Transcript of "Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it" by CloudCuckooCountry

CloudCuckooCountry.txt

Transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl4myN8q_KM

Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it
by CloudCuckooCountry

== I love Age of Empires ==

I love Age of Empires. I only recently got into the series a few years ago with Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, and it was the gateway to an enormous amount of fun. Not only did it introduce me to one of the best game series of all time, and not only did it introduce me to the RTS genre as a whole, but it also led me to one of the most fun PVP multiplayer experiences I've ever had. And I normally suck at competitive games. But I've actually really enjoyed my time learning the skills to play these games, and playing with friends, in pub lobbies, on the ranked ladder, in customs, playing with mod- [interrupt by clip montage of various speakers]

== RTS is dead ==

The RTS genre is dead.
RTS is dead.
Why did the RTS genre die?
Is it on its last legs? Very potentially.
essentially complete commercial death of the genre
There is a sickness plaguing the RTS strategy gaming genre.

Oh boy, what have I wandered into? As someone who is relatively new to the RTS multiplayer scene, I've had a pretty hard time squaring my experience learning the genre with all of the RTS discourse I see online. First of all, I find the claim that "RTS is dead" is just over dramatic hyperbole, because new RTS games are still being made regularly, and there are still plenty of active RTS communities. But the genre is undeniably In Decline, and fans have been trying to figure out why that happened, and what needs to be done to revive the genre. Now I'll say upfront that I'm not going to be sharing what I think made the genre decline. I only properly started paying attention to the RTS scene in the past few years. And I've heard too many different explanations already, from "it was killed by a lack of innovation" to "it was killed by a lack of quality games" to "it was killed by some kind of genre-wide pivot towards E-sports" to "it was killed because RTS games are too difficult or expensive for modern developers to make" to "it was killed because RTS games are too difficult to monetize". Everyone else has already stated their explanation for why the genre declined, and you don't need to hear another one from me.

However there is one persistent narrative, mixed in amongst all the moaning and complaining in RTS discourse, that I think is utterly incorrect, and it's that the real-time strategy PVP multiplayer scene is too difficult for casual players to get into.

[Clip of another speaker:] 20% stick around for the hardcore multiplayer.

People say that RTS PVP is hyper-competitive. That these games are basically nothing but rote memorization of optimized play-styles, and a contest of who can mash their keyboard the fastest. That it's impossible for new players to get into, because you have to play perfectly at high speed, and making a single mistake loses you the game. And RTS is the hardest genre ever made, something something Dark Souls. And that's just completely wrong. It's false. It's untrue. First of all, just a few years ago, I was a new player, and I found learning the PVP not only possible, but actually very easy. Second of all, competitive ranked 1v1 isn't the only way to play real-time strategy. My God, these games are so customizable! You can play in teams, in free-for-alls; there are tons and tons of maps, factions, unique game modes; and you can mess with game settings and install mods. My God, the modding scene of these games is just insane, and also responsible for inventing several other gaming genres. There's so much that you can do in the multiplayer of most RTS games that isn't just 1v1 competitive ranked, and it's so much fun! But here's the thing: if you don't play RTS multiplayer already, I know that telling you this isn't likely to encourage you to play, or to stick with the multiplayer. Because I'm quite late to this party, and therefore far from the only person to sing these these praises, and yet, RTS multiplayer still has an incredibly hard time convincing new players to try it out. And, crucially, to stick with it through the learning process.

It's not that no one except a hardcore niche wants to play a multiplayer RTS, but more so that most people who want to play tend to bounce off extremely fast. Either when they just start looking into it and get absolutely assaulted by the brick wall of abstract information that is the majority of RTS community tutorials—or they play a couple online matches and get so roundly demoralized by the first few players they run into obliterating their base—that they quit and never come back. The problem facing real-time strategy's multiplayer isn't that it's not fun, too competitive, or that nobody wants to play it. It's incredibly fun, nowhere near as competitive as people say, and there is a sizable number of people who have at some point wanted or even tried to play one. The problem is onboarding.

== Onboarding ==

It's an age-old question of game design so cliche that every self-styled video game intellectual has already done a play-by-play of a video game level at this point. But how do you get players to stick with a game through the learning process? This question has been answered a million different times for seemingly every genre except multiplayer RTS, and even seasoned RTS developers don't appear to have an answer. Frost Giant Studios is comprised of people who worked on StarCraft 2, and they posted on Reddit a few years back asking players what their experiences with onboarding was. So it seems like, at least at that time, they weren't confident with any solutions to the onboarding problem, either.

And that's why I've made this video. Because I am a recent convert to real-time strategy, and I've also managed to successfully onboard several of my friends, as well. Does that mean I know the answer? Probably not, but I'm going to try making my own overly long beginner's tutorial for one of my favorite games, and see if that can provide any insight at all for how to onboard new players. And the game I'm going to over-explain is Age of Empires IV. That's not a joke. This is actually the game I onboarded my friends with. And they've stuck around. So, whether you're an old veteran of the RTS scene or a newcomer, a multiplayer or single player enjoyer, or if you've never played an RTS game before in your life, welcome! This video is not about whether or not the RTS genre needs to change, what it needs to focus on, or how it can become more popular. Instead, I'm here to talk about how to onboard players into real-time strategy's PVP multiplayer as it exists right now, using Age of Empires IV as my primary example, and I hope you find this video useful. But first-

== You're wrong about APM ==

Stop me if you've heard this before: [montage of quotations]

Make an rts that is fun to play do not pay attention to apm
Focus more on strategy and tactics and not APM
I *do* actually like RTS games, I just find competitive APM RTS bullshit boring as hell...
I love the focus on squad equipment, troop variety and positioning on terrain rather than 5 bajillion APM build orders
RTS games online are entirely ruined for me by git gud APM gameplay.
RTS requires way too much 'APM' to be good
80% of your brainpower is devoted to maintaining APM
Modern RTSs have increasingly fallen prey to Grognard capture, [...] emphasizing high APM and streamlined economies
the APM required for RTS games is inhuman fr

For those of you who don't know, APM, or "actions-per-minute" is: [clips of StarCraft playes spamming hotkeys]
"You need at least this much APM to play Real-Time Strategy" is something I heard a lot, even before I decided to try out Age of Empires II. And the number just keeps going up:

"All my friends who got me to Brood War all told me not to play Terran, especially if my APM wasn't above 250"
"It's gonna to be tough if you make a game that's perfectly balanced on the idea that you need to play at 400 actions per minute or you instantly die"

APM is one of the most commonly cited reasons for staying away from RTS multiplayer. It's widely considered to be an enormous barrier to entry, and there are many many people who believe that maintaining a constant APM in the 200s, or 300s, or whatever number is in the discourse this week, is a necessary skill in order to play the multiplayer at all. And of course my personal favorite sour comment from the naysayers, is that real-time strategy has become more about APM than about strategy. Now I'm not a professional RTS competitor, so I'm not going to be commenting on how necessary APM is at the professional level, but what I will say, and I'm going to be honest, it feels crazy that I even have to point this out, is that the vast vast majority of RTS players whom you will encounter in public lobbies, quick match, and even the ranked ladder are not professionals, and are nowhere close to the skill level of professionals.

