Welcome everyone! This is Part III of my Guide series for Return of Rome, and you can find the rest below. Thank you for watching as always - cheers! • Part I: Fundamentals & Economy: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--Y36kKyXgD4.html • Part II: Buildings & Technologies: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0NiV3xNE-UI.html • Part IV: Water & Navy: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CPfsoN4lHz0.html
1:30 to 2:00 explains Age of Empires 2 not 1. In Age of Empires 1 barracks units beat stable units. Stable units beat archery range units. Archery range units beat barracks units. That is not even fucking close to the case in age of empires 2 in which archery range units beat archery range units and or stable units or barracks units but can be beaten by stable units and barracks units. Barracks units can beat stable units and archery units and barracks units or can be beaten by them as well depending on the fucking civilization you are using or fighting against and map generation and blatantly every fucking random bullshit can cause you to lose or win. In Age of Empires 1 you have club man that beats villager in stage 1 which is logical sense it requires building a new building that is military yet in Age of Empires 2 villagers can kill military units even in stage 4 so yea age of empires 2 makes no fucking sense and has too many variables that cause massive problems to the fucked up coding. In Age of Empires 1 in stage 2 you unlock the ability to upgrade your club man to axe man and unlock short sword guy in the barracks and unlock scout in stable and unlock bow man in archery range. Bow man beats short sword and axe man and club man, axe man and short sword beat scout, scout beats bow man. Then in stage 3 you unlock priest which comes from temple, stone thrower and or ballista in which both get 2 upgrades making them better and better and those are used for destroying ships and towers and walls mostly because that is what makes them better and lancing units from the academy. The lance based unit is counter to elephants which are end game units that beat siege and other units. Archery gets improved bowman which counters knights and composite bowman which works great against higher leveled stable units like chariots because some civilizations get chariots instead of knights while archery has chariot archers and horse archer which evolves into heavy archer. Short sword evolves into long sword and then into legion which counters all stable units. To put it bluntly Age of Empires is 100% balanced. Late stage has academy, temple, and siege. Academy beats siege, siege beats temple, temple beats academy. Academy is like barracks as both are foot style. Siege is like stable as both are power house. Temple is like archery range as both work from massive range. Age of Empires 1 also works far better than Age of Empires 2. Age of Empires 1 has max pop of 50 where you need 10 to 25 villagers to effectively last you throughout the entire game while in Age of Empires 2 it takes 150 villagers to do the same job that 10 villagers can do in Age of Empires 1. If Age of Empires did not slow down resource gathering and slow down the game play and slow down movement then it would be actually playable ish. Age of Empires 2 has so many fucked up problems with its balancing that they have to constantly change the game play complete just to make it somewhat playable. Hell in order to even get people to not leave it they added stuff from the first game just to make Age of Empires 2 playable. Age Of Empires 1 is still active completely and its campaigns are not complete shit like Age of Empires 2. Hell many of Age of Empires 2 campaign levels are straight up impossible without cheats. Hell one can't even get past the first fucking few steps because the enemies coding has been changed so much you die instantly without even having a fucking chance at all or even being able to move because you start with units that decades ago were strong against the units you are facing but after so many attempts to make Age Of Empires 2 playable the units now take a shit on you and the developers are such failures the campaign is now straight up impossible. Hell do to new patch works of the developers trying to fix shit they broke the game crashes constantly now. I got a fucking error code of a pop up telling me the game crashed using a text box that was from 1999 text box meaning the game is so shit cropped together the coding of it must be a fucking nightmare to real programmers.
I think you really missed the stone thrower and catapult being used against units. Against infantry and foot archers the splash damage is lethal. Especially in a defensive battle when they squeze between buildings or gather around to attack said buildings. A couple of shots in can swing a battle. But they are way harder to use compared to AOE2 Mangonel line because they dont get pierce armor.
catapults also decimate ballistas that can't often run away from the splash damage due to them being so slow. Catapults also excel against all elephants for the same reason, maybe except for persians.
