Chinese Civ. Strategies

[ZhouCong.Art]

Hi guys, I have been playing AOM for 2 years, I have been using Nüwa as main God since ToD came out. Throughout the games I realized many advantages Chinese civ (still very OP even after patches 2.4 and 2.6?) and also some serious disadvantages for them (mentioned below). My current rating is about 1650, I am interested in improve my gameplay, so far I didn't see any dedicated tutorial or strategy discussion thread about playing Chinese Civ. I would like to share my tips from my experiences as Chinese player.

Also I wish that this thread would encourage players to discuss further in detail about Chinese Gods.

Overall I found Chinese very strong against Norse, good against Greek and Atlantean and average against Egyptians. Although a strong civilization, Chinese is not beginner-friendly in many ways that requires a lot of micro both on building, economy, units in battlefield to succeed (compared to old civilizations). They tends to be very strong in late game due to their gardens, pop-effective military units, and quite strong myth units.

Nice Features "OPness"

• Chinese combat heroes: Immortals may only created from TC, as a double range units they are very effective against early Centaur raid and ranged myth units. They occupy only 2 pop space and are better than Hersir in combat, because counter infantry do not deal extra damage on them.
  
• Cataphracts are very good against Norses as they do not have any non-infantry counter-cavalry unit.
  
• Scout Cavalry, Immortals, Cataphracts, Mounted Archers, Fire Lancers, War Chariots and Generals are super population effective units.
  
• Barrage (Chang'e) god power deals a lot of damage on units and takes a whole army of closely packed units if the player dont move out of its range.
  
• Earth Dragon have too much HP and is too costly to take down.
  
• Choosing Huangdi minor god as Nüwa makes War Academy units 25% Cheaper in total (by researching Oracle Bone Script technology -15% cost plus -10% cost from Nüwa)
  
• One can use Call to Arms god power to duplicate 3 Generals (200F 200G) and one Heroic Age myth unit, which makes army a lot more powerfull.
  
• One can potentially spam a lot of Towers+buildings in key positions as Fuxi by using Blessed Construction + Imperial Examination (-60% of building time!).
  
• Putting Gardens to instantly generate resource that have been lacking helps a lot, specially hard to gold-starve a Chinese civ.
  
• Nüwa's God power that ressurects villagers is very good at archaic and classical age (villagers fights and raids).
  
• 2 Amphibious Myth units - War Salamander and Azure Dragon.

Weakness

• Immortals and monk are too slow to chase down fast-moving myth units. They use melee attack against Titan and Fire Giants which makes them very vulnerable under arrow fire.
  
• Chinese don't have a "Tank" human unit nor short range siege weapon with Pierce Armor above 40%. Which render them very vulnerable under arrowfire.
  
• Chinese don't have a really "Tankable" myth unit with Pierce Armor above 60%.
  
• Chinese get favor very slow in early game, cost of first 4 gardens (235F 235W 235G = 705 total) are more expensive than first 2 Egyptian monuments (150F 150G = 300 total). Requires more build time overall, have less HP (400hp), and are more bulky. That means Chinese army will have hard time to get Castles, myth upgrades and myth units on early game.
  
• Generals is the most expensive human unit of the game 200F 200G (vs 180F 70G from War Elephant). They can be easily killed if dont micro carefully - as they can be countered by both anti-cavalry and myth units.
  
• Mounted Archers are a bit expensive and fragile as it suffers huge damage bonus from a huge list of units: all anti-archers units, all anti-cavalry units, plus them are weak against regular archers. So to make them survive in battle one must micro them a lot.
  
• Sitting Tiger costs 4 pop and have same status as Egyptian Catapult which costs 3 pop.
  
• Sitting Tiger range do not improve from 28 to 30 with Engineers Tech.
  
• Chinese Fire Lances have low piece and hack armor, their range isn't long enough to stand out of tower/TC fire, often it is required 10-15 of them to effectively destroy a Town Center.
  
• Chinese don't have a long-range myth unit (their only ranged myth unit is Vermilion Bird with only 6 meters of range).
  