[clip] is he not oh he sees it oh and he did he patrol oh God oh God he patroled into a castle boys oh no oh no and now he's running into the lions oh God there's more li-

Unless you're talking about tournaments, or the very very top of the ranked ladder, which I assume most of you don't care about outside of being a spectator, having a high APM is not only unnecessary to be able to play, have fun, and win games, but as a skill, it actually has incredibly diminishing returns of effectiveness compared to all other skills at the nonprofessional skill levels. If you're a beginner, an intermediate player, or even reasonably high on the ranked ladder, working to increase your APM is actually one of the worst ways to improve your performance. And the skills that tend to make a far greater difference at the nonprofessional levels is stuff like knowledge, game sense, playing proactively, and, yes, strategy. But don't just take my word for it; people in RTS communities to this day are trying to dispel the notion that you need to be fast to play well:

"Sometimes new players get the idea that speed and maximizing little efficiencies are the most important things to focus on to improve. But as basic as it might sound, I think learning to make the correct decisions can be way more important than flawless execution when you're just starting out."
"I am telling you, your APM has nothing to do with your skill level. We had pro gamers in Starcraft that were top-level and they had 100 APM."
"I think it would be healthy to admit that, while professional play is absolutely cutthroat intense action all the way through, it's not that way for 99% of players. If most people knew most ladder games were more like two drunk toddlers fencing with pool noodles, the intimidation factor would be significantly lower."

Actions-per-minute has long been the red herring of the RTS genre. The most common misconception about realtime strategy is that high APM is one of the requirements to be able to play the game. But, in actuality, it's merely an extra edge that you can give yourself, after you've mastered every other skill in the game. There's a website that tracks Age of Empires IV stats called aoe4world.com, and one of the stats it tracks is the average APM of individual players during their matches. Now, these are averages, so don't take this as any of us maintaining a constant APM from start to finish; in reality, an average player's APM goes up and down several times over the course of the match as things become more or less chaotic; and APM measured as a game-wide average will also be slightly inflated by players spam right-clicking the ground when there's less things going on (because it makes us feel like pro players). From AoE4 World, I've learned that most players in my games have APMs somewhere between 50 and 150, including me by the way, but also that there are plenty of instances where players with significantly lower APM beat players with higher APM. Sometimes the difference in APM is quite stark, and the lower APM player still wins.

[clip of streamer] Today the goal is to play as slow as possible. Ideally I want to stay under 100 APM. [Victory screen] 64 vs. 334!

How could that possibly be? Well, if you're making bad decisions, then the only thing that having a high APM will do for you is have you make more bad decisions faster. In fact, at lower and intermediate levels, slowing down a bit to give yourself room to think and strategize will actually give you way more success than mindlessly sticking to a failing plan as you abuse the heck out of your keys.

[CloudCuckooCountry's friend:] "Please put in your video that I play with a higher APM than you and I am not as good as you"

So if I've thoroughly convinced you that high APM isn't a skill you need to learn, let's move on to what you actually need to learn.

== gitting gud at skill-based bimeo james ==

When you get down to it, your classic real-time strategy game with workers, base-building, and individual unit control, is probably going to be a skill-based game no matter what. Which is probably still a turn off for the people who would rather be playing a city-builder instead. But skill-based game doesn't mean an E-sports game. There are many games I could use to make this point, but really the best one is Team Fortress 2.

TF2 has plenty of skills and Advanced Techniques to develop; the informational brick wall at this point is incredibly dense, and the skill ceiling is incredibly high. And yet TF2 isn't known for being a sweaty hyper-competitive E-sports game; it's known as a casual game. And that's despite the fact that TF2 has terrible onboarding. The majority of newcomers are probably just going to get dumped in a random pub where there's a high chance they get farmed by some Spy main with 2000 hours. But here's the thing: if you're the type of person who would be trying out Team Fortress 2, you're already familiar with the absolute basics of the game. And I don't mean that you have a general idea for what the classes do, I mean the absolute basics. The basics so basic that you probably didn't even think about them. I'm talking about moving through a virtual 3D environment and controlling a first-person camera.

"She spent a lot of time wrestling with the camera in third-person games, and she wasn't all that great at moving and looking around at the same time in first-person ones. Due to her not rotating the camera around a ton, she didn't always get a great sense of her surroundings."

These are not innate skills that people just know. They have to be learned. Just ask Nintendo, because they actually make games for people who haven't played games before. "Tilt top to move Mario forwards." But 3D movement and camera control are the basis of so many games, that if you've learned them once, they're basically transferable to every game where you control a character in 3D space. The reason you don't have to learn Team Fortress 2 from scratch is because you were trained how to control a character in 3D by other games. So even though you're faced with terrible onboarding, an informational brick wall, and a high skill ceiling, you at least have a solid baseline of fundamentals to ground you as you learn the game.

Now, needless to say, real-time strategy is fundamentally different from most video game genres. Its basics are a lot more abstract, and even at its peak over 10 years ago, it was never as popular as shooters. That means that basically all newcomers won't have transferable fundamentals when they first try out the genre, and that's really going to stand out when they try the multiplayer. When most newcomers first queue into an RTS match, they're basically the equivalent of a confused grandparent. I don't understand what's going on, is there a Mario, how do I make my Mario do things in this game. So any effort to onboard newcomers into real-time strategy must start with the absolute basics. The basics so basic that all RTS players who regularly play multiplayer don't even think about them anymore. And I guess that begs the question, what is this genre's equivalent of moving and aiming? Taking into account the diversity of the genre, the fact that we have worker-based RTS games and RTSs with no workers, individual unit control versus squad mechanics, complicated base-building and economy management versus no base-building and automated economies, fighting on the battlefield versus fighting on a commodities market, what is a skill that would let you pick up any real-time strategy game and have a baseline that you can build from? I'm sure there are plenty of RTS players who would say differently, but my answer is:

== Multitasking ==

So if you've never played a classic real-time strategy game before, all the basic mechanics are incredibly easy: To move units, you select them with left-click, and then right-click where you want them to go, and then wait for them to get there. To make structures, you click an icon, and then click again on the ground, and then wait for it to finish building. To make units, you click the building that makes them, and then click the icon. and then wait for the progress bar on the unit to fill up. It's all very straightforward, takes more or less no mechanical dexterity to execute, and is surprisingly very slow, considering the genre's reputation. You might notice there's a lot of waiting for things in real-time strategy. Ah, but you see, the challenge and the fun is that to play well, you have to juggle all of these simple tasks at the same time. These games aren't simply, build your base, then recruit your army, then start fighting each other. Instead, you want to be building your base and recruiting your army and attacking or retreating with your fielded units simultaneously. This is why there's so much waiting in between you giving an order and the thing you wanted happening. The game isn't slow to waste your time, the game is slow to give you the breathing room to split your attention. You're not actually supposed to be staring at your building going up, or watching your units slowly pop out of a building one at a time. That's about as fun as watching paint dry.

No, the way that RTS players play is they'll order several buildings and several units all at once, and while they're waiting for all of them, they'll look away and give orders to their army. Maybe even split their army up and have it do work in multiple areas, they'll defend the flanks, capture objectives, bring the siege forward, send in a raiding force, sabotage their opponent, and they'll have their army doing all of these things at the same time. That sounds incredibly chaotic, and, yeah, it is. The chaos is part of what makes this type of game incredibly fun. But you'd be surprised how easy it is to keep on top of it all. RTS battles feel ginormous, and winning an RTS battle makes you feel like a goddamned tactical genius. There's a lot of room in the game system for individual strategy, tactics, skill expression, and creativity. And when you think of a novel strategy on the fly, tell your army to do it, outwit your opponent, and it works, you will be hooting and hollering and feeling mighty powerful, let me tell you. The best analogy for playing an RTS skillfully is juggling.

