we need it for sure!!!

it's a trade off. Going onto deer exposes your villagers against a civilisation with feudal age knights. This may feed jeanne experience which we want to avoid. With our early horsemen we are still somewhat able to punish blind expansion out onto the map. The farms are also very efficient for Byzantines. You get 20% additional resources as olive oil, gather 5-25% faster with cistern and +15% with horticulture upgrade in feudal age. you also only pay 60 wood per farm instead of 75. So you trade off your wood for olive groves and instead of using that wood for archer production you instead use the olive oil that you generate for ranged units instead, which you can then use to snipe out jeanne.

I've dabbled with that myself and the big issue is that Javelin Throwers are very micro dependent. If you aren't hitting the archers, you're losing out big time. So A-moving into a big fight is a huge loss of dps. Whereas longbows are effective against archer mass and especially into picking out spears. Just better at dealing with frontline in general.

This is what I was theorycrafting as well. Go heavy in limitanei to counter knights and then javs to counter the archers that follow. It’s much less resource intensive than horseman… however you do lose the ability to hunt Jeanne down when she’s hunting in the beginning like what crackedy did here

I've watched probably 20 Byz replays in the past few days trying to analyze how best to play it and I still haven't seen a KZfaqr pick Silk Road mercs a single time. I saw Eastern mercs picked in a couple of older videos but nothing from the past few days. Haven't seen anyone check a trade post to see what random mercs were available outside a 'faction mechanics introduction' video either. I think people have forgotten you can get things besides longbows? I think if you're playing against a civ that's guaranteed going to send armored cavalry at you in age II you probably don't want to ever get into a pitched battle with them with horsemen and longbows, two units that get countered by armored cavalry. IMO you should in general avoid picking Western mercs against civs with armored units in age II. If you pick the Hippodrome then you could pick the Eastern contract and get Keshiks, quickly mass cav from both the Hippodrome and the Merc House, and then slam Triumph before going in at the opponent's hero & any royal knights with superior numbers. With Grand Winery you could go for Silk Road and counter the opponent's knight/archer comp with limitanei/javelins.

i like LBs a lot due to their active ability once you reach imperial age. Silk road definetly works as well and synergizes nicely since you get camel riders in castle age. Both western and silk road are an excellent option. I don't recommend going for the eastern contract even with hippoedrome, since you will need a ranged unit to snipe jeanne with.

@@CrackedyCrackCrack I see, thanks. I guess it's a nice powerspike, you have to go foreign engineering everytime in this case then I suppose. What's your ideal early mid imperial army ?

i don't have an xbox so i have no way of knowing.

Does it work on Playstation?

@@karstenkroll287 Age of Empires 4 only exists on Xbox and PC. it's working on PC. if you can't get it to work on Xbox i recommend opening a ticket or write in the official AoE Forums.

cistern doesnt improve recruiting time of villagers

It depends on the mercenarys that you get in the markets. Royal knights are very nice. Desert raiders also add a lot of value.

Either Opponent should have gotten more kills with their knights, or they should've been guarding jean and guaranteeing the boars. Even if they lose her its not an issue, so long as she farming xp.

The Boar denying is literally the gameplan. That has nothing to do with luck. I talk about that in the video as well. The 1 vill loss was also absolutely avoidable on my part. What you want is a byzantine comeback not a match on equal footing, which is understandable. Would make for a very nice game.

Missplayed as in units were out of position. I go over all the things that i'd do slightly different in review, which i still think makes this a very good example of how to play this matchup. I don't really understand the issue here i'm afraid.