Maybe You are not using some feature of the game. Or misunderstood some basics like :
Micro ? Eco ? Deck ? Herding ? etc ?
have you co,pleted the Art of war section in the main menu ? (Ive seen thatthe influx of newbies after game getting free, are straight jumping into Multiplayers and getting devoured by any old player)
OR!!
Your rank is simply unfairly high and you are facing rediculously high level opponents 
Also,not boasting but
This game is simply mother of all RTS in term of craziness
well you probably already know this but the recorded games feature can be really helpful to see what the enemy did right and what you did wrong
this game is REALLY deep and complex each civ (currently 22) has its own gimmicks, cards, decks timing also maps need to be studied too, (natives, resources, trade route etc.)
I’m assuming this is Ranked 1v1 Supremacy. What’s your elo at the moment?
give a sample recorded game and lets see
i do wish we knew honestly, and people wonder why so few even give RTS a chance
Should point out here: Gold League in SC2 means that you’re an ‘average’ SC2 player. The way SC2 works is:
Bronze: Bottom 4% of players.
Silver: Next 23% of players.
Gold: Next 23% of players.
4+23+23=50.
Or to put it another way: 50% of all starcraft players are in gold or lower. The other half is in platinum or higher.
So here’s the kicker: AoE2 and 3 start you with an MMR of 1000, which goes either down or up depending on whether you lose or win matches. MMR 1000 is the middle value. In SC2 terms, that means you’re facing people in either the gold or platinum league at the start, before slowly being kicked down to your proper place in gold or silver. That’s gonna hurt when you’re still getting your footing.
That doesn’t mean you’re bad at RTS games: You’re just getting ranked in a pool of people who are currently playing AoE3 online, and there’s a lot of self-selection going on there. I don’t doubt that you’re smart, fast with your hands, and have been around the RTS block… But that goes for all your opponents too, and chances are a lot of them having been playing AoE3 a lot longer then you.
This evens out: The point of MMR is that once it’s settled, you get to fight against opponents that you have a 50% chance of winning against statistically, and obviously you accrue some experience along the way. It’s just that you’ll have to bite the bullet at the start.
And just like with SC2’s gold, just becuase you’re an “average” ranked player (or “below average” in AoE3) doesn’t mean you’re an average SC2 player. It’s a highly competetive scene. Even someone who gets to gold is going to be better at SC2 then most other RTS players, but most of them don’t play online ranked to begin with. It’s a bit like finishing 5th out of 10 at an olympic sprint. Sure, you’d rather have won, but also, you’re still a faster runner then anyone watching.
Tl;dr:
The statistics that AoE3 uses assume that any player who starts playing ranked is going to be able to beat 50% of the online ranked playerbase. This is almost never true for a new player, so the system will overestimate your skills until you’ve done a bunch of matches.
You may also note that there’s a big self-selection bias going on here: People who are decent players but who are intimidated by the losing streak drop out, so instead of a 50/50 split between “good” and “bad” players you instead get a 50/50 split between great players and excellent losers. That’ll skew a statistical system like MMR quite a bit.
One thing that I found out:
If you want to climb up the ranked ladder, check at what time in your country there are the least amount of players online AND AVOID IT, because as for myself, whenever I try to play at midnight (lowest amount of online players) I always get players with the most OP skills ever, like, “aging up to industrial in the blink of an eye” levels of swag.
It makes sense that in midnight only the most dedicated players keep playing the game, instead of having healthy hours of sleep like the rest lol.
Yes please.
My mmr is 800 ///////////////////////////////////////
This is a video I made of my first ranked game with Ethiopia.
Great response. Im always on during the dead hours of the night. Its true, things are better during the day but I generally dont want to play then. Also I thought for a second you were referencing the Civ vs Civ statistics where game length and which side wins. Both are great ideas
Thank you, that was a great response. I guess I just need to chisel away at the excess ladder points I started with until I reach people who are at my level
I’ve also noticed most people one 1v1 ranked are better players. I’m pretty low elo on 1v1 but around 1300 on team and better on treaty. It gets annoying on 1v1 especially when you get on a losing streak.
Being the first ever ranked game, you did ok, 90 hours in the game is still “low” as a beginner tho, the only advice is to keep playing.
Now, I’m no expert, my ELO score is around 1400, but if I had to give advice to beginners using the video shared as an example, it would go like this:
You need to improve in…
Crazy thing is, if your opponent didn’t resign so early (and for little to no reason) they would’ve completely steamrolled that strelet mass lol
That’s a lot of shotel warriors
You are Ethiopia in this game right?
i can analyze your matches , send me the record and i will stream it on twitch. But it would be better if i make you an exam, literally an exam where you are interrogated how to do you things and what prorities you have on the game. All resumes to fight a battle you will win, so you have to master the unit counters and how to use your units to maximaze damage dealed, also to know when you are weaker or stronger than the enemy and how to be stronger.
i highly recommend you to use this app AOE III DE Companion App to see and compare units.
