Nothing can beat Chinese at one place

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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And that place is at the bottom of the ranking page.

I’ve checked this page extensively…

I’ve checked all CATEGORIES! (took me almost 30 minutes)

98% of a time, Chinese Civ is at the BOTTOM of the rank… mostly at the bottom, sometimes comes in second… Noob games, it can come in middle. lol

So I am wondering why people are saying CHINESE is strong? I don’t understand…

No, I don’t need to provide a screenshot. You can check it yourself…

So, nothing can beat Chinese to be at the bottom of the rank…

Please do something…

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I am for buffing Chinese but we need at least two weeks or so to know where and by how much.

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Yes. I was suggesting auto tax without imperial officier (by using an upgrade using the imperial academy (if in castle age) or University (if in imperial age) Because taxing become useless in longer games.

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It’s easy to make the Chinese strong. Let the Chinese have zhugenu in the Tang Dynasty and palace guards in the Song Dynasty.

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The taxing mechanic is in a good spot, imo. The problem is that people misuse the Officials, in long games. Like… why the heck would people supervise resources while having 2k of each resource in the bank? Why would they supervise production in the late game, where 300w for 2 new buildings is nothing?
Arguably, the officials can yield way more res if collecting taxes, specially if a lot of production buildings are inside the imperial academy influence radius.

Other point is that the army compositions with the UUs aren’t really explored. Heck, no army composition is trully explored. We had the siege meta for way too long, and it is still here. IF it is dying, is in a very slow pace, beause people kind of have to learn how to play the game, again. Besides that, people still default to massing cavalry, due to the bad manners taugh by animation cancelling. This mess makes the meta development way slower, and China will only suffer from that. Think with me: The UUs are really powerful (which include the Palace Guard) in their roles, and the civ still have almost all the normal units. The amount of possible army compositions is enormous, but we haven’t even started to properly mix and match comps with the standart units. For China, exploring said comps will take even longer.

The civ was strong because some units were strong all by themselves. Springalds, Fire Lancers, Bombards and anim. cancel Lancers. Units are being tweaked so just massing them won’t budge anymore. People think, automaticaly, that the civ sucks because nothing is OP, anymore. But the idea was never for everyone to have OP stuff.

Imagine that the game is back to where it should be by launch. We are still learning. China can be absurdly powerful in the hands of a player that dominates scouting, economy management (with officials and such), strategy transitions (which dynasties are part of) and army compositions (which China have the most possibilites). But, of course, people just won’t master all of these when cheesing with mass bombards/fire lancers is a thing.

My point is: yeah, from the meta we come from, China is a very bad civ. To the meta this game was developed, China is as difficult as it is strong. In the end, give it time.

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Let’s give it time as you said. See if there’s new things come to it. If within a few weeks, and nothing change (it’s still in the bottom), then maybe they can buff taxing as I suggest, because you can build the lumber camp or the mining camp around the map, and tax are being stored there, so it’s useless. maybe there’s a way to transfer those tax gold to the mining camp that is nearest to a TC. (this way still required an officer to get it)

It’s still nice to see that changes are taking slowly…
It’s just clearly now that China is bad.

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Late game most of the tax comes from production buildings, instead of resource drop off buildings. That’s why base building is specially important with China. Probably is the most complex civ in that regard, also.

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IMO, the reason that Chinese is weak comes down to these points:

  1. Slow start:
    Every secondary landmark takes the same amount as the first, meaning you need to age up twice to get the dynasty bonus. This is resource heavy, and the Chinese will not be able to effectively utilize its dynasty units due to this reason.

  2. Weak units:
    ZGN is not good enough for a “late feudal” unit, especially after the horseman buff. Overall it’s a unit that the player would gladly take, but he won’t miss it if he loses the ability to build it.
    FL is a less cost effective version as the horseman in its current state, slower, less armor, overall not worth making.
    Granadier is great, but its basically a post imperial unit. If you can get it, you’ve probably mustered enough advantage to win without it.
    Palace guard is a weaker version of MaA. The speed boost does not justify the loss of armor, infantries walk at infantry speeds. It’s viable after HP boost from Battled Hardened and Ming dynasty, both in imperial.
    NoB is a weaker version of the mangonel. It has more dps than the mangonel on paper if the target doesn’t move, which is usually not the case. And it stops firing when the target moves out of range. Not sure if this is a feature or a bug. It’s cost effective after getting Reusable Barrels, which is an imperial tech.
    As you can see, not all units are viable. While for those that are, are only viable in the imperial age.

