Some commenters have pointed out the technical name of one of the phenomena described in the video is "overkill". I also don't want to confuse "focus firing" with other aspects of micro like hit/run and patrol, which isn't being looked at in this video. I've changed the title from "When NOT to Micro" to "Overkill and Focus Firing" so it won't be confused with any future videos I might make on other aspects of micro. Thanks for the comments, feedback, and support. You all make me a better man...er..UA-camr.
Hey spirit good video but from my point of view... In those kind of situations with archers the most appropiate thing to do is patrol and put the archers on mantener terreno(don't know english term) and the archers will attack mich more effectively
+Cesar Avila could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure patrol just does what they were automatically doing in every test without focus firing, which is to automatically find the closest target to start shooting at right away. We could say patrol is a technique to efficiently start the non-focus firing option, but not a 3rd alternative.
+Spirit Of The Law Great presentation on an aspect people fail to consider too often; overkill. How many times do we watch someone direct 8 siege onagers to fire on a single group. The only thing worse than improper micro is streaming in troops and not managing the fight at all.
+Spirit Of The Law regarding this clip with the crossbowmen vs onangers: why do the onangers never back away - i tried improving my micro creating a custom map with a similar scenario and found it impossible to kill 3 mange the way you did, in fact if i dont chase them so they can not fire at their targets i hardly get any damage in. So: have you some kind of range upgrade going here (so the crossbow matches the range of the onangers) or is it because the onangers are controlled by a human and setting a manual attack cancels out this annoying backing away of the onangers.
+Spirit Of The Law how do you play this game I have it but I can't play anymore it says you need the administrators privileges to play but I'm already I'm one please help I love this game but haven't been able to play for a month
Dominic Rose Maybe Blizzard people are nerds and they only do bullshit to their most popular RTS game. I am not even going to rant their recent balance patches here.
so cav archers actually nock and then draw and then fire mangudai basically hurl their arrows and then the uselessly fiddle around with their bows until they hurl the next arrow at least that is what their animation is showing
Hey Spirit, now that's a nice topic. Could you do one about how to obtain the best results when two big melee forces engage? Also, Happy Holidays dude!
+KomradeCPU its esentially the same thing. Only the units travel time is also a factor. So it depends on units.. Tanky units like War elephants are defo worth focusing down, but f.e. champions not so much. It all comes down to Overkill. Use just the right amount of effort to take the enemy unit down but not any more than that. So in many cases Not micro-ing your melees will be probably better.
Mikee CZ I don't agree all that much with your points; if you ever played cba before, there are a lot of people that patrol their units in fronts of your before engaging, just so they "envelop" your formation, having more units contributing to the damage dealt and received while some of the opposition is stuck in the middle of their own formation or pathfinding to melee range, all the way thorough the back. I just wanted Spirit to put that into numbers, so we have a clearer picture of that.
+KomradeCPU Be the AI. No, seriously, the AI has very good melee micro, because it can flawlessly select and path a lot of units simultaneously, even in a blob.
I always split fire in this situation so I have ~30-50% of my squad selected to micro and the rest free fire so you can punch out counter units and other important people
Man, this happened to me many times on naval battles. I was like "I can't be THIS bad at microing ships, they're not so different". Maybe I'm still bad but thanks to you, I got science backing me up.
I'm wondering what are the mechanics behind using multiple monks to make a conversion? is there a point where extra monks make no difference? and when units are being converted the seem to move slower, wondering if they attack slower too
i know its an old video but in starcraft when you micro you dont just focus fire, you pull back damaged units and after they dont have aggro anymore you issue an attack command so they avoid beign killed and you keep fire power
4:33 One idea I had recently, is that you have one big group, then just a few ranged snipers on a separate focused firing group. Try to scale the size of this group to the target you're trying to focus down and make sure to choose a new target before you overkill, but get them close enough for the scattered shots to actually finish the job. Alternatively, maybe shift-rmb queues could be a feasible way to have like 3 separate groups all focusing specific targets, but one issue is those numbers change thx to the enemy's dmg, maybe over-shoot the size a bit and be ready to sometimes reassign groups to scale efficiently again. I think I'll try the sniper technique first, seems easiest to wrap my head around and adapt to a dynamic situation. I think in some cases I will just spread my attacks as normal, then just drag a small section of that army to focus without even using a control group, a benefit being that you can rescale it to the target you're focusing each time, but I like the idea of a separate group when I want to make basically constant use of it.
It seems like the best solution in a large archer duel would be to micro a small number of them in the back rows where they won't get quickly auto-targeted and use them to focus fire while everyone else auto-targets. Best of both worlds, at least in situations where it really, really counts.
I was thinking the same thing! In the heavy cav example the best manageable thing would be controlling 12 cav archers cause that is the minimum amount necessary to take down the opposing full health heavy cav archer in a single volley.
I think you wanna micro so that each shot deals exactly enough damage to kill the unit. So in this case with 20 cav archers, why no let 8 fire at will, and micro the 12 remaining cav archers.
@Puppet you can take the 12 from the back or add one on the selection if one die, not rly an issue. Is it really worth it to spend ur time on this kind of micro, that's an other question though...
Hey Spirit, don't know if you want to mention this in one of your videos while we're on the topic, but I discovered a while back that pikemen benefit *immensely* from micro. It's often hard to pull off with lag, but you can greatly improve pike survival against elite war elephants by ordering to stab once, and then run while their cooldown recovers. Remember that they attack about half as fast as other units, so if you micro them to bring the exchange to 1:1 instead of 1:2, you can get a lot more use out of them. Also, they have a very short 'windup' so they can first-hit weakened units, killing them while remaining untouched if you do it right. I killed 20 swordsmen with one pike using that effect. Try pitting several pikemen against a mob of elite war elephants, with and without micro, the results are pretty substantial and worth mentioning imo.
SOTL: One thing I noticed in this video is that both in the testing & your gameplay, the enemy archers were the only enemies within firing range. The main downside to letting the AI take control is that if you were in his position (Raiding an enemy base) the each individual archer would go after the nearest enemy, unless they were getting fired on. So 25% of his army would attack that mil,l farms, or any nearby villagers, until the rest was shot down.
This is three years later, but you actually see some of that in pro-level play. During naval battles along a shoreline, sometimes players will run a couple trash units along the shore, and they distract enough of the opponent's ship fire to win them the battle.