Edit: With projectile speeds potentially changing in the upcoming patch, Catapult line as a response to mass Helepolis as mentioned in the comment below are relevant. :) At higher levels, catapult boulders don't matter, especially with the new military controls that allows easier movement and splitting. Yes, while they can *_theoretically_* deal damage to the backline, their projectiles are so slow that they are super easy to dodge. Stone Throwers also get rekt by ranged units with even minimal micro (as you mentioned, they don't have armor and go down fast), so recommending people to use the Catapult line against units, melee or ranged, is overall not a good idea. Heck, you can even micro the slow Priest and dodge its projectiles 100% of the time. If you have some on the field already, by all means hurl a boulder or two while you push into your opponents' buildings, but don't train them to deal with military units in general.
@@AgeofNoob one note tho, from the upcoming May-June hot fix (PUP): *Stone Thrower, Catapult, Heavy Catapult projectile speed increased from 2.49 to 3.49* (that's quite a lot, 40% increase). Also, some others: Broad Swordsman HP changed from 70 to 80 *Long Swordsman HP changed from 80 to 100* *Legion HP reduced to 140 (from 160)* *Cataphract HP changed from 220 to 240* *Elephant Archers +15 G cost* Elephant movement speed changed from 0.83 to 0.85 Ballista 15% faster attack speed (2.7 reload time in AOE1:DE) Helepolis projectile speed reduced from 7.2 to 4.067 Helepolis +5 attack These are balance changes from the last AOE1:DE patch, currently missing in RoR for some reason 😆.
This was really well done. You explained everything properly and had graphics to show the different sections/ages. Much thanks for your contribution to AOE!
I would say that Swordsmen line don't trade that well against Cavalry line because you need a huge number of swordsmen to hurt fully upgraded Cavalry and Heavy Cavalry. Your opponent is much more like to just run away when he starts to get to hurt as well; and by that point you'll have lost a whole bunch of swordsmen for not much gain.
I wouldn't say so. Broad Swordsman takes 26 seconds to train each, and Cavs 40 seconds. 3 Cavs train in 2 mins, while 7 Broad Swords train in 3 mins, but are overall 50 resources cheaper. Even a in a 3 Cavs versus 7 Broad Swords engagement, the Broad Swords win every time. You need a ratio of slightly above 2:1 to win each engagement, so you don't need huge numbers. Yes, Cavs can choose not to engage - my point in the video is that they simply cannot engage even if they want to. They lose every time. You can definitely make the argument of training time favoring the Cavs, but since you win engagements even with fewer resources spent, I can make the argument that the cheaper engagements free up resources to drop another barracks. No matter how you look at it, this engagement will favor the Swordsman line.
From what I seen, Cavalry have Bonus against Light Infantry which the Short Swordsman is considered Light Infantry before being upgraded into Broad swordsman
That's why you need to upgrade to Broad Swordsman asap - it's a super cheap upgrade and has a large impact on engagements, just like the Composite Bowman upgrade. :)
Indeed, but the +5 doesn't matter in equal resources. As I mentioned in a previous comment, here are a few examples: - In a 5 Cav vs 15 Broad Swords matchup, ~8 Broad Swords survived. - In a 10 Cav vs 30 Broad Swords matchup, ~13 Broad Swords survived. - In a 20 Cav vs 60 Broad Swords matchup, ~25 Broad Swords survived. Cavs can always choose if they want to engage at all. That's why I named the boxes as "Trades Against". If you choose to trade into the Swordsman line with your Cav line, then you're unequivocally taking bad trades.
@@AgeofNoob in that case it's true and we can see in the last two Trajan's campaign maps. However there are only two good longsword/legion civs that can may compete against a good heavy cavarly/catraphact civ. This is how I see it, but anyway I still enjoyed your video, to be clear❤️
The most important factor about the Scythe Chariots is that they are the only fully upgraded unit to not require gold to produce. For long games this makes them invaluable, as even though they are not particularly strong they can be spammed nearly infinitely, or so long as the most plentiful resource, wood, is left on the map. They are essentially the only useful trash unit, as the only others are the significantly weaker chariot archers, bowman, axemen, and scouts.
It's worth noting that AoE1 (this includes RoR) doesn't have a "Block Printing" tech and therefore could be focus fired by 10 range Elephant Archers and the like. Just depends on when/if a player can focus fire them momentarily. There is one civ that gets +3 range for monks but that's more of the exception. 11
I'd say Slingers are good at any age deppending on what you want from them. They are quite proficient in taking down buildings and are cheap if you want to save resources.