== The Juggling Analogy ==

When juggling, you have multiple objects, balls usually, that you're trying to keep in the air. But you only have two hands and one brain. Even so, humans can still easily learn to juggle three, four, five, or even more balls, because after a ball is thrown, it will remain airborne for a short time window, which gives the juggler the opportunity to catch and throw the other balls. Real-time strategy is very similar. You have several different tasks that require your attention. Once you get one task going, there's a short time window before you have to pay attention to it again. And that lets you give your attention to another task.

[Day9:] "StarCraft Brood War is primarily not a strategy game. It is secondarily a strategy game. Primarily StarCraft emphasizes the real-time aspect. The idea of how difficult it is to juggle all the things that one must juggle to be a commander. It is a game that perfectly embodies, really, the commander fantasy."

Back in 2020, I streamed myself playing Age of Empires II, back when I was still pretty new. And you can see from the footage that I'm bad at the game. My base management and my unit control is all lackluster. I mess up my build order almost every game. I'm making mistakes constantly. I was very, very clearly a new player. But you can still see me doing some basic multitasking. I regularly snap in-between my base and my army, making sure that I'm frequently giving my attention to both of them. And this is what lets me play skillfully and win games against other players, despite being new to the game. The same thing applies to my friends whom I onboarded into Age of Empires IV. One of the first things that I told them was that an RTS is a multitasking game. So instead of focusing on learning stuff like unit counters, army compositions, economy management, and a brick wall of other information about the game, the skill they ought to focus on developing first should be their multitasking. And it worked! Once they had the baseline of multitasking learned, which didn't take very long by the way, they started winning games against other players, and they were then far more eager to continue getting good at the game, and actually start learning things like unit counters, army comps, and so on.

"When I first start playing a game, there's only a certain willingness to put up with things, but as the game goes on, and I become more invested over time, my willingness to learn actually grows."

I actually think this reveals a massive problem in RTS community tutorials.

== The Problem with RTS Tutorials ==

Most beginner tutorials in the RTS community kind of assume that players already know how to multitask, and instead teach people about stuff like macro cycling, or how to optimize your build order.

"So what is a cycle? [...] well, we're talking about macro cycles, so this is going to be one of our underlying concepts [...] jump to our natural [...] queueing up two SCVs per Command Center [...] dropping as many Mules as we can [...] building two Marauders and four Marines [...] and then we are adding two Supply Depots [...] and we do that every 25 seconds"
"So this video I hope is gonna help pretty much everyone, including the beginner players, the low-level players, and even intermediate players [...] First step, two houses. Bring the sheep back, and if it's still early on, you can scout with the sheep you get [...]"

Look, I don't want to trash these tutorials, they're all fantastic, and from reading the comments sections, it's clear they've helped a lot of people. But I can't help but notice that the commenters who are saying these tutorials helped them start winning more games also seem to imply that they were already playing the game competitively. The people who found these tutorials useful were already on board for the multiplayer, and were looking to start improving their skills. Meanwhile, there are still some comments sprinkled in there from people who were actually discouraged from learning the game by watching these tutorials. Which kind of makes sense; if you're brand new, or if you've only ever played single-player RTS, and you want to know what the first step to learning how to play against human opponents is, of course you're going to think the game is too hard for you to play if a beginner tutorial already looks like it's a few steps above what you're capable of learning right now. If you're an absolute beginner, then macro cycling, or micro, or optimization techniques, or a brick wall of information about units and builds, is not going to help you. What's going to help you is learning basic multitasking.

So how do you learn that? I think the juggling analogy is still useful here, because juggling instructors won't get you to immediately start juggling some difficult number of balls. Instead, they make you start with one ball, then move up to two, then three, then four, and so on, building up more as you become better. You can approach RTS multitasking in exactly the same way: learning how to perform one task at first, then move up to two tasks, then move up to three, then four, and so on. Pretty much as soon as you can juggle two tasks to a competent level, you're ready to start playing games with real human opponents, and before you know it, you'll be managing ginormous empires and fielding massive armies that are spread all over the map, and you will feel like an absolute god. But before we get ahead of ourselves, I think Age of Empires IV might be the best game for beginner to learn RTS-style multitasking with. Let me walk you through.

== Task 1: Building your base ==

In Age of Empires IV, there are four resources: food, wood, gold, and stone. To get resources, you have to gather them with your worker units called villagers. The more villagers you have, the faster you gain resources, which lets you make more and more stuff. You can train villagers from your central building, called your Town Center. If you click the Villager button several times to queue several villagers in a row, the Town Center will work on producing them one at a time. And villagers take 20 seconds to produce. So as long as there's at least one villager in the production queue, your Town Center should be producing one villager every 20 seconds. You want your Town Center to continue doing this until you have at least 100 villagers. No, not 30 or 40, not 60 or 70; 100 or more! You want to be making a lot of stuff, so you want a lot of villagers. However, it costs 50 food every time you put a villager in the Town Center's production queue, and you only start the game with 200 food, enough for only four villagers, so the first thing you want to do is get more food. Luckily for you, you also start with six villagers and three sheep next to your Town Center. So left-click and drag a box over your starting six villagers, and right-click one of the sheep to tell them to start gathering food from it. This should, for the time being, be enough to let you continuously train villagers from the Town Center. Now when villagers spawn, on the top right side of the building for some reason, they'll need a task to do, typically gathering resources. And it will take too much of your attention to individually order every single new villager yourself, so instead, with the Town Center selected, right-click on a resource to set the building's Rally Point. What a Rally Point does is it orders any new unit created from the building to move to the Rally Point without you needing to tell them yourself. And if you right-click a task that unit can perform, the unit will start doing that task after it's moved there. So if you, say, wanted your next five villagers to gather gold, you don't need to order every single villager to work on the gold pile after they spawn; instead, you can just queue five villagers in your Town Center and right-click the pile once, and you don't need to pay attention to that task again for a minute and a half.

Now in addition to gathering resources, your villagers will also construct buildings, and there are four buildings that you ought to know about at this stage of the game: houses, mills, lumber camps, and mining camps. All units including villagers add to your total population, and you can't have more than the shown maximum, but building houses will raise the maximum for each house you build. So basically as your town's population grows, you want to add more houses. Simple enough. Mills, lumber camps, and mining camps act as resource drop-off points. You might notice that the villagers gathering food don't put it straight into your bank (the panel down here showing your available resources); instead, they gather until they're holding 10 food, and then have to drop off the food at the Town Center, and then it ends up in your bank. This means that if villagers are gathering a resource away from the Town Center, they have to make a long journey back every single time they gather 10 of a resource, which is very slow. We want as many resources as we can get, as fast as possible, which is where mills and camps come in. A mill acts as a drop-off point for food, a lumber camp for wood, and a mining camp for gold and stone. So as you move villagers further out to capture more resources, you always want to build the appropriate drop-off building as close to that resource as you can, to make sure your villagers are dropping it off fast. You can also free up your attention by using shift-command.