+Carrion any part in particular? Hit and run is pretty self explanatory, and I did show all the different formations in a video about avoiding town center fire
Micro are for Strong units vs many weak units,and many units vs many units let's be right you will micro 2 vs 2 champion battle you will "NOT" Micro 100 vs 100 Champion Battle
+Karina Katsuyaga Actually you should micro large battles if you can. Try and surround the other team such that most of their champions are stuck in the middle, and all of yours are attacking inward. This ensures you have more champions doing work, and they have more standing around useless.
The technical (gaming) term for this effect is called "overkill damage", and you're correct in trying to minimize it whilst reducing the unit count of your opponent's army asap.
You should work out how many units it takes to one-shot focus fire an enemy unit, micro with that many and let the rest of your army auto-fire. That way you get the advantage of reducing your opponent's damage output as fast as possible, but you aren't wasting your own damage output by firing too many projectiles at a single unit. Saying that, my micro is terrible.
Thats why I click the closest one when out of range WHEN moving in, so any ranged unit will shoot when in range meanwhile the rest is still not in range, I wait until the unit is dead then I click another target, by that time the reloads are intercalled
The rule of thumb is you dont "micro" your groups of units in imp when you are fighting another similar group, and neither in castle once you have ballistics. Besides the regular micro, with big groups it is still possible to micro in castle or feudal if you split them in 2 and micro kill 2 units at a time (even with ballistics), but leave that to the pros.
I'd say is correct to assume: 1. Focus fire when you cannot beat an enemy with one single hit (Xbows vs mangonels, Xbows vs knights...) to concentrate the damage effectively. 2. Overkill when you have a large army that can kill one enemy with a single hit (equal numbers fight, archers vs pikes, skirms vs archers, etc...) to spread the damage effectively. But do micro at all times. Issue your orders, watch closely and adapt to the situation.
Wait but you could have said more. So you had 21 archers to start and needed 12 to oneshot each of his full hp units. Ideally shouldn't you have let your front 9 cav archers autoattack while you focus fired with 12 in the back? Or something like that. Actually since your autoattackers would be weakening his archers, you should probably be focus firing with less than 12. Maybe you should have quickly box selected the back half (or slightly less than half) of your archers, focus fired his injured ones first, and then focus fired the ones injured by your autoattackers. Isn't that the correct answer here?
This is exactly like the how much villagers you should send to build houses the more shots spread the more effective but in smaller battles that might change it also depends on if its archers vs archers or archers vs melee
I think there's something to be said about focus firing with units that have multiple arrow shots and the potential for spread damage, e.g. the Chu Ko Nu still hitting multiple targets even when "over killing" due to the number of arrows and not having 100% accuracy. I think you could cleverly micro a greater path of destruction than allowing auto attacks, but that's very situational.
about the first situation i think it was kind of a coincidence that you started winning when you stopped microing because your archers would be at an advantage as soon as the enemy ones lack the numbers to kill an archer with less volleys and the main disadvantage with focusing is the huge number of misses as you explaned
+HECKproductions I agree. Kind of funny looking back that the observation which triggered the video was probably just a misperception. I still managed to learn something and dispell a misconception about micro I think some people probably had, though, so it all worked out haha.
Okay, so without really watching past the Anecdote, I'm gonna guess the result is someithng along the lines of 'when you have far more units than you need to one volley a thing, you shouldn't micro all your doods, but maybe a size of about that volley.' Mind my micro is absolute GARBAGE so there's that.
I wouldn't necessarily say multiple groups, you just have your horde, you select about as many as you need for a one volley kill, and have them as your micro group as the rest of the pile does their thing.
At 3:20, you say some viewers had some idea. Well, I think my playing Pokemon strategically helped me out. On Pokemon, you don't always look at how much damage you deal, but how many hits you need to kill your opponent. In your example (0:58), We could see these stats: your units: 21, with 100 HP / 11 Atk and 6 Def his units: 20 with 80HP / 11 Atk and 4 Def This means with micro, you deal (11-4)*21 damage, which is 147, while he deals (11-6)*20, which is 100. Of course, this would change as soon as one unit is killed, but still, you could argue you deal 1.5 the damage, however both of you OHKO one unit at a time (this gets to the overkill you spoke about), and this is why you don't win by a large amount of units. In Pokemon, it usually doesn't matter whether you deal 60% or 80% damage. In both cases, you 2HKO. On a completely different matter, thanks for your vids, man. This is entertaining, and you got me to get AoE on steam (well, you also got me to get a steam account to do so) so I could play this game I used to play when I was 10. And that is so much fun ^^ Keep it up
Well that(3:44) is called overkilling I guess.The micro is good if you re not overkilling it s wasting ammo. Overkill=www.thefreedictionary.com/overkill Edit:Nvm it says up in the title "Overkill" so...yeah.If you could set like 4 archers on 1 one not the whole army then is perfect microing but in game is nearly impossible
haha love the last comment of not using things against you! off topic tho in terms of melee, i wonder at what point you're better off letting them scatter into someone's base so they have to hunt you down as opposed to microing on units or buildings, i think the walk time into position would probably be most important
Nice video! This might be a bit late(like 5 years) but I think there is another possibility apart from more micro and no micro choices we should consider. And that is microing part of our army. For the Turks vs Huns cavalry archer situation if we just grab approximately 2/3 of our army ( which is 14 or 15 cavalry archers) we would deal around 100 damage to one of their units + another 40 damage to all of their army. In this scenario our army waste about 20 damage to overkill instead of 60 and we will reduce their total damage over time without quickly losing our critical mass(20 lost damage creates some sort of buffer for our critical mass which also reduces micro). So with that we manage to reduce enemies damage output and total unit number without a dramatic effect to our micro and damage output( we can just grab 2/3 of our army without much trouble and if we lose our critical mass we can just select all of our army and overall per volley we just lose 15-30 damage). And also we can think of microing as a process. Maybe we should start with selecting part of our troops as I mentioned, and then transition to all of our army and then finally(after we lose our critical mass) we should abandon micro completely. With that said I didn't test this little idea of mine and if you ever consider returning to this topic I think this deserves a thought. edit: pharagraphs.
