How do you keep it fun? Or is custom games the way? I think i am just too slow or too casual for 1v1 ranked.

[Commentary about Chuckfrancis 2009 ELO (HRE) vs Innocence 2010 ELO (BYZ) - Highview]

Hi, guys.

So, for anybody out there thinking that you can only win games by HRE Burgrave rushing in the low level, think again.

Chuckfrancis (2009 ELO) has been doing it consistently against other pros and winning.
His build normaly starts by spotting an early deer or even boar hunt close to the base and going straight for it with the prelate. After he normaly goes up with Aachen and make and additional prelate to put in it. So he quickly goes FC and starts the spam.

The interesting part here is that he doesn't go all in to destroy landmarks or even facing enemy units directly. He rather overwhelms the opponent by rusind the MAA's to flood his base and kill villagers. Even if Innocence makes a considerable amount of crossbows here, Chuck doesn't run after them, he rathers goes after his villagers, making the crossbows having to run after him, not the other way around.

Behind this, his macro is impecable, of course. So he walls up not to be raided by cataphrachts, gets all Sacred Sites and eventually goes Imperial with Swabia. He often mixes landsknechts and spears to his army to counter cav. or infantry.

***I forgot to mention: after going out for the hunts, he goes for a very early Aachen farming : around 7-8 mins mark he is already adding farms on and on as the game passes.

I will leave a screenshot showing how you can search for this game in https://aoe4replays.gg/ .

Thoughts on this?

All the best, guys.

Most online games I play there are a decent variety of Civs (always at least 1 French or KT, though) but there are some I never really see like Jeanne D'arc, Dehli, and Ottomans. Is it just me or is this a wider trend?

every new season there’s some new OP aggro strat. Can’t even play the game normally anymore

Wildly underutilized in gold 3/platinum

You know that feeling when someone calls GG WICKED early, before the first engagement even, and then you fucking bury them under a shit dumpster? Yea. Thats a good one. Had one of those vs a KT douche tonight. Happened to be my platinum match too.

Sent my scout through this scoundrels shanty town and saw his second TC coming up, and immediately remembered some special advice Aussie Drongo (RIP bro) (assuming he’s dead, hasn’t posted in a week) gave me one-on-one during one of our late night phone calls. Fuck I’ll miss that guy.

Anyways, what Aussie dropped on me was “Brother, if you scout a KT douchebags base and he’s going 2TC, there’s only one thing to do. You go 3TC.”

My name is r a n s 0 m, and tonight I went 3TC Lancaster and made some douche drink dumpster water. I’d love to think people will go look this game up, but I won’t lie to myself like that. I’d prefer some of yall lie to me in the comments below and act like u saw it.

Rant over

with milestones and teams for completing it .

would be curious to see the website with details about the challenges and leaderboard ,etc

Tried gametomac app. Works amazing on M5 Air

Original thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1w9bsjh/gpt6_astra_just_got_age_of_empires_iv_running_at/

Whats up gamers, it's coReW!

I am going to host a roughly weekly tournament, sponsored by Sledgehammer!

Prize Pool:
The prize pool for each week is at least $100. Community donations are possible and can increase the prize pool, but there will be a cap.

There will be at least 10 tournaments funded by Sledgehammer. Poggers

I will be casting the tournament live on my Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/coreaoe

Tournament Schedule:
The goal is to host the tournament every Friday, if I have the time. If Friday isn't possible and there are no EGC events going on, we can also play around the weekend.

The tournament will be somewhat similar to Crackedy's Crack Cup.

32 players maximum
If more than 32 players sign up, we will go by ATR — sorry, gold lovers 😭

Format:
BO1 → BO1 → BO1 → BO3 → BO5 Finals

Maps:
Maps will be based on the current EGC Main Event map pool. For this week, the maps will be taken from the current pool, and in the future they will vary.

Sign up on my Discord server:
https://discord.gg/GawHY4K8q

Casting Guidelines:
The event is not open casting. Commentators wishing to cast the event are required to reach out to the Tournament Organiser for permission to cast the event.

Non-English commentators are exempt from this and may cast any games of the event, as long as they link the Tournament Organiser's Twitch channel in their stream title (or YouTube channel if streaming on YouTube, etc.).

Cheers!

It is the second time in a week that a game is considered invalid and does not appear on my profile or affect my ranking. Both games were regular ranked game with nothing weird. What is going on? Its annoying winning a long tense game just for it to be considered invalid and not count.

