Naaahh, just Tatoh, who is super chill and easygoing. The rest are a bunch of arrogant stiffs full of themselves, they'll never give this guy an interview.
@@dondeestaCarter Are the top level players really that isolated from the community that they wouldn't know of spirit of the law and these sorts of videos? That kind of arrogance is not the impression of top level players that I've gotten from watching t90 videos. Albeit the most recent pro player game I saw was mbl vs daut where daut fell for the old "has advanced to the imperial age" trick. Not even correctly spelled or punctuated either.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of top players who would participate in a SOTL video^^ They are very well connected with the comunity - I mean e.g. a bunch of them streams regulary^^ And TBH not sure if Donde is trolling or not 11
Chinese start takes a lot of micro to get right. It's the most difficult to minimise idle time for. Lower level players simply can't take advantage as much.
As soon as you're good enough to not be a vil behind the bonus will be pretty good as there are vils out longer gathering res. However the lack of starting food can not be compensated for fully no matter how good of a start. That's why the chinese don't favor drush + FC strats. You'll see them often go feudal.
@@majungasaurusaaaa you literally use your starting food to make vills if you stick them all on sheep from the get go then by the time you finish researching loom you'll be able to start making more vills
@@majungasaurusaaaa Assuming you have a villager lead, that lack of starting food can be compensated for. Noting that in reality it is only a -50 food cost, as 150 of the 200 goes to the 3 villagers, that would mean if you manage to keep a 1 villager lead, the food is paid off for in less than 3 minutes. The wood cost is similar. So as long as you keep a 1 villager lead, the resources are paid off within 6 minutes, or 9 if you also include the cost to build a farm. And the time when you have a 2 or 3 villager lead just further reduces that time. There is also the advantage of the extra villagers at the start meaning less decay on the meat. The reason they don't go for a drush is because that is very early on. You should have your militia near the enemy village before you are compensated for the lower resources.
I would chalk up the difference between Chinese win rates among pros and everyone else to three things; 1. Pros better use the early Chinese economic bonuses to snowball their economy. 2. Pros make better use of the wide variety of unit options the Chinese tech tree grants. 3. Pros are far better at microing the Chu-ko-nus to devastating effect.
I don't really see how it is a burn. It is a high correlation in this context. What is high depdens on what is being studied. By the very nature of what is being studied, most social sciences will naturally have lower correlation.
Many pros understand that the games they thrive at don't exist without a strong community to support them (which RUclips is good for helping to build). Anything they can do to bolster game popularity can eventually help their pocketbook, and a healthy community also gives you more people to compete against/learn from. It's also great karma to give back to something that gives you value.
He nailed it early on with the pro maps that they've been using... Having a sheep under your TC to begin with eliminates so much stress and allows them to capitalise on the six villager start.
What Tatoh said about the diffrent Maps is really important. A year ago most standard maps and Arabia variations introduced the starting sheep under the TC which should limit annoying RNG and that really helpen Chinese. When before they clipcked Feudal Age with 0,5-1 Vil advantage (with a small propability of a complete titanic in Dark Age) now they have consistently 1-2 vil advantage which is a huge deal. On lower leves the 1 vil is not that huge and the start is not so sharp that it makes a huge diffrence if they have the sheep or not. if they even have the maps that have the starting sheep. i bet most players on 1600 dont.
Starting with one sheep close to the TC makes a huge difference. If you start producing villagers ~15s later, you do not only delay your seventh villager, but you also delay every single one that follows after. Therefore you`re not losing only 15s villager work time but 15s for every single villager.
I would say Chinese on El Dorado is one of the most OP civs since you start with all that fish next to your TC, plus instead of 3 vills working, you have 6 vills gathering food right off the bat, giving you crazy vill leads and Feudal times.
Experts play differently than noobs, so can take great advantage from original advantages. Pretty sure "white have a advantage in chess" is null for chess noobs.
In the end tho; pro chess games still are: Play black: be wary as fuck, try to foresee enemy plays Play white: still be wary as fuck, try to foresee enemy plays
Marketing tip: next time you have a pro player on, put them on the title. I wasn't really gonna watch this one (topic didn't really interest me) but ended up doing it anyway cuz I was kinda bored. However, if I had seen "ft. Tatoh" or " with Tatoh interview" or something similar in the title I would've clicked when I first got the notification lol. Keep it up, amazing video as always. +++ for the subtitles.
I really like the style of this video. Sometimes pure stats and math seem a little lifeless but the opinion of a pro player can bring up some viewpoints that you might have not thought about. Pls bring more interviews if you can
I knew this all along. Thanks for confirming, Spirit of the Law and TaToH! There had to be reasons why the Chinese civilization was chosen so many times in Hidden Cup 2.
Quality content here, didn't expect anything less from SOTL. Not only he provided some very interesting statistics, he also interviewed one of the top players to add even more value to the video. This is why we love you SOTL (just please include the intro next time, we love it too)
Hmm, this gave me a bit to think about. (I would be on the lower end rating for sure and as I mentioned before, I chose to main chinese civ because of your suggestion.) I already knew Chu Ko Nu were very strong. However, I never really thought about scouts as something to go into. (Makes sense with the farm bonus.) Also, I must have missed/forgot about the HP on Bombard Towers. I honestly thought Byzantines would have the most overall. (I was wrong. I should consider making more of those as well.) As for the cheaper techs thing, I used to wait on them but a friend told me, you are better off getting them ASAP. (Tatoh seems to agree.) It still can be a nice backup for lower rated players to get them later for cheaper in case they forget or something forces them to age up first without them. Anyway, thanks for the video SotL. :D
Me: Okay that's enough statistics learning for today, let's watch some RUclips. Spirit of the Law: Rank Correlation...Chi-Square Me: Okay let's do some more statistics!
I never post comments on RUclips but I have to say thanks for the amazing videos. I've found your channel like 2 weeks ago and have been watching your stuff every day, not even joking. You're fucking amazing man keep up the great work :)
Why upgrade to Hussars? You trade speed atk speed for more health and damage when in reality you’re just getting worse light cavalry in the long run. Sure they hit the hardest, but what are you doing throwing them at knights and pikes when you should be putting them to killing siege and archers? Wasting them.