What i most hate in AOE is the amount of micro. There is nothing wrong with extremely detailed stuff, but micro i hate. For example why do i need to always place new farms to mill? Just make new farms as long as i have food you stupid villagers. Why can`t i have every production cap be set on infinite repeat? And why do i need to micro my invidual soldiers so they can dodge shots... Ugh, no thanks. Game should be about large scale *Empires* , not about invidual soldiers being micro managed. i hate games like Starcraft where one who is fastest wins. Age of Empires IV should avoid that as much as possible.
I guess what one could do is to take a sub-group (as many as needed to one-shot an enemy unit, not more) and use those to focus-fire the enemy units in the back line (i.e. the ones not targeted by "nearest enemy"), and let the other units do their "pick nearest enemy unit" thing. This way you reduce the enemy's fire power fast, while also not having overkill (wasting damage). Or for micro-gods (or people programming an AI): have several groups which each can one-shot enemy units, use them separately to focus-fire enemy units. Re-group when your groups become too small to one-shot enemy units.
Well isn't that a thing nearly every commentator says when these smaller galley fights turn into these mass galleon fights with 30-40 units on each side? But you explained it quit well, this wasted damage output n stuff ;) nice video. Btw, are you planning on doing an in depth look at the monk and maybe the different civ bonuses? I know, much randomness going in there, but that's a mathematic topic too right? :D
Dear Spirit of the law, can i suggest this; - Let all archers find their own targets first (patrol/attack command) that way all archers will start to fire atdifferent times -After that select all your archers and SHIFT+RIGHT CLICK on 3-5 enemies fast. -After doing that shift-right click on the rest, that way what happens is; *Your micro is easier to manager since you just do it once and you can go check your eco at the back whilst your units are fighting exceptionally well firing at what you wanted all along *Since each archer is firing at different intervals, when one target dies, and the attack command switches to the other, there will be achers reloading, idle ,min animation and already firing as well as some ready to fire. This way, when archers ready to fire kill your target, the rest which couldnt fire (achers reloading, idle ,min animation and already firing previously) will be the ones that are ready to fire this time. You are the expert of these videos and i would definately want you to give a fair time on the subject as i feel as it is groundbreaking.
Hopefully, Computer micro is as bad as human's. In the example where he micro two groups at a time, SoL waste about just as much arrows as each half group need two volleys of arrows to take one unit down. But a computer with perfect micro could theoretically avoid any overkill by having the exact amount of archer to finish a target (micro managing each unit individually and between each arrow, with full awareness of the rest of the group).
Damn this vid is old.. So I am way late to the party.. what I noticed in your 20v20 match up between cav archers, is simple maths. So let's say each cav Archer had about 100 hp make it simple, 2000 for 20 on each side. Factor damage in, attacking one at a time guarantees you would have to fire 20 times, wasting over all damage itself. While the other side has an over all attack yes it might look like it should take more than 20 times for each archer on the enemy to fire, bu that simply wouldn't be the case. So the answer to why this match up doesn't work is mathematics. Again I know this is old and you probably moved past this a long time a ago, you are my go to source of information on this game, I also think you should rehash your unusual strategies video. you know the one you made for your first sub.
Some other things not accounted for: - When focus firing a unit that is not in range of all of your units, you'll end up with lost attack time while your units get in range (you can see this happen at the end of your cav archer vs cav archer tests) - Attack animation resets. This is a big thing in sc2 (I think you can end up with thors that never shoot by clicking between two different enemy units rapidly). Don't know if/how this happens in AOE2, but it would be worth investigating. There are times where it looks like you are interrupting your units' attacks by right clicking on a target they are already attacking.
Basically, if your targets are dying with one volley, you're wasting a bunch of shots. You've eliminated a single attack at the expense of several of yours.
The AI of your units isn't a slouch, you are right in thinking the problem lies with trash damage. By allowing large groups of your own units to pick their targets you allow the computer to do what it does best, simulate a bunch of complex tasks at once. Meaning it knows exactly how many horse archers it needs to kill a unit, what units need killing (if any are damaged). This means where you might focus all of or half your archers on a half health unit, the unit AI will use exactly how many it needs. So in a lot of cases leaving "Micro" to the computer that is your units can be better, due to how fast computers can micro. Of course a computer isn't a micro genius, it just does math. As a result it wont do everything for you and is likely to know less about the intricacies of focus that you. Which is why humans can beat AI
have you done a video about the american civilizations? I'm enjoying a lot playing with astecs, mayans and incas, all of them have eco bonuses and are pretty stronger. (discovering civs that not japanese, my fav civ too, dunno if they'll be my fav civ if i keep playing this american civs for too long)
So, you have 20 units, and need 12 to kill 1 enemy, i would suggest, that you patrol/attack move a group of 8 units, and micro focus attack with the other 12. Of course this is easier to say than to do.
I know this video is 5 years old, nobody cares and nobody is going to read this, but archers actually dont optimally pick enemy units either. Since they all focus on the closest unit, that means that the AI also loses some efficiency to that. Not a big deal, but i thought i'd mention it since you always counted the maximum potential damage output for the AI firing. Also even 1 arrow can overkill an enemy target, so that also comes into play.
Micro has two components- movement and focus fire. we are mainly talking about focus fire here. You can dodge the mangonel shots with movement, and press stop rather than click to fire. This might give better results as they would fire instantly rather than perhaps move to position into fire at a target currently not in range You can try making a test with using a big group, but only controlling a group which the estimated volley would barely kill one enemy unit. Any stragglers which may not be killed by each focus volley can be picked off by the non-focusing units. This is why you would focus the front ones first and move on to the next after one volley,
Hey...realistically you are discussing the difference between small unit leadership and strategical (or organizational) leadership. Again real world, the larger the forces used, the less specific the generals get so that lower commanders can adjust to the changing environment.
I'd love it if you were to do a Turks overview. I have been playing a few games with Turks using basically only jannisaries and some bombard cannons and winning quite a lot :). Gotta admit im a noob playing against noobs, but still ^^
+Clemens Fakkeldij yeah, Turks are the next civ overview. It's a few days away, but in playing and testing them lately I've been feeling like they're a pretty underrated civ
+Spirit Of The Law Steps on how to play as turks: -Build as many castles and bombard towers as possible -Shift+A on every castle -Chuck in a few bombard canons while you're at it You're set to play turks (I wish I was joking but there isn't a counter to janissaries and bombards)
It is basically like this; wasted arrows. When the enemy dies from the first 8-10 arrows from focus firing, the rest are wasted on pretty much a corpse, while the enemy is doing a constant streamline of damage buy letting the units fire automatically.
