Age of Empires 4 - The Japanese Buffs Are COOKING

Age of Empires 4 guides, AoE4 casts and gameplay are here for all civilizations, including the Byzantines, Japanese, English, Chinese, Zhu Xi's Legacy, HRE, Order of the Dragon, Mongols, Delhi Sultanate, Rus, French, Jean d'Arc, Abbasid, Ayyubids, Ottomans & Malians.

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#ageofempires #ageofempires4 #aoe4

[sxxon]

I have been playing with buddhist monks only since they came out. I just love wololo thing, its how I got into AoE since the beginnings of AoE1.

Anywho, here are some clarifications and gameplay tips.


*Pickpocketing Monk Build*

Dark age:
* Go for gold and hunting early when done do sheep. I usually skip farms and berries and sheep. Skip the stone. Minimum wood gathering.

Feudal
* Go for Shinobis if enemy has monks (like HRE), otherwise the Storehouse. Use the shinobi to snipe enemy monks and scouting.
* Focus on hunting and mining gold
* Start amassing units. Focus quantity over quality.

* A few villagers on stone for 1-2 TC in castle age.

Castle
* Build monks right away and pick up relics, store them in temple.
* Focus on wood (move gold and farmers to wood). Use wood to build temples and then some military buildings and then farms.
* Get berry upgrade and farm berries.
* The Buddhist conversion *damage buff* is available already in Castle age for free (+20% damage).
* The Buddhist *debuff* is available already in Castle age for free (-50% on enemy base damage).
* Once monks are generating gold, use gold to buy wood for TCs and farms. While you have berries, farm them out.

Imperial
* Only farm food. Kill the rest of the villagers. Buy stone and wood from market, or make more monks, with the gold.
* Go for the siege workshop. Ribaldequins have very high base damange.
* Get the Nehan speed bonus as quickly as you can.
* Switch from cheap units to samurai, and bannermen samurai in particular.
* Make more TCs.
* If you have surplus gold, trade it for stone and upgrade your TCs. This will unlock more bannermen, which are tanky.
* If you have enough TCs and you need lots of units temporarily, you can kill all your villagers and attack and then use the gold from the monks to buy food to restore food production quickly. 40 monks with 2-3 relics and 160 infantry with +25% damage and +20% speed is scary.


*Random hints about the monks*
* The monks should keep relics with them when they attack. The monks generate gold to offset loss of relic income.
* You can toggle the damage debuff by toggling the healing.
* The damage buff is available already in castle age. Most players miss this!!!
* The damage buff, healing and nehan speed bonus affects allied players. So in large 4v4 battles with 2-3 unit balls, one monk can increase damage of all units moving through the relic casting range already in castle age. In lower tier player games, people usually amass 100s of units before they attack, which makes this tech extra dangerous. A 300 pop army becomes more like 375 for a short while.
* The conversion buffs are instant so it does not matter if monk dies.
* With the samurai shields, the idea is to Charge, Engage, Conversion buff, Wait a few sec and retreat to heal in 20s intervals. The more relics and monks you have the more intensly you can cycle.
* Monks can be put in towers, where they generate gold and shoot arrows.
* Monks can be kept in battering rams, with relics. There is a way to move units in and out of rams very smoothly.
* Always keep 2-3 relics along your front army. But never more then 50% of your relic count, so if you only have 2 then keep one at front.
* With the Nehan upgrade and 4 relics you can continously wololo for every 20s the rest of the game + extra wololo when a relic monk dies, as the conversion timer is shorter.
* You can only have 4 monasteries so tearing them down and building them up at strategic locations is a legit option. If you play team games and get the imperial age damage debuff, you can help your allies by placing them in their bases.
* You need lots of monks to rescue the relics as they die, in order not to loose relics. Its better to wait before moving out of TC region until you have about 5-20 or so.
* If a monk wololo:s and puts down the relic, another can pick it up and wololo right away. So having lots of monks you can E the relics down and cycle them.
* If a monk dies, the gold generation made it pay off itself, and another monk can pick up the relic (assuming you made a bunch). The monk can convert instantly.
* The debuff target the nearest enemy so if the monks are surrounded by enemies, the debuff will be cast evenly around you. The best way to achieve this with little macro is keep them inside an infantry ball.
* Horses have higher mobility but the difference between monks and horses is so big they tend to get spread out. Infantry is better, samurai especially and samuari bannermen in particular as they are so tanky. And then a contingency of horses to flank.
* The monastaries are supposed to be built aggressively, to create defensive sites. When not being attacked, keep relics in temples, when attacked pull them out and wololo.
* You need 40 monks to generate 1000 gold per minute. 20 for 500, 80 for 2000 gold. In imperial age, I usually net 2300 gold with some 70 monks and some relics in storage and the rest of villagers on food.
* Keep the temples and a market on the same hotkey. It makes it easy to rapidly trade and buy more monks, in case you run out of out of them.
* You can lock enemy units inside relic conversion range if you make your infantry stand ground. So in a battle, you can spread units out, move over your enemies, group them tightly, hit stand ground and convert.
* Not having exposed gold mining from trade or villagers makes it possible to be more aggressive and not think so much about walls.
t to loose too many.
* When you upgrade Nehan the effect is instant (this is a bug), so even though there is a timer on the upgrade, you can speed buff your units right when you hit imperial age and can afford the upgrade.
* If you try to pick up 3 relics with lots of monks, sometimes they freeze in front of the temple. The only way to make them unstuck is to place the relic in the temple until they are all unfrozen.

