Aussie YouTuber Aussie_Drongo casted a game between high-level AoE4 players recently, and one of the players used a trading strategy with the Mongols that allowed him to get a decent resource advantage.
This post first appeared on Kotaku Australia on November 2, 2021. It has been retimed as a weekend read.
Legendary player DauT has a long history in the AoE2 scene, and it looks like he’s getting crafty now that AoE4 is out. The new strategy involves pumping traders out of The Silver Tree next to the Mongol Ovoo, effectively getting them half-priced and producing at double speed.
Before long, DauT has an immense number of traders heading to a nearby trading post, which he was able to defend. The gold advantage allowed him to win the first few military engagements comprehensively.
You can watch the full video below:
It’s also worth noting that this trade route isn’t very long. Imagine what could be done if the route was across the map?
The strategy seems counterintuitive given it’s based on map control, and the Mongols are a raiding civ. If the route is successfully attacked or an opponent manages to build fortifications there, perhaps the Mongols can just change the route to somewhere else? I’ll have to watch more DauT to find auT.
It may not be “busted” as the title claims, but it’s certainly very interesting. It also highlights how much AoE4 is about matchups, instead of just learning build orders for your main civ.
As Drongo notes in the video, the Holy Roman Empire men-at-arms rush with rams is strong, but the Mongols can just pack up their base and move it. As soon as they see the rams, they can outpace them and make it to a more defensible spot.
As a result, you can see the opponent doesn’t even attempt to build rams, instead opting for armour.
After the stress test, the Age community was staring down the barrel of four weeks without our favourite new game. We couldn’t play it, but we could do the next best thing, which was immerse ourselves in videos. Drongo was a saviour in that moment.
I’m fairly sure he recorded as many games as possible during the stress test and slowly drip fed them to us until he got genuine early access to the game, and I tip my hat to him, because those videos kept me sane while I was jonesing for another AoE4 fix.
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