What about letting your large army engage without micro, but using maybe 8 archers (or whatever seems sufficently deadly) to take down one guy at the time (chosing among the full health)?
Seems like the best combo would be to select only the number of your units that it takes to one-shot one enemy unit, focus-fire with those (probably on enemies at the back who aren't being auto-targeted, or on those with highest health) and let the rest of your units autofire? That way you're reducing their strength with every shot without wasting any shots. Similar to the multiple-groups strategy but with less micromanagement, basically.
But with scorpion it's different. Against a large army of infantry and scorpion it's much better to focus fire. Because they harm all of them in a straight line. Just spread them in a long row and focus fire in the middle column you will be damaging multiple rows
And this is why I prefer micro managing Elite Mangudai, because there the trick is to keep moving. The fact that they shoot instantly means that they spend very little time stopped to shoot, and they can effectively dodge most return fire.
what about letting them be but taking a small group (preferably not in the front line) for microing the back ones in the enemy line? That's what i like to do, so my units in the front soak up dmg and distribute the damage on the enemy front line while my back line focuses down the enemy's hiding behind Don't know if it works very well but that was my tactic until now.
The only thing he didn't mention is that if you KILL a unit, it is gone. If they had both not micro'ed and let the auto attack go on, it is possible that the winning side might have taken more damage... but it would be on several units. So one 100g monk and it is rendered moot.
This is why when I group number even portions of a group of archers. Sure it is more work but if you can do it correctly you can focus fire on multiple targets provided you know how many you need to still kill said unit with one volley.
Good old overkill effect. Overkill might sound awesome but it wasting your resources. Interesting how we see this go against general concept of Force concentration. We can see real world examples of this to where to much focus on one area leads to loss of effectiveness.
It adds to the micro again, but why not send nearly lethal volleys at the full health units until you run out, then let your archers proceed to auto select (or if your forces start dwindling go back to focusing as needed)?
sorry if it was suggested before, i dont read comments, but i think a combination of the two tactics would work best. i mean that you micro manage a small group that deals damage just to weaken the enemy unit and bring it to low health without killing it, then you target another unit and your other units can then target the damaged enemy unit by themselves - in a sense they micromanage themselves.
You didnt mention distance. Force firing on a unit farther away means decreased accuracy, when auto selection of closest targete means maximum accuracy
It'd be interesting to see how this can transfer between games. I tend to focus fire in SCII and I lose a lot, I wonder if I'm just wasting my time doing that
just an idea what about letting all fire at will except maybe 3 or4 -something that will take it to about one hit so the ones firing at will ...would have already hit it
if u need 10 shots for one hit kills, take 14 (in case some of them get taken out) of your ranged units in a control group and the rest in another. Micro the 14 to shoot at full health units past enemy frontline and let the rest go on a rampage, preferably in front of the ones being told what to shoot at.
Ive always del chat focus fire os more effective when using rapid fire units like te Mangudai or the Kipchak because you can do hit and run tactics and so as you retreat or move and fire they dont waste too much time reloading and so your enemy looses a lot of units chasing after you
you seem to imply micro is selecting all units to attack one, what if you select half or a third to attack one, and then another half or third, etc., to go for the single kill + damage by the others?
I saw this video on your channel and thought it was something new. So I started watching it and I eventually worked out that you had just re-titled an existing video. I is disappointed. :(
you should select a group to focus fire and let the rest of the army shoot where they want to. (the selected group that u will use to focus fire needs to be in the back so it have all the units that u need to kill another unit of the enemy army without wasting arrows and without loosing your controlled group troops, so your math keep the same.
![Are Sicilian Cavaliers better than Paladins? [AoE2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4-FJvBUltEs/mqdefault.jpg)
Well I don't have to worry because my micro is so bad it's not even effective.
+DrearyPlane8 My micro is probably better because I use the pause key everytime :3
DrearyPlane8 can't pause in multiplayer
@@raptorhacker599 not with that attitude
Some commenters have pointed out the technical name of one of the phenomena described in the video is "overkill". I also don't want to confuse "focus firing" with other aspects of micro like hit/run and patrol, which isn't being looked at in this video.
I've changed the title from "When NOT to Micro" to "Overkill and Focus Firing" so it won't be confused with any future videos I might make on other aspects of micro.
Thanks for the comments, feedback, and support. You all make me a better man...er..UA-camr.
Hey spirit good video but from my point of view... In those kind of situations with archers the most appropiate thing to do is patrol and put the archers on mantener terreno(don't know english term) and the archers will attack mich more effectively
+Cesar Avila could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure patrol just does what they were automatically doing in every test without focus firing, which is to automatically find the closest target to start shooting at right away. We could say patrol is a technique to efficiently start the non-focus firing option, but not a 3rd alternative.
That's a good change, thanks for keeping it tidy as well as being honest about the content :)
+Spirit Of The Law Great presentation on an aspect people fail to consider too often; overkill. How many times do we watch someone direct 8 siege onagers to fire on a single group. The only thing worse than improper micro is streaming in troops and not managing the fight at all.
+Spirit Of The Law
regarding this clip with the crossbowmen vs onangers: why do the
onangers never back away - i tried improving my micro creating a custom
map with a similar scenario and found it impossible to kill 3 mange the
way you did, in fact if i dont chase them so they can not fire at their
targets i hardly get any damage in. So: have you some kind of range
upgrade going here (so the crossbow matches the range of the onangers)
or is it because the onangers are controlled by a human and setting a
manual attack cancels out this annoying backing away of the onangers.
>'Hello, Spirit of the *Log* here'
For some reason I keep hearing that
Spirit confirmed for being a piece of lumber
+Martin Marzano who wood have thought
+Spirit Of The Law I (chain)saw what you did there.
+Spirit Of The Law the tree of us.
You mean spirit of the logarithm?
+Martin Marzano dang it now i hear it too
he didn't mention the Japanese did he
*ILLUMINATY CONFIIIRMED*
+Lyriel Luna Who is this impostor, and what has he done with the REAL SotL?!?
luigi54321
I don't know, love...MAYBE BETHESDA HAS CONSUMED HIM COMPLETELY
+Lyriel Luna replaced by a Synth?
