Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition

Overall seetings:

map-type: mountain range (the one with only a small passage between the sides.
map size: mico or small
victory: your choice
ressourcess: maximum
map: uncovered/everything visible
age: depending on mastery-stage
[usefull map-seed: 3d335fea]

faction... well, ottomans

If the challenge does not require you to kill any enemy units, you can do them in a game without enemy. Just Select skirmisch and start the game alone. But since there are achievments linked to winning games, I would recomment to add at least an easy AI enemy.



Tactics [If you are playing vs. hard and very hard AI]

Overall goal:
Choose Abasides as enemy faction and select Wonder+Landmark victory.
The AI tends to bunker of its Wonder and place nearly all its troops next to it. YOu can exlpoid this, if you just mass up a middle to big army and walk into its base via the backdoor to destroy its two landmarks (Abasides only have 2 landmarks, so this is the easiest in terms of targets to destroy. Try not to pass the wonders location with your army, since pulling theire aggro is the only way to fail this.

Early-game:
Select 2 of your workers and send them to the middle of the map to build a stonewall. This closes the gap and prevents the AI from rushing.

Meanwhile, build more workers. I like to build 10. the first one build is send of to a the closest corner of the map (on your side) and has to build 19+ houses using Q+Q and then queue them up with shift+left mouse.
This will max out your population cap.

The other workers are used to build archerys, stables and barracks. Building those in the middle allows you to produce closer to the enemy. First should be archery to defend the wall. Then you can basicly do as you please and use a combination that counters your opponents.

Dont forget to tech your units via foundrys and universitys, as well as to build artillery to get rid of buildings faster and most importantly to destroy enemy Keeps.

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Trade & Bustle
Construct a Sultanhani Trade Network and garrison Traders within it to maximum capacity.

Tactic:
start 1st age
level 2nd age choosing the "Trading Post"
build 4 traiders and garisson them in the Trading Post

You are done. Now you can win toe game to get progress on:

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Eat, Drink, & Be Berry
Construct a Twin Minaret Medrese and harvest 2,000 Food.

Tactic:
start 1st age
level 2nd age choosing "Twin Minaret"
after a few secounds, the building will spawn 4 berry bushes, one after another.
select 3 wokers and set them to harvest those 4 bushes. They respawn.
Wait till you have 2000 Food collected. [You can use other sources as well.]

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Test of Strength I
Win a 1v1 Custom or Skirmish match against the Easy A.I.

Tactic:
Play. You win if you dont AFK for 10 minutes.
[Trivia: I wrote this guide playing a intermediate AI and had no problem AFKing for 3-5 minutes sets after the wall was build. So easy AI should be impossible to loose unwillingly]

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By Wing And Hoof
Defeat 15 ranged enemies with Sipahis affected by Fortitude.

Tactic:
1.1 choose a opposing faction that builds archers. I used the English.
(1.2) If you got problems with the opponent not building archers, look for another human to play with
E.g. using this link: https://www.trueachievements.com/creategamingsession.aspx?ga...
or use my guide for this achievement (Thanks to FuzzyRabbidDogg for pointing this out):

2. Start 2nd age
3. Build Siphahis
4. As the approach enemy archers, you can activate their ability via mouseclick or Q.
5. repeat until you kill 15 archers, or go for more to make sure the game tracks it correctly

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Grand Council
Research 5 Imperial Council bonuses before reaching Age IV.

Tactic:
1. Start 1st Age and play normal till you reach 3rd age.
2. Build a lot of unity to gain vizier points.
3. Spend them unlocking the Council bonuses (left corner of your Screen)
4. Do till you have 5
5. Upgrade to 4th Age

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Bards of Battle
Have 10 Mehters playing their war drums simultaneously.

Tactic:
1. Start in 2nd age
2. Build 10 Mehters in the stabels

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Test of Strength II
Win a 1v1 Custom or Skirmish match against the Intermediate A.I.

Tacitc: Play. You should not need special tactics, but the one provided under "overall" youd help if you got trouble.

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Military Training
Construct at least 3 Military Schools and produce 100 units from them.

Tactic:
1. Start in 1st age.
2. Build a Military school and keep building them (you unlock one "slot" to build one every age.
3. wait till you have 100 units. To count them you can send the destination point to a corner and have them build a unit typ you dont normaly use. This way you can keep track.
4. Use your Imperial Council points to unlock bonuses for the Military Schools. (2nd row left, 3rd row left)
5. Wait/play till you got 100

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Bullet Hail
Repair 5 siege units with janissaries.

Tactic:
1. build any siege units
2. build some janissaries (and a small group of units/an army)
3. set the siege units to go ahead and get hit by enemies.
4. keep the units close together.
5. once the artillery gets hit, draw them back and place the army in between/defend them.
6. let the janissaries repair them

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Swift Winds
Research the Imperial Fleet upgrade, then construct 10 Cannon Ships.