For example, you can use poruchik to kill horses but also you are very weak versus anything that deals bonus damage versus poruchiks or even anything that is faster than your poruchiks that has range damage from which you have no resistance.
When using poruchiks you could use a formation (the one that has an image where soldiers are crouched down that give you 50% range resistance and 50% siege resistance if the enemy is atacking your poruchiks while they run to a safe place, although this formation reduce by half poruchik’s speed while they’re in this formation
Oops, well, the advice goes to the russian one lol
First of I want to say welcome! I hope you are enjoying the game
It does not look like you built a granary. The granary is a free building unique to the African civs that attracts hunts and provides a 10% gather rate bonus to the hunt/berry/field gather rate. It also lets you research techs for increasing the hunt gather rate. Once I have my first villager in queue, I like sending a villager to shoot the nearest hunt once to herd it to my tc then build a granary close to my tc. I sell a cow for 150 wood then use it to build a house and get the first hunting upgrade. You should build a granary wherever you are gathering food from the map. You can tell if a villager is benefiting from the granary bonus by a green circle that appears around the villager.
For herding there is a timer between when you can shoot it to herd. I think it is around 11 seconds. If your hunt is far from your tc/granary you can shoot them every 11 seconds to get it closer. It may be a different hotkey for you but for me when I hit alt I can see the hp of the hunts so I can only shoot full hp ones so that I don’t kill one unintentionally.
I think Era of Princes is not a very good card. At most it will save you a few hundred resources on your age ups. Typically in supremacy games villager shipments are good to send as a first card since they can help you gather the food to age up faster to age 2 and then give you a lot of value for the rest of the game. Ethiopia’s villager shipment equivalent is Trinity (2 villagers + 1 abun). While you can’t gather with the abun right away, you can use him to pick up treasures and heal your hero while gathering big treasures. He can also be used to build a mountain monastery in transition to age 2.
If you herd your hunt closer to your tc, build a granary and get the upgrade, and send Trinity as a first card you can age up before 5 minutes.
Taboot is a good card in the later game but it is not too good to send as a second card. You mainly would like to send it after you no longer have safe mines on the map. Even if you get the xp for a second shipment in age 1, it can be good to hold on to the shipment until age 2 since the age 2 shipments typically provide better value. (unless you have a specific build that requires 2 age 1 cards)
For unit comp I would say that since your opponent was going strelet heavy, it would have been good to mix in some shotel warriors in earlier. Dervish are mainly good against musketeers and pikemen. Since they have a 0.5x multiplier vs non-heavy-infantry, they do not trade as well vs strelet. Once you added some shotel you seemed to start trading well with the Russian army.
You relaxed and the enemy did a lot of map control on you…you have to prevent the enemy from establishing itself on your side…use cavalry to patrol your area of the map and infantry to protect your base…
Others have already given some good advice. Here’s mine, based on the video you posted. I happen to main Ethiopia in DE and I’m one of those old timers who’ve been playing since vanilla AoE3.
Get out of the Exploration Age faster. With Ethiopia, get your ~13 vils and then age. Keep everyone on Food until you click up to Commerce, then adapt. It is standard to sell one cow for ~150 Wood then get a House and the first hunting upgrade from the Granary (which also attracts hunts and gives a 10% gather rate buff near it)
Overall your deck is not too bad, but Era of Princes is rarely ever very useful, and Lalibela Rock Church is something I’d use only in very long team games. Also, remove 700 Food and add 700 Wood. Shipments are absolutely a resource in this game and Wood gathers much slower than Food, so a 700W shipment is worth significantly more than 700F. I suggest either Trinity or inf. 4 Cows as your first shipment. Follow that up with 4 vils or 3 Abuns in Commerce, or just send Trinity twice. Overall for 1v1, prioritise unit or resource shipments over upgrades, unless the upgrade is particularly powerful.
You and your opponent both floated way too many resources. If you’re not saving it up for something, use it! Especially to train units. Also, don’t forget to sell a cow as soon as the sale value reaches 500 of either resource, and also don’t forget to train cows if you have extra Coin. They are very important for the African civs.
Send a cheap unit to go and scout what your opponent is doing every now and then and adapt accordingly. This goes hand in hand with knowing the counter system. You probably have an idea of what counters what by this time, but take some time to get to know your civ’s units and exactly what they are strong and weak against so that you can train the right units when you see your opponent training a lot of something. If you hover over a unit’s portrait after selecting it, you can see what it is tagged as, and you can then train units with multipliers against those tags.
Don’t lose heart! This game can be confoundingly complex due to the variety of different age-up options and cards there are, even just for your own civ. Keep playing, and keep watching your replays to see what you could have done better, and soon enough you will find it a very rewarding experience, I’m sure. Also feel free to ask for advice as you have done here, and perhaps take a look at some games featuring Ethiopia on Youtube or Twitch to see how other people are playing them.
Good luck!
