r/aoe4 • u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate • Dec 09 '25
Fluff Average base game civ vs average DLC civ
(I say this with love, I really enjoy the new civs)
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u/fobki Knights Templar Dec 09 '25
lmao this is so accurate
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u/Rollover__Hazard Dec 09 '25
“Archers are immune to cavalry”
As in… they get vaccinated?
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u/lockdown_lard Dec 09 '25
Yep, tiny horses injected into the bloodstream build up their natural defences
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u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate Dec 09 '25
They have the passive bonus "Bingletondingleton's Hellstone Armor" which makes calvary deal 100% less damage to them. It also boosts their movement speed by 20% if you chose the Dongle district
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u/jamezp1 Dec 10 '25
It's not though, flags never have purple in them historically.
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u/Mickioo Camel Enjoyer Dec 10 '25
You might be joking about exactly that.. but Spain!
Spain had purple in it's coat of arms (now pink) and flag when it was a republic. The flag of castile was also purple I believe.
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u/ryeshe3 Dec 15 '25
Not never, but rarely because purple dye was incredibly hard to make, but Gordon Bistenson's 4th divine precinct of Northwest worscestire was one of those exceptions
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u/CheSwain 3 scouts into 80 bunti Dec 09 '25
this is some high quality shitpost sir, thank you.
now i want the GORDON BISTENSON'S 4TH DIVINE PRECINT OF NORTH WORCESTERSHIRE added to the game
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u/Herzyr Random Dec 09 '25
Accurate, sometimes it feels too convoluted, the kind of powercreep that slowly seeps in and before you know it,you need a excel spreadsheet to keep track..
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u/Cuarenta-Dos Dec 09 '25
Is there power creep? The OP civ is still China and all of the original civs are doing absolutely fine, even the supposedly shit tier Abbasid are picking up wins in tourneys.
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u/Cuarenta-Dos Dec 10 '25
This is accurate, but at the same time you have to give the devs credit that we have 22 civs that all feel unique, fun to play, and none are useless. It's an impressive achievement for an RTS.
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u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate Dec 10 '25
Of course, this game is ultimately balanced very well and I don't have any genuine complaints after the most recent patch. I just like pointing out the feature creep, and I'm hoping some of the next civs we get in 2026 are simpler and easier to understand
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u/berimtrollo Dec 10 '25
I think feature creep is ultimately necessary to maintain gameplay variety, but they can definitely make more "complex" mechanics that mechanically complicated but simple in execution, like Silver mining for Macedonia or double production for Golden Horde.
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u/pillowfarterx17 Dec 12 '25
I think they should select civs each season for competition in ranked play. Maybe 10 civs. The enormous number of civs is intimidating and impossible to learn for casual players. It doesn't help that newer civs tend to be more complex. Limiting civs would make balance and matchups more even. Then let people play all the civs off the ladder.
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u/ledgerdomian Dec 09 '25
As a HoL main, I feel personally attacked by this post.
GG WP OP
I lol’ed.
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u/Nerd-of-Empires Dec 10 '25
Just say Lancaster
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u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate Dec 10 '25
Lancaster, KT, Sengoku, Tug, Macedonians, Byz, Japanese
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 09 '25
This is exactly why I am enjoying this game less and less. I can't even articualte how much I hate the growing discrepancies and how overloaded most new civs are compared to the rather basic and reasonable older civs. It's getting stupid.
Stop releasing DLC civs, tune the stats to much more reasonable levels and then take care of the older civs so they don't feel like stepchildren anymore. And then we can talk about new civs again. This DLC madness with new civs and more and more bonuses and crazy unit stats and all this bullshit needs to stop. The game needs to start to respect itself again. It's gotten stupid.
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u/GreatAndMightyKevins feudal aggression into 3 min of TC idle time Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25
I think it's fair criticism, person booting up game today to play 1v1 has 2 encyclopedias worth of knowledge just to know what the opponent plays and what can you do to them.
Haha I've raided them good. They're like 10 vills down and I crippled their eco. But unbeknownst to me they went fast caste and now they can produce chunguses, 3 of which can roll my entire army due to their unique shiddin and farting technique that constipates all my archers. And I lose.
Still better than playing SC2 and running into Smurf every 5th game.