Nice summary of units and counters. I have a question though: you made the test with equal resources, but did you take fully upgraded units? Also I'll make a comment that in return of rome, cost efficiency matters a lot, but back in rise of rome with 50 pop max, pop efficiency mattered a lit more! 11
That's correct - but they still lose in equal resources. The bonus damage is not enough to tip the engagement in their favor because they're just so expensive. :)
About the Cavalary and Heavy Cavalary,Cataphract, dont they have bonus damage vs Infantry? basicaly them being able to destroy the Swordsman line? or in the Return of Rome they dont have the +5 for cav, +6 for heavy cav,+7 cataphract vs light infantry , also using catapults vs the Phalanx can be a good ideea since the catapults have huge atack and the Phalanx are very slow
In my experience the swordsman line is pretty rubbish against the cavalry line, they're certainly not a hard counter like the spearman line in AoE2. Even scythe chariots arent that bad against them due to the splash damage and cheap cost.
They're not a direct counter no, but they trade cost effectively throughout. Equal numbers is easy for the Cavs, but remember that they cost x3 more. Hence, you need to engage 2-3 Swordsmen into Cavs if you want to win the engagements.
@@AgeofNoob thanks for the reply. It always made intuitive sense to me that the game generally follows a infantry > cavalry > archer > infantry style gameplay, but that's probably what I'm misjudging when trying to take engagements.
@@L3monsta It still mostly follows the general structure you mentioned - but it's so dependent on upgrades, # of units, and scale of engagement that you'll have to look at units one at a time here. For example, as mentioned in the video, War Elephants win against Long Swords in equal #s and resources, but Armored Elephants lose to Legionaries in equal resources. Choson Long Swords rek Elephants regardless, so it really depends on each unit. Intuitvely, someone can just say Elephants kill Swordsmen easy, which is true most of the time, but becomes untrue in the very late game (or, again, Civ bonuses). Hence, AoE1 requires more memorization of each engagement than AoE2, but there are significantly fewer units to learn overall, so it's not that bad. :)
@@AgeofNoob All you metioned mostly apply only for 1v1, which never get into iron age and reach max early bronze age. In multiplayer resources arent the issue anymore like in 1v1. Elephants rekt all but siege, monks and centurions. CAs are much better then comps, rather make chariots for speed balance. Inf kills everything but siege, elephant archers, elephants and situationally CA. Cav is strong against siege and "trash" units. In small numbers against legionaries. Siege rekt all but cav and elephant archers.
I remember on the classic aoe cataphracts can beat legions without problems. Legions were only for create massive units since cost 1/2 pop and more with Rome. I think that rule was changed. Is kind a buff i guess. 🤔
You need calvaries a buff in bronze age. They are very expensive and can't beat chariot archers. Either you make them cheaper or give them more hp. Give heavy calvary and cataphracts +2 pierce armor vs range units.
Shame there are no upgrades for tool age units. I think devs should consider making some changes with possible future dlcs. Like introducing upgrades for axemen, slingers and scouts. Bowman would be upgradeable to improved bowman and composite bowman. Scythe chariot would be separate unit with bonus attack vs foot unit. Regular chariot would gain ratha's ability to switch from mele to archer mode. Introducing new building like stronghold/fort to fill the role of castle. Nerfing hoplite line attack by half in exchange for extra armor and pierce armor or bonus attack vs cavalary. Removing ballistic affect from siege units and introducing new siege units like siege towers and rams. Making centurions and legionaries unique for romans. Making horse archer, elephants, swordsman, cavalier, scouts, bowman, slinger, stone thrower, ballista, fire galley and catapult trireme one age sooner.