== shift-command ==

When you command a unit to do something while holding shift, instead of the unit stopping what it's doing and going to the new task immediately, it queues the command as the unit's next task. So if I want my villager to build a house and then a mining camp, I don't have to wait for the villager to finish building the house and then order the mining camp. Instead, I can order the house like normal, and then, while holding shift, order the mining camp, which will make the villager build the mining camp after it's finished building the house. Using shift commands to order several things in advance is the main way that RTS players free up their attention.

"very straightforward, holding down shift to queue up commands is always how you queue up anything, you'll notice I'm queueing these up to move along the edges of the map to simulate actual harassment"

If there's a complicated series of tasks that you want a unit to do unsupervised, you can order all of those tasks in advance, and then not pay attention to them for the next few minutes.

This is the basics of base-building in Age of Empires IV: make villagers, keep villagers working, and build houses and drop-off points.

OK, so your three starting sheep should last you for a short while, but you're going to have to find more sources of food. There are berries within your Town Center's sight range; however, we're ideally not going to use those, because they gather slower than sheep. For now, it's best to think of berries as a fallback for if we can't get another food source. Instead, there are more sheep scattered throughout the map, and those sheep will become captured and leashed by Scouts that move close to them. Now, you can't actually see the sheep out there in the mid-map, because the game uses a fog-of-war system, and the maps are randomly generated and concealed, so at the start of games, the map is completely obscured by black, and you won't know exactly where everything is. However, Scouts move relatively fast, and have enormous sight range, so they're also the best unit for revealing the map. That means that the very start of a typical Age of Empires IV match is spent revealing the map and looking for sheep with a Scout. It just so happens that you also begin the game with a Scout. If you're still trying to to get used to base management, you can, if you want to, just hold shift and right-click your Scout around the minimap to set a bunch of waypoints, and then set the last one back at your base, but if you want to learn multitasking, here's where it starts.

== Task 2: Controlling your units ==

So your first task is to keep your economy growing. That means keep your Town Center queued with villagers at all times, make sure all villagers are working at all times, either gathering resources or building something, and make sure to construct the buildings you need to develop your base. At the same time, your second task is to explore the map. Keep your scout moving into new areas, and make sure to look at it once every few seconds, as there are a couple of things you need to pay attention to. The first is that the capture range for a sheep is shorter than the Scout's line of sight. So if you spot a sheep tell your Scout to move towards it to capture it. The second thing you need to pay attention to is back at your base: those sheep under your Town Center aren't going to last for very long. So if at least one sheep has already been used up, that's a sign that you ought to bring your scout back to your Town Center to drop off whatever sheep it's found so they arrive before your villagers run out of sheep to gather from. The third thing you need to pay attention to is your opponent's Town Center. Town Centers have a ranged attack that fires at enemy units that move in range, and villagers can also be garrisoned to increase that attack. That means that if you run your scout in range of your opponent's Town Center, it's probably going to be shot to death. And if you had sheep following you, well, you've just gifted them to your opponent. The enemy Town Center is the only threat to your Scout on the entire map at this stage, and it doesn't move, but you also can't see where it is at the start of the game. So you will still want to be paying attention to where your Scout is going, so that you don't accidentally lose your Scout to it. The enemy Town Center will always be on the opposite side of the map, so you do have quite a lot of the map to explore before your Scout is in danger, but since your opponent's base is something that you'll want to scout eventually anyway, it's kind of unavoidable that you will need to pay attention to your Scout as you try to find it.

This stage of the game is the perfect opportunity to practice basic multitasking. When looking at your base, first check your Town Center queue, and if you see less than two villagers in the queue, add at least one villager. Then take a quick second to check if there's anything else you need to do, like set a new Rally Point or make something like a house or a drop off building. Then focus back on your scout and control it for a few seconds, keeping an eye out for any sheep or enemy structures. Then go back to your base, and repeat, changing your focus from your base to your scout, and back again, repeatedly, at a comfortable yet frequent pace.

Now, there are several ways to move the camera between your scout and your base. The worst way is scrolling the camera by putting your cursor to the side of the screen. Never do this when you want to move the camera long distances, because it's clunky and it's disorienting and you'll spend way too much time finagling the camera to exactly where you want. Only scroll the camera when you want to adjust your view, like when you want to move it slightly to see something that's a short distance off screen. The second way to move the camera is better for moving it long distances, and in fact, you'll be doing it a lot during the game anyway. And that's clicking the minimap. By clicking the minimap, you snap the camera to wherever you clicked, and this is a great way of focusing instantly on anything that requires your attention at any time. I recommend doing this a lot. If you hear an alarm and see a red circle on your minimap, just go ahead and click it, because the game is telling you that you need to pay attention to it now. But this is still kind of cumbersome for something that we want to be doing every few seconds; the minimap is all the way down here, and almost everything that you actually want to be clicking is in the center of your screen instead, so it's not something that we want to be doing all the damn time. So the final and best way to refocus the camera is with hotkeys.

== Hotkeys ==

Now I know some of you winced, but don't worry, you don't need to learn all the hotkeys. As you learn the game, hotkeys will just be something that you can incorporate one at a time into how you play as they become useful. To start, I would recommend only using two hotkeys: H and 1. By default, H will snap the camera to your Town Center and select it; so anytime you're looking at the mid-map and want to focus back on your base, you can press H, and you'll be instantly looking at your base with your most important building selected. 1, meanwhile, is a control group.

== Control groups ==

What's a control group? Well, basically, a way to save one or more units or buildings for you to select at any time with number keys. 1 corresponds to control group one, 2 to control group two, and so on. Control groups are actually how RTS players manage multitasking, because you can put different groups of units or buildings in different control groups. You can put a set of production buildings in control groups to let you train new units without even looking at your base. You can put villagers in control groups to preemptively set up for if you need a precise number of villagers to do something. There's a lot that you can do with control groups, but for now we're just going to be control-grouping the Scout. You can set control group one by selecting whatever you want to make the control group, holding ctrl, and pressing the 1 key. From then on, you can press the 1 key without holding ctrl to select those units or buildings from anywhere on the map. And if you double-tap the 1 key, you'll also focus the camera on those units or buildings as well.

So this is how we're going to multitask the Scout and our base. Before sending the Scout, select it and assign it to control group one. Then whenever you want to snap the camera to the Scout, double-tap the 1 key, and you'll immediately focus on it and be able to give it orders. After you've given it its orders, press H to instantly focus back on your base. Keep snapping back and forth between your Scout and your Town Center at a comfortable but regular pace. And just get used to this type of multitasking, because this is actually the most basic version of how to play an RTS skillfully. Snap back and forth between two or more simple tasks, and regularly give both of them your attention. Later in the game, instead of simply building up your base and controlling a scout, you'll be managing an already built-up base and controlling an army, and the exact same principle applies. For developing your multitasking as a beginner, don't just focus on one of these things for minutes at a time and neglect the other. You have to check on both of them multiple times each minute. Bind your entire army to control group one, and keep snapping back and forth using H and 1 to manage both.

