Age of Empires 4 - The Untouchable China Base 

I'm shit at this game and even I would have done something to get past the wooden palisades. I mean what was going on here?!

Great idea.

You can try that but trust that a good China player will come at you hard within those ten minutes

interesting, the newest upload is also English vs Chinese played by vortix as Chinese and he lost... no mention of Chinese op there. as a matter of fact they are not there every time Chinese loses but always there when they win. hmmm. aoe is a strategy game with many aspects that need to be managed to execute a plan. each of the "op" aspect you described is only one aspect out of many that need to be managed to execute, that is where the balance comes from. every civ has eco boost aspects, for China it is the imperial officer, if used to boost military they lose out on economy while still requiring resources to pump out units, that is the balance. spears are not the end all be all unit, same with knights. if you make you army entirely paper then it will be countered by just a pair of scissors, as it should. the clocktower is the only good landmark China has while most games will require building more landmarks many useless in most cases. nest of bees is just a weaker mangonel, if you take away the speed they are redundant that's the balance. palace guards are the weakest maa and are weaker to knights, basically a weaker knight without charge. take away the speed again equates to redundancy, that is the balance. and then there is the bombards, they don't have the strongest cav, infantry, archers, but what they do have makes the entire civ op? they don't even have imperial anti siege siege weapons, or aoe ones either. take away their buffs means making a landmark to produce them again, redundant. plus the extra range is a research, not getting gains for cost is pointless. everyone has unique tech. you can throw trash units to counter bombards. at the end of the day it is a battle of economics. like i have said the game is not just one element, one aspect. it is a strategy game after all. if opponent is faster they are weaker, if they are stronger they are slower. if you cant attack head on attack everywhere else. saying they can have too much spears, a trash unit for knights is too one dimensional, fine they have a lot of spears, wasted resources standing around, control the map with your knights if producing archers is too much of an annoyance.

China is not weak, but they are not op at all! Mongols are :D

@@hzhang1228 no. they are op

@@poijupoij yes. the earth is flat

@@hzhang1228 it is in this game

Actually there is a tech in the imperial academy which can increase the ability of imperial officer to carry the gold from 20 to 40 with only around 75 wood +125 gold as I remember. I think that is a quite important tech comparing to the gold haven't been collected during whole game.

I think it's far more valuable to have imperial officials supervising than collecting gold. Maybe there could be two versions of the official one which is slightly cheaper and has a different cap number that can only collect taxes.

sure let's buff the chinese i don't see what could go wrong

@@TommyFit7 tweek them. Not a straight buff. Tax is nearly pointless. Some changes are needed to make it usable, otherwise just remove it. Balancing China is needed too, Clocktower siege is OP late game. Maybe increased training time, or cost. They're special after all, workers need to take their time.

@@yabayaba8267 upgrade is practically useless, buildings will generate a lot more tax than what can be collected even with the upgrade and you benefit more from supervising

Yes. I am tired of getting China diffed

viper messed up, many noobs would have a larger army than his, he was sitting at around 2500 res not doing anything and had too much food. if he had more wood he could have had nearly 20 lancers to deal with the backline and would have been able to resecure map control. aoe4 is a hard rts even when you aren't getting pressured, common mistakes happen all the time.

They just need siege to seal the deal. Every match is a siege to seal the deal. This game is so unbalanced.

They are already cost a lot. They just should not be so hard to kill if you jump on top of the siege with your melee units. They have too much hp and speed and almost always can run away or just survive untill your army kills enemy army that jumps at your siege.

Siege needs to be slower. It's just silly that it can out run infantry. I also feel like siege was more vulnerable to cavalry in AoE3 since it didn't need to be torched.

I feel like making the population cost of siege higher would also be a positive change. That way players would have to choose to sacrifice more field units for the same amount of siege. This seems more balanced to me since siege is capable of easily killing multiple field units whereas one MaA cannot kill five MaA.

I think they should take X2 dmg from melee units and that's it. And remove the ability to build siege on the field to the mongol.

I agree with the comments on here, just half the siege speed and you are probably good to go!

He was mad tilted from the last game.

His opponent was playing as China and had shielded himself against an early game trash army assault. There was no way for Viper to win against the inevitable siege spam assault so he just put up some pretty castles and went to make toast or something. China seriously needs to be nerfed, I do like the idea of a civilization that you need to take out early on if you want to conquer it, but that tactic is too easily countered and once China goes Imperial there's basically nothing you can do. It's very unbalanced, and it's not even justified by historical accuracy; inventing gunpowder did not make the Chinese undefeatable masters of the world, they were still getting their shit pushed in by tiny island nations well into the 20th century. I'm starting to suspect the developers are licking China's arse because they have their eye on that market.

