Dude, I'm 33 and rediscovered this game a few months ago. I played this when I was about 11 and never knew the community is actually very much active. I've learnt a ton from your games and advice. Plus your narration is top tier
This. I was coming here to say similar story, it's INSANE how amazing the community is (and how I can sleep to a new t90vid every night but don't tell Hera that)@@nielsdeminitair
Hera, have you thought about doing a reverse population handicap? You keep 200 pop, but they only have 100, 120, or 150 (depending on ELO, etc.). I think it would be a fun way to shake it up.
A map with extra center gold would be good. Give a chance to balance out the lack of trade. We also love seeing big SO shots as viewers. So if more gold = more SO; then that is a win for us 😊
Hera, if you check in the tech tree it says all the possible upgrades for a unit, so it should mention that it can be upgraded in the archery (yup, it says " accuracy (archery range)" so that way you know ) but i mean, you are not even 3k ELO ofc you didnt know that
But thumb ring is not always about accuracy. Example: even players like TheViper (who I think still has more lifetime tournament earnings in AoE2 than Hera; certainly more tournaments won) have been caught saying that thumb ring is important for skirmishers. For, basically, cav archers, the accuracy increase from thumb ring is helpful (and even then, arrows that miss can end up hitting moving targets, while 100% accurate arrows without ballistics can all miss, like with that tournament game on Coast to Mountain where the casters kept laughing at mangudai missing a villager). But War Wagons already have 100% accuracy. So the tech tree is wrong: it doesn't increase the accuracy, it increases the firing speed. This is the main benefit that Thumb Ring gives to units, and the reason why TheViper is wrong and skirmishers don't need it: because while it increases the accuracy of skirmishers from 95% to 100%, it doesn't increase their firing rate at all. You wouldn't know this from looking at the tech tree; you have to go to other sources like the wiki.
My "go to" map was Team Island, i used to peacefully expand on my island and then land on the opponent island, fighting my way to wall a side and then try to conquer the enemy city (playing against Standard AI when i was 8 in the '00s)
Consistently u stayed at least 2x above the number 2 player, and at times 5xahead of the lowest player in score. It was interesting to watch the map on this one. Your empire slowly grew and it was slightly scary to watch as blue became a dominant color. I thought of Ukraine/Russia. I just watched 4x cities get attacked by a massive army with a master taction, even in a "loss", he still won. Well fought.
Wow this panned out completely different than I expected. Thought you would quickly destroy one of the players to avoid getting overwhelmed by the numbers later. Nicely fought, though. I still think war wagons are a great unit here as amateur players generally have insanely difficult time dealing with them, or the Bohemian ones.
Anyone who plays a lot of nomad knows that war wagons are insanely strong. Being able to jump tc's like that is really nasty. So unless the opponent has some mangonels to defend, he's pretty much screwed.
You can tell a 1vX game is lost when the title doesn't say something like: "Insane death ball" or "They didn't see it coming." If the title is: "Great game" "Awesome effort" "Crazy game" then Hera loses :) 11
hey Hera, weird question: lets say i get all your knowledge, so i know all the build orders, all the strats and counter-strats, all the game reading and predicting opp movements. what would i need to improve next to be like you?
Practice. Just because one knows music theory doesn't mean they know how to play an instrument. It's all about execution, being able to think fast (USING your knowledge to make the best decision), and not choke. Hotkeys help. But overall, it's the actual decision making and execution of those decisions and how fast you make those decision and how fast you can execute them. That's muscle memory and second nature. Which only comes from practicing.
when trade is so op, you might wanna set it as a rule that their not allowed to trade if you wanna keep up those 1v4s or that they have to build a trade inside your base so you can counteract xD
Okay, is there an agreement that they don't militia rush you? If I was playing a 4v1 I'd coordinate with my teammates to send 3x4=12 militia to slow down your economy.
Tired Hera still rules! I thought it was funny tho when he first talked up Hussar, when I just learned that Korean Hussar is so bad. Also I felt like he didn’t realize how he wasn’t making villagers for such a long time. As you’re playing against these slightly higher ELO people, I wonder if you should bring back the +100 pop per extra player like from back in the day? My math was wrong and I thought you had 400 pop anyway. It feels like you should have 100 pop per enemy.
he has some script for laying those farms automatically as he even looks away as the script or auto click rolls... anyone knows how Hera is doing that?
