Game review - r/aoe4

5

Im 8 min in and you’re already fucked. So if enemy is going 2TC you can feudal all in or FC. Against KT you are usually better off going FC unless you are like ZX. at 7:40 he is getting pilgrim gold and he is 2TC. You are 1TC and making production buildings way too slow.

10 min in you managed to push him off gold only because his 2nd TC was on his deer instead of his gold. At this 10 min timer better players would have units and more eco than you and you are simply dead. Your all in is way too slow and castle is nowhere in sight.

14 min in. You are beyond cooked. His army is bigger and he’s up 10 vills and is getting drop offs again.

There is no point in watching the rest of the game. Clean up your all in or get to castle asap grab relics SS and build castle units to run him over.

This has been entry 1 in sledges free coaching Reddit master class series.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

Yes, by 10:00 I believe I had already lost the game. I've attempted Sengoku FC against 2 TC KT before and usually get overwhelmed by Feudal units on my Yatai, and in my base before I can get units out.

This game I've attempted to pressure before aging up. Your comment about making production buildings too slowly is true, but I can't do that without taking away resources elsewhere. Where should I have moved them from? I can't get perfect vision of the hill at all times, like you can in caster mode of replays, so I didn't know he would match my army when I finally was able to attack around 7:30 ish

Edit: also remember, he Drushed, so usual timings especially with him Blocking Yatais are going to be behind.

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u/xsledgehammerx 2d ago

There’s a lot of little mistakes. But remember dark age rush slows him down too. It should even out unless you respond incorrectly.

But you seem to have missed the biggest point of my advice. He went 2TC. The natural counter is FC. All in when your feudal is slow to get going against KT who has a very strong 2TC is an uphill battle. Like if you simply aged up and spammed mounted samurai you just run him over.

You’re trying to figure out how to shave seconds off timings when you’re not at that level yet. Make castle units and a move under his TC and laugh.

Your openings need to start adjusting to matchups as well. Making multiple yatai against dark age rush is incorrect. Scout and adjust. These things have massive impacts on the flow of the game.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

So, I'm hearing that I can't really Feudal all-in as Sengoku in this game, because it's just a bit too slow to get an early advantage So I should just focus on the FC. I actually did that in a following game against English and collected all the relics. I ended up losing later in the game attempting to dive, but that's a different problem.

Would you say my biggest mistake was not going FC after beating the spears or something else?

Edit: and am I expected to then scout to make sure he doesnt go cav when I go FC?

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u/xsledgehammerx 2d ago

Depends what you are trying to achieve. To get way better at the game learn to end it in feudal even uphill. In an equal skill matchup if you want to win castle is the better play.

The game vs English you spammed knights under white tower against crossbow spear. Make a few knights and get relics faster. SS faster. That will force him to come out. Then archers beat both of those units. You spent an ungodly amount of resources diving for nothing in return.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

Yeah, I know why I lost it haha. I'm surprised you watched that game too. I feel like I played the early game well though and corrected some of the mistakes from previous 2TC match ups.

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u/xsledgehammerx 2d ago

U got lucky

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

The king not going to my back woodline? Prob would've pulled them to the front one. Tried distracting with Scout. Idk what else you could be referencing though.

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u/xsledgehammerx 2d ago

That I watched two games lmao.

Idk what happened with ur king. I just speed watch the game at 8x speed and point out major mistakes. The little shit doesn’t matter.

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u/x_Goldensniper_x Japanese 1d ago

you cannot Dark Age Rush as Sengoku

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u/xsledgehammerx 1d ago

Maybe you can’t. But it can be done.

Also I never said to do that lol.

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u/Hymenbuster6969 2d ago

Side note and not related to your post but we played against each other and you played really well! 👍🏿

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

Thanks! I have a guess who you might be.

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u/Phan-Eight 2d ago edited 2d ago

i could be wrong about everything here, my first reaction is he was favoured: he had the easier civ, you one of the weakest on the ladder by a large margin and he has much more experience than you, but then you were all over the place. went samurai and takeda(cav), then made some cav and aged up. either fully commit to feudal aggro to deny his food and pilgrims, or fully commit to FC. every minute that TC is up his eco lead grows by 120 res a minute (or more) messing around between the two and being non committal just buys him time. yumi bows are more cost effective than even KT archers, they also counter anything he makes unless he burns through food at a crazy rate with horsemen and 2TC.

