Reflections on a Top 200 / Conqueror 3 Grind in Age of Empires IV

The game is honestly pretty decent nowadays

I spent the last month doing a top 200 / Conqueror 3 grind in Age of Empires IV, and I wanted to write up some brief thoughts on it.

The Grind

I did a brief grind to Conqueror I earlier in the year, and I came away impressed by how far Age 4 had come since launch. I had a nagging sense that I had left a lot on the table, so I decided to repurpose my planned Age of Empires II grind and put some more time into Age 4. The high-level idea was to work toward becoming a top 50 player with at least half the civilizations, with a planned pause and reflection at the top 200 milestone.

Well, here we are.

The Approach (and Results)

I play regularly on two main accounts, brownbear and Goggins, rotating through the best six civilizations (in my humble opinion) - Rus, French, Abbasid, Mongols, English, and Malians. I dabble in Ottomans, HRE, and China because they all seem OK, power-wise, but I just don’t enjoy their gameplay all that much. I also actively dislike playing Delhi, so I hardly play them at all. (No offense to Delhi players - just a personal preference).

I got both accounts up to Conqueror 3 this past week off the back of 127 games (around 50 hours of gameplay). I feel pretty good about where I’m at; I didn’t want to write this up until I felt like it wasn’t a fluke. Ratings fluctuate, of course, so I’m sure I’ll bounce up and down.

The Tips

I think a lot of people read articles like this to learn how they, too, can make the leap to a higher ELO tier. I’m sympathetic to that perspective, so I figured I would start with some tips, and then move on to the part I’m more interested in, which is a reflection on the gameplay and state of Age of Empires IV.

(Never say Brown Bear RTS isn’t commentary For The People™).

Let me preface this by saying I grinded Age of Empires II to top 1% a few years back, played StarCraft II at a Master’s 1 level, and played top-level competitive Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III back when those games first came out. I have a good amount of experience with competitive real-time strategy; it’s not realistic for everyone to hit Conqueror III after a few hundred games. Remember that the only person you should compare yourself to is who you were yesterday.

Anyway, onto the advice.

The biggest thing I’d say to most players is to understand the early to mid-game meta, specifically how different match-ups are played and why. For instance, in any given game - what’s your opener, and what’s your goal? Why is that the right approach in this match-up? Where does the opener lead - what’s the follow-up? What information would you scout that would cause you to deviate from your plans?

I know these can feel like overwhelming questions to answer given the complexity of the game. And that’s a very fair way to feel. But at some point you’ll realize that you’ll never understand all of it, and that the best you can do is just crack away at it piece by piece. And that by itself is pretty comforting. Plus, after awhile you’ll discover that in practice there’s not actually that much meta diversity in Age 4 at the moment. That’s partly because the game is relatively new and still being figured out, and also partly because the design and balance of the game encourages each civilization to play in a limited number of ways.

For me, anytime I lose a game, I take a quick peek at the replay and compare my approach to that of top players playing the same match-up. If it looks like my approach - roughly speaking, at a high-level - is wrong, I course-correct and move on. If not, I look closer, following the old Day9 advice to look for my earliest significant mistake. I then strive to correct that in future games.

To that end, I spent some time cataloging the most common types of significant mistakes I made:

• Wrong unit compositions - Age 4 features a hard counter system which puts relatively more emphasis on building the right units over building more of them or controlling them well. (Of course, all three matter to some degree). The most common reason I lose games is that I either react to my opponent’s composition with the wrong units, or I forget to scout their composition and end up blindsided.

• Lack of eco investments - Defenders have a lot of tools in the current meta, so it can be hard to close out games or find game-ending damage. I often lose games because I get a meaningful lead, but fail to compound that lead with eco investments back at home. This gives my opponent an opening to come back, which they typically do by building a better unit composition (see above). The lesson: always take advantage of moments of strength to “get more ahead”, by getting more economic upgrades, adding a TC or adding trade.

• Tempo games - I lose a decent number of games due to tempo losses - basically, I lose control of the pace of the game and get washed out, even if I have a theoretical advantage. The most common cases: 1) rushing up to Castle and getting killed before my tech advantage kicks in, and 2) booming too much and getting killed by someone rushing a tech advantage before I can defend it. Basically, that Feudal/Castle transition point can be quite tricky, and it requires proactive scouting. No going on auto-pilot or tunnel visioning.

• Minimap awareness - I play without sound in case my partner needs to get my attention at a moment’s notice. It goes without saying - if you do not hear attack notifications, you need to compensate by frequently checking your minimap. The bright side is that better minimap awareness is a useful skill regardless.

Finally, I know people will ask the question, so I’ll say directly that I can’t tell you how long it will take you to reach Conqueror III. It’s not worth asking how long it took me, or your buddy, or anybody else, because everyone has unique advantages and disadvantages that you’ll never be able to fully appreciate over the interwebs. The only question you should ask is whether you’re better than you were yesterday.