It's the only trash unit that can do decently against a lot of the gold units. Amazing raiding tool; as a such, having a bit more HP makes the raids last that much longer. You'll want to produce a shit ton of them if it comes to late game, so it's worth the upgrade if it comes to that. Upgrading gold units is obviously the priority when you have enough of it.
This video was really interesting, could you interview more ro players in the future? Your input in the interview was also spot on with what I would have asked. Thanks a lot Spirit of the Law!
Spirit, I just want to say thank you for getting me to love AOE again, your videos have helped me play and think more productively in game and I am always happy to watch your videos, you made AOE 2 take the crown of my favourite RTS back since my childhood. Thanks.
a major issue is that onagers are the only cost effective counter to cho-ku-nu 40 of them beat cost effectively anything including heavy and light calvery
Pretty sure Huskarls are a cost effective counter to Cho-ku-nu, but the odds of a Goth player ever getting a good number of Huskarls out against a skilled Chinese player in a pro-level game are probably nonexistent.
@@thehermeticgamer3736 Depends on a lot of factors, like map, playstyles, and overall flow of the game. Example game: ruclips.net/video/j-hPHhBRiz0/видео.html It's funny you say that, because according to the same Voobly stats website, Goths have a ~60% win rate against Chinese, so they more often than not able to get to their infantry flood up and running to kill the Chinese.
@@thehermeticgamer3736 that somthing i havent tested however do to minimum damage, a cho-ku-nu does 5x more damage to a huskarl than other archers (5 vs 1)
@@radiationpony8449 Spirit of the Law does a lot of Huskarl testing for his Goths faction overview. They tear Cho-ku-nu to pieces. As well as handcanons and scorpions. It's not just a question of being able to damage the Huskarls. Five damage is nothing against a unit that does almost three times that base, gets a fat bonus vs archers to boot and attacks faster, combine that with the speed, HP and price of Huskarls and things are not going to go well for the Cho-Ku-Nu. Sure, Cho-Ku-Nu are probably the one archer who do the best against them (perhaps excluding handcanons, though I think if you factor in the price difference and the handcanon's inaccuracy they're probably on about equal footing here) but they still don't translate to a cost-effective counter. Once the Huskarls get close it's all she wrote, and you're talking post imp stats when the Goth player can build Huskarls in seconds from every barracks while the Chinese player had to build multiple castles to spam Chu-Ko-Nu, so yeah they're absolutely going to get in close unless the Chinese player has a huge eco bonus. But like I said, given how strong Chinese are in Fuedal compared to Goths they will have that eco bonus and be finishing the game in early castle age if we're talking about pro players in an open 1V1. If it goes to Imperial at all I'd bet real money it will only be for the Chinese player to to a forward a castle, grab some Trebuchets, and finish things off. Certainly not going to be seeing any post-imp Huskarl spam unless there is a big skill gap.
@@Gyeseongyeon 60% win rate across all games wouldn't surprise me. Most players aren't pros, and civs with a lot of late-game power tend to do very well in games with less experienced players, in team games, on closed maps, etc. But straydog played a good game there. I would argue that he used Goths perfectly, but still had a lot of luck with sheep, killing his enemies scout, and some bad early plays with him not scouting around his resources to watch for towers even when he knew the other guy was using them. Still well played. Imho, especially his scouting which, I would argue, won him the game in some respects. I think if you're playing Goths in a serious game (and that, in and of itself, is kind of an oxymoron, but serious in the sense of two skilled players on an open one vs. one) then playing defensively and trying to boom (no offence to Spirit of the Law's advice in his Goth overview here) will get you toasted as almost every civ in the game has major eco bonuses over you unless you're making use of your cheap infantry, which you need to start doing as early as possible and continue doing throughout the game, as in this game with a drush quickly backed up by spears, skirms, and towers. Towers I always thought was a good move for Goths against any archer civ since you'll want stone to lay down a castle the instant you can either way. But for all their statistical advantages on paper with top-tier micro I'd put my money on scouts, or even villagers and archers vs. militia or even men-at-arms, spears (even at Goth prices) and skirms because even two or three scouts or villagers can keep the skirms from firing while dancing around the spears (or the archers can focus them down and retreat) due to the skirms minimum range then the archers are free to kite and focus down the militia/men-at-arms. While the effect of raiding with infantry can really be limited with good town-planning and fast walling in of resources. Which is especially telling in a raid-counter-raid scenario. Imho, I've never been a skilled player (though I know what skilled play looks like) and even I would rather have men-at-arms (or militia especially) and skirmishers in my base than archers and or scouts. MAA's/Skirms can bully your villagers off resources sure, but those vills can go harvest somewhere else, even if it does cost you a new camp, and rarely will the MAAs have the numbers to kill camps quickly enough to make it a worthwhile trade, while Skirms need huge numbers to really kill vills. Of course idling enemy villagers is good, but scouts, and especially archers, in contrast, will not only kick vills off resources but can actually kill many, and that's way more devastating.
Its very important to change/mix composition of units over time. IMHO chinese can switch/mix units much better. So, they have insane range units and they easily can be covered with halbs. In late game they can very easy add cavalry for raiding
These statistics are pretty much required for any science/engineering major really. Usually, the math school will have 3 courses that cover stat, one for the math major, one(or as a half of a combined course) for other people who need math to survive, And they may or may not have one for everyone else. Moreover, each sci/eng major will have their own course that talks intensively about the application of stat in their own field.
@@palebears8913 Not only hard sciences or engineering. Most sociel studies rely heavily on statistics. Even if you specialize in qualitative methods in something like sociology, you still have quite heavy stistics courses during your education. Many sociologists, political scientists or other students of human societies specialize in statistics.
@@palebears8913 That's probably one of the worst quirks of the English language, making science to just be the hard sciences. I much prefer the construction used by for example German. There, any rigorous and systematic academic research is wissenshafft, essentially the same word as science.
@@heavyreynald - Fuck that. 0ThrowawayAccount0 - Imagine a storm from the eyes of gentle soul, unkempt as one would expect from a man who lives at his screen, but, yea, not _so_ unkempt as to repulse. A comfortable roundness has set in around the cheeks and jaw but time has hewn his brow and temples; those youthful hints of a beard and mustache have matured into mildly bushy dark colors and stubble. His hair has remained as understated yet unpredictable as his tactics and age has done nothing to quell its subtlety nor chart its future course. His shirt has been cast across the back of an armchair in our Spanish apartment and its collar is jostled by a warm sea breeze through the open balcony doors. I am naked on the bed and waiting in anticipation. "Hola," he says, voice like liquid victory, "Listo para ver mi nave de demolición?" As he unzipped his pants I couldn't help but notice his package had swolen five- -shit. Wait. Um. Yeah you should probably just google what he looks like.