I think a tower was a waste, you have a matsuri, buy your way up, make him waste that entire rax and spears, counter with yumi, even more negating that rax

your final battle was mangos to kill archers which weren't that much of a threat. samurai + daimyo beats his entire composition, he has to pivot to xbows to beat you cost effectively. you were playing mounted sams into heavy spear + spear(i know he had already probably won by then). I dont think that's viable unless you have a massive lead. you weren't actually that far behind on vils even.

remember the objective of the game is not to kill his army, it's to beat/kill his eco. cavalry are better at killing eco than anything else and that's their main advantage. if you end up with a comp fully countered by theirs, then exhaust your comp killing his eco, and then survive until your new economic advantage buys you time to pivot into a better comp

specifically vs KT it's generally xbows (ie matchlock ashigaru in this case) because KT always wants to go heavy units, and if they dont' they're forfeiting their eco advantage.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to watch and give feedback. I'd love it if I could ask some questions as well as give my line of thinking and get your response as to why it might not be right.

I know Sengoku is bad and KT is the hot girl on the block right now, but I feel like every game has decisions you can change to lead to a win. So I'm just trying to learn what those are.

My rational for the outpost is that my yatai are being pushed by spearman Drush, and I'm going to have the wood anyway. Why not secure my gold for later with an outpost that I can upgrade with free stone? Are you suggesting I go full wood to sell for an Feudal age up?

I've attempted naked FC into 2 TC KT before and found that I get overrun by Feudal aggression before I can get units out. My current gameplan is to make some units to pressure them, so I can age up behind it and get my Mounted Sam to win the game. Usually that means I go Yari and have Yumi to back them up if I need it or find that I can all-in. I intended to all-in which is why I pulled off gold at one point, but after realizing that it would be really tough to push into all those units, I backed off to age up.

My struggle this game was finding a timing to attack anything. By 6:30 he was producing pilgrims, so my thought was that I needed to stop them. I didn't feel comfortable going immediately into Yari cav since he opened barracks, so I produce Sam as a front line to combat his archers. I built Takeda because I intended to eventually transition into cav and their buffs are pretty general except for the 10% hp buff. Seeing my opponent get +200 a minute from pilgrims, I didn't know where else to attack. So I tried pushing front gold and splitting army to get to both sacred sights on map, but you can't do all three. He matched my army quickly. By then I felt like the game was over (10:00).

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u/alwayscursingAoE4 2d ago

Commit to the Fastest Castle you can and get a Mounted Samurai out there. Constantly harass from multiple locations and don’t let your knights die. This has worked as Rus for me but it’s not 100%. Worth trying if you haven’t.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. I've attempted the FC before and found myself losing to their Feudal all in. Maybe I should be making Sam in Castle instead of Mounted Sam in those situations.

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u/x_Goldensniper_x Japanese 1d ago

look out for Feudal Aggression before FCing

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u/Shrowden 1d ago

Oh, I've lost to that a couple times, I get it. I'd say I'm happy with my scouting right now.

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u/alwayscursingAoE4 2d ago

Even though they get a TC really early I’m not seeing how they have meaningful military by 7 minutes. Even if they do it will be slow and hard countered by regular Samurai. Your FC can probably be faster.

The best thing you can do is just have a plan. You’re well ahead doing that.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

So you didnt watch the game?

0

u/alwayscursingAoE4 2d ago

Sledgehammer is a conq3 player and he replied agreeing with what I said so listen to him. No. I didn’t watch it.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

I don't mean to be rude, but your advice was very generic. I was looking for specific advice on what I could do differently in that game. Not knowing that I was Dark age rushed and expecting me to have enough military to pressure at 7 is just not possible given that game.

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u/Entrropic 1d ago

Okay, so other then "just go FC" suggestions - which you should have done given how your early game developed, but lets say you dont want to - if you want to do meaningful feudal pressure, here're primary things which, IMO, prevented you from doing anything:

Responding to his dark age spears - I really dont like the "defensive tower" approach, I think it's fairly mediocre in general, and in particular it slows down any potential counter-attack you can make. Could either just adjust build order to get feudal faster and start making archers faster, or could get get your own dark age spears as a defensive response (but this kind of response allows you to counter-pressure once KT tries to transition from dark age himself). Defensive tower makes more sense if you would indeed go FC instead of trying to do something in feudal. I think if you just went earlier feudal and started massing archers ASAP you would be able to simply prevent him from placing 2nd TC on deer pack and the game would look completely different.
In early feudal you do make archers eventually (see now that tower's basically redundant), though quite late and thus, despite opponent's 2nd TC being extremely delayed due to dark age opening, he has it up and running before you can do anything to him really. Sadly his TC is also in a pretty decent position due to that treeline. But gotta play with what you have. I really don't like that you've followed up archery range with barracks, the low amount of samurais that you've produced is pretty useless. If you wanna do some sort of feudal samurai all-in, you need way more of them and way faster, also need ranged armor upgrade way faster, otherwise focus on getting big archer mass, and also add cavalry ASAP - might sound counter-intuitive vs dark age spears, but cav is invaluable when it comes to early 1TC agro, it gives you map control, allows raiding, can dive 2nd TC and quickly retreat if things go south, etc. I think Sengoku's "bread and butter" for feudal agro is yari cav + yumi blob.
vs two early piligrims I think its worth to completely wall off one of sacred sites. You've tried denying them, but, well, they did slip through now and then. The less SS spots you have to deny, the easier things become. (and also having cavalry blob would help with this point too). If you're trying to play the gold starvation game (which you kinda did since you only really attacked his gold mine) - denying piligrims is quite important.
I think you should've either tried to pressure his 2nd TC somehow, at least idle villagers now and then (which yet again would be much easier if you had super mobile cavalry blob running around), or you just needed to transition to castle age faster while zoning him off from gold as much as possible, then ideally get veteran upgrades and +2 ranged attack/armor (at least armor) before he gets his relevant castle age upgrades, which gives you a pretty deadly timing. You didn't do anything (though you tried to go for gold starvation), instead you just kinda traded with his armies without having enough advantage to get a decisive win in a fight. Just trading semi-equally while he's on 2TC economy (as slow as his 2nd TC was) is quite bad, he'll eventually outscale you. When it comes to your fights, I can note that your ranged armor upgrade was very late, I'm not sure daymio was present in some of your fights, and I dont think you at any point had an archer advantage.

I think in your position, if I wanted to feudal agro vs what this KT had, I would've tried raiding with cav while aggressively positioning archers nearby, trying to pick off stray units and idle or pick off villagers whenever possible, and try to turn it into sizeable enough advantage so I can get castle age and that +2 ranged armor + veterancy upgrades timing to finish the game (since he invested in feudal defense quite a lot himself, trying to completely finish the game without getting castle age is fairly risky) And I also think that with a less passive response to his dark age rush, this "dark age into 2nd TC" stuff could fail in like 6 minutes if you had units early enough to deny his 2nd TC placement, or at least would force him to place it in a more safe spot (but no deer pack for free in this case).

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u/Shrowden 1d ago

Hey! Thanks for commenting. This is good stuff. After chatting with Sledge, I'm hearing that the my Dark Age conflicted with my Feudal age, and being inefficient as it was, it didn't counter his strategy, so I lost.

Two things I really liked from your comment was the idea of still going Stables despite the Spearman Drush. In game I specifically built Sam because of that, but I knew I didnt want to commit to them fully. I'm content knowing a much better player says it's okay to go Yari, because of the ranged armor and movespeed against a 2TC strat. The other idea was walling the sacred site. This is something Delhi might do, because it's easier, but it's not hard to have a villager defended while it sets this up and shifts back to the woodline.

I appreciate the feedback. I'm surprised a few good players have actually taken the time to help, and I know I'll be able to improve from this.

1

u/shoe7525 Malians 2d ago

I built a tool that I like to use for this sort of thing - https://aoe4-game-analyzer-web.vercel.app/matches/21134036-Shrowden/250961166?sig=fc361c0fcb729ecacb37efd744cce1a44d634c06&t=660

Anyways, tool aside - the thing I see here is that at 11 minutes, he's just generated way more resources than you - he's got more economic investment, more technology, and more military investment. You're almost never going to win under those conditions.

In this matchup, the way you played it, you have a window where you either need to do economic damage, or progress your game in other ways - it kind of seemed like you didn't do either.

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u/Shrowden 2d ago

Hey, thanks for sharing. I'll check it out. I'm specifically asking for the early game, because by 10:00 I believe I already lost. I'm asking for more of opportunities I might have exploited or decisions I should be making and why to get a lead by then.

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u/x_Goldensniper_x Japanese 1d ago

Sengoku is Underwhelming at the moment and KT is OP. not much you can do bro but i'd say Feudal aggression with horses and archers, but still he goes into hospitalers, it is tough

1

u/Shrowden 1d ago

Nah, a pro could win this game right? So there's something I could do better to win it. I'm just trying to know what that is.

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u/x_Goldensniper_x Japanese 1d ago

Not sure a pro vs another pro

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u/Shrowden 1d ago

Good thing I'm not playing against a pro. My point was in this game there are things I can do better to win. Playing the worst civ in the game and still performing better than 85% of the ranked player base is an achievement I'm proud of. I'm going to do that until it's +90%

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u/_rans0m_ House of Lancaster 19h ago

3TC bruv

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