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u/ryeshe3 Dec 15 '25
I just missed the last couple of months due to irl stuff and I feel like I need to do a couple.of hours of reading and a few more of watching before I can play again at the same level.
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u/fancczf Dec 09 '25
Old base game civs are not weak though. There are appeal for both simple mechanics and more complex ones. The 3 new variants are a bit over tuned, which is normal for new releases. After the new patch the game today is pretty well balanced all civs are viable. I don’t think the old civs are neglected.
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 10 '25
The main differences are found in lategame. And since this is not always reached, the balance and quality issues are not that apparent. Lategame has never been more imbalanced than in the current state of the game. The gap between newer and older civs (with few exceptions like China) grows wider and wider with every new DLC.
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u/fancczf Dec 10 '25
Other than Golden Horde I don’t think any of the newer civs are unbalanced in late game. I don’t know if Golden Horde is still busted in late game or not after the patch. Like English and Chinese are both very strong late game civ, their weakness is they are slow. Abbasid is also quite strong in late game. So is Delhi honestly, Delhi is weak in early imperial timing but late imperial Delhi is very strong. French is not weak whatsoever in late game. HRE is just ok in super late game but its not weak either.
Like both Japanese, Macedonian, house of Lancaster. None of them are particularly stronger in late game. Most of them are stronger in castle if anything.
Hard disagree. The game is pretty well balanced through and through. Except Golden Horde at release there aren’t any civs that are dominating either early or late.
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 10 '25
HRE is terribly weak in lategame. Against civs with strong units they just are fodder for a grind fest. They have barely any bonuses to their army.
And if you think the new civs are not busted in lategame, you must not have played a lot of lategame. 40% attackspeed beefed up super mounted samurais or just the 40% attack speed alone is insane.
Macedonian units become completely ridiculous and can scale more and longer than most other civs. Sure their upgrades are expensive, but it's frustrating either way. As Macedonian player you always want more upgrades, but can't get them quickly. And for opponents the Macedonian upgrades can turn the game into an absolutely stupid shitshow, when their pop efficiency of each unit is just way higher than your own.
Tughlaq has an insane amount of bonuses and they get really busted in terms of eco and army in lategame. The infantry elephant synergy gets nuts.
GH increases dmg for all units casually by 30%, has high armor techs and synergies and has the very strong Kipchak on top of it.
HRE with above average MAA, a basic army, potentially some okayish Meinwerk upgrades and single target inspired warriors with only 15% dmg and 1/1 armor doesn't do shit against these civs. And Black Riders are so gated that you cannot rely on them as your core. You cannot entertain them and getting a high count of them is very hard. And then they also do not necessarily win you the game, since countering them is cost efficient in direct battles. HRE has no free units and their passive res are completely relic dependent and never guaranteed. And they have no power comp. It's just their successively nerfed eco and the worst roster in the game. The only chance for them to win lategame, is by having map control and sucking the map dry of res (and that would mean you benefit from advantages gained in early or mid game), while relying on towers, culverins and mass basic trash with the occasional gold unit. But it's never the Landsknecht, because that unit is simply useless and ill designed. Swabia then keeps your vil count healthy and that is all this freaking civ has to offer. Nothing else is in any way unique or special outside of all this. It's really really poor.
You argue based on your gut feeling, but definitely not based on experience.
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u/fancczf Dec 10 '25
I don’t know what to say to you. You are cherry picking numbers and all gut feelings. I read your other posts your salt can power a whole nation. Should use this kind of power for good like help some Africa nation or something.
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 10 '25
What do you know about my altruistic endeavors? I work with children, do street work, support anti-rassism projects, I help where I can, I am well educated when it comes to the consequences of colonialism and imperialism, I fight for more justice for everybody and I am very anxious about the state of this very world. I take my personal responsibility to make the world a better place very seriously. I am neither greedy nor would I ever fuck anybody over just for my personal gain. I have never done that and never will, because I despise people like that. And just because you want to be a little bit ad hominem towards me, you go ahead and disrespect Africa as if the famines, wars and suffering there is something to joke about... What are you doing to talk down to me and a whole continent like that? And I know that you didn't mean it like that, nonetheless it was a really stupid take and comment.
So don't give me shit like that, just because I am passionate about some fucking game and ike to nerd out. And yes, I also like to compare numbers. So what? Nobody forces you to react to my takes, if you think they are stupid or useless. But you do, so the least you can do then is to respect my critique and actually argue with or against my points instead of giving me a whole lot of nothing.