I can say, though, that if it interests you, it’s honestly pretty doable, and you should definitely feel free to go for it. Age 4 is a new enough game that you’re not up against a gauntlet of build orders that people have been refining for years and years - you can learn the general outline of the meta pretty fast. And from that point on, it’s mostly refinement.

Reflections - The Game State

Alright, with the tip tax™ out of the way, I’ll jump into what actually interests me - reflections on the gameplay and state of Age of Empires IV.

Let me say unequivocally that the glaring balance issues that helped spoil the launch window - siege dominance, Rus FC, etc - are in a much better spot. I wouldn’t say the game is necessarily well-balanced, but I was pleased to feel like every single one of my losses was a skill issue. For the game to feel like that after launching the way it did is really, really great.

The gameplay itself is also pretty decent. I never found myself dreading logging on or anything like that. I enjoyed the process of learning different match-ups, studying top-level players (including the wonder of cloud replays, which makes it possible to view any player’s replays unless they opt out), and finding holes in my own gameplay. I mean, all things considered, this is a perfectly reasonable competitive RTS. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the playerbase is stable at around 13-15k peak concurrent players and roughly ~18k 1v1 ladder players who’ve completed their placements this season. For context, this is meaningfully higher than W3Champions, a little less than half of Age of Empires II, and around 10% that of StarCraft II. Even after Age 3’s free-to-play transition, Age 4 is still solidly the second most popular Age title on Steam.

I am a little bummed at the lack of meta diversity. It feels to me like there are a handful of strong ways to play each civilization, and you sort of rotate through them depending on the match-up and the map gen. This impacts certain civilizations, like Abbasid and Chinese, more than others. There’s some degree of responding to your opponent, of course, but the higher you climb the more standard everyone else plays, too.

The two points of comparison that come to mind are StarCraft II, where there are a larger number of viable build orders in each match-up (at least at any level below top-level pros), and Age of Empires II, where there’s a larger variety in civs and match-ups, and more variation in the build order traversals and reactions. And that’s despite ranked ladder play mostly occurring on a single map (Arabia).

None of this is to say that I’ve mastered the Age 4 meta or anything like that. I still get lots of things wrong! It’s more to say that the feeling of teasing apart and understanding the tricks of a new game gave way to a feeling of refinement and incremental improvement a lot faster than I expected. The meta is just a little lacking in depth at the present moment.

I guess the positive spin on this is that Age 4 nonetheless feels like a very skill-based game. Each party kind of knows what’s what, and tries to put together the pieces faster than their opponent can, focusing on divergences in tactics and moment-to-moment gameplay. I always feel a good sense of agency, even when I lose, and even when the match-up is bad.

In other words, a straightforward, somewhat predictable meta isn’t necessarily bad.

But, it does place relatively more importance on the quality of mechanical execution. And that… still feels a little wonky. Laying down walls doesn’t feel great, click targeting doesn’t feel great (though better than at launch), clicking on sacred sites through the fog of war doesn’t feel great. There’s just a whole lot of not great in the moment-to-moment mechanics of playing the game - whether I’m struggling to assign a worker to shorefish on Marshland due to trees blocking the default camera angle, or putting down my first Ger as Mongols, or any of the other myriad ways in which the user interface still feels unfinished.

I get the idea that high-level ladder gameplay is a relatively niche concern. But I want to offer the alternate perspective that what bugs high-level players is often the same stuff that bothers everyone else - we just notice it more because we play the game more. There are cases where this noticeably diverges, like the relative unimportance of click targeting, but by and large, user interface problems affect everyone.

I feel that as much as I’ve made my peace with Age 4’s meta - and, in some ways, even find the stability of it relaxing - I still struggle to get used to what it feels like to actually play this game. And that makes me wonder whether it’ll become a limiter on the longevity of my time with this game.

That all being said, though, I like the game a lot, and I think I’d look past my concerns pretty fast in the face of new content and civs and maps and so forth. I don’t play games because they lack flaws; I play them because they give me cool stuff to do! Like many in the community, I’m eagerly looking forward to Gamescom for potential developer updates.

Next Steps

I think I still feel pretty OK continuing the grind and seeing how it goes. That said, I did have a chance to attend StarCon 2023 and it got me excited about picking up my Brood War grind again. So I might do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and see how things shake out.

(It’s funny, to me at least, that I take issue with user interface problems in Age 4, only to make plans to play more of a game with an even worse user interface. To me it just comes down to expectations and what sort of interface a game was designed for.)

If you’re a subscriber to Brown Bear RTS you probably know that I originally planned to grind Age of Empires II, and I wanted to mention that I ended up changing gears soon after I started. I enjoy the game a lot, but when I gave it a go for a bit in May, I found myself searching for something that was newer to me, something where I felt more like a novice. Nothing against the game, and I’m sure I’ll play it a ton at some future time.

Alright, that’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed and I’ll see you next week.

Until next time,
brownbear

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