Check recent patch notes for auto-farm placement, hold down a certain modifier key while mouse is on a (built or unbuilt, for Khmer) mill or TC. It just works poorly with high latency
We low level players are allergic to being at 200 pop, but you are allergic to walling properly :DD I know pro players want to safe stone, but all these raids in your base are unnecessary if you secure the area you conquered. It was painful to watch them going havy on cav and you resisting going halb for so long. You just needed some staying near your trebs. I think it could have been possible that you win, but you were tired. The community seems to get much more competitive since you are teaching so nice all the players. So many low elo mofos are microing like crazy xDDD
epic game! feels weird to say that to the best player in the world but why didnt you go halbers+skirms+onagers it would have been a better compo, especially vs red's archers, and only make a few hussars for raiding? spamming hussars dying to their pikes is a big sunk on the food which is supposed to be your source of gold
I'm mostly saying "make more forward production buildings", but in a lengthier way. Good example at 31:09. You could have made the barracks in front of the trebuchet. But you made them in the back. Even just this small difference: that's an extra 12 tiles to run towards a fight, which is ~4 extra hits or ~120 damage. In a normal 1v1 game, you often have a few big fights. It can make sense to build production buildings back a little, because you are actually defending them with castles, and if you build them safely your opponent's units will spend more time standing around doing nothing, or moving around in response to your attacks. In a messy game, you need to keep pushing. It's like building a wave: you need to reinforce the front of the wavefront, even if it means villagers are building production buildings in the middle of a battle. You see this during pushes in Rage Forest, where it's the same principle: fighting doesn't stop, so faster reinforcements is more important than safe building placement. Second point, at 44:25: you have 13 production buildings, including town centers, with 40 units in the queue. But it's not enough, because you have 8k resources to spend and 60 unused population space. This can happen in a normal game as well, but with 350 population the problem is exaggerated: creating units at a rate that you think is normal is more likely to lead to a population deficit and military disadvantage. I'm going to compare forward production buildings to World of Warcraft, a game which I know DauT and TaToH have played but I don't think you ever played. There, everyone controls just a single unit, which seems easier than controlling many, but it doesn't always lead to people making smarter decisions. So, briefly: WoW has "battlegrounds", where a set amount of players fight on two teams. If you die, you respawn automatically at no cost, on set timers that go off every 30 sec (so dying every 25 sec is a lot better than dying every 31 sec, but it isn't that important). In one battleground, Alterac Valley, which has some situations where the fighting can seemingly be reduced to pushing in a single direction (no real strategy): there is a tendency for fighting to move back and forth in waves between the two spawn points. When fighting gets close to a spawn point, defenders who die can immediately rejoin the action as soon as they respawn, while attackers must travel a long distance. A quick video check indicates it can be around 30 sec extra: so defenders who die before every respawn spend up to 60 sec fighting every minute, while attackers who die are spending 30 sec traveling, and then 30 sec fighting. It's obvious how this favors the defenders. So you would get people yelling in chat to fight on the objective where spending 10 uninterrupted seconds interacting with a flag allows you to take control and stop respawns. This means running forward a bit into the thick of battle to force defenders to move backwards, even if it means that you almost immediately die; because while you do this, someone else might be taking control of the objective. Naturally, a lot of people are not smart enough to understand this well, so they fight in front of the flag instead of on the flag and the push gets broken with the wave of the battlefront being reflected towards the other, distant spawn point. In AoE2, you control where units spawn. You can prevent defenders from having a reinforcement advantage by building forward production. But a lot of AoE2 players do not properly understand the importance of doing this to support a push: they spend their APM doing other things.
most times you lose these 1vmany games its because you fight in the center instead of working your way around the map and taking their bases. raiding does little vs many because others are booming while you are hitting one.
Hera, you've observed that the 'meta' is shifting towards more cav archers being used. What I wonder is if players in AoE2 are going to discover the redoubt, which could lead to a similar change in commonly observed strategies. UA-cam auto-deleted this comment so I'll break it up into replies.