I love Tatoh!! I think he’s an underrated player to watch of the top players because he doesn’t flourish his um, “player’s bravado.” He’s a really thoughtful and quiet operator, and his thoughtfulness truly shines in team play. Thank you for bringing him in, this was a fascinating video.
Is there is huge skill gap between 1500-2000 compared to 2000+? Because I would imagine the position getting higher as the skill increases, but not a sudden jump like that.
no only that, high elo player utilize every chinese bones, they all work together so well that pros often can pick up the civ and make the play they palnned. discounts, farm bones, extra villages, reletively open tech tree. nothing really snignificant if you think of those bones, but they just work so well on one civ.
This video is amazing. Its a great idea to get high level answers to this interesting question. Tatohs answer reminds me of what we learned from AlphaGo, actually. The really key thing that AlphaGo consistently did to beat the strongest humans at Go was favouring moves and lines that gave it the widest possible array of strong options as far into the game as possible. It actively played to achieve strong, flexible positions. This is in line with Tatohs evaluation: The chinese have a strong early game that yields strong positions combined with high flexibility later in the game. The civ is strong early and adaptable later, which high level players are the best at exploiting.
Another great video Spirit. I love your videos so much. As a poker player I especially love how you delve into all the maths. Tatohs comment about forcing the other player to take the same upgrades as you was a cool little strat bit too :) Seriously love your vids man.
The reason I love age of empires 2 even after 20 years this game is still kicking ass and the strategies you can pull off on each civilisations is so fun. Can be hard to master but with a lot of effort you can eventually become a killer pro at it.
There is a point he mentioned and that could be taken into consideration: the map people play. A couple months ago, there was an Arabia tournament called "King of the Desert" which was played on a special version of the map where every player starts with one sheep directly under the town center. Even more so than the versions that make the players start with a sheep under their control, this was hugely boosting the Chinese as they could put 5 villagers to work almost immediately, thus enabling them to have a roughly 2.5 villagers lead over all the other civilizations when arriving in Feudal Age. Since the statistics gathered mostly account for recent games, the players training for the tournament played on this map a lot and this boosts the Chinese winrate a lot.
Man you really have the best AoE 2 related channel. You put so much effort and love into your work, one really notices you do it because AoE 2 is your passion. And it's nice to see that this game from the 1990s is now again becoming more and more popular because back then game development was actually a enthusiast-thing about making the best game and not about eye-candy, hysteria-hype marketing, virtue-signalling, political corectness, ripping of little kids etc. I still play AoE 2, Caesar 3, Stronghold Crusader. Compairing them to modern games is like compairing chess to guess who.
I read in my reference textbook as part of the Advanced Statistical Methods course that a 'good' correlation varies heavily among fields, even a 0.40 value is sometimes 'significantly high enough' for some social scientists. I wonder if Spirit of The Law commented based on similar knowledge?
I really appreciated Tatho’s comments. Good work spirit, hopefully in the future you could invite some other high ranking players to discuss strategies and points of view. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
I feel like the correlation should be done on winning percentage, rather than on the rankings. Ordinal data isn't as good for statistical analysis, since you could have several rankings that are super close together followed by a big gap between two of them, but just sorting by rank order doesn't allow for this in the analysis.
As a player returning from playing casually as a grade schooler, I cannot express how happy I am that one of my favorite childhood games has this level of depth, 20 years after existence
Another interesting thing that happens is that the game time ticks upwards above 2000+ Voobly, which is the opposite trend of what you'd expect. I suspect at intermediate levels people are getting good at rushes, but above 2000, maybe they are much better at countering or scouting them?
I'm late to the party, but Ranked matches in Starcraft 2 also experience the same pattern. Rushes and Cheesy strategies can get you to about Platinum league in SC2 Ladder. But at higher level such as Master League, players are getting good at scouting and situation awareness that they can see your strategy coming miles away by just looking at your worker counts and what they're doing, or just outright spotting your cheesy strategy during in-progress. Hence the games get longer as this kind of Win Quick scheme didn't work as often anymore. AOE2 ranked matches is also no different.
Agreed, it comes down to the micro at the beginning, pros dont have any idle time in the tc because they force drop the food while amateurs have a lot of idle time and lose their vill advantage
@spirit you forgot about one very important factor. which players tend to choose Chinese a lot and what is their standard average winrate with/without Chinese? if say the t10 players use Chinese a lot Chinese will win a lot but not necessarily because of the civ but player skill.
Hey Spirit of the Law, I've been getting hooked up to AOE II mostly due to your videos. Great game, hard to master. I was wondering if you could inform through a video for viewership. How to learn about checking on ratings and civilization match up. And above all, won't lie. I am pretty noob. If an average start up could be explained, would be great. I often find myself reaching Feudal and in the following seconds, the other players reach Castle. Thank you!
Would you ever consider discussing Regicide? I'm not sure how this game mode is viewed among the AoE II player base, but it is my favorite style of play due to the fact that you have an objective that doesn't consist of killing every single villager and soldier from opposing civilizations like in TDM, you have a single target to hunt, a king! In my opinion there is nothing cooler in a medieval tactical game like Age of Empires II than slaying the king.
