Well I don't have to worry because my micro is so bad it's not even effective.

>'Hello, Spirit of the *Log* here' For some reason I keep hearing that Spirit confirmed for being a piece of lumber

he didn't mention the Japanese did he *ILLUMINATY CONFIIIRMED*

Some commenters have pointed out the technical name of one of the phenomena described in the video is "overkill". I also don't want to confuse "focus firing" with other aspects of micro like hit/run and patrol, which isn't being looked at in this video. I've changed the title from "When NOT to Micro" to "Overkill and Focus Firing" so it won't be confused with any future videos I might make on other aspects of micro. Thanks for the comments, feedback, and support. You all make me a better man...er..KZfaqr.

The depth of a game that originally came out in 1999, no wonder aoe 2 can still compete with modern RTS games.

This guy's voice really relax me, i use it to fall asleep. Amazing videos btw really good channel subscrited and liked

so cav archers actually nock and then draw and then fire mangudai basically hurl their arrows and then the uselessly fiddle around with their bows until they hurl the next arrow at least that is what their animation is showing

"Never use anything you learn in these videos against me." Lol

Interesting video. I haven't played Age of Empires 2 in a long time, but watching these videos bring me back.

Man, this happened to me many times on naval battles. I was like "I can't be THIS bad at microing ships, they're not so different". Maybe I'm still bad but thanks to you, I got science backing me up.

Very good information. Never underestimate the value of the work you do for us Spirit.

It seems like the best solution in a large archer duel would be to micro a small number of them in the back rows where they won't get quickly auto-targeted and use them to focus fire while everyone else auto-targets. Best of both worlds, at least in situations where it really, really counts.

Dont even play AOE but still cant resist watching you're videos. Keep upp the good work and have a good holiday :D

4:33 One idea I had recently, is that you have one big group, then just a few ranged snipers on a separate focused firing group. Try to scale the size of this group to the target you're trying to focus down and make sure to choose a new target before you overkill, but get them close enough for the scattered shots to actually finish the job. Alternatively, maybe shift-rmb queues could be a feasible way to have like 3 separate groups all focusing specific targets, but one issue is those numbers change thx to the enemy's dmg, maybe over-shoot the size a bit and be ready to sometimes reassign groups to scale efficiently again. I think I'll try the sniper technique first, seems easiest to wrap my head around and adapt to a dynamic situation. I think in some cases I will just spread my attacks as normal, then just drag a small section of that army to focus without even using a control group, a benefit being that you can rescale it to the target you're focusing each time, but I like the idea of a separate group when I want to make basically constant use of it.

That music In the background fits the video so much. I love it, its like your a physics teacher who's into Piano Music.

Micro has two components- movement and focus fire. we are mainly talking about focus fire here. You can dodge the mangonel shots with movement, and press stop rather than click to fire. This might give better results as they would fire instantly rather than perhaps move to position into fire at a target currently not in range You can try making a test with using a big group, but only controlling a group which the estimated volley would barely kill one enemy unit. Any stragglers which may not be killed by each focus volley can be picked off by the non-focusing units. This is why you would focus the front ones first and move on to the next after one volley,

i know its an old video but in starcraft when you micro you dont just focus fire, you pull back damaged units and after they dont have aggro anymore you issue an attack command so they avoid beign killed and you keep fire power

I always really look forward to the next civ overview, I think I can safely assume a lot of people do, but scientific questions like these are what really make me love your work. I've been playing around with the "attack move" button, and I wonder if it is the best micro for large groups of archers. Since the ultimate goal of attacking with archers is to keep them attacking for the duration of the battle, the player has the problem of somehow keeping the units in the back occupied when they run out of range. You could move the whole formation at once, but that wastes the time of units in the front who already had viable targets. I've observed some success using "attack move," where the archers in the back automatically start moving to whatever point I selected and automatically engaging targets in range rather than having them idle in the back. Units sort of do that anyway, but I think the "attack move" makes the movement more consistent. Food for thought!