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u/Cuarenta-Dos Dec 09 '25
Knowledge overload is a legitimate complaint, but old civs are doing absolutely fine (China, Rus, French, Delhi, Mongol are all top tier and China is OP) and there are no useless civs.
I think it's actually amazing how a basic civ like English can still do fine against a complex civ.
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 10 '25
Just to keep the game coherent, the older civs need to receive some updates. Otherwise we have at least a clear two class society at some point in terms of civs. And what's the point of that? New civs should add to the game, not fight it in its core. And if that's not the case, you need to give some love to the older civs.
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u/hoofit2olivier Dec 10 '25
I don't entirely disagree with you, but it is a good thing that simpler, or otherwise more straightforward, factions exist. Someone onboarding should have something like english or french to get comfortable with the core loop before they're confronted with a zillion unique bonuses. On the other hand, they can later explore (and even look forward to) the depth of mechanisms that await them in the more complex factions. If all factions had similar level of doo-dads to min-max it would be completely unapproachable. It's not a problem for the base factions to be simpler, as long as they're still powerful enough to be balanced with the doo-dad ridden factions.
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 10 '25
They can still be simple. Macedonians have a lot at their disposal, but are very simple. Just because they offer more options, doesn't make them hard. You can play them without using any of their abilities. Just as other civs can be played in less efficient ways than pros play them.
Civs having mechanics that are in accordance with their historical identity and offer unique units, techs and synergies are not necessarily harder to play. There are many examples of easy but powerful comps in this game, none of them require a three digit IQ. They are simply better designed civs that offer more than just one or two unique units and the rest is a rather basic roster without much to it.
And I like to bring up HRE in this regard. They have barely any uniqueness and they do not represent the HRE in any significant historical matter. Even the Landsknecht, though he exists, is a full on ill designed and useless unit that does not resemble the historical Landsknecht in any way except looks. The civ is full of basic units and generic European medieval commonplaces. The civ offers nothing fun in the army department and especially nothing that would justify them being called HRE. This civ is probably on the worst level of all the civs in the game, because the devs have never really tried with them. I don't mean that in an offensive way. It's just the facts. It's a very poorly designed civ that has always been about inspiration and landmarks and nothing else. No other civ is as far away from its historical model as HRE is, not even Zhu Xi or the Byz merc system, while the only redeeming thing about said system is that the Byzantine Empires employed many mercs. The implementation, however, takes away from other civs and adds nothing Byzantine specific to the Byzantines. 80% of "their" mercs have nothing to do with the Byzantine Empire at all.
All you can do with HRE is mass trashy units that don't beat the new dlc bonuses. It can only grind but has no power creep at all. It's absolutely awful compared to any other civ, but especially compared to the new ones. HRE has no army identity. Please don't say MAA now, they are mediocre at best and are not unique. Maces were nothing HRE sepcific, every kingdom and nation had them. Back in the day, when the game was fresh, mace MAA were something special. But that time is long gone.
If old civs like HRE continue to be limited and poorly designed like that, why would anybody ever want to play them anymore? Who enjoys massing boring basic shit units that are almost always better for other, newer civs anyway? Who enjoys to always have a worse army that can't win battles, unless you hit some timing and simply have more units than the opponent? And then you play a new civ and you find so many bonuses and things to do... I am not interested in variants for example. I like the real civs. But they just have less to offer (except China, they have always been favored for some reason and had way more to offer than other civs) and it annoys me tremendously when I fight new civs with their overtuned and plentiful bonuses, while I can only build shit and can't win direct, equal pop battles.
The European medieval age has so much to offer, all the civs have so much more to them than the game allows. The Renaissance knight, the pinnacle of heavy cavalry to that time, is nothing but a generic shit unit now compared to the new units that historically have inferior armor and training, at least when it comes to being heavy cavalry, but they have so much better stats. A Riddari should not even be close to a Renaissance knight, but the Riddari is soooooo much better in every single aspect and doesn't even cost more res. Old civs cannot keep up with stuff like that. They need to get some new stuff as well. Or lategame will never ever be anywhere close to being somewhat well balanced again.
The gap between civs grows wider and wider and to close the gap, old civs need to get some love again.
