Age of Empires 4 is a huge real-time strategy game with countless combinations of stratagems. From defensive tips to siege weapons, how to group your units, and when to build farms (spoiler: still), there's plenty to keep in mind even at a young age.
All that freedom can be a little overwhelming, especially for beginners, so we've put together a list of useful tips and tricks to help you get through the centuries and dominate the world regardless of the victory conditions.
Age of Empires 4 Tips and Tricks
It takes a villager to raise an empire
Villagers fuel your empire, and you'll want to produce lots of villagers as soon as possible. Villagers are the lifeblood of your civilization. They are responsible for producing food, gathering wood, and mining stone and gold. More villagers means building buildings faster.
They need attention, however. Villagers will continue their tasks indefinitely as long as resources and tasks are available. If work is interrupted or resources run out, they will need to be redirected.
Use the "." to cycle through idle villagers and put them to work, or unhide them by clicking the button at the top of the menu in the lower left corner of the screen.
You can also track the number of villagers assigned to collect specific resources. This is listed to the right of resources and your stock numbers in the menu at the bottom left of the screen.
Ol' McEmpire had a farm and a mill
And you should too, many. Don't waste your time with the berries as they provide little food for the time it takes to harvest them. Your best bet is to build a mill and plant farms around it.
Always place farms as close to mills as possible to prevent your villagers from having to travel too far. Some civilizations, such as the English, increase their production by building farms adjacent to mills.
Technologies such as the wheelbarrow and horticulture allow your villagers to collect more food from farms and faster, so be sure to research them quickly.
Mills and similar civilization-specific structures are also a good idea if you plan to focus on hunting or herding in the early ages, which is a viable strategy for conserving timber resources. Researching survival skills technology, for example, is important then because it increases the amount of food you get from hunting. Use your scouts to herd sheep in your town center, mill, or pasture for your villagers to harvest.
Finally, if you're playing on a map with rivers or oceans, don't overlook building a wharf and fishing as a viable complement to farming when entering the mid-game. Keep in mind that there are no fish traps in Age of Empires 4 to serve as water farms. And the only problem with fishing is that you will need a lot of wood not only for fishing boats but also for galleys and warships, wood that you could spend elsewhere.
Diplomacy never pays – until it does
Your overall strategy will likely vary how you approach diplomatic issues. At certain points in your campaigns or skirmishes, you will have the choice of paying off a potential rival or engaging them in combat.
If you manage your units well enough, you can leave a small force in your main base to defend it and send the overwhelming majority of your army to face the second threat, bulldozing your enemy.
If you have more resources to spare, however, and a more pressing threat elsewhere, it's almost always worth paying for them. This way, you don't have to wait for stables and barracks to produce more units to replace the ones you've lost, leaving you vulnerable to other nations.
The triangle of death
Age of Empires 4 features a simple but important unit hierarchy.
- Barracks units (soldiers, spearmen, etc.) are strong against cavalry
- Cavalry is strong against archers
- Archers are strong against Barracks units
As with any AoE game, you can technically overpower any enemy simply by throwing a huge army at them. If you want to be more efficient or even play a role, it's worth taking the early game tutorial and Art of War lessons to heart.
Deploy archers to harass infantry and keep them out of harm's way by placing them in stealthy forests and on cliffs. Take down archers with your horses and deploy spearmen against cavalry.
Use control groups
Age of Empires 4 allows you to group units into groups using the "Control" key and the numbers from zero to nine. This somewhat eliminates the need to constantly double-click units or draw boxes around them in combat, for example.
- Highlight the units you want in a group
- Hold the Control key
- Tap the number you want to create the group
Get used to doing this as it's the easiest way to divide your soldiers and deal with specific threats.
You have a few ways to approach this. You can copy the way your own reinforcements arrive and group them into mini armies with infantry, archers and cavalry, or you can group unit types, like having one group for cavalry and one for archers .
I found good success with the first method, at least early in the game on a smaller scale, as it made it easier to target specific enemy groups.
Upgrade early and often
Age of Empires 4 doesn't sound its trumpets on upgrades, but they are among the most important elements of any strategy. You have few upgrades in the first age, but advancing to the feudal age unlocks upgrades for buildings and new buildings that help improve units. Click on a building or unit and you will see the upgrades marked in turquoise colored tiles.
For example, you can research a Lumber Camp's Double Broadax upgrade to increase the speed at which villagers gather wood, or you can build a blacksmith to unlock new soldier upgrades like Bloomery, which increases damage melee attack.
In the beginning, it is very important to focus on resource upgrades, while adding attack and defense upgrades to your military units. The key here is to collect resources faster than the enemy AI can gobble them up.
In the same vein, be sure to balance upgrades with creating new units and villagers. Always hunt resources and build defenses with military units. Upgrades are of no use to you if you are destitute or find your base in flames and on the verge of destruction.
Build a good defense
You should spend most of your resources on establishing your cities and building an army. However, as you get closer to your enemy's strongholds, you'll want to divert some of those resources to fortifications as you progress through later ages, such as the Castle Age and the imperial age.
Villagers can build wooden palisades – and, later, stone walls – to keep advancing enemies from burning down your buildings, but outposts that become guard towers are your best option early on.
If you position them well and keep them buffed, you can take out enemy forces before they even reach your defensive walls. Enemy AI units are often awfully focused on anything attacking them or in their path, so towers can at least distract them long enough for your forces to arrive and take them down.
It's also important to use the terrain to your advantage. Place units and towers along high ground wherever possible and create choke points with mountains, valleys and even forests that you haven't harvested.
Siege (sort of)
Some Siege Weapons become available from the Feudal Age, while the Siege Workshop becomes available in the Castle Age and brings significant upgrades. However, building siege weapons is not always necessary and depends on the situation.
I've found rams to be largely useless most of the time, but mangonels (catapults, basically) are effective in both knocking down walls and stopping groups of infantry. If you're attacking a fortress, be sure to bring some mangonels or trebuchets.
Take a research trip
If you want to try all of this in a pressure-free environment, go to the Skirmish menu under "Play", to the right of "Campaign", and choose to create your own game. There you can set a match without enemies and with a large amount of starting resources, choose the age you want to start at, and customize it basically however you see fit.
It's the best way to explore new strategies and understand how units, buildings, and upgrades work without those pesky Frenchmen or Mongols setting your walls on fire every couple of minutes.
That's it for our Age of Empires 4 beginner tips and tricks guide, but keep an eye out for more Age of Empires 4 guides in the coming days.