I've always gruped my ranged units into smaller numbers of 10 -10 or so, it's funny how 10 years later or so you just confirmed it is the best move.

Thanks for the videos broski, i watched all of them and i consider myself a big fan!

Nice Video, pls keep making them!

Holly crap i love that music 😀😁

Hey Spirit, don't know if you want to mention this in one of your videos while we're on the topic, but I discovered a while back that pikemen benefit *immensely* from micro. It's often hard to pull off with lag, but you can greatly improve pike survival against elite war elephants by ordering to stab once, and then run while their cooldown recovers. Remember that they attack about half as fast as other units, so if you micro them to bring the exchange to 1:1 instead of 1:2, you can get a lot more use out of them. Also, they have a very short 'windup' so they can first-hit weakened units, killing them while remaining untouched if you do it right. I killed 20 swordsmen with one pike using that effect. Try pitting several pikemen against a mob of elite war elephants, with and without micro, the results are pretty substantial and worth mentioning imo.

Your final word. . . My man I love your videos! You help the community get better and stronger, but I statistically speaking, it’s unlikely you will meet more than a handful of us on the AOE battle field! Love your work and keep up with the awesome content!

This is really insightful.

Hey Spirit, now that's a nice topic. Could you do one about how to obtain the best results when two big melee forces engage? Also, Happy Holidays dude!

Great Video! I would really love to see some gameplay commentaries of your games again :)

The technical (gaming) term for this effect is called "overkill damage", and you're correct in trying to minimize it whilst reducing the unit count of your opponent's army asap.

That's a really interesting analysis, SOTL. Thanks. :) Big armies have new rules that apply simply because of their sheer numbers. Wow!

Some other things not accounted for: - When focus firing a unit that is not in range of all of your units, you'll end up with lost attack time while your units get in range (you can see this happen at the end of your cav archer vs cav archer tests) - Attack animation resets. This is a big thing in sc2 (I think you can end up with thors that never shoot by clicking between two different enemy units rapidly). Don't know if/how this happens in AOE2, but it would be worth investigating. There are times where it looks like you are interrupting your units' attacks by right clicking on a target they are already attacking.

I dont even play the game anymore, still watch every video of yours. Haha

I always split fire in this situation so I have ~30-50% of my squad selected to micro and the rest free fire so you can punch out counter units and other important people

Spirit please make a video on cav archers, the heavy cav archer upgrade seems pretty expensive to me, so I would like to know when is it wort it

Thats why I click the closest one when out of range WHEN moving in, so any ranged unit will shoot when in range meanwhile the rest is still not in range, I wait until the unit is dead then I click another target, by that time the reloads are intercalled

The rule of thumb is you dont "micro" your groups of units in imp when you are fighting another similar group, and neither in castle once you have ballistics. Besides the regular micro, with big groups it is still possible to micro in castle or feudal if you split them in 2 and micro kill 2 units at a time (even with ballistics), but leave that to the pros.

amazing video

This is why when I group number even portions of a group of archers. Sure it is more work but if you can do it correctly you can focus fire on multiple targets provided you know how many you need to still kill said unit with one volley.

I'd love love with you post some 1v1 games of your own!

Love this "Let's check it out" just perfect :D

I'd say is correct to assume: 1. Focus fire when you cannot beat an enemy with one single hit (Xbows vs mangonels, Xbows vs knights...) to concentrate the damage effectively. 2. Overkill when you have a large army that can kill one enemy with a single hit (equal numbers fight, archers vs pikes, skirms vs archers, etc...) to spread the damage effectively. But do micro at all times. Issue your orders, watch closely and adapt to the situation.