With higher capacity farms you are spending less wood on them, so while they do start with -50 wood, you get that back in spades later. That saved wood can go into techs, buildings or units. Back when I use to play I didn't prefer them as the chi ko nue is just a rapid fire crossbow that, for some reason translates horribly to tower DPS. Being a rapid fire crossbow means they do what normal crossbows do, but better, and weaknesses are dampened. But they are used the same way I preferred Britons as they can open faster than average, allowing you to gank villagers in the Dark and early Feudal age. If your opponent could survive the militia into man at arms/archer boom or the scout boom depending on what I felt like doing, the early castle age Longbow/Knight boom after the opponent has already been weakened usually ended games before siege became a thing as enough villagers were killed before meaning that they never aged to Castle, or did so way later than you. If a rare game were to happen in that the opponent survived to post-castle/early-Imperial they would be so vastly damaged and worn out that the match was essentially over anyway. Maybe I built the odd bombard to hasten the end game push if a game made it this far. Longbows have the unique advantage of simply being hard to attack. If you have a solid melee line normal archers would have no chance of shooting back at the longbows taking them down. If I was Knight rushing with Longbow support and the opponent had pikemen I could just keep them aggroed to the knights while the Longbows picked them off. If the opponent tired to attack the longbows with the pikes instead seeing that they can't reach the knights they would still die as Longbows can hit critical mass on Pikemen easily. The only choice was retreat and lose frontal buildings/ villagers as Longbows out range towers, they may have crap damage vs buildings, but it's free damage. Castles though? they take my strat and smear it into the dirt. Hints why I village gank from the vary start so that never happens. With that. Civs that can out pace Brits in the early game would keep me on the defensive most times, but I had my own method of Brit defense where I would have my knights leave out a gate that isn't under attack and pincer the attackers between my base and the knights. The knights would ether attack as normal if I didn't see many spear units, or would just distract the hell out of the attackers if I did.[ I guess cav archers could do this too, and also attack, but I didn't like the tiny range so would only start making those if I was being attacked repeatedly.] This defensive Knight[or cav archer] micro was hilarious to pull off as I would watch my attackers be completely discombobulated being annihilated by Longbows, while also waiting for the Knights[or cav archers] to attack at any second[ or being shot by cav archers], unable to do dick about it. skirmishers and their pierce armor+ bonus damage to archers means little if they out range you so badly you can't attack, normal archers would always get hit first and harder, cav rushes got met with my own cavs being backed by longbows, camels had good success against me, as I always held my melee infantry in reserve when being attacked. Having to move my pikes outside, my knights inside and my longbows back a bit all at once sometimes led to some damage as some camels could sneak in my gate, would die super fast, but maybe could take some Longbows away. After the first camel rush against me in a match my Pikemen would be ordered near the gates and told not to move unless ordered manually, a tactic normally meant for archer units, but my pikes weren't gonna go out and fight anything other than cavs as they should be. Overwhelming defense wins make opponents lose total resources. Wood lines being exhausted, gold and stone depots being exhausted[stone not being used] and with wood lines vanishing so do farms that need wood, so food stocks vanish too. All that's left is to break though the resource deprived base and 1 shot the enemy. This is one of the few times I pull out siege in mass. All in attack against a force that can barely fight back.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
I've actually found that the Chinese winrate is exactly the same as the winrate for every other civilisation. 0%.
I am very bad at this game.
Same :-(
Been playing since AOK. I'm still trash as well. Working on beating a hard computer consistently!
@@jam34786 That's the spirit
I know how that is I half expected to see me as the main reason the Chinese have such a low win rate
I am as bad, but the last game I won was as chinese so they are really good, and towers and chu ko nu are OP.
Nice, I think getting topplayers as a really good addition to this channel! Hope we see some more!
Agreed! This reminded me of how he interviewed one of the creators of the original AOE 2 AI in one of his videos few months ago.
Naaahh, just Tatoh, who is super chill and easygoing. The rest are a bunch of arrogant stiffs full of themselves, they'll never give this guy an interview.
@@dondeestaCarter Are the top level players really that isolated from the community that they wouldn't know of spirit of the law and these sorts of videos? That kind of arrogance is not the impression of top level players that I've gotten from watching t90 videos. Albeit the most recent pro player game I saw was mbl vs daut where daut fell for the old "has advanced to the imperial age" trick. Not even correctly spelled or punctuated either.
@@DaddyMouse oh hey its the guy I was talking about my kid self forest nothing memories with lol.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of top players who would participate in a SOTL video^^ They are very well connected with the comunity - I mean e.g. a bunch of them streams regulary^^ And TBH not sure if Donde is trolling or not 11
Spirit of the Law: Been making noobs feel like pros since 2015.
Love you SOTL.
😂 fucking right I’m viper now
Thanks for subtitles under Tatoh's words. His English is excellent but the bad audio quality made it hard to hear what he said.
Yeah they came in handy to me as well cause I was eating some chips on top of that lol.
I can understand his English but sometimes I can't
Yes his English is very good, but he does speak (understandably) with a heavy accent that can be hard to properly understand first time go around.
@@Tapiola666 True, as a Spanish I can say he has a fluent English but his accent is too heavy even for me
He speaks too quickly, it would be a lot simplier to understand if he spoke a little slower.
1:49 3:13 guitar suddenly plays in my head
so disappointed they don't :(
@@n1n3dk watch other SOTL videos, it's about the intro music
@@n1n3dk Tatoh is spanish
Chinese start takes a lot of micro to get right. It's the most difficult to minimise idle time for. Lower level players simply can't take advantage as much.
As soon as you're good enough to not be a vil behind the bonus will be pretty good as there are vils out longer gathering res. However the lack of starting food can not be compensated for fully no matter how good of a start. That's why the chinese don't favor drush + FC strats. You'll see them often go feudal.
@Bat Orgil me too
+3 vill, -200 food just becomes -200 food when I use the Chinese
@@majungasaurusaaaa you literally use your starting food to make vills if you stick them all on sheep from the get go then by the time you finish researching loom you'll be able to start making more vills
@@majungasaurusaaaa Assuming you have a villager lead, that lack of starting food can be compensated for.
Noting that in reality it is only a -50 food cost, as 150 of the 200 goes to the 3 villagers, that would mean if you manage to keep a 1 villager lead, the food is paid off for in less than 3 minutes. The wood cost is similar.
So as long as you keep a 1 villager lead, the resources are paid off within 6 minutes, or 9 if you also include the cost to build a farm.
And the time when you have a 2 or 3 villager lead just further reduces that time.
There is also the advantage of the extra villagers at the start meaning less decay on the meat.
The reason they don't go for a drush is because that is very early on. You should have your militia near the enemy village before you are compensated for the lower resources.
I would chalk up the difference between Chinese win rates among pros and everyone else to three things;
1. Pros better use the early Chinese economic bonuses to snowball their economy.
2. Pros make better use of the wide variety of unit options the Chinese tech tree grants.
3. Pros are far better at microing the Chu-ko-nus to devastating effect.
"still sounds like a great correlation to any of you social science majors" that burn
I noticed that too! Goddamn the hard sciences.