Part 1: _"A redoubt is a fort or fort system usually consisting of an enclosed defensive emplacement outside a larger fort, usually relying on earthworks, although some are constructed of stone or brick. It is meant to protect soldiers outside the main defensive line and can be a permanent structure or a hastily constructed temporary fortification. _*_The word means "a place of retreat"._*_ Redoubts were a component of the military strategies of most European empires during the colonial era . . . A redoubt differs from a redan in that the redan is open in the rear, whereas the redoubt was considered an enclosed work."_
Part 2: Consider this game. Towards the end, you're just getting swamped with units. At some level, you just need firepower: pure skirms may beat pure halbs, but pure skirms do not beat pure halbs from 4 players, let alone a mix of all types of trash units with some gold units mixed in. So the problem here is, how might you create gold units, like arbalests that kill halbs faster than skirms kill halbs, that you never lose? Regardless of your civ.
Part 3: And this is really one of the concepts behind the tower: it's a building where archers can theoretically do the same amount of damage (in practice it's often less, because tower arrows have different, usually less bonus damage; each arrow slightly slows the overall fire rate because reloading only starts once all arrows are fired; and number of arrows added is rounded down), without taking any damage themselves. They even get extra range. Obviously, towers can't move (*I think it would be cool if siege towers were immobile without any garrisoned infantry but archers could shoot out of them like normal towers, but that's a different topic), so to push the archers must leave the tower at some point. The role of the tower then becomes to consolidate ground and hold against mini-pushbacks while pushing in another place. Units that don't fit in the tower, such as war wagons, might retreat a little, while still staying close enough to pose threats against units like bombard cannons that might siege the tower. The point, basically: if your g*ld units are taking damage, some of them will die. You view this as acceptable if you're getting good trades, like you lose 1 war wagon (many others damaged) while enemy loses 10 knights. But to conserve these units into the late game, you have to take no or almost no damage. This can actually be done if your g*ld units are ranged, by just protecting these units with walls or buildings. These take time to build; so it becomes a matter of advancing with cavalry, scouting and distracting enemy forces while villagers build the walls (and maybe a tower or castle), then falling back to those walls.
Dude, I'm 33 and rediscovered this game a few months ago. I played this when I was about 11 and never knew the community is actually very much active. I've learnt a ton from your games and advice. Plus your narration is top tier
Man you are in for a treat, next to hera there is a lot of nice material on t90's channel like the tiny maps, tourneys etc. . Good times my dude
Pretty much same for me too. Childhood game here just pickin it back up. Aoe2 de all day
This. I was coming here to say similar story, it's INSANE how amazing the community is (and how I can sleep to a new t90vid every night but don't tell Hera that)@@nielsdeminitair
I hope you get you enjoy AOE2 again, it's so much better and much more interesting.... with all the Civs to learn.
Hera, have you thought about doing a reverse population handicap? You keep 200 pop, but they only have 100, 120, or 150 (depending on ELO, etc.). I think it would be a fun way to shake it up.
I love that you play games where it will be hard for you to win…you are the GOAT.
This is my favorite AoE channel
Thx Hera for the game and the video upload. Did not think i was such a problem 😂😂
A map with extra center gold would be good. Give a chance to balance out the lack of trade. We also love seeing big SO shots as viewers. So if more gold = more SO; then that is a win for us 😊
Great idea, and ban trade. On the other hand busting pop cap makes 1v4 not so 1v4.
Also thought of 1000 pop for everyone, it would give more potential for snowball effect from the lone player.
19:00 yes it is wagons are same as cavalry archer.
Hera, if you check in the tech tree it says all the possible upgrades for a unit, so it should mention that it can be upgraded in the archery (yup, it says " accuracy (archery range)" so that way you know )
but i mean, you are not even 3k ELO ofc you didnt know that
But thumb ring is not always about accuracy. Example: even players like TheViper (who I think still has more lifetime tournament earnings in AoE2 than Hera; certainly more tournaments won) have been caught saying that thumb ring is important for skirmishers.