Good to see I don't have a habit of focus fighting except with seige

I'm wondering what are the mechanics behind using multiple monks to make a conversion? is there a point where extra monks make no difference? and when units are being converted the seem to move slower, wondering if they attack slower too

Nice video Spirit. I think you may be able to follow this up by talking about how to micro big groups of units. IE grouping you're army into two groups and setting them as 1 and 2 so that you can focus fire more than one at a time allowing you to still benefit from micro. another way you could micro is letting them auto target and just select units with tab as they die to maintain enough units selected to one shot. Fingers crossed ;)

Nice video! This might be a bit late(like 5 years) but I think there is another possibility apart from more micro and no micro choices we should consider. And that is microing part of our army. For the Turks vs Huns cavalry archer situation if we just grab approximately 2/3 of our army ( which is 14 or 15 cavalry archers) we would deal around 100 damage to one of their units + another 40 damage to all of their army. In this scenario our army waste about 20 damage to overkill instead of 60 and we will reduce their total damage over time without quickly losing our critical mass(20 lost damage creates some sort of buffer for our critical mass which also reduces micro). So with that we manage to reduce enemies damage output and total unit number without a dramatic effect to our micro and damage output( we can just grab 2/3 of our army without much trouble and if we lose our critical mass we can just select all of our army and overall per volley we just lose 15-30 damage). And also we can think of microing as a process. Maybe we should start with selecting part of our troops as I mentioned, and then transition to all of our army and then finally(after we lose our critical mass) we should abandon micro completely. With that said I didn't test this little idea of mine and if you ever consider returning to this topic I think this deserves a thought. edit: pharagraphs.

One thing which might come into effect as well might be the distance. The units pick the closest target and therefore have a bigger chance of hitting

It is basically like this; wasted arrows. When the enemy dies from the first 8-10 arrows from focus firing, the rest are wasted on pretty much a corpse, while the enemy is doing a constant streamline of damage buy letting the units fire automatically.

I guess what one could do is to take a sub-group (as many as needed to one-shot an enemy unit, not more) and use those to focus-fire the enemy units in the back line (i.e. the ones not targeted by "nearest enemy"), and let the other units do their "pick nearest enemy unit" thing. This way you reduce the enemy's fire power fast, while also not having overkill (wasting damage). Or for micro-gods (or people programming an AI): have several groups which each can one-shot enemy units, use them separately to focus-fire enemy units. Re-group when your groups become too small to one-shot enemy units.

This is exactly like the how much villagers you should send to build houses the more shots spread the more effective but in smaller battles that might change it also depends on if its archers vs archers or archers vs melee

God I love this show

Nice video I been playing AoE3 and got to wondering just the same thing, without doing an testing and only applying logic I came to the same conclusion of very likely lots of lost damage potential.

THIS INTRO

That's why I always micro 10 units at most when picking targets with ranged units vs large armies

Very interesting to see an mathematically proven answer to this topic. I'm curious to see the efficiency of patrol fighting (like in CBA) and stacked up archers/soldiers against non-stacked up units.

SOTL: One thing I noticed in this video is that both in the testing & your gameplay, the enemy archers were the only enemies within firing range. The main downside to letting the AI take control is that if you were in his position (Raiding an enemy base) the each individual archer would go after the nearest enemy, unless they were getting fired on. So 25% of his army would attack that mil,l farms, or any nearby villagers, until the rest was shot down.

while on this subject, you should look into the effectiveness of attack movement in engagements vs micro.

sorry if it was suggested before, i dont read comments, but i think a combination of the two tactics would work best. i mean that you micro manage a small group that deals damage just to weaken the enemy unit and bring it to low health without killing it, then you target another unit and your other units can then target the damaged enemy unit by themselves - in a sense they micromanage themselves.

And this is why I prefer micro managing Elite Mangudai, because there the trick is to keep moving. The fact that they shoot instantly means that they spend very little time stopped to shoot, and they can effectively dodge most return fire.