I was like:”Daamn, shots fired” when I heard that!
LOL, same
I don't really see how it is a burn. It is a high correlation in this context. What is high depdens on what is being studied. By the very nature of what is being studied, most social sciences will naturally have lower correlation.
@@evil001987 found the arts major lol
Always top quality content! And Tatoh as a guest is awesome
Tatoh gives amazing commentary!
Now it's time to make a video on AoE2: DE
indeed!!
I bet there will be balance change too so Spirit is gonna review EVERY civilization again yaaaaay
Screw communists :)
Hell yeah !
@@rythmjc3 i doubt that
Barely even play AOE2 any but I love this channel
Same. I literally played only 3 games online. But I still watch this :D
I only played it 17 years ago and never online (I didn't even know how to read at the time)
@@VonKuro Same,the last time I played this game was when I was eight or seven.Good times.
I love to know that a pro like Tatoh is willing to help you ... excellent video, as always!
Many pros understand that the games they thrive at don't exist without a strong community to support them (which RUclips is good for helping to build). Anything they can do to bolster game popularity can eventually help their pocketbook, and a healthy community also gives you more people to compete against/learn from. It's also great karma to give back to something that gives you value.
extremely interesting topic and video format, as always you're just top notch
imagine making statistical tests and spreadsheets about a game made 20 years ago. That's some real dedication and a testament to the game's quality.
This is a game for the ages, for sure...
He nailed it early on with the pro maps that they've been using... Having a sheep under your TC to begin with eliminates so much stress and allows them to capitalise on the six villager start.
What Tatoh said about the diffrent Maps is really important. A year ago most standard maps and Arabia variations introduced the starting sheep under the TC which should limit annoying RNG and that really helpen Chinese. When before they clipcked Feudal Age with 0,5-1 Vil advantage (with a small propability of a complete titanic in Dark Age) now they have consistently 1-2 vil advantage which is a huge deal.
On lower leves the 1 vil is not that huge and the start is not so sharp that it makes a huge diffrence if they have the sheep or not. if they even have the maps that have the starting sheep. i bet most players on 1600 dont.
The hindsight of Tatoh here was insane, and it really explains how little things make the potential of a Civ vs the difficulty to execute it
Can you please do more Campaign vs. history?
YES YES YES
As a social science undergrad I am a big fan of this video, great work Spirit!
That was such a good stab at the discipline, I love it.
This is insane. You brought me straight back to Energy Data Analysis - a master level statistics course for my business school!
Starting with one sheep close to the TC makes a huge difference. If you start producing villagers ~15s later, you do not only delay your seventh villager, but you also delay every single one that follows after. Therefore you`re not losing only 15s villager work time but 15s for every single villager.
Yeah I think this was undersold a bit. Would also have been nice to mention which maps these are, maybe with some links in the description.
I would say Chinese on El Dorado is one of the most OP civs since you start with all that fish next to your TC, plus instead of 3 vills working, you have 6 vills gathering food right off the bat, giving you crazy vill leads and Feudal times.
Experts play differently than noobs, so can take great advantage from original advantages. Pretty sure "white have a advantage in chess" is null for chess noobs.
white is racially superior in chess
@@schmeed0000 In Go, its the black. And white player has extra three points to compensate.
In the end tho; pro chess games still are:
Play black: be wary as fuck, try to foresee enemy plays
Play white: still be wary as fuck, try to foresee enemy plays
Marketing tip: next time you have a pro player on, put them on the title.
I wasn't really gonna watch this one (topic didn't really interest me) but ended up doing it anyway cuz I was kinda bored.
However, if I had seen "ft. Tatoh" or " with Tatoh interview" or something similar in the title I would've clicked when I first got the notification lol.
Keep it up, amazing video as always. +++ for the subtitles.
This man, he speaks the truth.
Spirit doesnt need "marketing tips" he can put the tittle or hes videos anything what he want.
its now there lol
I really like the style of this video. Sometimes pure stats and math seem a little lifeless but the opinion of a pro player can bring up some viewpoints that you might have not thought about. Pls bring more interviews if you can
I knew this all along. Thanks for confirming, Spirit of the Law and TaToH! There had to be reasons why the Chinese civilization was chosen so many times in Hidden Cup 2.
Quality content here, didn't expect anything less from SOTL. Not only he provided some very interesting statistics, he also interviewed one of the top players to add even more value to the video. This is why we love you SOTL (just please include the intro next time, we love it too)
interview the Viper next please! nice vid
Hmm, this gave me a bit to think about. (I would be on the lower end rating for sure and as I mentioned before, I chose to main chinese civ because of your suggestion.) I already knew Chu Ko Nu were very strong. However, I never really thought about scouts as something to go into. (Makes sense with the farm bonus.) Also, I must have missed/forgot about the HP on Bombard Towers. I honestly thought Byzantines would have the most overall. (I was wrong. I should consider making more of those as well.) As for the cheaper techs thing, I used to wait on them but a friend told me, you are better off getting them ASAP. (Tatoh seems to agree.) It still can be a nice backup for lower rated players to get them later for cheaper in case they forget or something forces them to age up first without them. Anyway, thanks for the video SotL. :D
Me: Okay that's enough statistics learning for today, let's watch some RUclips.
Spirit of the Law: Rank Correlation...Chi-Square
Me: Okay let's do some more statistics!
I never post comments on RUclips but I have to say thanks for the amazing videos. I've found your channel like 2 weeks ago and have been watching your stuff every day, not even joking. You're fucking amazing man keep up the great work :)
why don't you?
Spirit of the Law, please do a video on the hussar upgrade. Why is it so expensive, when is it useful?
Its shit
Why upgrade to Hussars? You trade speed atk speed for more health and damage when in reality you’re just getting worse light cavalry in the long run. Sure they hit the hardest, but what are you doing throwing them at knights and pikes when you should be putting them to killing siege and archers? Wasting them.
It's the only trash unit that can do decently against a lot of the gold units. Amazing raiding tool; as a such, having a bit more HP makes the raids last that much longer. You'll want to produce a shit ton of them if it comes to late game, so it's worth the upgrade if it comes to that. Upgrading gold units is obviously the priority when you have enough of it.