For, basically, cav archers, the accuracy increase from thumb ring is helpful (and even then, arrows that miss can end up hitting moving targets, while 100% accurate arrows without ballistics can all miss, like with that tournament game on Coast to Mountain where the casters kept laughing at mangudai missing a villager). But War Wagons already have 100% accuracy. So the tech tree is wrong: it doesn't increase the accuracy, it increases the firing speed. This is the main benefit that Thumb Ring gives to units, and the reason why TheViper is wrong and skirmishers don't need it: because while it increases the accuracy of skirmishers from 95% to 100%, it doesn't increase their firing rate at all. You wouldn't know this from looking at the tech tree; you have to go to other sources like the wiki.
@@RiskyDramaUploads yeah, the tech tree is wrong about what does it say it improves, but it does improve them, so....
My "go to" map was Team Island, i used to peacefully expand on my island and then land on the opponent island, fighting my way to wall a side and then try to conquer the enemy city (playing against Standard AI when i was 8 in the '00s)
21:26 my man’s going for the castle of doubt achievement
Hera at 32:26 casually saying: This isn't even my final form 😆
confident i could beat hera in a 1v1 if his monitor is off
idk how he ignored arson for so long having all those halbs, gg
Hera taught me today that wagons are impacted by thumb ring
Consistently u stayed at least 2x above the number 2 player, and at times 5xahead of the lowest player in score. It was interesting to watch the map on this one. Your empire slowly grew and it was slightly scary to watch as blue became a dominant color. I thought of Ukraine/Russia. I just watched 4x cities get attacked by a massive army with a master taction, even in a "loss", he still won. Well fought.
i love single player arabia vs AI
Hey Hera just thankful you support youtube :) I don't watch anything live except NHL lol
You missed the opportunity to use the water.. turtle ships may have been a game chager.
we have all been joking for years about DauT boar lures, but we really should be joking about Hera boar lures. this + the BF games = 11111111
s tier hera
Wow this panned out completely different than I expected. Thought you would quickly destroy one of the players to avoid getting overwhelmed by the numbers later. Nicely fought, though. I still think war wagons are a great unit here as amateur players generally have insanely difficult time dealing with them, or the Bohemian ones.
This is mad impressive wtf lol
Anyone who plays a lot of nomad knows that war wagons are insanely strong. Being able to jump tc's like that is really nasty. So unless the opponent has some mangonels to defend, he's pretty much screwed.
Crazy game. I think once turks got back in the game it went downhill.
Still Holding out that long with KOREAN HUSSAR is insane
great game want to see hera win more often in this 1 v n games
You can tell a 1vX game is lost when the title doesn't say something like: "Insane death ball" or "They didn't see it coming." If the title is: "Great game" "Awesome effort" "Crazy game" then Hera loses :) 11
Definitely a Civ Dif in the 2nd half. Still good game my dude.
Lol, personally I started in 2020 on arabia, practicing your build orders till I got over ranked anxiety. Hundreds of 1v1 arabia games against AI.
insane trap at 29:30
but how the video is uploaded 5 mins ago how you already seen 29:30
@@ahsamkaimkhani9500 im just build different, just like heras traps
Hello Hera, in the future can we get an tips for meso civs? like how to play eagles archers opening
for 400 pop , 210-220 villager pop. is very good usually
26:35 im offended
hey Hera, weird question: lets say i get all your knowledge, so i know all the build orders, all the strats and counter-strats, all the game reading and predicting opp movements. what would i need to improve next to be like you?
so you know the theory, need to get expert in practice
Practice. Just because one knows music theory doesn't mean they know how to play an instrument. It's all about execution, being able to think fast (USING your knowledge to make the best decision), and not choke. Hotkeys help. But overall, it's the actual decision making and execution of those decisions and how fast you make those decision and how fast you can execute them. That's muscle memory and second nature. Which only comes from practicing.
Do another imposter game that was fun to watch 😀😀
Yucatan is my favourite map you get 15 turkeys!
man, if you could only have gotten wonder victory!! hah.
I think it would be interesting to see how 4 pros play a 1v1 where 2 control each civ
It's hilarious, a few months ago Daut, Hera, Viper and Tatoh had a series of games like that and the voice chat is great.
