I got outplayed fast from a bunch of MaA so I tried to boom to castle.

BUT, something I’ve noticed, is, despite force him to do some units to defend, and kill some villagers, he got to castle so so so fast.

First thing I thought was “ok, he had so many fish boats so he got the food from there”, but after finishing the game, I’ve checked and he had only 3 fish boats, he didn’t spend on it, he just boosted his villagers and got that amount of food in little time, and got to castle like 3 minutes before me.

At this point, despite we lost sea and in competitive pro games this is GG (im in platinum rank, so not all lost), I find that as HRE is possible to finish age up to feudal and 1-2 minute after start to get into castle, so the window to attack him in feudal is so so narrow, and in maps where close is that easy, is near impossible.

Then, I ask, isn’t HRE dark age to castle age too fast? Right now no other civ can reach castle age that fast.

And, what would you try in that situation, 2v2, abbasid+english vs HRE+french? Maybe forget the sea and just 3TC boom?

Not asking if they are OP or something like that, just asking about age up.

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2

I don’t think the difference is that big. I just tried getting to castle age as fast as I could, with HRE and Abbasid. I reached castle age at 6:53 with HRE and 8:15 as Abbasid. A lot of the faster HRE time was from using every single villager to build the age III landmark, so Abbasid would reach age III with more resources due to not having used any villagers to age up, offsetting the time advantage to at least some extent.

I’d like to see Abbasid start the game with 50 more wood, that would help their early game a lot IMO.

3

I think you can improve that mark a lot as HRE. Putting all villagers on it doesn’t seem a good tactic.

What I’ve noticed is that getting to feudal with 2-3, then letting 2 on wood and rest in food and gold, when you finish the feudal age up you have near 500 food, and boosting all the villagers on gold and food makes that between the feudal age up and the moment where you start aging to castle pass just like 2 minutes…

2 minutes where build barracks, do some troops and get to enemy base it is very little time.

I will test tomorrow if I can improve your mark.

4

That was only for the age III landmark. I can’t see any faster way for that aspect, if the goal is to reach age III as early as possible. I put the age II landmark on deer, it might be that it’s possible to get all the food from sheep, in which case putting it between the TC and gold would be better, I’ll try that some time. I didn’t collect any wood at all before starting to build the age III landmark.

5

Tried some more just now, and my best times are now 6:29 for HRE and 7:58 for Abbasid. For both of them, I made it faster by only using sheep for food. I wouldn’t expect in a real game to necessarily be able to get enough sheep to do that, but with just me and a revealed map, it can consistently be done with only sheep.

For HRE, I’m not sure if this was what you were suggesting, but when ageing up to feudal, I had every villager that wasn’t building the landmark on sheep, so every collecting villager was inspired. Once the landmark was up, I moved villagers to gold, so more total collection time was inspired.

It’s definitely a big difference, but 1.5 minutes not 3 minutes. I’m sure it can be done a bit faster than my times, but I can’t see that there are any huge gains available compared to what I did.

One thing they could do to buff specifically Abbasid a bit is to increase the effective villagers used for ageing up each age. I think at the moment ageing up takes the time it would take 3 villagers to build the landmark, it could be made 3, 5 and 7, or 3, 6 and 9, say, as the ability to throw every villager at the job of building the age III landmark is still a big part of what lets HRE get there so much faster.

To clarify my earlier suggestion that Abbasid should get 50 more wood at the start - when doing these two builds, if I were to continue from reaching castle age, Abbasid would need to take straggler trees to build the next house, whereas HRE effectively gets a free lumber camp in the form of the age II landmark. Giving Abbasid 50 more wood at the start would at least equalise that aspect.

6

Ok, so rushing to castle is 1 min 30 sec aprox. faster, but what about doing troops?

As I said, I’ve done some troops as Abba (Wood+food), and he done a few MaA (food+gold) to defend.

If collection rate is greater on food and gold from HRE, the difference of food and gold over time from HRE with Abbasid would be bigger, I think, that could be the reason for which after he reached castle age, I was at 800 food aprox. and started to pass 1 min later.

What I am thinking is, if you don’t do serious damage to his economy, the longer the conflicts lasts, the more benefit HRE gets from it, if they don’t loss eco due to his better collect rate. So, conclusion is if you can’t do serious damage to HRE in a narrow window frame, just stop.

Would that make sense?

PS. Can you answer to my other question, how will you face that game (abba+english vs HRE+french)? For me, before starting the game, seemed a very hard game because since the start water is lost because the french ships.

After finish the game I thought that maybe it would be better to just bait the sea (Dock+fisherman, 150 wood), to force him do battle ships, then mass spears and archers and go for his docks.

7

I’m not able to play the PUP as it crashes for me, but I believe the French feudal dominance of the water will end when it goes live in late October. For now, I don’t think there’s much you can do about that aspect.

Have you tried early 3 TC with Abbasid? I’ve seen conqueror players do that. You get fresh food stuffs, then only need 2 villagers on food to keep the main TC making villagers, all the other villagers collect wood and stone to get two more TCs built very early.

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