This video was really interesting, could you interview more ro players in the future? Your input in the interview was also spot on with what I would have asked. Thanks a lot Spirit of the Law!
Spirit Of The Law feat Tatoh drops the most bangin vids
I really liked that you interviewed a top player on this instead of speculating on why.
Super interesting stuff! I’d love to hear this sort of analysis in even MORE detail! Good stuff!
Oh my gosh, having pro players come in and discuss is HUGE thank u Tatoh and Sotl
Spirit, I just want to say thank you for getting me to love AOE again, your videos have helped me play and think more productively in game and I am always happy to watch your videos, you made AOE 2 take the crown of my favourite RTS back since my childhood. Thanks.
I Appreciate you & Tatoh coordinating this interview so we can get the perspective of a high level player. Thanks Spirit!
a major issue is that onagers are the only cost effective counter to cho-ku-nu 40 of them beat cost effectively anything including heavy and light calvery
Pretty sure Huskarls are a cost effective counter to Cho-ku-nu, but the odds of a Goth player ever getting a good number of Huskarls out against a skilled Chinese player in a pro-level game are probably nonexistent.
@@thehermeticgamer3736 Depends on a lot of factors, like map, playstyles, and overall flow of the game. Example game: ruclips.net/video/j-hPHhBRiz0/видео.html
It's funny you say that, because according to the same Voobly stats website, Goths have a ~60% win rate against Chinese, so they more often than not able to get to their infantry flood up and running to kill the Chinese.
@@thehermeticgamer3736 that somthing i havent tested however do to minimum damage, a cho-ku-nu does 5x more damage to a huskarl than other archers (5 vs 1)
@@radiationpony8449 Spirit of the Law does a lot of Huskarl testing for his Goths faction overview. They tear Cho-ku-nu to pieces. As well as handcanons and scorpions.
It's not just a question of being able to damage the Huskarls. Five damage is nothing against a unit that does almost three times that base, gets a fat bonus vs archers to boot and attacks faster, combine that with the speed, HP and price of Huskarls and things are not going to go well for the Cho-Ku-Nu.
Sure, Cho-Ku-Nu are probably the one archer who do the best against them (perhaps excluding handcanons, though I think if you factor in the price difference and the handcanon's inaccuracy they're probably on about equal footing here) but they still don't translate to a cost-effective counter.
Once the Huskarls get close it's all she wrote, and you're talking post imp stats when the Goth player can build Huskarls in seconds from every barracks while the Chinese player had to build multiple castles to spam Chu-Ko-Nu, so yeah they're absolutely going to get in close unless the Chinese player has a huge eco bonus.
But like I said, given how strong Chinese are in Fuedal compared to Goths they will have that eco bonus and be finishing the game in early castle age if we're talking about pro players in an open 1V1. If it goes to Imperial at all I'd bet real money it will only be for the Chinese player to to a forward a castle, grab some Trebuchets, and finish things off. Certainly not going to be seeing any post-imp Huskarl spam unless there is a big skill gap.
@@Gyeseongyeon 60% win rate across all games wouldn't surprise me. Most players aren't pros, and civs with a lot of late-game power tend to do very well in games with less experienced players, in team games, on closed maps, etc.
But straydog played a good game there. I would argue that he used Goths perfectly, but still had a lot of luck with sheep, killing his enemies scout, and some bad early plays with him not scouting around his resources to watch for towers even when he knew the other guy was using them. Still well played. Imho, especially his scouting which, I would argue, won him the game in some respects. I think if you're playing Goths in a serious game (and that, in and of itself, is kind of an oxymoron, but serious in the sense of two skilled players on an open one vs. one) then playing defensively and trying to boom (no offence to Spirit of the Law's advice in his Goth overview here) will get you toasted as almost every civ in the game has major eco bonuses over you unless you're making use of your cheap infantry, which you need to start doing as early as possible and continue doing throughout the game, as in this game with a drush quickly backed up by spears, skirms, and towers. Towers I always thought was a good move for Goths against any archer civ since you'll want stone to lay down a castle the instant you can either way.
But for all their statistical advantages on paper with top-tier micro I'd put my money on scouts, or even villagers and archers vs. militia or even men-at-arms, spears (even at Goth prices) and skirms because even two or three scouts or villagers can keep the skirms from firing while dancing around the spears (or the archers can focus them down and retreat) due to the skirms minimum range then the archers are free to kite and focus down the militia/men-at-arms. While the effect of raiding with infantry can really be limited with good town-planning and fast walling in of resources. Which is especially telling in a raid-counter-raid scenario. Imho, I've never been a skilled player (though I know what skilled play looks like) and even I would rather have men-at-arms (or militia especially) and skirmishers in my base than archers and or scouts. MAA's/Skirms can bully your villagers off resources sure, but those vills can go harvest somewhere else, even if it does cost you a new camp, and rarely will the MAAs have the numbers to kill camps quickly enough to make it a worthwhile trade, while Skirms need huge numbers to really kill vills. Of course idling enemy villagers is good, but scouts, and especially archers, in contrast, will not only kick vills off resources but can actually kill many, and that's way more devastating.
About the AoE 2 coming soon 4k version
Amazing video! Would really like to see more pro player interviews from you on certain topics in the future ;)
Combining the math from the game + the output of playing it: great video
Great Chinese overview thank you Tatoh. Also Spirit your hearing is strong lol
As someone who started AoE2 for the first time 2 months ago, this is a very compelling video. Love the analysis!
Really interesting interview. Very insightful. Thank you for your content.
Its very important to change/mix composition of units over time. IMHO chinese can switch/mix units much better. So, they have insane range units and they easily can be covered with halbs. In late game they can very easy add cavalry for raiding
Hey Spirit, quick question.
Do you have a statistics degree or do you just enjoy math ?
These statistics are pretty much required for any science/engineering major really. Usually, the math school will have 3 courses that cover stat, one for the math major, one(or as a half of a combined course) for other people who need math to survive, And they may or may not have one for everyone else. Moreover, each sci/eng major will have their own course that talks intensively about the application of stat in their own field.
He mentions on a video (I believe one of the Q&As) he has two or three degrees in science, I can only recall math (or psychology? maybe both) tho
@@palebears8913 Not only hard sciences or engineering. Most sociel studies rely heavily on statistics. Even if you specialize in qualitative methods in something like sociology, you still have quite heavy stistics courses during your education. Many sociologists, political scientists or other students of human societies specialize in statistics.