@@BrentTJo where can I find this?
Search Co-op Showmatch Hera/Daut vs Viper/MBL (was MBL not Tatoh), 9 months ago they did one and multiple put up the videos
@BrentTJo at lower Elo, I feel like this is a better way to play as speed isn't really a factor
when trade is so op, you might wanna set it as a rule that their not allowed to trade if you wanna keep up those 1v4s or that they have to build a trade inside your base so you can counteract xD
Should try coastal forest. Next. 1v 2 or 1v3
GOOD GAME
Japanese player really missed an opportunity to just go full halbs and rams at the end to wipe hera out completely.
hera you gonna play age of mythology retold?
Okay, is there an agreement that they don't militia rush you? If I was playing a 4v1 I'd coordinate with my teammates to send 3x4=12 militia to slow down your economy.
Yep, rule is no dark age rush stuff
600 pop games are the way
Great Game! Too bad you couldnt go for a wonder :/
Tired Hera still rules! I thought it was funny tho when he first talked up Hussar, when I just learned that Korean Hussar is so bad. Also I felt like he didn’t realize how he wasn’t making villagers for such a long time.
As you’re playing against these slightly higher ELO people, I wonder if you should bring back the +100 pop per extra player like from back in the day? My math was wrong and I thought you had 400 pop anyway. It feels like you should have 100 pop per enemy.
ggs!
Incredible game ❤
what is the reason hera
😃😃
he has some script for laying those farms automatically as he even looks away as the script or auto click rolls... anyone knows how Hera is doing that?
Check recent patch notes for auto-farm placement, hold down a certain modifier key while mouse is on a (built or unbuilt, for Khmer) mill or TC. It just works poorly with high latency
We low level players are allergic to being at 200 pop, but you are allergic to walling properly :DD
I know pro players want to safe stone, but all these raids in your base are unnecessary if you secure the area you conquered.
It was painful to watch them going havy on cav and you resisting going halb for so long.
You just needed some staying near your trebs.
I think it could have been possible that you win, but you were tired.
The community seems to get much more competitive since you are teaching so nice all the players.
So many low elo mofos are microing like crazy xDDD
yeah, i never understand high elo players are so allergic to walls
epic game! feels weird to say that to the best player in the world but why didnt you go halbers+skirms+onagers it would have been a better compo, especially vs red's archers, and only make a few hussars for raiding? spamming hussars dying to their pikes is a big sunk on the food which is supposed to be your source of gold
Omg i used to play with wingman
I'm mostly saying "make more forward production buildings", but in a lengthier way.
Good example at 31:09. You could have made the barracks in front of the trebuchet. But you made them in the back. Even just this small difference: that's an extra 12 tiles to run towards a fight, which is ~4 extra hits or ~120 damage.
In a normal 1v1 game, you often have a few big fights. It can make sense to build production buildings back a little, because you are actually defending them with castles, and if you build them safely your opponent's units will spend more time standing around doing nothing, or moving around in response to your attacks.
In a messy game, you need to keep pushing. It's like building a wave: you need to reinforce the front of the wavefront, even if it means villagers are building production buildings in the middle of a battle. You see this during pushes in Rage Forest, where it's the same principle: fighting doesn't stop, so faster reinforcements is more important than safe building placement.
Second point, at 44:25: you have 13 production buildings, including town centers, with 40 units in the queue. But it's not enough, because you have 8k resources to spend and 60 unused population space. This can happen in a normal game as well, but with 350 population the problem is exaggerated: creating units at a rate that you think is normal is more likely to lead to a population deficit and military disadvantage.
I'm going to compare forward production buildings to World of Warcraft, a game which I know DauT and TaToH have played but I don't think you ever played. There, everyone controls just a single unit, which seems easier than controlling many, but it doesn't always lead to people making smarter decisions. So, briefly: WoW has "battlegrounds", where a set amount of players fight on two teams. If you die, you respawn automatically at no cost, on set timers that go off every 30 sec (so dying every 25 sec is a lot better than dying every 31 sec, but it isn't that important).