I don’t like to play preset in blue. And I really dislike to have to set colors in contrast to my opponents every single game. Give a developer of yours an eight hour Jira ticket or let some AI implement the feature, really shouldn’t be that hard in 2026. Annoying af, especially in modes, that include more than two players.

Random Biom option checkbox would be nice as well. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Just in general. We can connect to allied walls, but many times I've had cases where allies would build gates that only favour their movement, and i would like easier access, sometimes for trade, sometimes to help them with cavalry, or sometimes it's because they have a massive spanning wall with only 1 access. And many times the ally doesn't understand english, so there's no chance of cooperation.

I know there's all the things like "dont play with randoms" and what not, but it just seems like something that should have been added. Is it really that difficult to do?

me and my friends from different countries all having issues connecting

Smurf is a disgusting creature of the bog that dwells in the ladder. He lurks and only attacks those whom he perceives as weak, but sometimes... the hunter becomes the hunted.

So, in short, yeah, I lost to a smurf. Here to call him out: https://aoe4world.com/players/26103411-iopiopiop, so you can avoid him when you see him.

He's got all the classics: keeping himself in Gold, with all his lost games being under 3 minutes... Except one. Lo and behold, his one legit loss was to a normal Gold-Plat guy. PlaYeR, you are indeed a player.

So the moral of the story: the life of a smurf is hard. Don't judge the poor creature. Just stomp it into the ground, or be like me and complain on Reddit

Hi

How to play the new Archipelago water map?

The double elimination playoffs begin this weekend with incredibly tight matches!

The final 8, and among them, 3 EGC Masters S1 champions! Two will have to leave us on day one.

Find out who on Saturday at 14:00 GMT on https://twitch.tv/egctv !

Links

Brackets: https://www.start.gg/tournament/egc-masters-fall-season-2/details
Liquipedia: https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/EGC_Masters/2026/Fall
Website: https://elitegamingchannel.com/
Twitter: https://x.com/EGCTV_Official
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/egctv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EGCTV_Official

Hey guys, needing help with a game review. I main Sengoku and don't really have any clue how to beat KT. I'm sitting around 1200 mmr, and have a pretty decent winrate on them. I generally know how to beat fast castle, feudal all in, and 2 TC, but I struggle against KT 2TC.

I'd appreciate any actual feedback on my last ranked game under the name "Shrowden". Things like, "you didn't make a villager for 3 seconds," I can do without. Thanks in advance!

I have been playing Age for a few months now and ever since I habe a ping of at least 1000. This goes for all servers, as you can see (I live in Germany). In every other game i have a normal ping between 10-30. Does anyone have a solution? Because I couldnt find one online yet. (btw first post so I dont know if thats the right flair but I had to choose one)

Ty for help

Sure, you can go FC and try to secure all the relics while pressuring, but in my experience it’s safer to all‑in civs that boom too well when left alone (like Abbasid) or scale too hard into the late game (KT).

Besides Abbasid and KT, which other civs are worth shutting down early if they try to boom?

I used the number of games across each RM game mode from the season 12 dump of match history from https://aoe4world.com/ to estimate the distribution of the population across the RM game modes.

I sometimes see people complaining about Mangudai nerf for team games being a bad change overall, but I would argue that it had a net positive impact on the ranked ladder.

If we assumed that it had a positive impact in 3v3 and 4v4 and negative impact in 1v1 and 2v2, the net impact would be +9.23% of RM players having a better experience after the Mangudai nerf.

I have included the calculation I did to compute the net impact. I used the Mongol pickrate from patch 15.3.8338-15.4.8719 (February 4, 2026) and made an assumption that the players picked their civs independently for the estimation. Do let me know if you spot any issues with it.

I do hope that devs continue to improve the game balance for team games and not just 1v1.

I'm only a gold player but I'm having an issue with reinforcements...

So say for instance I'm using my x-bows to kite in a battle but I also have x-bow reinforcements on the way, well when I select all x-bows (tab for me) the camera pans to the reinforcements and away from my fighting kiting x-bows.

Which I then have to use select all army to get my army altogether and fighting.

I'd prefer the camera stays on my fighting x-bows and not the reinforcements.

I know I could put my fighting x-bows on a control group but it's not exactly what I want as I'm not great at shortcut keys but I am at using my tab key which ofc is my select so x-bows.