== Advancing through the Ages ==

Now in an RTS game, you're always trying to work towards something, and in the Age of Empires game, that something has typically been advancing through the Ages, the mechanic that is the series's namesake. In Age of Empires IV, there are four ages: you start in the Dark Age, and you can advance to the Feudal Age, then the Castle Age, then the Imperial Age. (I know, very original.) Each age unlocks more stuff for you to do: more units and buildings and technologies. And Dark Age is basically your warm-up; you have access to very, very little in the Dark Age, and for this reason you can use Dark Age to practice basic multitasking every time you start a new game. I would recommend doing this even if you're only playing against AI: put your scout on control group one, and just always use the first four or five minutes of the game as an opportunity to get used to multitasking. But of course we want to be able to advance to the next age so we can make a proper army. In Age of Empires IV, you advance to the next age by building one of two special structures called landmarks. Your first landmark costs 400 Food and 200 Gold, and right now, you might be thinking, okay, this is starting to feel a bit overwhelming again, you've just explained to me that I have to pay attention to both my base and my Scout, and while I'm thinking about both of those things at once I have to also figure out how to balance my early economy to get specific resource numbers, while I'm also spending one of those resources every 20 seconds, so I have to figure out how to divide my villagers up between resources and make that decision with each new villager that spawns, and this is where I tell you that you don't actually need to figure all of this out on your own, because of build orders.

== Build orders ==

So a build order is a set of instructions that RTS players memorize or have written down on a notepad or a second monitor or something, and then execute at the start of games to put themselves in a competitive position. You can think of build orders in RTS like openings in Chess. Chess players will often memorize openings to make sure they're always putting themselves in a competitive position in the early game, but this doesn't make high-level Chess stale, firstly, because there are a lot of openings to choose from, and because a typical chess opening will only take you as far as the first six or seven moves before you have to start making the kinds of tactical decisions that makes Chess such a great game. Likewise, there are a lot of build orders in Age of Empires IV, and they're all different for each civilization in the game. There's a set of build orders that give a variety of different openings for English, and those are very different to the set of build orders that work for the Holy Roman Empire, and both are different still to the build orders for the Chinese and the Abbasid dynasty and the Delhi sultanate and so on for every other civ in the game. An Age of Empires IV build order will also only take you about as far as the first four or five, maybe six or seven, minutes of a match, maybe with some minor adjustments depending on the map or the matchup, before you're entirely on your own. However by the time a build order ends, you're in a competitive position, and decision making becomes a lot easier. This is why I actually recommend that new players learn just one build order to start with, because it can seriously reduce the decision anxiety that faces a lot of new players when learning how to navigate the early game. You don't have to worry about how to divide up your villagers, or what buildings to make, or anything like that. If you know one build order, then all of that is decided for you in advance, and you can focus on just your multitasking and your strategic decision-making. And then, once you've got the hang of those fundamentals, you can start learning more build orders to vary up your early game and open up a lot more possibilities and variety for you. To show you how straightforward build orders actually are, here's a build order:

== Beginner English Longbow Rush ==

As the English, put your starting six villagers on sheep, then send one more villager from the Town Center to sheep. Then send your next three villagers from your Town Center to Gold. The first villager that goes to Gold should build a house, then a mining camp. After three villagers are tasked to the gold mine, add one more to sheep, for a total of eight on food and three on gold. Then rally your Town Center to Wood. Remember to build a lumber camp with the first villager that goes to Wood. Then forget about rallying for the time being. Make sure that you have no more than two villages in your Town Center, and then when you have the resources required, you'll hear this sound. When that happens, drag a box around your three villagers mining gold, and have them build the Council Hall landmark. The Council Hall is a great landmark because it can train Longbowmen. At this point you're probably approaching the population cap again, so just have a villager on food or wood build a house, and then go back to whatever they were doing afterwards. After the landmark is finished, the three villagers building it should go back to gold, and you can even queue that command in advance by holding shift. Then click the Council Hall and use it to produce Longbowmen until you have at least five of them, and that's it! You ought to be less than five minutes into the game with a well-balanced Feudal Age economy and a small force of Longbowmen. This build order absolutely isn't optimized by a long shot, but it's a solid beginner build order to learn if you're a newcomer to the genre. And from here, the game gets really interesting.

== Units ==

The second age unlocks most of your basic soldiers, and you'll need to build one of three buildings to train them from. Melee infantry like Spearmen and Men-at-arms are trained from the Barracks; ranged units like Archers, Crossbowmen, and Cavalry Archers are trained from the Archery Range; and melee cavalry like Horsemen and Knights are trained from the Stable. Some civilizations also have landmarks that act as military buildings, like how the Council Hall acts as an archery range for the English, and you can use it to train Longbowmen. There's a lot of nuance when it comes to unit matchups, and there's even an entire grid of how favorably units match up against each other, but generally speaking, Barracks units counter Stable units, Stable units counter Archery Range units, and Archery Range units counter Barracks units. Basically, Spearmen counter Cavalry, Cavalry counter Archers, and Archers counter Spearmen. But of course, most armies are made of more than one unit type, which can make things complicated, and as beginners, we want to avoid that, so here's the best army composition to make when you're just starting out: a mass of archers plus a supporting squad of spearmen. Archers and their variations like longbowmen are great generalist units that get better in large numbers, but their main weakness is cavalry. So by adding a supporting squad of spearmen to your archer mass, you're protecting your archers from their main weakness. It's also an army composition that's really easy for new players to control, as your archers and spearmen want to be sticking together basically all the time regardless, so there's very little disadvantage to just slapping your entire army into the same control group and controlling it as one big giant blob of damage. It's certainly not unbeatable, and most players above a certain rank will know how to counter it, but it's still an effective composition that can be easily defaulted to for new players as they learn about the rest of the game. Feel free to experiment with all the other units, of course, especially Knights, because Knights are busted. And as the game goes on, you also have the option to swap out the archers for crossbowmen and the spearmen for man-at-arms. But when you're in doubt and you want to not lose, archer-spearmen can be your reliable army comp.

So you have an army. What do you actually want to be doing with it? Like let's say you made an army and your opponent didn't; what's the best way to take advantage of that? Well remember what you're supposed to be doing with your base: always make more villagers until you have 100 or more, and keep those villagers working as much as possible. This tells us how we can do damage to our opponent's economy: attack their villagers. By the way, yes, I am aware that the objective of this game is to exploit your own people in order to commit war crimes. This is called economy damage.

== Economy Damage ==

In RTS, all your units and buildings have health bars, but you don't, so it helps to think of your economy as your health bar. Villagers going idle or Town Centers going idle or villagers getting killed by enemy units damages your economy and puts you further behind in a 1v1. You can think of the villager count between both players as the score that determines who is currently in the lead. This is true for basically all worker-based real-time strategy games. Your goal with your army is to kill your opponent's workers and protect your workers by fighting off your opponent's army. If your opponent's army is attacking your workers, but your army isn't there to defend, pull your workers back to the safety of your Town Center, and garrison them if needed, because your number one priority is to stop your opponent from killing your workers. Now, if you do lose workers, don't immediately surrender. I know that it's very common to feel like the game is over after a small setback, but it really isn't, especially at the low levels. Everyone at low and intermediate levels in RTS is making mistakes. We're not playing optimally. And most low-level players have no idea how to leverage advantages into a win. So stay in the game. You can bring yourself back to par or even swing the game in your favor by counterattacking your opponent and killing or idling their villagers.

Also, if you have idle villagers somewhere on the map, this little box down here will tell you how many you have, and if you click it, it will select and focus the camera on an idle villager. Alternatively, there is also a hotkey for that, which by default is period for some reason, so I rebound it to spacebar, because this is something that experienced players will be checking a lot.