@@Taeerom Ok. I hereby acknowledge that sociology and political science are real science and those who study them know and use math.
@@palebears8913 That's probably one of the worst quirks of the English language, making science to just be the hard sciences.
I much prefer the construction used by for example German. There, any rigorous and systematic academic research is wissenshafft, essentially the same word as science.
Excellent video and idea! Hope to see more topplayer commentary
You did a Chi(nese)-Square test, nice.
One of the finest AoE2 videos
Really nicely done :)
Dat Tatoh (old) file photo...
heavyreynald what does he look like now?
I strongly advice you to google it and you will get a better answer than a written one.
@@heavyreynald - Fuck that.
0ThrowawayAccount0 - Imagine a storm from the eyes of gentle soul, unkempt as one would expect from a man who lives at his screen, but, yea, not _so_ unkempt as to repulse. A comfortable roundness has set in around the cheeks and jaw but time has hewn his brow and temples; those youthful hints of a beard and mustache have matured into mildly bushy dark colors and stubble. His hair has remained as understated yet unpredictable as his tactics and age has done nothing to quell its subtlety nor chart its future course. His shirt has been cast across the back of an armchair in our Spanish apartment and its collar is jostled by a warm sea breeze through the open balcony doors. I am naked on the bed and waiting in anticipation.
"Hola," he says, voice like liquid victory, "Listo para ver mi nave de demolición?" As he unzipped his pants I couldn't help but notice his package had swolen five-
-shit. Wait.
Um.
Yeah you should probably just google what he looks like.
Tried to warn you, cause I know how describing a Tati ends like...
@@lettuceprime4922 that was beautiful. Thank you
I love Tatoh!! I think he’s an underrated player to watch of the top players because he doesn’t flourish his um, “player’s bravado.” He’s a really thoughtful and quiet operator, and his thoughtfulness truly shines in team play. Thank you for bringing him in, this was a fascinating video.
P.S. The Chu Ko Nus are assholes. I go into full panic mode when another player starts pumping them out
This video perfectly highlights how high is the skill floor AND the skill ceiling for the Chinese. Loving it!
Is there is huge skill gap between 1500-2000 compared to 2000+?
Because I would imagine the position getting higher as the skill increases, but not a sudden jump like that.
So +3 villager is better for high level player because they can use the bonus to the maximum potential rather than lower level player
yes
no only that, high elo player utilize every chinese bones, they all work together so well that pros often can pick up the civ and make the play they palnned. discounts, farm bones, extra villages, reletively open tech tree.
nothing really snignificant if you think of those bones, but they just work so well on one civ.
I think the maps were a bit undersold here. Starting with a sheep directly below the TC makes a massive difference.
@@freefallintoflames true
@El Bottoo i do sorry mate
Nice use of the stats! Wasn't expecting chi square on an AOE video.
Jokes you used a Chi-Square test in this 😂 Dissertation on AOE2 ??
That extra arrow attack with the Chuks is like square. Seems like there are more shooters than there are...
This video is amazing. Its a great idea to get high level answers to this interesting question.
Tatohs answer reminds me of what we learned from AlphaGo, actually. The really key thing that AlphaGo consistently did to beat the strongest humans at Go was favouring moves and lines that gave it the widest possible array of strong options as far into the game as possible. It actively played to achieve strong, flexible positions. This is in line with Tatohs evaluation: The chinese have a strong early game that yields strong positions combined with high flexibility later in the game. The civ is strong early and adaptable later, which high level players are the best at exploiting.
Another great video Spirit. I love your videos so much. As a poker player I especially love how you delve into all the maths. Tatohs comment about forcing the other player to take the same upgrades as you was a cool little strat bit too :) Seriously love your vids man.
Waiting for a video on aoe2 definitive edition
Great video Spirit, huge fan from Alberta
The reason I love age of empires 2 even after 20 years this game is still kicking ass and the strategies you can pull off on each civilisations is so fun. Can be hard to master but with a lot of effort you can eventually become a killer pro at it.
There is a point he mentioned and that could be taken into consideration: the map people play. A couple months ago, there was an Arabia tournament called "King of the Desert" which was played on a special version of the map where every player starts with one sheep directly under the town center. Even more so than the versions that make the players start with a sheep under their control, this was hugely boosting the Chinese as they could put 5 villagers to work almost immediately, thus enabling them to have a roughly 2.5 villagers lead over all the other civilizations when arriving in Feudal Age. Since the statistics gathered mostly account for recent games, the players training for the tournament played on this map a lot and this boosts the Chinese winrate a lot.
Will you upload a civs review in AOE2 DE version after it release?
Man you really have the best AoE 2 related channel. You put so much effort and love into your work, one really notices you do it because AoE 2 is your passion. And it's nice to see that this game from the 1990s is now again becoming more and more popular because back then game development was actually a enthusiast-thing about making the best game and not about eye-candy, hysteria-hype marketing, virtue-signalling, political corectness, ripping of little kids etc.
I still play AoE 2, Caesar 3, Stronghold Crusader. Compairing them to modern games is like compairing chess to guess who.
I read in my reference textbook as part of the Advanced Statistical Methods course that a 'good' correlation varies heavily among fields, even a 0.40 value is sometimes 'significantly high enough' for some social scientists.
I wonder if Spirit of The Law commented based on similar knowledge?
6:45 is "usually" and not "not really" i think
I really appreciated Tatho’s comments. Good work spirit, hopefully in the future you could invite some other high ranking players to discuss strategies and points of view. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Great video and interview !
I have no idea why I'm subscribed and watch and enjoy literally every one of your videos. I don't even play this game. I'm so confused.
Hey spirit, please review about AoE II Definitive Edition. Thank you
This was a really good episode, Spirit!
I feel like the correlation should be done on winning percentage, rather than on the rankings. Ordinal data isn't as good for statistical analysis, since you could have several rankings that are super close together followed by a big gap between two of them, but just sorting by rank order doesn't allow for this in the analysis.
The only complain that I have is that you used a real picture of TaToH and not a picture of a dorito
That's racist. But it's not illegal to be racist. Carry on.
@@Lucas_Jeffrey Dey terk er jerbs!