+Spirit Of The Law I see what you did there ;P
+Spirit Of The Law how do you play this game I have it but I can't play anymore it says you need the administrators privileges to play but I'm already I'm one please help I love this game but haven't been able to play for a month
This guy's voice really relax me, i use it to fall asleep. Amazing videos btw really good channel subscrited and liked
The depth of a game that originally came out in 1999, no wonder aoe 2 can still compete with modern RTS games.
Dominic Rose Maybe Blizzard people are nerds and they only do bullshit to their most popular RTS game. I am not even going to rant their recent balance patches here.
so cav archers actually nock and then draw and then fire
mangudai basically hurl their arrows and then the uselessly fiddle around with their bows until they hurl the next arrow
at least that is what their animation is showing
"Never use anything you learn in these videos against me." Lol
Hey Spirit, now that's a nice topic.
Could you do one about how to obtain the best results when two big melee forces engage?
Also, Happy Holidays dude!
+KomradeCPU its esentially the same thing. Only the units travel time is also a factor. So it depends on units.. Tanky units like War elephants are defo worth focusing down, but f.e. champions not so much. It all comes down to Overkill. Use just the right amount of effort to take the enemy unit down but not any more than that. So in many cases Not micro-ing your melees will be probably better.
Mikee CZ
I don't agree all that much with your points; if you ever played cba before, there are a lot of people that patrol their units in fronts of your before engaging, just so they "envelop" your formation, having more units contributing to the damage dealt and received while some of the opposition is stuck in the middle of their own formation or pathfinding to melee range, all the way thorough the back.
I just wanted Spirit to put that into numbers, so we have a clearer picture of that.
+KomradeCPU Be the AI. No, seriously, the AI has very good melee micro, because it can flawlessly select and path a lot of units simultaneously, even in a blob.
Maneuvering so that their units are in a choke point or the low ground is better than micro in a big fight.
Research Druzhina
Interesting video. I haven't played Age of Empires 2 in a long time, but watching these videos bring me back.
+Jersher Lee Me too, every once in a while I take a break for a few months, but these videos make me always come back.
Start playing again, they have a HD version now and loads of people play!
This videos are extremely good even if you have never played aoe. Top quality channel
Hello.
I've come to be that one guy who leaves the first dislike.
Just kidding lol.
I always split fire in this situation so I have ~30-50% of my squad selected to micro and the rest free fire
so you can punch out counter units and other important people
Man, this happened to me many times on naval battles. I was like "I can't be THIS bad at microing ships, they're not so different". Maybe I'm still bad but thanks to you, I got science backing me up.
Spirit please make a video on cav archers, the heavy cav archer upgrade seems pretty expensive to me, so I would like to know when is it wort it
I'm wondering what are the mechanics behind using multiple monks to make a conversion? is there a point where extra monks make no difference? and when units are being converted the seem to move slower, wondering if they attack slower too
It would be interesting to see stats on who watches your AOE videos: age, gender and region
No
Yes
Business related information for free? Nah
33 - Male - WOLOLO
i know its an old video but in starcraft when you micro you dont just focus fire, you pull back damaged units and after they dont have aggro anymore you issue an attack command so they avoid beign killed and you keep fire power
4:33 One idea I had recently, is that you have one big group, then just a few ranged snipers on a separate focused firing group. Try to scale the size of this group to the target you're trying to focus down and make sure to choose a new target before you overkill, but get them close enough for the scattered shots to actually finish the job. Alternatively, maybe shift-rmb queues could be a feasible way to have like 3 separate groups all focusing specific targets, but one issue is those numbers change thx to the enemy's dmg, maybe over-shoot the size a bit and be ready to sometimes reassign groups to scale efficiently again.
I think I'll try the sniper technique first, seems easiest to wrap my head around and adapt to a dynamic situation. I think in some cases I will just spread my attacks as normal, then just drag a small section of that army to focus without even using a control group, a benefit being that you can rescale it to the target you're focusing each time, but I like the idea of a separate group when I want to make basically constant use of it.
Nice video man. Must have finally beat Fallout 4? haha
how do you do the "split" command, in order to avoid projectiles?
It's a formation ingame.
I'd love love with you post some 1v1 games of your own!
It seems like the best solution in a large archer duel would be to micro a small number of them in the back rows where they won't get quickly auto-targeted and use them to focus fire while everyone else auto-targets. Best of both worlds, at least in situations where it really, really counts.
I was thinking the same thing! In the heavy cav example the best manageable thing would be controlling 12 cav archers cause that is the minimum amount necessary to take down the opposing full health heavy cav archer in a single volley.
I think you wanna micro so that each shot deals exactly enough damage to kill the unit. So in this case with 20 cav archers, why no let 8 fire at will, and micro the 12 remaining cav archers.
Once one of the 12 cav archers die, you are back to the original problem though.
You'll want to to target the back with the 12 you are micro-ing so that way they won't target the same units the ones auto targeting will target.
@Puppet you can take the 12 from the back or add one on the selection if one die, not rly an issue.
Is it really worth it to spend ur time on this kind of micro, that's an other question though...
Holly crap i love that music 😀😁
Hey Spirit, don't know if you want to mention this in one of your videos while we're on the topic, but I discovered a while back that pikemen benefit *immensely* from micro. It's often hard to pull off with lag, but you can greatly improve pike survival against elite war elephants by ordering to stab once, and then run while their cooldown recovers.
Remember that they attack about half as fast as other units, so if you micro them to bring the exchange to 1:1 instead of 1:2, you can get a lot more use out of them. Also, they have a very short 'windup' so they can first-hit weakened units, killing them while remaining untouched if you do it right. I killed 20 swordsmen with one pike using that effect.
Try pitting several pikemen against a mob of elite war elephants, with and without micro, the results are pretty substantial and worth mentioning imo.
Dont even play AOE but still cant resist watching you're videos. Keep upp the good work and have a good holiday :D
SOTL: One thing I noticed in this video is that both in the testing & your gameplay, the enemy archers were the only enemies within firing range. The main downside to letting the AI take control is that if you were in his position (Raiding an enemy base) the each individual archer would go after the nearest enemy, unless they were getting fired on. So 25% of his army would attack that mil,l farms, or any nearby villagers, until the rest was shot down.
This is three years later, but you actually see some of that in pro-level play. During naval battles along a shoreline, sometimes players will run a couple trash units along the shore, and they distract enough of the opponent's ship fire to win them the battle.
Have you ever done a micro tutorial video? ,If not, would you do it please?