So by now what you should be able to do is spend the first few minutes of the game building up an economy while scouting the map and revealing the outskirts of the enemy base. You should be able to reach Feudal Age and then build an army, send that army forward, and start picking off villagers around your opponent's base. It's at this point that if you're low on the ranked ladder your opponent will probably resign and call you a sweat which you will find very funny because you probably learned the game 30 minutes ago. But if you're playing against the AI because you're scared to play against other humans, or you found yourself up against the one player in Silver League who doesn't quit after losing one villager to early aggression, you're probably wondering how to win the game.

== Win conditions ==

Well, if you go to Castle Age, you can train a monk who will be able to stand on sacred sites and capture them, which will give you a small trickle of gold for each one you capture, but if you capture all of them, a timer will start that counts down from 10 minutes, and if you can hold all of the sacred sites during that time, then when the timer reaches zero, you win the game. Alternatively, you can age up to Imperial Age, save up an absolute fortune's worth of resources, and use every single villager you have to build a wonder, which does the same thing, sets a timer for 15 minutes, and if you keep the wonder standing for the whole duration, you win the game. But, of course, the actual way you win the game without sitting on your ass for literal ages is you destroy your opponent's town. Now you can do this by just making an overwhelming number of melee units and having them burn down all the buildings by throwing torches at them, that works, or you can try to speed up the process by first building a Blacksmith. A Blacksmith contains upgrades for your units, buffing their attack and defense, but it also contains the technology Siege Engineering. If you research this, it gives your infantry the ability to build battering rams in the field. Battering rams are a siege weapon.

== Siege weapons ==

Siege weapons all have unique roles. For example, the Springald kills other siege weapons from a distance; the Mangonel deals area-of-effect damage to clumped up units; the Trebuchet can batter away at defenses from long range; the Bombard is a universal building destroyer; the Ribauldequin is irrelevant and desperately needs a buff; the Nest of Bees is annoying as fuck and needs to be removed from the game; and the Culverin basically does what the Springald does but better and also it's way cooler cuz it's a fucking cannon; the Battering Ram is exclusively an anti-building weapon so you can use these to help you flatten the enemy base. Just make at least two of them with your infantry, attack-move them into the enemy base, and protect them with your army as they take out buildings one by one. Now this obviously doesn't work in every situation, but if you've managed to run circles around the enemy base and kill lots of villagers and wipe their army and they're far behind but not quitting for some reason, this is how you brute-force to a swift win condition. If you can do this to at least the intermediate AI, get to Feudal Age, pressure with an army while building up your base, and finish them off with rams, guess what? You're actually good enough to play against human opponents.

== End of Beginner Tutorial ==

You could, if you wanted to, turn off this video now, download Age of Empires IV, run a couple Skirmish matches to get the hang of the build order and play pattern, and then take that onto the ranked ladder. From my experience watching my friends learn the game, and from content creators in the community who showcase low-level games, I can confidently say that simply knowing a build order will probably put you in Silver League at the very least. And if you're confident with your play pattern, then you can climb as high as Gold, which is where the average player typically is on the ranked ladder. And if you did that, it would make me very sad, because it would hurt my video's retention time, and also because if I stopped the video here, the entire Age of Empires IV community would hate me for sending a bunch of new one-trick English mains into the low leagues. Sorry guys, it just so happens that Longbow Rush is the easiest thing for beginners to learn.

== Strategy ==

But if I've still got your attention, I want to actually start talking about strategy. I know, strategy in a real-time strategy game, who would have thought. There's a really, really old theory of basic strategy in worker-based RTS games that I found still applies to the low and intermediate levels of Age of Empires, and it goes like this. Most decisions in a classic RTS game fall into one of three broad categories: aggression, defense, and economy.

Aggression is the simplest type of strategy to understand. You make military units and you put them in the enemy base. When attacking, different units have different advantages and disadvantages: cavalry has high mobility and is difficult for the defender to keep track of, but is expensive and can be easily driven away by spears, and have their mobility cut off by palisade walls; ranged units are very strong at area denial, but have incredibly low damage against buildings, which makes it difficult for them to fight defensive structures of any kind; and heavy infantry is especially tanky and hard to get rid of, but is very slow which makes it easy to punish if it's caught in a bad position. Same as before, your primary goal when attacking is to kill villagers, and if you can follow that up with a siege push, even better.

Defense is when you defend from your opponent's attacks with your own units and defensive structures. Your army isn't necessarily an investment into aggression, because by keeping your army at home, you can use it to defend yourself from your opponent's army. And you can also make use of defensive structures like palisade walls and outposts, and later in the game, stone walls and keeps. Walls make it easier to keep track of your opponent's army by cutting off its mobility and slowing it down, while outposts let you spot the army's approach from further away, as well as give your villagers a remote garrison point you can use to protect them. Using your defensive structures including your Town Center gives you the home field advantage in fights. And of course, remember that your highest priority is to keep your own villagers alive, even if it means running them all the way back to your Town Center.

Economy is when you accelerate beyond simply producing one villager every 20 seconds. You can build additional Town Centers which lets you make two, three, or sometimes even more villagers every 20 seconds. Markets can be built to set up a trade route, and Traders will also give you resources. Docks can train fishing boats which also give you resources. And there are economic upgrades you can research at your dropoff buildings that make your villagers gather resources faster. Investing into booming your economy gives you way more resources than your opponent which lets you advance through the ages faster and build a bigger and more upgraded army which even the sturdiest of defenses won't be able to keep out.

These three broad categories of strategy have a rock-paper-scissors relationship with each other: aggression is good against economy, because it punishes players for not having any defenses; economy is good against defense, because if players have invested into defenses that aren't doing anything because you're not attacking them, and you invest into an economy, you will have a greater economic lead; and defense is good against aggression, because if your opponent invests into an attack that doesn't do anything, you're now ahead. If you're playing solitaire with your base and losing because people are attacking you, it's not because the game is all about aggression, it's because you're using a strategy that gets hard-countered by all-in aggression, and what you ought to do instead is try defending yourself. Similarly, if you're doing nothing but attacking relentlessly, and your opponent is keeping you out of their base by turtling, it's not because this is a turtling game; all-in aggression simply gets hard-countered by turtling, and what you ought to do instead is try booming your economy. Now that's not to say that RTS is just an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors. There are two major things that make the strategy in this game incredibly dynamic.

== Scouting ==

The first is scouting. RTS is not just a multitasking genre, it's an information genre. In RTS, most strategies take at least a couple minutes to set up. You can't just launch an attack out of nowhere, you need to build a military building and slowly train the units. Defenses also need time to be built; and your economy needs time to grow and more time to pay off. So a big part of success in this genre is spotting what your opponent's plans are and responding to them ahead of time.

The information game is a huge part of real-time strategy. If a force of bad men with sharp objects just shows up out of the blue and surprises you, that's a sign that you didn't scout properly. Once you see that your opponent is in Feudal Age, which the game announces to you by the way, you ought to be using your Scout to try and spot exactly what they're doing at their base. If your plan is to play solitaire with your economy, but your scout spots military buildings going up in the enemy base, that's a sign you should switch your strategy to something more defensive. Or if you're the one making an army, and you spot walls and towers going up, that's a sign that you ought to stop making units and accelerate your economy instead. I'm really sorry to have to be mean, but if you're the kind of player who stubbornly refuses to do anything but play solitaire with your base for 30 minutes, or anything except relentlessly all-in attacking all the damn time, or even always turtling, if you're the type of player who just builds walls and nothing else, and you aren't adapting to what your opponent is doing, that's not you having a play-style, that's actually just a bad strategy.