In one battleground, Alterac Valley, which has some situations where the fighting can seemingly be reduced to pushing in a single direction (no real strategy): there is a tendency for fighting to move back and forth in waves between the two spawn points. When fighting gets close to a spawn point, defenders who die can immediately rejoin the action as soon as they respawn, while attackers must travel a long distance. A quick video check indicates it can be around 30 sec extra: so defenders who die before every respawn spend up to 60 sec fighting every minute, while attackers who die are spending 30 sec traveling, and then 30 sec fighting. It's obvious how this favors the defenders. So you would get people yelling in chat to fight on the objective where spending 10 uninterrupted seconds interacting with a flag allows you to take control and stop respawns. This means running forward a bit into the thick of battle to force defenders to move backwards, even if it means that you almost immediately die; because while you do this, someone else might be taking control of the objective.
Naturally, a lot of people are not smart enough to understand this well, so they fight in front of the flag instead of on the flag and the push gets broken with the wave of the battlefront being reflected towards the other, distant spawn point.
In AoE2, you control where units spawn. You can prevent defenders from having a reinforcement advantage by building forward production. But a lot of AoE2 players do not properly understand the importance of doing this to support a push: they spend their APM doing other things.
We also played a 4vs1 against you on this map, was fun but it never made it to UA-cam ❤😢
Should ban or disable trade for your 1 vs many's, it would be fair, even more fair than busting your pop cap.
most times you lose these 1vmany games its because you fight in the center instead of working your way around the map and taking their bases. raiding does little vs many because others are booming while you are hitting one.
Bruh that person was dying 8:50
Hera, you've observed that the 'meta' is shifting towards more cav archers being used. What I wonder is if players in AoE2 are going to discover the redoubt, which could lead to a similar change in commonly observed strategies.
UA-cam auto-deleted this comment so I'll break it up into replies.
Part 1:
_"A redoubt is a fort or fort system usually consisting of an enclosed defensive emplacement outside a larger fort, usually relying on earthworks, although some are constructed of stone or brick. It is meant to protect soldiers outside the main defensive line and can be a permanent structure or a hastily constructed temporary fortification. _*_The word means "a place of retreat"._*_ Redoubts were a component of the military strategies of most European empires during the colonial era . . . A redoubt differs from a redan in that the redan is open in the rear, whereas the redoubt was considered an enclosed work."_
Part 2:
Consider this game. Towards the end, you're just getting swamped with units. At some level, you just need firepower: pure skirms may beat pure halbs, but pure skirms do not beat pure halbs from 4 players, let alone a mix of all types of trash units with some gold units mixed in.
So the problem here is, how might you create gold units, like arbalests that kill halbs faster than skirms kill halbs, that you never lose? Regardless of your civ.
Part 3:
And this is really one of the concepts behind the tower: it's a building where archers can theoretically do the same amount of damage (in practice it's often less, because tower arrows have different, usually less bonus damage; each arrow slightly slows the overall fire rate because reloading only starts once all arrows are fired; and number of arrows added is rounded down), without taking any damage themselves. They even get extra range.
Obviously, towers can't move (*I think it would be cool if siege towers were immobile without any garrisoned infantry but archers could shoot out of them like normal towers, but that's a different topic), so to push the archers must leave the tower at some point. The role of the tower then becomes to consolidate ground and hold against mini-pushbacks while pushing in another place. Units that don't fit in the tower, such as war wagons, might retreat a little, while still staying close enough to pose threats against units like bombard cannons that might siege the tower.
The point, basically: if your g*ld units are taking damage, some of them will die. You view this as acceptable if you're getting good trades, like you lose 1 war wagon (many others damaged) while enemy loses 10 knights. But to conserve these units into the late game, you have to take no or almost no damage. This can actually be done if your g*ld units are ranged, by just protecting these units with walls or buildings. These take time to build; so it becomes a matter of advancing with cavalry, scouting and distracting enemy forces while villagers build the walls (and maybe a tower or castle), then falling back to those walls.
beat 1 of them first for minerals? 😸
Hera i would love for you to comment on one of my games is it possible? :)
I'm 1050 elo :D