+Carrion any part in particular? Hit and run is pretty self explanatory, and I did show all the different formations in a video about avoiding town center fire
i had missed that, sorry :)
Micro are for Strong units vs many weak units,and many units vs many units
let's be right
you will micro 2 vs 2 champion battle
you will "NOT" Micro 100 vs 100 Champion Battle
+Karina Katsuyaga Actually you should micro large battles if you can. Try and surround the other team such that most of their champions are stuck in the middle, and all of yours are attacking inward. This ensures you have more champions doing work, and they have more standing around useless.
@@weylin6 Also, you have fewer champs standing in the back waiting for the guy in front of them to die.
The technical (gaming) term for this effect is called "overkill damage", and you're correct in trying to minimize it whilst reducing the unit count of your opponent's army asap.
You should work out how many units it takes to one-shot focus fire an enemy unit, micro with that many and let the rest of your army auto-fire. That way you get the advantage of reducing your opponent's damage output as fast as possible, but you aren't wasting your own damage output by firing too many projectiles at a single unit.
Saying that, my micro is terrible.
Thats why I click the closest one when out of range WHEN moving in, so any ranged unit will shoot when in range meanwhile the rest is still not in range, I wait until the unit is dead then I click another target, by that time the reloads are intercalled
The rule of thumb is you dont "micro" your groups of units in imp when you are fighting another similar group, and neither in castle once you have ballistics. Besides the regular micro, with big groups it is still possible to micro in castle or feudal if you split them in 2 and micro kill 2 units at a time (even with ballistics), but leave that to the pros.
tldr micro only if its early game and all your units can't kill an enemy unit in one shot
I'd say is correct to assume:
1. Focus fire when you cannot beat an enemy with one single hit (Xbows vs mangonels, Xbows vs knights...) to concentrate the damage effectively.
2. Overkill when you have a large army that can kill one enemy with a single hit (equal numbers fight, archers vs pikes, skirms vs archers, etc...) to spread the damage effectively.
But do micro at all times. Issue your orders, watch closely and adapt to the situation.
Wait but you could have said more. So you had 21 archers to start and needed 12 to oneshot each of his full hp units. Ideally shouldn't you have let your front 9 cav archers autoattack while you focus fired with 12 in the back?
Or something like that. Actually since your autoattackers would be weakening his archers, you should probably be focus firing with less than 12. Maybe you should have quickly box selected the back half (or slightly less than half) of your archers, focus fired his injured ones first, and then focus fired the ones injured by your autoattackers. Isn't that the correct answer here?
This is exactly like the how much villagers you should send to build houses the more shots spread the more effective but in smaller battles that might change it also depends on if its archers vs archers or archers vs melee
I think there's something to be said about focus firing with units that have multiple arrow shots and the potential for spread damage, e.g. the Chu Ko Nu still hitting multiple targets even when "over killing" due to the number of arrows and not having 100% accuracy. I think you could cleverly micro a greater path of destruction than allowing auto attacks, but that's very situational.
about the first situation
i think it was kind of a coincidence that you started winning when you stopped microing because your archers would be at an advantage as soon as the enemy ones lack the numbers to kill an archer with less volleys
and the main disadvantage with focusing is the huge number of misses as you explaned
+HECKproductions I agree. Kind of funny looking back that the observation which triggered the video was probably just a misperception. I still managed to learn something and dispell a misconception about micro I think some people probably had, though, so it all worked out haha.
Spirit Of The Law
true that and i for one are gonna make good use of it just like with basically any other video of yours
keep the great work up
Okay, so without really watching past the Anecdote, I'm gonna guess the result is someithng along the lines of 'when you have far more units than you need to one volley a thing, you shouldn't micro all your doods, but maybe a size of about that volley.'
Mind my micro is absolute GARBAGE so there's that.
+zswords You're probably getting into pro-level (2k+ rating) if you're capable of micromanaging multiple groups in a single blob.
I wouldn't necessarily say multiple groups, you just have your horde, you select about as many as you need for a one volley kill, and have them as your micro group as the rest of the pile does their thing.
At 3:20, you say some viewers had some idea. Well, I think my playing Pokemon strategically helped me out. On Pokemon, you don't always look at how much damage you deal, but how many hits you need to kill your opponent.
In your example (0:58), We could see these stats:
your units: 21, with 100 HP / 11 Atk and 6 Def
his units: 20 with 80HP / 11 Atk and 4 Def
This means with micro, you deal (11-4)*21 damage, which is 147, while he deals (11-6)*20, which is 100. Of course, this would change as soon as one unit is killed, but still, you could argue you deal 1.5 the damage, however both of you OHKO one unit at a time (this gets to the overkill you spoke about), and this is why you don't win by a large amount of units.
In Pokemon, it usually doesn't matter whether you deal 60% or 80% damage. In both cases, you 2HKO.
On a completely different matter, thanks for your vids, man. This is entertaining, and you got me to get AoE on steam (well, you also got me to get a steam account to do so) so I could play this game I used to play when I was 10. And that is so much fun ^^
Keep it up
you divide your army into smaller groups and micro those instead. that way there's less stupid bumping, less overkill and its better
Very good information. Never underestimate the value of the work you do for us Spirit.
Well that(3:44) is called overkilling I guess.The micro is good if you re not overkilling it s wasting ammo.
Overkill=www.thefreedictionary.com/overkill
Edit:Nvm it says up in the title "Overkill" so...yeah.If you could set like 4 archers on 1 one not the whole army then is perfect microing but in game is nearly impossible
Isn't this all about the overkill factor? You're shooting way too many arrows at a single unit for all those arrows to be doing something.
haha love the last comment of not using things against you! off topic tho in terms of melee, i wonder at what point you're better off letting them scatter into someone's base so they have to hunt you down as opposed to microing on units or buildings, i think the walk time into position would probably be most important
Nice video! This might be a bit late(like 5 years) but I think there is another possibility apart from more micro and no micro choices we should consider. And that is microing part of our army. For the Turks vs Huns cavalry archer situation if we just grab approximately 2/3 of our army ( which is 14 or 15 cavalry archers) we would deal around 100 damage to one of their units + another 40 damage to all of their army. In this scenario our army waste about 20 damage to overkill instead of 60 and we will reduce their total damage over time without quickly losing our critical mass(20 lost damage creates some sort of buffer for our critical mass which also reduces micro).