== Dynamic Strategy ==

The second thing that makes real-time strategy dynamic is that these broad categories of strategy are not mutually exclusive. Strategies in RTS can be a mix of any of these three categories. Your villagers will give you far more resources than you need to simply keep one Town Center queued and to build the houses you need, and the excess resources they give you back can be divided in any proportion that you want between these three categories. You can play a strategy that's mostly economy-focused but still has some defense, or you can play a strategy that's mostly aggressive but still accelerates your economy somewhat, or you can play a mixture of all three. You have a lot of freedom in choosing your strategy, and you can even adapt your strategy on the fly to whatever you spot your opponent doing.

== Strategy Adaptation ==

Strategy adaptation is actually incredibly common at high levels, for example, investing into a small early attack to bait the opponent into overinvesting into defense, and then switching into an economic boom

[transcript cleanup stops here and resumes at Final Thoughts]

I love it Recon he doesn't scout out the trade yet doesn't spot out the market he's looking at The UU he sees the barracks and I'm wondering if he's about to see yep sees the deer Stones as well and this could just be the perfect bait that be was wanting and not every investment falls into only one category a force of Defenders can easily turn into a force of attackers and vice versa oh my God I just cleaned up all his archers imagine being French oh I can't imagine it an economic structure like a town center can be placed in a risky location where it's difficult to defend or it can be placed in a much safer location that's more defensive but perhaps doesn't boost your economy as much man the English flank went Triple Town Center in his base but I just love how like hyper defensive these these three town centers are this guy was taking no chances so this ought to inform your decision making when playing an TS if you see that your opponent is planning an attack build the appropriate defenses and defensive counter units if you see a lot of enemy villagers on gold or stone that's a sign your opponent is planning to invest in either their economy or technology in which case your best option is to attack them you can attack them with a small raiding Force which will be effective or you can go all in on a big attack which can severely punish them if they're not prepared although an fall in attack takes longer to set up which means your opponent will have a greater opportunity to respond and finally if you see your opponent playing defensively by building early walls and outposts respond by building a second town center and doubly invest in your own economy accelerate ahead and then use that economic and Tech advantage to overpower their defenses with a bigger and more upgraded Army your scout is basically your most valuable unit in the early to mid game which is why if you accidentally run it under a town center and it dies you ought to train another one from your town center or a stable yes it might mean you'll have one less villager but the information is worth more if you find yourself up against one of the people who closed the video after the previous section and are currently stomping silver league with their longbowmen choose French perform this basic Night Rush clean up their longbows and crash your Cavalry into their Woodline the last thing that I want to say about strategy is never assume that it's a oneandone affair sure you might have spotted an enemy attack ahead of time and successfully defended your base but the game still isn't over and both you and your opponent still have an opportunity to either double down on or switch your strategies if you're in the position where you successfully defended an opponent's attack your opponent still has options they can either double down and come back in a couple minutes with a bigger attack or they can switch into accelerating the economy instead but you still have the advantage because if you've successfully defended your base you probably still have units hanging around that counter their units as well as some defensive structures so what do you do well if they're planning to try again with a bigger attack then you still need to invest more into defense but because some of the defense that you need is already done you don't need to invest quite as much to be effective and you can instead invest the rest of your resources in either an extra Town Center or advancing your technology on the other hand if your opponent is planning on switching into an economic boom you could switch into an aggressive strategy or you could take advantage of those defensive units that you made earlier and turn them into aggressive units by sending them to the enemy base now you can switch into an economic strategy while the units that you originally made to defend your base now disrupting the enemy economy and slowing them down this is something that I really really want to drill into anyone watching realtime strategy is not a genre where you just pick a strategy and execute it RTS instead asks players to be adaptive and proactive you have to be able to switch your strategy on the Fly and to make adjustments to your strategy based on what you see your opponent doing and this is even before we talk about

== Objectives (other than destroying your opponent's base in feudal age) ==

neutral objectives like resource deposits relics sacred sites choke points and other high priority locations on the map when RTS is at its best it becomes this elaborate free form dance between you and your opponent where the value of your options the structure and pace of a match and even the specific objectives you're both fighting over are completely Dynamic and deter determined by the both of you organically BS are the strongest source of food on land Maps but they're also usually way outside of players bases in dangerous no man's land where if villagers are gathering from it and they get spotted by Cavalry it's a long run back to safety so if a player wants to make a gamble for the boar they can and there are matches where players fight tooth and nail over who gets to gather the boar but at the same time there are also matches is where neither player goes for the boore and it never gets involved at all same goes for relics a very strong source of gold but in order to capture them you need to send a vulnerable monk unit out into No Man's Land again there are matches where players fight tooth and nail over relics and other matches where all five relics sit unclaimed in no man's land forever same goes for sacred sites same goes for trade posts flanks choke points you name it if it's on the map and it can be fought over it might be the most important thing in the entire match or completely irrelevant and you won't know until either of you decides to go for it players choose which objectives they want to go for which makes every match incredibly dynamic do you want to go for trade or relics or boar or fish maybe you want to go for multiple objectives maybe you got prevented from taking one objective so you decide to switch your focus to going for a different one instead how do you think your opponent will respond and how will you protect yourself from their response if you spot your opponent going for trade the ways that you can respond to that are very different to the ways that you could respond to them going for balls or relics or fish or sacred sites or whatever building up your economy in this game doesn't just mean building a second or a third town center and saying come at me bro just like there are many different ways to be aggressive and many different ways to defend yourself there are also many different ways to accelerate your economy centered around various totally optional neutral objectives that only need to be fought over if players choose to go for them even going for Castle age or imperial age is a decision that players have to judge and commit to sometimes players basically skip over feudal age and go straight to Castle age while other times they spend almost the entire game fighting in feudal age sometimes Castle age fights go on forever while other times it's a race to Imperial age sometimes matches are absolute slugfests where both players are throwing wild Haymakers at each other constantly sometimes they're delicate back and forths sometimes they're highly tactical tests of positioning and timing sometimes match are staring contests between two players building up their bases while barely interacting with each other at all both waiting for the other one to make the first move even if this game only had a 1V one mode it would still be incredibly Dynamic and fun and have an amazing amount of variety the fact that it has all of these other ways to play as well is a huge huge oh my God ginormous absolutely big bonus so let's say you've run some

== Ways to play that aren't ranked 1v1 ==

Skirmish matches against the AI or matches with or against your friends maybe you've even taken your chances in quick match or even the ranked ladder you've maybe run a build order maybe you've tried playing aggressive or playing defensive building tall or building wide you've experimented a little with multitasking and you're you know getting the hang of this whole RTS thing so what's the best way to learn and not feel like you're just grinding away in yet another rat race to get good at yet another video game muscle memory is a crucial part in being consistent esport really well there are a lot of things to do in most good RTS games and Age of Empires 4 is no exception as someone who does play a lot of what this game has to offer I can provide a brief assessment first of all