The amount of statistics in this video brought back PTSD from maths stats lessons. All that variance, hypothesis testing and standard deviation
TaToh and Spirit? Whooop!
I want to know what's your reaction to AOE2 Definitive Edition that was announced at E3 :)
Literally his previous video. 👍
@@irtijaadib42069 which is AOE not AOE2 gamescom nor on this year E3
DE was announced in 2017.
@@Tempires Oh that one. Whoops. My B. Yeah Spirit should get on it.
Good luck to Tatoh right now, he's doing the Red bull tournament!
As a player returning from playing casually as a grade schooler, I cannot express how happy I am that one of my favorite childhood games has this level of depth, 20 years after existence
Another interesting thing that happens is that the game time ticks upwards above 2000+ Voobly, which is the opposite trend of what you'd expect. I suspect at intermediate levels people are getting good at rushes, but above 2000, maybe they are much better at countering or scouting them?
I'm late to the party, but Ranked matches in Starcraft 2 also experience the same pattern. Rushes and Cheesy strategies can get you to about Platinum league in SC2 Ladder. But at higher level such as Master League, players are getting good at scouting and situation awareness that they can see your strategy coming miles away by just looking at your worker counts and what they're doing, or just outright spotting your cheesy strategy during in-progress. Hence the games get longer as this kind of Win Quick scheme didn't work as often anymore. AOE2 ranked matches is also no different.
Great video man! Keep it up!
I see a new SOTL video, I watch it, I'm a simple man
Tatoh is awsome, bringing him in was a great idea
Great format !
I don't know if i'd have coped without those subtitles
Agreed, it comes down to the micro at the beginning, pros dont have any idle time in the tc because they force drop the food while amateurs have a lot of idle time and lose their vill advantage
@spirit you forgot about one very important factor.
which players tend to choose Chinese a lot and what is their standard average winrate with/without Chinese? if say the t10 players use Chinese a lot Chinese will win a lot but not necessarily because of the civ but player skill.
Hey Spirit of the Law, I've been getting hooked up to AOE II mostly due to your videos. Great game, hard to master. I was wondering if you could inform through a video for viewership. How to learn about checking on ratings and civilization match up. And above all, won't lie. I am pretty noob. If an average start up could be explained, would be great. I often find myself reaching Feudal and in the following seconds, the other players reach Castle. Thank you!
Interesting concept and very good vid
Great interview with Tatoh
Would you ever consider discussing Regicide? I'm not sure how this game mode is viewed among the AoE II player base, but it is my favorite style of play due to the fact that you have an objective that doesn't consist of killing every single villager and soldier from opposing civilizations like in TDM, you have a single target to hunt, a king! In my opinion there is nothing cooler in a medieval tactical game like Age of Empires II than slaying the king.
amazing content as always
With higher capacity farms you are spending less wood on them, so while they do start with -50 wood, you get that back in spades later. That saved wood can go into techs, buildings or units.
Back when I use to play I didn't prefer them as the chi ko nue is just a rapid fire crossbow that, for some reason translates horribly to tower DPS.
Being a rapid fire crossbow means they do what normal crossbows do, but better, and weaknesses are dampened. But they are used the same way
I preferred Britons as they can open faster than average, allowing you to gank villagers in the Dark and early Feudal age. If your opponent could survive the militia into man at arms/archer boom or the scout boom depending on what I felt like doing, the early castle age Longbow/Knight boom after the opponent has already been weakened usually ended games before siege became a thing as enough villagers were killed before meaning that they never aged to Castle, or did so way later than you.
If a rare game were to happen in that the opponent survived to post-castle/early-Imperial they would be so vastly damaged and worn out that the match was essentially over anyway. Maybe I built the odd bombard to hasten the end game push if a game made it this far.
Longbows have the unique advantage of simply being hard to attack. If you have a solid melee line normal archers would have no chance of shooting back at the longbows taking them down. If I was Knight rushing with Longbow support and the opponent had pikemen I could just keep them aggroed to the knights while the Longbows picked them off. If the opponent tired to attack the longbows with the pikes instead seeing that they can't reach the knights they would still die as Longbows can hit critical mass on Pikemen easily. The only choice was retreat and lose frontal buildings/ villagers as Longbows out range towers, they may have crap damage vs buildings, but it's free damage. Castles though? they take my strat and smear it into the dirt. Hints why I village gank from the vary start so that never happens.
With that. Civs that can out pace Brits in the early game would keep me on the defensive most times, but I had my own method of Brit defense where I would have my knights leave out a gate that isn't under attack and pincer the attackers between my base and the knights. The knights would ether attack as normal if I didn't see many spear units, or would just distract the hell out of the attackers if I did.[ I guess cav archers could do this too, and also attack, but I didn't like the tiny range so would only start making those if I was being attacked repeatedly.] This defensive Knight[or cav archer] micro was hilarious to pull off as I would watch my attackers be completely discombobulated being annihilated by Longbows, while also waiting for the Knights[or cav archers] to attack at any second[ or being shot by cav archers], unable to do dick about it.
skirmishers and their pierce armor+ bonus damage to archers means little if they out range you so badly you can't attack, normal archers would always get hit first and harder, cav rushes got met with my own cavs being backed by longbows, camels had good success against me, as I always held my melee infantry in reserve when being attacked. Having to move my pikes outside, my knights inside and my longbows back a bit all at once sometimes led to some damage as some camels could sneak in my gate, would die super fast, but maybe could take some Longbows away.
After the first camel rush against me in a match my Pikemen would be ordered near the gates and told not to move unless ordered manually, a tactic normally meant for archer units, but my pikes weren't gonna go out and fight anything other than cavs as they should be.
Overwhelming defense wins make opponents lose total resources. Wood lines being exhausted, gold and stone depots being exhausted[stone not being used] and with wood lines vanishing so do farms that need wood, so food stocks vanish too. All that's left is to break though the resource deprived base and 1 shot the enemy. This is one of the few times I pull out siege in mass. All in attack against a force that can barely fight back.
hi spirit what do you think about the new skin of age of empire 2 announce at the E3 ? usefull or just for money?
Love your work SOTL
This is great content!
Thanks Tatoh and Spirit!!!
Great video! I would really like to get more opinions of 2k+ players on the civs. They have so much interesting input, if you are playing the game!
Theres one exception...
But not the Mongols:(
I enjoy this video very much !