There are errors here. The most obvious mistake is regarding ranged units in general. AoE 1 and thus RoR unit balance is pretty swingy depending on the amount of units involved. Like two cavalry vs 5 composite bowmen is a good match up but 20 cavalry vs 50 composite bowmen is an awful matchup so playing into a long bronze against composite bowmen is suicide. Generally this goes for all ranged unit scaling with mass and micro. So cavalry counter composite bowmen and scouts counter archers when there's just a few of them, with any meaningful mass it turns the other way around. The other corrections are: - Composite bowmen are good vs camels and chariots(civ bonuses change these) - Chariot archers are bad vs everything in iron once shield upgrades for infantry come in - Elephant archers trade okay vs camels(again, civ bonuses matter here) - Scythe are good vs longsword(due to trample, but not vs legion, civ bonuses...) - Chariots are good vs cavalry(but you need 50% more stables to produce enough) - Armoured elephants are good vs legion(due to trample, and you even mention this in the armoured elephant section contradicting yourself from the legionary section) - Massed helepolis are good vs everything except catapults. Yes even cataphracts. There is a huge step up from the ballista due to faster firerate and +1 range. - Catapults counter ballista/helepolis!, elephant archers, composite bowmen and are situational vs horse archers. The aoe is also very useful against most units so add some to any lategame army Really liking the series btw. Good work!
Hello! The issue with that comparison is training time, as it will take about half the time to train 20 Cavs compared to 50 C. Bowmen, which is a huge time discrepancy. Good players shouldn't stand idle and allow their opponents to randomly get 50 C. Bowmen in the Bronze Age. That said, your main point still stands - the engagement of ranged vs melee units sometimes tips based on kiting and critical mass. The caveat here is that you cannot spend 100% of your focus kiting with your Bowmen and will take less than ideal engagements. Even then, there's also the point of inflection where losing your critical mass tips the engagement back into the favor of the melee unit - so 50 vs 20 is a very specific niche number, but, say, 25 vs 10 tips the engagement back into the favor of the Cavs ONLY if C. Bowmen don't focus fire and ball up closely. And what about the lack of ballistics in the Bronze Age? So even in this example, there are too many variables and the answer is still *_"it depends_*. I suppose I could've put C.Bowmen into the Situational box instead in hindsight. That's why I mentioned in the beginning of the video that the original video was supposed to be 45 mins - but if I wanted to compress the guide down to a palatable
@@AgeofNoob Yeah the cav/compies is the ultimate example of how the relationship tips completely the other way as numbers rise. Your categorization for them is correct but people need to be aware that changes as numbers rise. if you see 4-5 improved bowman making cav at that point is great. If you see 15-20 compies starting to make cav at that point is not a solution and you might be better served going towers. My experience and tests don't match up with yours: - Ele archer/camel can swing either way with EA becoming more favoured as numbers rise, 7 EA vs 12 Camel, for example. - Scythes win against long sword in any meaningful numbers, 10 SC vs 20 LS, for example and the larger the armies the better scythes do. - Armoured elephants the same thing, 5 AE win vs 21 Legs, for example and the more there are, the better they do. - Helepolis bolts are insanely fast they have a projectile speed of 7. That's the same as archers! - A catapult vs 4 compies is easy micro for compies. 5 cats vs 22 compies not so much. And I do mean catapults here, stone throwers are useless vs anything with the nerfs in RoR2.
It goes this way: archers beats infantry, cavalry beats archers and infantry beats archers. But... ballista/helepolis beats everything in aoe1 and mangonels beats everything in aoe4.
honestly, just like most RTS it often comes down to who has the bigger eco to back up their army. who can produce more and keep producing longer. you can beat centurions with axemen if you have an infinite number of them and the centurions cant be rebuild
I actually used the wrong icon initially. I say in the voiceover that *War Elephants* can deal with Long Sword in equal resources, but I showed Armored Elephant's icon by mistake. That's my bad. :) In other words, War Elephants > Long Swords and Legionary > Armored Elephant.
There is just too much info to cover - as mentioned in the start, this is a compressed version of what was supposed to be a 45-min video, and even then folks are arguing with me in the comments section about nuance that I cut out of the long version. I figured folks can slow down the video or pause to read the cards if they want to like you did. :)
how do i win as romans in the campaigns, the heavy horse archer, cataphracts combo the opponent is sending is op af they have heavy horse archer and i dont get composite bowman, cool
Just one point I would like to add. While centurions do beat armoured elephants one on one, they get destroyed when there's multiple of them, due to the crazy splash damage. Unlike aoe2 , splash damage is 100% in aoe1 for units like the scythe chariot and armoured elephant. Due to the this, legions alone are not at all cost effective vs elephants, especially at mass.
