Age of Empires IV is here, and both new and returning players are having to master how the game works before they take each other on online. This page will detail Age of Empires 4 tips and tricks that you can use to become the very best civilization quickly and then assert your dominance on the lesser kings that surround you. Want to be the very best? Well, take note of these Age of Empires 4 tips and tricks.
You should keep your villagers busy
Villagers are crucial to the Age of Empires experience and are secretly the most valuable and important unit in each and every one of the games. You need villagers to gather resources and build structures in order to have a healthy economy and society.
Always assume that the computer is making villagers and then make slightly more than that whenever you can. It might seem overprepared, but if you don’t have enough then you’ll fall behind both in your society and your military. You should build more town centers as soon as you can, to maximise your villager production speed.
Fishermen can double up as secret repairmen
On maps with lots of water, you’ll likely build a dock and start to fight a war on the sea. On that sort of map, fishing boats are a key food gathering resource. You really don’t want to lose an expensive warship, so you’ll probably want to bring them back to the shoreline when they get damaged until around Age 4.
Once you hit Age 4, your fishermen on their cheap boats will be able to fix up your warships too — a good reason to add a smattering of them to your fleet. Make sure your sea warriors protect them though, as they’ll go down quickly if targeted.
But make sure you also have fishermen
If you expand outwards and find the shoreline, then you can fish at appropriate spots along the coast. You’ll be able to get a substantial amount of food without putting too many resources into it. You can drop the food off at your docks, so it can be a very quick way to solve a famine.
When you can, you’ll want to send boats out to go deep-sea fishing. In Age of Empires 4 these spots come back, so you’ll be able to scout our new locations to get food from time to time. The Fish Traps from Age of Empires 2 are gone, so don’t worry about wasting wood with those anymore.
Buildings influence one another, so pay attention
Age of Empires 4 has a new mechanic where structures provide special bonus effects to the other builds around them. Farms built close to an English Mill, for example, cost 50% less wood and get harvests 15% faster. Hunting Cabins near trees will generate more gold. Different civilizations are better at influencing different stats and incomes, so learning about each one is important to being good at the game.
Have people stand guard on your fanciest stone walls
Age of Empires 4 has redesigned the mechanics around walls, and stone walls are now an incredible advancement that are crucial in defending against enemy armies. Units can now stand on top of walls, as long as they climb up via. a tower, gate, or broken section of wall. Units can also walk along the wall as long as there are no gaps.
If a unit is on top of a wall, they’ll have extra protection from long range attacks and have the advantage on attacking enemies below them. You’ll want to keep some powerful melee attackers near your archers to prevent them being murdered in a siege or a breach, though.
AoE IV also now considers outposts and towers to be different things. You can do a classic Age of Empires game tower rush with outposts, which are standalone structures that can be upgraded a lot. Towers are now an extension of the stone wall building mechanic. You can give them weapon emplacements and other upgrades that will maximize your defenses. There are a few civilisations with extra options for towers if you do your research at the Siege Workshop.
Be careful when building walls like palisades near hills and stone fields, as sometimes it will clip and you’ll end up with a gap that sneaky blighters can make their way in through to attack you by surprise.
Textiles are important, so make sure your villagers wear nicer clothes
You need to research Textiles in Age 4, because having good clothes makes your villagers sturdier. It’s a bit like the loom from Age of Empires 2. Make it a priority, because it’s quite cheap and will definitely help to determine who wins combat encounters in the early game.
Burning things isn’t a war crime, because there’s no hague yet
AoE IV also has a new fire mechanic that is great if you want to destroy enemy buildings. If a building has below 25% health it will catch fire. You’ll then see a special emblem that will let the enemy know to start to worry about the blaze finishing the building off.
Attackers can move on to smashing another structure and leave the fire to finish their previous work on damaging the building. Unless an enemy villager comes along and repairs the building, then a burning building’s days ahead are numbered. You can let your attacker finish it off if you’re wanting to be thorough, but generally it’s not worth wasting the time.
If you’re playing the Mongols, then burning down structures will also give you free resources.
Siege equipment is for sieging
Now that stone walls have been redesigned, siege equipment is very important when it’s time to make an attack on a foe. When you’re attacking, you should build both battering rams and siege towers and use them to put the pressure on. You can use a siege tower to scale a foe’s wall and kill his archers, while the rams will resist damage and smash in walls and gates with relative ease.
Back these up with volleys from the trebuchet from a distance. They’re expensive, so you never want to let the enemy get close enough to smash them up. Our last piece of advice on sieges, is that you’ll want to use springalds as emplacements in your towers to defend your own lands from attacking enemy forces.
This concludes our Age of Empires 4 tips and tricks. Still interested in Age of Empires 4? Why not check out our AoE4 review here. Want to know if there are any Age of Empires IV cheat codes? Then check out this page.