So with that we manage to reduce enemies damage output and total unit number without a dramatic effect to our micro and damage output( we can just grab 2/3 of our army without much trouble and if we lose our critical mass we can just select all of our army and overall per volley we just lose 15-30 damage).
And also we can think of microing as a process. Maybe we should start with selecting part of our troops as I mentioned, and then transition to all of our army and then finally(after we lose our critical mass) we should abandon micro completely.
With that said I didn't test this little idea of mine and if you ever consider returning to this topic I think this deserves a thought.
edit: pharagraphs.
What i most hate in AOE is the amount of micro. There is nothing wrong with extremely detailed stuff, but micro i hate. For example why do i need to always place new farms to mill? Just make new farms as long as i have food you stupid villagers. Why can`t i have every production cap be set on infinite repeat? And why do i need to micro my invidual soldiers so they can dodge shots... Ugh, no thanks. Game should be about large scale *Empires* , not about invidual soldiers being micro managed.
i hate games like Starcraft where one who is fastest wins. Age of Empires IV should avoid that as much as possible.
I guess what one could do is to take a sub-group (as many as needed to one-shot an enemy unit, not more) and use those to focus-fire the enemy units in the back line (i.e. the ones not targeted by "nearest enemy"), and let the other units do their "pick nearest enemy unit" thing. This way you reduce the enemy's fire power fast, while also not having overkill (wasting damage).
Or for micro-gods (or people programming an AI): have several groups which each can one-shot enemy units, use them separately to focus-fire enemy units. Re-group when your groups become too small to one-shot enemy units.
Well isn't that a thing nearly every commentator says when these smaller galley fights turn into these mass galleon fights with 30-40 units on each side? But you explained it quit well, this wasted damage output n stuff ;) nice video.
Btw, are you planning on doing an in depth look at the monk and maybe the different civ bonuses? I know, much randomness going in there, but that's a mathematic topic too right? :D
Dear Spirit of the law, can i suggest this;
- Let all archers find their own targets first (patrol/attack command)
that way all archers will start to fire atdifferent times
-After that select all your archers and SHIFT+RIGHT CLICK on 3-5 enemies fast.
-After doing that shift-right click on the rest, that way what happens is;
*Your micro is easier to manager since you just do it once and you can go check your eco at the back whilst your units are fighting exceptionally well firing at what you wanted all along
*Since each archer is firing at different intervals, when one target dies, and the attack command switches to the other, there will be achers reloading, idle ,min animation and already firing as well as some ready to fire. This way, when archers ready to fire kill your target, the rest which couldnt fire (achers reloading, idle ,min animation and already firing previously) will be the ones that are ready to fire this time.
You are the expert of these videos and i would definately want you to give a fair time on the subject as i feel as it is groundbreaking.
Hopefully, Computer micro is as bad as human's. In the example where he micro two groups at a time, SoL waste about just as much arrows as each half group need two volleys of arrows to take one unit down. But a computer with perfect micro could theoretically avoid any overkill by having the exact amount of archer to finish a target (micro managing each unit individually and between each arrow, with full awareness of the rest of the group).
Damn this vid is old.. So I am way late to the party.. what I noticed in your 20v20 match up between cav archers, is simple maths. So let's say each cav Archer had about 100 hp make it simple, 2000 for 20 on each side. Factor damage in, attacking one at a time guarantees you would have to fire 20 times, wasting over all damage itself. While the other side has an over all attack yes it might look like it should take more than 20 times for each archer on the enemy to fire, bu that simply wouldn't be the case. So the answer to why this match up doesn't work is mathematics.
Again I know this is old and you probably moved past this a long time a ago, you are my go to source of information on this game, I also think you should rehash your unusual strategies video. you know the one you made for your first sub.
Some other things not accounted for:
- When focus firing a unit that is not in range of all of your units, you'll end up with lost attack time while your units get in range (you can see this happen at the end of your cav archer vs cav archer tests)
- Attack animation resets. This is a big thing in sc2 (I think you can end up with thors that never shoot by clicking between two different enemy units rapidly). Don't know if/how this happens in AOE2, but it would be worth investigating. There are times where it looks like you are interrupting your units' attacks by right clicking on a target they are already attacking.
Basically, if your targets are dying with one volley, you're wasting a bunch of shots. You've eliminated a single attack at the expense of several of yours.
I've always gruped my ranged units into smaller numbers of 10 -10 or so, it's funny how 10 years later or so you just confirmed it is the best move.
I believe once you and your enemy have ballistics, you pull back the damaged CA's and try to snipe some of the enemy's damaged CA's.
I love you, man. I fuckin love your videos. MATH THE SHIT OUT OF THIS GAME
The AI of your units isn't a slouch, you are right in thinking the problem lies with trash damage. By allowing large groups of your own units to pick their targets you allow the computer to do what it does best, simulate a bunch of complex tasks at once. Meaning it knows exactly how many horse archers it needs to kill a unit, what units need killing (if any are damaged). This means where you might focus all of or half your archers on a half health unit, the unit AI will use exactly how many it needs. So in a lot of cases leaving "Micro" to the computer that is your units can be better, due to how fast computers can micro. Of course a computer isn't a micro genius, it just does math. As a result it wont do everything for you and is likely to know less about the intricacies of focus that you. Which is why humans can beat AI
have you done a video about the american civilizations? I'm enjoying a lot playing with astecs, mayans and incas, all of them have eco bonuses and are pretty stronger. (discovering civs that not japanese, my fav civ too, dunno if they'll be my fav civ if i keep playing this american civs for too long)
So, you have 20 units, and need 12 to kill 1 enemy, i would suggest, that you patrol/attack move a group of 8 units, and micro focus attack with the other 12. Of course this is easier to say than to do.
I know this video is 5 years old, nobody cares and nobody is going to read this, but archers actually dont optimally pick enemy units either. Since they all focus on the closest unit, that means that the AI also loses some efficiency to that. Not a big deal, but i thought i'd mention it since you always counted the maximum potential damage output for the AI firing. Also even 1 arrow can overkill an enemy target, so that also comes into play.
I large groups of ranged units, I just select a group that takes exactly 3 volleys to kill and focus fire while having the rest just pick their own.
Micro has two components- movement and focus fire. we are mainly talking about focus fire here. You can dodge the mangonel shots with movement, and press stop rather than click to fire. This might give better results as they would fire instantly rather than perhaps move to position into fire at a target currently not in range
You can try making a test with using a big group, but only controlling a group which the estimated volley would barely kill one enemy unit.