  3. Weak landmarks:
    Almost all landmarks for the Chinese are pretty bad. But a Chinese player would have no choice but to build them. For instance, the Barbican is probably comparable to the Kremlin, while the Imperial Academy is worse except maybe on water maps. Overall very underwhelming.

I think IO is pretty strong now. I don’t think there’s need to buff the taxing system. Supervising military building in the early game is pretty powerful (if your resource can keep up, which is not always the case). Tax collection is good for aging up and getting gold in niche situations. Supervising resource dropoff buildings is very strong. Supervising blacksmith or university is great for getting ahead in the late game.

All in all, most buffs for the Chinese come in too late. In a game that starts in the dark age, it’s pretty lethal for a civ.

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My suggest for improved taxing system also help with building the 2nd Landmark for Dynasty. Less workers on gold, more workers on food. At least there’s a little speed boost to reach the Dynasty we need to catch up with other civ’s bonus.

Anyway, overall I do agree with you here.

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Not its not. Taxing is civilization bonus just like french getting faster villager production or cheaper economic upgrades or english better farms or delhi free research

Compared to these few examples taxing is worst and most likely worst in game and there is few reasons for it.

First is all the tax money can be lost if building is destroyed. Yes if you lose your mill to ram rush then u might lose 200gold or even 1.5k gold which is huge

Second reason why is because the longer the game goes on more worthless it becomes because its not possible to collect taxes from far away resource buildings. Got a gold mining outpost 30 squares from TC? Well that tax gold is irrelevant and not used at all

Third reason is because controling tax collection and micro managing IO makes civilization way harder to play than any other civ in game. Which I personally find fine and can manage it.

Fourth reason is. IO’s are too vulnerable and too squishy. Its easy to deny and kill all IO’s with few horses that are raiding through your base. Also if IO is left to low hp it can’t generate the hp so its even further vulnerable position.

Fifth reason is making IO early game is huge investment and delays aging up and villager production. Even tho IO will eventually pay off but its still something that slows china early game down

Because supervising resources especially resources you need is much more worth than supervising production. Resources are something that run out over time. If you can use IO to get extra free resources why shouldn’t u? Also supervising production buildings and relying IO is double edged sword. If you get your IO killed you lose 3x production rate or well now in this case they nerffed IO but you get what I mean. Random raids are not going to shut down your production as efficiently as they can with kill your IO

Not exactly true. One IO can generate 160 gold per minute assuming its instantly delivering the gold with no travel time 4x 40g = 160. Supervising gold node with 20 villagers with no eco upgrades is 160g. There is always a tresh hold when IO is better collecting taxes and not.

For china they’re. They were gunpowder civilization and all their tech was put towards making their siege superior and their main goal. That being butchered there is nothing to be discovered.

Also don’t act like there is suddenly some weird idea how to use horses or infantry because there isn’t. RTS games comes to build orders and not what units itself can do. Horses are countered by spears if horses fight them head on and this wont change no matter how many times someone makes spears.

China is most part figured out and only things that might rise from this is how often chinese players do tower rushes because its their only viable strategy and relies civ strengths and nothing else. Everything else is gutted and nerffed to ground for no reason other than to please low elo players.

China is one of the most flexible civs when it comes down to openings and build orders but thats meaningless if there is nothing else going for them. Villagers are not going to win against army of units.

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China still has by far the best army composition in the late game. I mean, come on. MLB-grade throwers at only 240 resources is a bargain. I would also argue that their castle army composition comes 2nd after Delhi. The problem is getting to that Ming dynasty late game. Speeding up that process slight bit is the only thing that needs to be done at the moment. Cutting the dynasty landmark price by 20% would maybe do the trick.