== the campaigns ==

they're all [Applause] the campaigns right they're not as good as age of mythologies campaign enough babbling but if you're looking for a fun way to get used to the basic controls of an RTS they're a great place to start the most fun way to explore and learn the various

== skirmish ==

Civilizations for multiplayer is through either Skirmish or teams versus low-level AI if I just want to chill by myself for 40 minutes and muck around with a Civ that I don't normally run against other players I have a lot of fun sometimes just running free-for-alls against the AI on the map Mega random with various tuning packs so go to Skirmish change the map size to accommodate eight players put seven AIS in the game and set them all to no team change the difficulty to whatever you're comfortable with personally I recommend easy for brand new players choose a map that looks fun choose whichever Civ you want and have a grand old time comp stomping if you have friends who are also learning the game you can party up and start a custom match alternatively if none of your friends are willing to play the game with you but you still want to team up against the AIS there is

== co-op vs ai ==

quick match versus AIS just choose your difficulty and you can get matched up with other people who are looking for teammates to comp stomp with this is the feature that I use the least so I have no idea how populated the queue is but if you just can't find a match in the queue there are usually also team versus AI matches being hosted in custom games as well so if you just want to comp stomp with friends or strangers there are a lot of options and it's probably the most chill way to enjoy the game with other players now if you're new and you want human opponents 1 V one is a

== 1v1 vs humans ==

great way to learn because it's relatively uncomplicated compared to matches with a much larger number of players the game also tends to get balanced primarily around its 1V one mode so if you're the type of player who finds it fun clashing against a human opponent in a fair test of skill this is probably where you'd spend most of your time there's quick match or ranked depending on what flavor of 1 V one you want just know that if you cue into quick match it's far less likely that you'll get matched up with a player who is around your skill level now team

== team games vs humans ==

games are my personal favorite way to play as they retain a lot of the fun of the 1v1 mode but add team coordination and team strategy on huge maps with up to four times as much stuff going on this gives the game even more depth and also makes it more impossible to keep track of everything that's happening what happened to my tri what are my tribs doing what the [ __ ] are my TRS doing team games in aoe4 are incredibly chaotic but also incredibly fun and have way more opportunities for swings and comebacks than 1V one however I would advise against diving into Team game cu's as a newcomer for two reasons firstly team games are way more complicated than 1v1 games so as a newcomer it is more likely that you'll be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff going on or be blind decided by several opponent's armies showing up at your base and not knowing what to do in that situation but the main reason I don't recommend it to newcomers is Team game players are shall we say less Chill on average than the people typically encountered in 1V ons it's unfortunate that gamers in competitive team games are like this because it's actually my favorite way to play and playing as a four stack in aoe4 is extremely fun that being said if you have a play group of at least four friends then absolutely feel free to run some team games amongst yourselves there's literally no downside to that now freefor alls on the other

== free-for-alls vs humans ==

hand are a fantastic way to play multiplayer casually even if you're running solo because they are very silly usually completely unbalanced and nobody expects to win them oh the king oh The King The King manag just oh he pops the movement speed he's out of there see you later mate I'm on to a new I'm on to something better but look at this this is the boiling oil the boiling oil coming through right now and aan and he escapes through to the next one he's making him run the gauntlet right now core he's slowly but steadily losing Health on all these units in a 3 minutes until sacred defeat comes through he works towards the next one he's only got one more keep to go no I take it back he's got another two but the boiling oil look at the boiling oil he it works it's working it's actually working the mad man is doing it's also very funny when you're just chilling in your own little corner of the map and there are several people molding in chat because of some [ __ ] happening somewhere else that you can't see as for playing modded game modes they're very fun and I highly

== mods ==

recommend getting into them even if you're a brand new player if you're interested you don't have to do any fangling to get mods to work as this game has inbuilt mod support that can be accessed from inside the game itself so that's my brief assessment of the modes in Age of Empires 4 if I missed any then the aoe4 community is free to cry about it in my comments section or on the subreddit where it seems like they cry about everything

== Final Thoughts ==

Depending on how much traffic the YouTube algorithm bestows upon this video, I imagine there might be a few opinions about my approach, and that's fine. I'm not like married to this method for onboarding or anything. My primary goal is, well, honestly, to just get more people interested in one of my favorite video games. But my secondary goal is to try and push back on how people typically talk about PVP multiplayer in RTS discourse. So much of the discourse is centered around the PVP being too hard or too fast or too complicated or too competitive, and suggesting ways in which it could be made simpler and easier, or else saying just scrap the PVP entirely and focus exclusively on single player. But RTS games have been made that have multiplayers which are simpler, easier, less punishing, and less complicated, and that doesn't stop people from complaining that the entire genre is too difficult to get into. And that's beside the fact that there do exist PVP multiplayer genres that are just as if not more complicated, fast, and competitive than real-time strategy typically is; and they don't seem to have the same problems. A hyper-competitive multiplayer in one game doesn't kill the entire genre for a decade. A lack of quality doesn't kill the genre for a decade. Very few people complain about a lack of innovation in first-person shooters because they're all about moving around with WASD and clicking on targets with a mouse. I look at these two facts, the fact that there was an effort to make RTS games more accessible, and that the supposed problems that killed RTS games never seem to have that same effect on other genres, and I come away unsatisfied by the explanation that the reason you can't get players into RTS multiplayer is that the genre as a whole is too complicated, fast, hard, or competitive.

That's why I started thinking about onboarding, thinking about the main difference between skillful and unskillful play in a PVP RTS, and eventually coming to the conclusion that the baseline skill of an RTS is multitasking. That learning how to multitask using an RTS control scheme is akin to learning how to navigate a 3D environment with WASD and mouselook. The tutorial that I made for this video was actually based on how I learned Age of Empires II and how I taught my friends Age of Empires IV. When I was first learning AoE2, I watched how pro players played the game and realized very fast that the main way they were controlling it was via snapping between camera locations with control groups. So that's what I decided to practice first. I just played matches against the AI snapping back and forth between my town center and one control group. Which I honestly found very fun and relaxing. It's kind of chill to challenge yourself in this novel way by juggling two simple tasks using this control scheme. I also learned just one build order at the start to take the decision pressure off of me in the early game, which ended up helping me a lot. And it also helped my friends a lot. I taught them English Longbow rush to start, and they used that to win games against human opponents. And then when they felt confident in their abilities, they started learning more build orders and more civs. So this tutorial is based off of what has appeared to work for my friends and me. But I'm honestly very open to suggestions for tweaks or alternative methods for onboarding that other people might have, and I'll be happy to hear about them in the comments. And I should also say that I'm not opposed to the idea of the RTS genre changing. Obviously any genre would get boring and stale if it remained exactly the same forever, and I'm excited to see how how this genre evolves into the future. I'm excited to see where campaigns go, where skirmish modes go, where co-op goes, and, obviously, where mods go. But personally, the thing that I'm excited for the most is to see where the PVP multiplayer goes. Because it's amongst the most fun I've had playing video games, and I'm very happy I gave it a try. Thanks very much for watching this whole video. If you'd like to see more Age of Empires IV content, I can recommend the creators Aussie_Drongo, Age of Noob, BeastyqtSC2, EGCTV, and ChillyEmpire as the best places to start exploring this incredible community. And if you enjoyed this video, then please remember to not smash that subscribe button, because I'm actually a book reviewer, and after this video, I'm going right back to reviewing books. Bye!