The most fun units to damage buff are:
* Castle age: Shinobi > samurai > battering rams > mounted samurai > spearmen > archers
* Imperial age: Ribaldequins > samuari > mangonels.

The shinobis are nice as they have very high base damage and get free health/damage upgrades every age up.

Other civs units: Elephants, ottoman great cannon, OOTD units and of course any gunpowder units as they have the highest base damage.

Edit: forgot some things.
* ozutszu count as biological unit so can be healed by monks. They can take down walls if you attack ground on the wall.
* when attacking, select monks and press S to make them stop circling around so much. This will make them start healing or debuffing enemies depending on what is closest.
* with the Nehan bonus you can speed up villagers and traders but the effect is minimal. Wood workers have the biggest gain.
* when you cast the wololo the enemy can see everything inside the radius. You can use this to draw attention to the wrong places.
* having 3 relics in the army is ideal as you need one to charge in, one to convert enemies and a third to charge out.
* when you are max pop the enemies won’t convert but simply die. If you are in a full engagement with ootd as an example you can kill an entire army with one conversion. If you have lots of relics you can daisy chain them and chase enemy into choke points and kill them all off using conversions only. But for this you need more like 4-5 relics.
* good players will flee when the conversion is cast so you can attack them while they flee esp if your units are faster.
* the spearmen and onabugeisha have range upgrades which mean in a ball situation they can reach enemies even if they are not in frontlines. I think the range is 1 which is really far for melee.
* Healing is a hidden resource collection. A mounted samurai costs 250 resources. So if you heal up one mounted bannerman that had 1 HP, where generation is 7HP per second, the monk gathers 25+(110*2)=245gold + 140*2=280 food per minute which is the fastest gathering rate in the game per unit.
* Mass monks makes a nice meatwall against spearmen and MAA as they heal each other, debuff closest units which are stabbing them and the spearnen cant use their bonus damage.

[GermanBoomBeach]

The space between the first two farms was there, because there was a sheep carcass, that blocked the space.

[CosmicValkyrie]

That koka township was completely useless. Would have benefitted with the kura storehouse. Especially with the daimyo palace. the monastry is certainly useful.

[twinsen]

They should increase the cooldown of the debuff, make it so that monks use it automatically while not healing, and so that they don't all choose the same target. And increase the zen gold to 28. Problem solved.


I still won't wanna use them though

[RealShaun]

Why cant soheis sutra not be an autocast like inspiring vils?

[Arcodus]

You are the game cast'erical drinker, Drongo! Thanks for your kind of casting 😊

[rodrigoserrano]

Perfect vid for my break, keep it up drongo!!

[VictorCarrasquero]

Sohei's Sutra has a global cooldown

[Vlix]

The Farm gathering rate just feels broken for Japanese, it doesn't feel like it's buffed at all while HRE get so much they drown in food with a way smaller buff, But hey it's aoe4 and the red palace bypasses building armor for some reason. 10/10

[gozziho]

fight at middle time dealing tons of maa/xbow with a pack of monks were overwhelming
Not surprise it stirs all other macro just to allow villager massacre in poor way😢

[marcodalu]

can't lose 57 vills and win the game
won't happen

[VladimirLenine]

Faye is the most entertaining player to watch, you know you’re getting a good juicy vid whenever they turn up

Edit: not even 4 minutes in and I know I’m going to steal this build

[shivam]

what happened to war of lords? playoffs finals ?

[smbintegrated]

idc what anyone says the mounted samurai shields are broken or something lol - those mofos dont die

[steelcommander]

Anouther Aussie video ✅
Anouther 2 tc English player ✅

[DarkArrowk]

Really dont like the direction the devs are making the Japanese go. Big nerfs this patch on an already bad civ on land

[Quicklanta]

i hate when the title of the video gives away who wins

[shotartist]

I think Faye is a dude, judging by the twitch stream. Unless they are transitioning 🤔

[integralinsanity]

Republicans reading the thumbnail: I WON'T STAND THIS.