Any stragglers which may not be killed by each focus volley can be picked off by the non-focusing units. This is why you would focus the front ones first and move on to the next after one volley,
Hey...realistically you are discussing the difference between small unit leadership and strategical (or organizational) leadership. Again real world, the larger the forces used, the less specific the generals get so that lower commanders can adjust to the changing environment.
I'd love it if you were to do a Turks overview. I have been playing a few games with Turks using basically only jannisaries and some bombard cannons and winning quite a lot :). Gotta admit im a noob playing against noobs, but still ^^
+Clemens Fakkeldij yeah, Turks are the next civ overview. It's a few days away, but in playing and testing them lately I've been feeling like they're a pretty underrated civ
+Spirit Of The Law Steps on how to play as turks:
-Build as many castles and bombard towers as possible
-Shift+A on every castle
-Chuck in a few bombard canons while you're at it
You're set to play turks
(I wish I was joking but there isn't a counter to janissaries and bombards)
+Attilas Spyfrags Skirmishers are cost efficient against this.
+Attilas Spyfrags Longbows combined with onagers had me sweating a few times though...
+Clemens Fakkeldij
Jans are still anti-archer units, and if micro'd can properly deal with onagers too (jan damage does full damage to siege)
It is basically like this; wasted arrows. When the enemy dies from the first 8-10 arrows from focus firing, the rest are wasted on pretty much a corpse, while the enemy is doing a constant streamline of damage buy letting the units fire automatically.
You should see if defensive micro will have an advantage when you outnumber. By pulling weakened units into the back line against AI.
What about letting your large army engage without micro, but using maybe 8 archers (or whatever seems sufficently deadly) to take down one guy at the time (chosing among the full health)?
Can't you just take a group of 15 of them and shift command kill through them and have the other 5 shift command kill through the opposite way
Seems like the best combo would be to select only the number of your units that it takes to one-shot one enemy unit, focus-fire with those (probably on enemies at the back who aren't being auto-targeted, or on those with highest health) and let the rest of your units autofire? That way you're reducing their strength with every shot without wasting any shots.
Similar to the multiple-groups strategy but with less micromanagement, basically.
For large battles, couldn't you manually select the appropriate amount of units that would minimize the amount of overkill?
But with scorpion it's different. Against a large army of infantry and scorpion it's much better to focus fire. Because they harm all of them in a straight line. Just spread them in a long row and focus fire in the middle column you will be damaging multiple rows
big groups fighting against big groups is all about patrolling
And this is why I prefer micro managing Elite Mangudai, because there the trick is to keep moving. The fact that they shoot instantly means that they spend very little time stopped to shoot, and they can effectively dodge most return fire.
what about letting them be but taking a small group (preferably not in the front line) for microing the back ones in the enemy line?
That's what i like to do, so my units in the front soak up dmg and distribute the damage on the enemy front line while my back line focuses down the enemy's hiding behind
Don't know if it works very well but that was my tactic until now.
The only thing he didn't mention is that if you KILL a unit, it is gone. If they had both not micro'ed and let the auto attack go on, it is possible that the winning side might have taken more damage... but it would be on several units. So one 100g monk and it is rendered moot.
What civ would you want to do next?Also, when is it the right time to use druzhina? Like the ideal troop output. Becuse i am mostly a slav player
This is why when I group number even portions of a group of archers. Sure it is more work but if you can do it correctly you can focus fire on multiple targets provided you know how many you need to still kill said unit with one volley.
That's why I always micro 10 units at most when picking targets with ranged units vs large armies
Good old overkill effect. Overkill might sound awesome but it wasting your resources. Interesting how we see this go against general concept of Force concentration. We can see real world examples of this to where to much focus on one area leads to loss of effectiveness.
There is not a mod with heroes and experience like on Warcraft 3? Would be awesome. Or xp for all units like in tzar
SAVED UP FARMS LOVE YOU AND JUST WANT YOU TO HAVE MORE FOOD.
basically, what you're saying is, flanking works.
It adds to the micro again, but why not send nearly lethal volleys at the full health units until you run out, then let your archers proceed to auto select (or if your forces start dwindling go back to focusing as needed)?
sorry if it was suggested before, i dont read comments, but i think a combination of the two tactics would work best. i mean that you micro manage a small group that deals damage just to weaken the enemy unit and bring it to low health without killing it, then you target another unit and your other units can then target the damaged enemy unit by themselves - in a sense they micromanage themselves.
You didnt mention distance. Force firing on a unit farther away means decreased accuracy, when auto selection of closest targete means maximum accuracy
It'd be interesting to see how this can transfer between games. I tend to focus fire in SCII and I lose a lot, I wonder if I'm just wasting my time doing that
just an idea what about letting all fire at will except maybe 3 or4 -something that will take it to about one hit so the ones firing at will ...would have already hit it
if u need 10 shots for one hit kills, take 14 (in case some of them get taken out) of your ranged units in a control group and the rest in another. Micro the 14 to shoot at full health units past enemy frontline and let the rest go on a rampage, preferably in front of the ones being told what to shoot at.
Ive always del chat focus fire os more effective when using rapid fire units like te Mangudai or the Kipchak because you can do hit and run tactics and so as you retreat or move and fire they dont waste too much time reloading and so your enemy looses a lot of units chasing after you
In age of empires III is quite common the overkill even if the target is taken automatically
you seem to imply micro is selecting all units to attack one, what if you select half or a third to attack one, and then another half or third, etc., to go for the single kill + damage by the others?
I saw this video on your channel and thought it was something new.
So I started watching it and I eventually worked out that you had just re-titled an existing video.
I is disappointed. :(
+YodatheJedi12 sorry bud
you should select a group to focus fire and let the rest of the army shoot where they want to. (the selected group that u will use to focus fire needs to be in the back so it have all the units that u need to kill another unit of the enemy army without wasting arrows and without loosing your controlled group troops, so your math keep the same.
hey spirit, can u make a video about the hotkeys you use in the game? would apreciate that a lot, thanks mate very nice videos
If you want to micro all the time with a big army against a lot of non-tanks, maybe micro half and let the other half auto-target?
I do the focus firing all the time against cannon galleons because their fire rate and projectile speed are soooooo slooooowwwwww
I just put my mass longbowmen on don't move and let them do their thing.
Once lots of units die, then you can focus fire.