Is it better to attack move or focus fire?

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

From what I recall of SC2, it was usually better to focus fire to make sure units died quickly. Is it the same here or is hyper micro not worth it and it’s better to just attack move?

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2

I tried attack move its terrible. Especially with knights they will turn toward spears and just die.

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3

True. I find that specifically targeting units or buildings when buildings are close together can really mess up the ai of my units though and they’ll get stuck twirling around in the tight spaces.

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4

But be also careful with melee targeted attacks. If targeted unit is in the middle or back, your units will just run around without engaging… In such case, it’s better to attack move on the ground… I personally don’t find this very intuitive but after loosing a couple of battles due to units running around enemy, while getting slaughtered, I had to learn this :smiley:

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5

For sure, it’s super frustrating. It’s also annoying how melee units will start to auto chase a unit or building that shot at them. That happened to me once where I lagged and then suddenly, my entire unit of spearmen got wiped out, all because a single archer aggroed them into a tower. It was really annoying.

6

Yes, couple of players doing this to lure units in, and you have to micro your units. I think to prevent this, you could use the hold ground stance, but not sure…

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7

Both are needed. It depends on the situation. For instance, 30 archers vs 30 archers and you’d be dumb to focus fire with 30 archers on one unit

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8

Depends. With mass archers, you generally have to choose between stutter stepping+ target fire( overkill) stutter step+ a-move, or standing still, splitting the mass into separate target fire units( maximum dps, but ruins kiting). It really seem to depend on the scenario and army comp.
Sometimes it’s worth it to focus fire non-armored units with archers and armored units with crossbowmen. Sometimes you wanna focus archers to keep your spearmen alive, sometimes you wanna focus spearmen to clean up the rest with cavalry. Sometimes, you don’t micro at all to do some multipronging + macro on the side.Previously, springalds were so important to target fire siege with effectively, that everything else was sufficient to mostly a-move.

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9

This. Micro wins the battle, macro wins the game.

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