Most Chinese players make critical macro mistakes when I look at replays. Even pros make macro mistakes during matches. For instance, rushing to Yuan when you could have stayed in Song until you get like 70 workers. Or allocating too many workers to wood as opposed to food and gold. It happens to the best of us, but Chinese civ is more sensitive to such mistakes, because you will inevitably be delaying dynasty.

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No, not at all. I gave extensive feedback on the Tax mechanic in stress test already. It has many flaws.

First of all, supervising is pretty much always better. Which is not a big problem in itself, but the tax mechanic has multiple issues. For example:

Tax will pile up on early game buildings such as your starting mill. Especially because as you research tech you get a lot of tax, but you can never gather all of it. Because you are unable to collect all the tax (often times you can end up with 300 tax or more) the 100% Tax boost from the Wonder doesn’t do anything for this specific building.

As you build more mining camps, they are always far away from your Town Centers there is no way to gain any Tax gold from far away lumber camps and/or mining camps unless you build a Town Center nearby, which would be a waste of ressources nobody is doing this.

This means, as the game goes on, Tax income from ressources buildings will go down drastically. The only tax you will be getting is from mills, because farms don’t move.

You can also get Tax from production buildings. However, here is another problem: You can only get Tax from production buildings near your Town Centers. And as the game goes on, players build production buildings like Barracks near the middle of the map because its important to keep reinforcement time short and you want units to get produced at the front line. However, this means you won’t be getting any tax from these buildings.

So in the end, you will end up with less and less Tax as the game goes on, because ressource drop off buildings and production buildigns are being build far away from town centers.

I have pointed out this problem in the stress test already. And I already gave a solution: Simply allow Officials to drop off Tax at Keeps. Because players build Keeps at the front line next to mining camps. And they can build barracks around them aswell. This would instantly solve the problem of getting no tax income later in the game.

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Not gonna tear apart your first argument but this im gonna.

How exactly can you say that when all chinese castle age units are inferior or generic version of units.

Lancers - not special no upgrades nothing. Worse than French knights / Delhi
PG - worst MAA in game. Only good at running
Crowssbows - Generic unit
Archers - Generic unit
Horsemen - Generic unit
Zhuge Nu - Good against spears?
Firelancers - Resource sink waste of effort
Nest of Bees - Worse version of mangonel
Springalds - Probably strongest springald in castle age but worthless cuz 1x production

So how exactly you gonna make 2nd best army comp from this?

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I’ve won 5 matches already with china after patch, against other chinese players… so it has a lot to do with players too…

I’ve said this before: best civ in the hands of the worst/noobiest player is the worst civ. Player’s ability has big influence on those charts.

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  1. Fire lancer still wipes ranged unit clumps; better at defeating enemy ranged advantage than what is available in castle for every other civ.
  2. Nest of bees worse version of mangonel? Being faster and having more hp makes it worse? It also has higher DPS than Mangoes. Try upping APM and individually target nest of bees instead of letting them auto target or a+move.

The fact that the units are not utilized to their potential doesn’t mean they suck.

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Spears still wipe horses that fight them head on? Your point? You want to right click on top right corner of map and let your units run somewhere and just die?

After the nerf I faced FL only once as chinese and I can tell I didn’t have to micro my units in any meaningful way anyway because the FL splash hardly did any dmg. Split formation was enough to counter the splash dmg and before I had to individually micro units

Would you like to sent those apm words back at you about the FL? Anyhow they’re inferior version of mangonels. They might have more hp ONLY if they’re clockwork and clockwork tower cant be supervised anymore so it takes VERY long time to get any meaningful mass of them otherwise they actually got less hp than mangonel. They’re faster to move which is true but not that relevant.

NoB also has a lot slower firing animation. Mangonel would’ve already shot when first hit from NoB hits. NoB cannot be used on water crossings, NoB firing animation is so long that if target dies it cancels rest of shots and if target moves out of range it does same thing. Its also easier to dodge NoB dmg than its Mangonel so their 10x8 dmg is irrelevant because most just miss or gets cancelled.

Its well known fact that mangonel > NoB. Yes mass of NoBs easily demolish clunked unit group but so does mangonel and it does it better.

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