Tactic:
1. change the map to one with a water area.
2. build a dock/some docks
3. research the upgrade
4. build 10 Caravels (at least that was the name in the german version of the game. Tho make shure just build 10 of every ship)

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Test of Strength III
Win a 1v1 Custom or Skirmish match against the Hard A.I.

Tacic: Play and use the tactics under "overall" if you got trouble. Better be agressive and kill of some of his workers as you got 3-6 cavallery units.

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On the Move
Construct the Sea Gate Castle Landmark and have 5 buildings providing Trade Protection.

Tactic:
1. Start in 3rd age
2. Build Sea Gate Castle to upgrade to 4th age.
3. Build 5 Keeps.

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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School of Thought
Construct the Istanbul Observatory and produce 100 units.

Tactic:
1. Start in 3rd age
2. Build Observatory to upgrade to 4th age.
3. Build 100 units.

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Bombastic
Destroy 3 enemy Keeps with the Great Bombard

Tactic:
1. Choose a Ai that you can easily handle, that rebuilds keeps. [For me the fastes rebuilds happened with hard AI]
2. Destroy their keep with the bombardes.
3. Retrait and wait till the AI rebuilds it.
4. Repeat

You are done. Now you can win the game to get progress on:
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Test of Strength IV
Win a 1v1 Custom or Skirmish match against the Hardest A.I.

Tactic:
1. remember that you can change you unit composition to adapt to the enemy. Very hard AI tends to adapt to you after 1-2 attacks.
2. Play as stated in "overall" and wall off as fast as you can (2-3 workers going to the middle). Play aggressive with your first cavallery and kill of some workers. Mass up a force with cav+archers+bombardes/trebuchets.
If you keep building units endlessly from 6-10 buildings each and have your buildings close to the middle, you should always "out-produce" the AI, since it tends to only build from 2-3 buildings per unit type.
Kepp in mind, that 5-10 artillery units should be enouth.
3. Dont rush after the AI units, rather defend your slowly advancing artillery as they kill of his buildiungs. Prioritise Keeps with the artillery and units with your infantary and chavallery. Only attack buildings with your non-siege units if you got no enemys-units in sight/attack range.
4. Good luck!

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Well done!

Hi all,
Apologies in advanced for my misspelling and probably a bit structureless English, also sometimes a bad translation because I have the game in Spanish and the buildings' names are different.

For the Hardest A.I. match, I tried doing something AOE's 2 and 3 enemies also have problems with, which is travelling across the sea to another island. I've played this with Very High resources, and starting from the 1st age, so there's a bit of challenge. The map is War Islands (I guess that's the name, Islas en Guerra in Spanish), the 3r map starting from the bottom, and you should deactivate the holy victory.

Basically you want to rush ages until the 4th and build a Wonder at the corner of the map. But while ageing up, send a few workers to build a wall around your island, and you leave a space near your town center, where you build a couple of Keeps (so the wall isn't closed). Build some infantry, cavalry and siege buildings, and make some cannons or bombards; some cavalry and basic infantry, and send them all near the keeps. Also build some war ships as you will get attacked by enemy ships.
The enemy will unload some of their units with ships onto your island, it's quite impossible to prevent that, so that's why you need to build your wall ASAP. They might get stucked and/or bugged and won't walk until the entrance of your wall, specialy is there's space for the ships to unload but the space between the wall and the sea gets narrower until you can't walk trough, but if they do you can have your keeps full of workers, and all your army in the front. It's important you build bombards or cannons (this is not only applied to Ottomans, other civilizations can make cannons; I've completed French and English mastery so far) and send them to the front, this way you can kill a few incoming ships and some infantry.
It is also important that there's a hole in your wall, so that enemy units try to go and destroy your wonder through there; otherwise you risk getting your wall destroyed from different points and enemies entering your island and going directly towards your wonder.


EXTRA INFO

In AOE 2 there's also a map with 2 islands, one for each team; where I played a game some years back and I found out that my island was huge (around 80% of the map), and the enemy's was very narrow (about 5% of the map), so they couldn't really develop, and they got stucked there with less than 10 buildings and almost no army, also there were very little resources on the island. That seemed a bit strange but obviously a bug.

Also for those who played AOE3 (the 2007 one), I played against the hardest A.I. in the Caribe map, where there's 3 islands, one for each team and one with only the commercial route and the Caribbean native villages. Basically at age 2 I sent my explorer there and build on all the commercial route places and native villages, and in 5 minutes I won for Commercial Monopoly (you need to age up more for that to start). When I went to see what the enemy was doing (I played me vs 3), it had quite a huge army on their island, and some fortress defense near the coast, so it was almost impossible to reach it with my ships without getting them all sanked. Anyway, all the enemy units were near the coast, but seemed uncapable to get on their ships and go to the 3rd island to destroy all my commercial buildings. Definitively some kind of bug.

So when I was doing the Hardest A.I. achievement in AOE4 I thought of giving it a try and mess a bit with the A.I., making them board all units on ships to invade my island, and succeeded.


Anyway, long explanation but I wanted to share this tip with other players! ;)