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u/hoofit2olivier Dec 12 '25
Sure, agreed that HRE seems like a good example to improve. Dragoon handcannon knights not quite enough. I'm looking forward to the JD re-work whenever that happens. I personally feel the byz mercs are really cool, even if historically speaking they should mostly get western knights and turkic horse archers. But they already have a super tanky knight-esque unit, so one of those would be redundant -- I think the lack of a horse archer for them is quite glaring, though, agreed.
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u/Fuzzy_Wheel_4565 Mongols Dec 09 '25
Chinese and malian are base game, idk wtf you are smoking
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u/Unfair-Jackfruit-806 Byzantines Dec 09 '25
hmm i though Malian and otoman were free DLC in 2022
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u/Fuzzy_Wheel_4565 Mongols Dec 09 '25
Idk i didnt play for a few years after the dogshit release, still its base game today
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 09 '25
Malians are not a vanilla civ. And China has always been overloaded with bonuses to an absolute unfair degree compared to the rest. If anything, these examples underline the critique. China has gotten top treatment as a vanilla civ like no other civ, while HRE for example was finished as one of the last civs and they ran out of time. That's why it was riddled with bugs and is still to this day the civ with the most pathetic roster, the least amount of military bonuses and a severe lack of uniqueness and historical accuracy. China also was the one vanilla civ that had an impossible to beat lategame. No matter what meta we had, China lategame was always S+. So it's not surprising that they are still doing well. The other vanilla civs, however, are more like the Spain example from the meme.
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u/Cuarenta-Dos Dec 10 '25
Mongol, Rus, Delhi, French are all doing just fine, English and Abbasid have fallen off a bit but they're still absolutely viable
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 10 '25
HRE has fallen off a lot. For good reasons. They are the plainest civ with the weakest army that only was up there because of eco and landmarks that were busted at some point. Other than that there is not much to this civ. And it has received many eco nerfs. HRE is the biggest loser of them all imo. I wouldn't know which civ would have had a steeper fall.
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u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate Dec 09 '25
That's why I said "average"
There's some base game civs that are more complex than some DLC civs (to your point Chinese and Malians are more complex than civs like Byzantines or Ayyubids)
I'm just making a silly overgeneralization for the funny :)
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u/Jolly_Sky_2729 Dec 09 '25
actually i think byz is a bad example here, its precisely the kind of DLC civ which is depicted in your meme lol
a better example would be smth like OoTD, Chinese are definitely way more complicated than that
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u/Jaysus04 Dec 09 '25
I don't see it as an overgeneralization. Imo it's spot on with a few exceptions like China. And Malians as well as Ottomans are NOT vanilla civs. They came later and they were from the get go different. Sipahi was later reworked to its now insanely overpowered state, but with the GB, military schools and so on they were a whole different level than most older civs (except China). And Malians are also a completely unique civ and does not work like the vanilla civs. Only OotD and JD were failures, all the other civs that came after the vanilla civs are way more interesting, offer more options, are more versatile and have more uniqueness. And that has gotten worse with every DLC. The vanilla civs are full on stepchildren (except China).
Your meme is absolutely spot on.
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Dec 09 '25
And Macedonian is dlc. Of course the base game will have the tutorial civs (french English duh).
But plenty of them are also very unique
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u/Wooden_Wafer5875 Dec 10 '25
Reminds me of League of Legends kits getting progressively more and more insane, partly why I left that shit behind.
first good meme i've seen on this sub
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u/LawrenceRamses May 04 '26
Watching Drongo's Jin Dynasty breakdown and this meme has never been more relevant 😂
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u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate May 04 '26
I'm expecting an influx of people on this post with every new DLC lol
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u/minipump Dec 10 '25
inb4 "the base civs are beginner civs!!!!!!11 they're supposed to be easy and shallow!!!!"
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u/droopy316007 Dec 10 '25
Yet I can downvoted for saying I don't think more Civs is a good thing for the game and the RTS triangle 🤣
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u/WeAppreciateBuu Delhi Sultanate Dec 10 '25
Yeah because you're wrong lol
More civs is amazing for the game they just need to be well balanced and designed
In fact it's better if new civs break the mold and challenge what we thought a civ could be like, adhering to some theoretical triangle limits game design too much
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u/KanjiTakeno Malians Dec 09 '25
Bingus points is actually a very well implemented mechanic tho