@@AgeofNoob yes, my bad. I was thinking about the gold cost, which made them 2x more expensive. With food + gold, they are 4x more expensive. The same goes for centurions (1x to 2x). Historically gold has been crazy hard to get in the iron age in aoe1, which isn't that true anymore. Also legions are 160 hp here, I completely missed that (they forgot to apply the latest aoe1 patch in return of rome 😛)
Help me please Age of Noob or someone: where does the 10 second violin intro come from? It reminds me of something from a movie. Does anybody have any idea?
It's a variation of the Godfather theme: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-HWqKPWO5T4o.html Which is essentially a variation of this song: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PQBW6G0hSrs.html
@@AgeofNoob After a long search, step by step getting close, I finally found what I was looking for: the Matrix theme - Clubbed to Death ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pFS4zYWxzNA.html Thank you Age of Noob. You're doing God's work my friend
@@scorchedxxearth7065 I didn't use this theme, but glad you found what you were looking for. It's crazy to think that this theme is more than 2 decades old now.
So, the scythe charriot isnt a legendary upgrade anymore?. And, the helepolis was nerfed? it tas the most powerfull unit in the game if you can make a mass of them
Hi how do i advance to the bronze age in the rome dlc. Im playing as the romans and i need two tool age buildings but i can only build a market need to build looks like a stable and a archery how?
Cavalry archers are certainly the strongest unit in the game as long as you have the ability to micro them. In fact the devs at ensemble were quite worried about repeating that in AoE2 and nerfed cavalry archers in it a lot by comparison.
This guy obviously have no experience playing actual aoe1/aoe2ROR game These games work very differently from aoe2 games due to 2 factors: 1. Defense is almost non exist. You don't have garrison at TC, no loom(Jihad/Zealotry is iron age temple), tower/wall need to be research in tool age. So it is raid or getting raided. 2. Resources are way tighter. Farms need market in tool age, no starting herdables, need to look for new hunts, each tree is 75 wood, _villages bump into each other all the time, weird/bugged/poor resource spawn_ (should be better in aoe2ROR). You barely have resources to get to next age, let alone extra barracks/ranges/stables and spam unit This is why you are not seeing 50 army vs 50 army or some sub-1k ELO game in aoe2 where both player get to imp and have one huge battle. You don't trade armies in aoe1/aoe2ROR, you just need a strong enough unit to wipe off your opponent's obsolete army or damage economy. The whole 'trade against' analysis is useless. This is a truly noob video
Villagers can garrison in TCs and towers in RoR. Also not only did he already state that this video is for noobs, but most of what you argued doesn't apply in campaigns which a lot of this information still applies to. Your comment was useless.
worth mentioning is the macedonian centurion (if the player gets to that point, e.g. D3) - they have so much pierce armor that most archers do only 1 damage to them, allowing them to just ignore ranged fire
Extreme AI has been quite wonky in my experience - I think it needs a few iterations before reaching the level of AoE2's AI. Even then, if you're an above average player on the ladder, shouldn't be an issue to beat. :)
@@AgeofNoob Yeah I noticed that, specially with how the AI wants to defend with villagers, it's crazy and I hope they can fix that latter with the next patach
@@ArawnOfAnnwn The Key is to mass them and unlike bowmen, you can start making them in the barracks, instead of building an archery range to finally make bowmen But you need to make a market fast to research the stone mining update for the +1 attack and range
@@HiyokoSupiritto Seems like a lot of soon to be useless investment if it doesn't work out. They barely hold up in Bronze Age, let alone Iron, and the Stone Mining upgrade is the least useful of all the eco techs. So if the rush doesn't work, you're dead?
No Scythe chariots in legendary golden upgrade section :c? They also have a similar price and it did have the gold legendary upgrade in the original AoE. Also, do they lose vs infantry in equal res when taking into account that the infantry costs gold while the chariot is a trash unit with trample damage?
Yeah it probably should have had a gold skin but I guess the point of the legionary and centurion etc having gold skins was to easily identity it differently from their previous upgrade that shares a skin. Since scythe chariots look so different to regular chariots the gold isn't necessary for identification