I think there's something to be said about focus firing with units that have multiple arrow shots and the potential for spread damage, e.g. the Chu Ko Nu still hitting multiple targets even when "over killing" due to the number of arrows and not having 100% accuracy. I think you could cleverly micro a greater path of destruction than allowing auto attacks, but that's very situational.

hey spirit, can u make a video about the hotkeys you use in the game? would apreciate that a lot, thanks mate very nice videos

I usually micro micro, like when you have 20, split them into two and let ten focus on one, and the other ten, another one, or you can divide them by three, about seven a group.

Thank you, since i start to watch your videos i improve my game, your an amazing teacher. Pd: whats te name of the song that you use as opening? (Btw, Im from argentina, sorry if my english isnt good)

thx well done

This is particularly true with melee units and onagers.

I large groups of ranged units, I just select a group that takes exactly 3 volleys to kill and focus fire while having the rest just pick their own.

Nice video man. Must have finally beat Fallout 4? haha

what i like to do is hotkey the whole goup, and then hotkey a couple smaller parts of that group as well, so i tap 1 for whole unit, 2/3 for the subunits, and have the whole unit move to the area, while i micro the sub units to give the unit as a whole an edge. this doesnt really work for many matchups, like against onegers, but for ship battles or same unit battle i find it can give me a huge edge. its hard to choose whens the right time to do it though since while im doing that im not elsewhere on the map being more useful, and i find the 3 mintues im staring at the battle can hurt my economy if it happens to be re-seed time or something. how to do it without waste: is to get in sync with your attack animation. a kinda "3 shoot wait 2 shoot" like youre playing the piano? if you have a larger battle, it can be better to let the whole unit choose targets, while using a sub unit or 2 to snipe valuable target. though i feel like this is something a lot of players do anyway.

i always compensated for this by second nature while playing, only focus firing with say half the formation and letting the other half let out a constant stream.

Hi Spirit, before any thing, nice videos! Pretty cool (and helpful) your approaches and testing. In this one I had a doubt. Since you figure it out that micro you waste some shots, why not trying micro only 12, or what I think it will be better, 6? When you tried with 2 groups, of course the human element got in the way, double focusing was difficult. But I still think with you only micro one group (between 6-12) and let the other for the AI perhaps you'll achieve better results? What you think?

if u need 10 shots for one hit kills, take 14 (in case some of them get taken out) of your ranged units in a control group and the rest in another. Micro the 14 to shoot at full health units past enemy frontline and let the rest go on a rampage, preferably in front of the ones being told what to shoot at.

curiosity can get a horse archer killed

haha love the last comment of not using things against you! off topic tho in terms of melee, i wonder at what point you're better off letting them scatter into someone's base so they have to hunt you down as opposed to microing on units or buildings, i think the walk time into position would probably be most important

Seems like the best combo would be to select only the number of your units that it takes to one-shot one enemy unit, focus-fire with those (probably on enemies at the back who aren't being auto-targeted, or on those with highest health) and let the rest of your units autofire? That way you're reducing their strength with every shot without wasting any shots. Similar to the multiple-groups strategy but with less micromanagement, basically.

I will DEFINITELY consider that in sea battles... :O

One way to mitigate the overkill while still using micro is to micro a part of your army while letting the rest pick their own targets. It would take practice to figure out the number of units you should be microing in different situations. What you'd want to do is have a large enough group to one shot enemies without too much overkill. If your micro group starts to fall short, just target units that are close to full health in the frontline, so that your non-microed units will finish them off.

Good raiding tip

great video, as always. 3:40 exactly what I was thinking looking at your real-game example. you negate the 20 hp bonus because instead of distributing damage evenly over his units you switch to turn-based where you're trading one large volley for one large volley that's more than 100hp anyway. he gets a damage cap of 100 and you of 80 even though you could be doing the 147 you mention at 6:45. for this reason I'm not sure your conclusion at 7:30 about it being better to focus fire as army sizes go down makes sense; it's really only as /your/ army size goes down that it gets better-as the ratio of possible damage output of your army to the (remaining hp of one enemy unit goes down.