@@chasm671 "its very unbalanced" Well, say hi to the Relics. They do it in every their rts. They think that if every civ/team got someop sht its balanced

@@MrNotesofmusic I think that is probably true, just watched that game with no deep fish that was only a few minutes before this one- you could tell Viper wasn't really thinking here. build lb, see walls, do nothing... might as well just tapped then. grabbing sacred sites and forcing vortix to do more than boom while going maa and crossbows vs the palace guard and siege could have allowed a map control win but it would have been a tough game for sure but viper just gave up. english lack of cav isn't too bad vs most civs but vs china and abbasids it truly delhi it shows.

a nobody giving advice to one of the best aoe4 players, get outta here let me see you do better before you critisize someone way out of your league hahaha

or just kill the barbican

lets say he HAD two rams at the point where he was there with his first 10 longbows. The villagers at the barbican will just shut them down, and you cannot approach with your longbows, because of the range of the Barcican (3 shots for a longbow) and Vortex already had 8 archers of his own. And that only if he had them at that point. Building two rams wouldve costed him 150+175+2*300 = 925 ressources and about 3-4 minues of time. At that point china wouldve laughed about it. Its just so frustrating to play against china!

The game has balance patched it’s way to longer games - so china is just OP till astronomical gets looked at.

lol that is the only good landmark they have. be weird to make a landmark for a unit and produce the same units... making the landmark redundant. and since they can only make one landmark it means you can outproduce it. you can also out mine gold or gold starve them. way too many anti siege methods and aspects in this game to say one unit is the end all be all for any civ. China does not have the strongest infantry, archers or cav. even for siege the nest of bees is weaker to mangonels except speed. not to mention they dont have imperial aoe siege or anti siege units. the game is not one dimensional. focus on your strength and your opponent's weakness instead of tackling your opponent's strength head on. go watch the latest upload to see vortix lose against English as Chinese. you would also see there is no China op in the comments there lol

@@hzhang1228 Judging from your username you are a bit biased, but, you’re also wrong. China has great landmarks (when considering they aren’t mutually exclusive, they need to be weaker) that play into their playstyle very well. I have started playing exclusively China and have yet to lose a single game (12 games played) - they are just too easy. Calling their late game “broken” is an understatement. Besides, the only real counter to China is a true ALL-in, which is the only difficult thing to handle, but if you do hold, you win.

@@thefirst165 my username equates to bias? the irony is oh so thick. and your reasoning for my points being wrong is they are great in your opinion? the landmark is good when factoring two vs one? you have yet to lose a game means a single variable can represent a statistical mean? there are more than one China players are they dominating? are the top players always winning using China? holding against opponent's strategy results in winning is op? solid argument against my bias.

No

Yeah scouts lol

just put 1 on gold 1 on food 1 on wood and they have insane vallue. If you have 20 vills mining gold one official is worth 4 vill‘s. I really don‘t understand why pro players are not doing them so often. I think they don‘t play that much chinese and are unsure about the power of this unit.

@@robocopter2534 The cost of imperial official is x3 than a villager, takes 20 seconds to build. Id say unless the value of the official is worth 2.5 villagers, then it isnt worth making. No reason to use the official before you have x10 vils on a resource.

I agree, he probably regretted the lack of a blacksmith early on

Really? Well what could he have done? English vs Chinese... if the chinese puts his first landmark in a safe spot to secure both food and gold income until age 3, like Vortex did. What are you gonna do as the English? Your ONLY trump card (the longbows) are totally useless against that.

Always good to have it on that Clocktower indefintely

I believe his complaint is more under the control of the official. It feels difficult to manage them. I personally would hope they can make a better UI to indicate what each official is doing, like if he's supervising a dropoff point, how many vills is dropping there and if he's supervising a production building, is there anything producing, so I don't have to click through each single one of them every few minutes.

@@RongDirection they aren't always the most ah.... Easy units to micro...... The buggy ness is a problem. But.... Part of the reason you might only use them in specific areas

Thry should only be supervising resource drop offs. They give you alot more resources for nothing. He would of won way earlier had he had some officials and wheelbarrow

Clocktower

english artillery gets clapped by china's

You are not going to last long enough to see the farm enclosures doing their work because as soon as china can mass bombards, nest of bees, fire lancers etc etc they will run through your base

Artillery needs nerfing so that having the best artillery doesn't automatically make you the best late game civ.

how english have great cav and great art? they have absolutely no bonus for them

Lol. What hocus pocus English school did you go to? It’s bonuses!

He was busy winning back to back biggest aoe2 tourneys, so...

Exactly. AOE2 did it better. Now we got boring game play, walls, and OP seige balls

imo the english are perfectly capable of not even letting the game get to imperial vs China

@@rickf6375 Well Rick that seems like a baseless claim in light of the results we see at the top level. Maybe amongst the less talented of us this is possible but vortix just showed how smart base design and patience can make the early game trades unfavorable. From there it is just a matter of time.