At 3:20, you say some viewers had some idea. Well, I think my playing Pokemon strategically helped me out. On Pokemon, you don't always look at how much damage you deal, but how many hits you need to kill your opponent. In your example (0:58), We could see these stats: your units: 21, with 100 HP / 11 Atk and 6 Def his units: 20 with 80HP / 11 Atk and 4 Def This means with micro, you deal (11-4)*21 damage, which is 147, while he deals (11-6)*20, which is 100. Of course, this would change as soon as one unit is killed, but still, you could argue you deal 1.5 the damage, however both of you OHKO one unit at a time (this gets to the overkill you spoke about), and this is why you don't win by a large amount of units. In Pokemon, it usually doesn't matter whether you deal 60% or 80% damage. In both cases, you 2HKO. On a completely different matter, thanks for your vids, man. This is entertaining, and you got me to get AoE on steam (well, you also got me to get a steam account to do so) so I could play this game I used to play when I was 10. And that is so much fun ^^ Keep it up

Nice!!!

Ive always del chat focus fire os more effective when using rapid fire units like te Mangudai or the Kipchak because you can do hit and run tactics and so as you retreat or move and fire they dont waste too much time reloading and so your enemy looses a lot of units chasing after you

Basically, if your targets are dying with one volley, you're wasting a bunch of shots. You've eliminated a single attack at the expense of several of yours.

This works to this is. awsome👌

That last line was kinda Chad ngl

Can you do a vid on attack move

I love you, man. I fuckin love your videos. MATH THE SHIT OUT OF THIS GAME

what about letting them be but taking a small group (preferably not in the front line) for microing the back ones in the enemy line? That's what i like to do, so my units in the front soak up dmg and distribute the damage on the enemy front line while my back line focuses down the enemy's hiding behind Don't know if it works very well but that was my tactic until now.

It'd be interesting to see how this can transfer between games. I tend to focus fire in SCII and I lose a lot, I wonder if I'm just wasting my time doing that

Well isn't that a thing nearly every commentator says when these smaller galley fights turn into these mass galleon fights with 30-40 units on each side? But you explained it quit well, this wasted damage output n stuff ;) nice video. Btw, are you planning on doing an in depth look at the monk and maybe the different civ bonuses? I know, much randomness going in there, but that's a mathematic topic too right? :D

I believe once you and your enemy have ballistics, you pull back the damaged CA's and try to snipe some of the enemy's damaged CA's.

just an idea what about letting all fire at will except maybe 3 or4 -something that will take it to about one hit so the ones firing at will ...would have already hit it

have you done a video about the american civilizations? I'm enjoying a lot playing with astecs, mayans and incas, all of them have eco bonuses and are pretty stronger. (discovering civs that not japanese, my fav civ too, dunno if they'll be my fav civ if i keep playing this american civs for too long)

Is the correct answer to split your cavarchers into two halves, letting the first group shot at will, while micromanaging the second group to focus fire on the enemy in the back row? This way the AI controlled group would auto-fire at the front line (as they always do), lowering them down, while your controlled group would snipe down the back row of enemy units.

how do you do the "split" command, in order to avoid projectiles?

Once lots of units die, then you can focus fire.

Can you do a video on fighting against onagers. My friend loves to use them and I need a strategy against them.

What civ would you want to do next?Also, when is it the right time to use druzhina? Like the ideal troop output. Becuse i am mostly a slav player

Please do a review of the Turks, Spirit :) Thank you very much for this video! Keep up the good work!

you seem to imply micro is selecting all units to attack one, what if you select half or a third to attack one, and then another half or third, etc., to go for the single kill + damage by the others?

I think you wanna micro so that each shot deals exactly enough damage to kill the unit. So in this case with 20 cav archers, why no let 8 fire at will, and micro the 12 remaining cav archers.

you could just also select a group of archers (at the back) that match the attack you need to take an enemy down and let the rest attack what they want?

big groups fighting against big groups is all about patrolling