• I found it quite hard to advance into classical within 5min, even in high hunt maps, building 2 gardens takes a bit of villager working times and some food too. In order to advance fast, one may need to delay gardens build time.

Archaic Build Order for Nüwa High hunt land maps:

• 6 on Food (get Hunting Dog) followed by 2 on Gold then 1 on Wood
  
• next villager build a garden then a house and then another garden the go to Wood
  
• Put gardens to generate Food
  
• 2 more on Wood
  
• 4 more to Food and 1 more on Gold, make an Immortal (to get relics)
  
• Start building a temple as soon as you have 100W and 100G
  
• More guys on Food and advance as soon as you have 400F
  
• Upg. Handaxe, Pickaxe and put Gardens on Wood while advancing, move 2 villagers from food to gold, and 4 more from Food to Wood. Build 2-3 more houses.
  
• Once on Classical, make 3 Immortals ASAP, get 2nd Town Center with 6-8 Food Villagers and after that, build 2 War Academies and 1 Stable
  
• Queue villagers from 2 TCs (task them to herdables and wood then gold), put gardens on Favor, and make 2-5 more Gardens. Try to get map control and heroic at 10-12min.

How to beat Chinese:
Usually playing as Chinese I found they have a huge weakness that basically resumes into: low favor income, lack of a fast hero or a real ranged hero and above all lacks of a meatshield unit that can resist heavy arrowfire.

• Egyptian FH, Archers+siege+war elephants/camels: best answer to this seems to be mounted archers, chu-ko-nu and scout cavalry, but that takes a lot of macro from my side than opponent's side, I need to make archers to target on their cavalry and chariots (instead of sieges) while my scout cavarly have to keep running around from camels and attacking sieges.
  
• Fast non-ranged myth units and fire giants as my immortals and monks can't chase them down, and they end up stuck in middle of crowd and dying under arrowfire.
  
• Towering/building at key positions supported by archers, cavalry and fast units on classical. Chinese don't have a very effective way to deal with towers and heavy arrowfire, they only answer is Fire Lance or try to advance to Mythic and get Sitting Tiger. Also, their low favor income don't allow them to get enough myth units to destroy building.
  
• Titan+Close range siege supported by heavy arrowfire and some anti-cavalry. Use archers to pick off Immortals and whorever blocks the Titan. In that case Chinese player have no other choice than give ground and keep retreating.

As conclusion, I think Chinese may be the hardest civilization to play with. They have to take key positions of the map before opponent secure it, so player must go for relatively aggressive map control. At same time, a lot of thing must be manually done: deal with drop points, making heroes from TC, making Generals from Castle like the Greeks, and try to get all 10 gardens up and make monks from Temple like the Egyptians. Plus they need to keep switching gardens from one resources to another. That is like unique tasks of all other civilizations summed up together. But nevertheless its fun to play with them. =)

[tangoman 999]

Chinese are considered OP because Chu Ko Nu are extremely strong early game to the point of being almost uncounterable especially with a meat shield. With Nu Wa even more so because of the cheapness.

Chinese is extremely strong vs any kind of rush due to cheap and easily make-able heroes, very strong and cheap ranged units plus year of the goat can provide 1800 food in classical, plus gardens makes them very hard to starve of any resource. They also don't need much gold for any of their classical units.

Their myth units suck, vermillion bird has been nerfed really hard so is pretty useless now. Generals are good, but overpriced imo. As you point out they don't have good siege so are pretty powerless against noobs who just like sitting their and spamming buildings (I played an Oranos the other day who literally maxed out on palaces, towers and mirror towers then just made a titan and wonder and there wasnt much I could do because all the fighting was on my 3rd tc so I was at a population advantage). They also don't have a regular unit that can be buffed to be good against buildings; all they have is archer with flaming pitch. Greek get myrmidon/zeus hoplite/gastraphetes/hetaroi, egypt get horus axemen and atlantean get contarius with lance of stone or destroyers.

Monks are decent but only really present a problem against high population units eg elephants but are easily picked off by chariot archers. son of osiris causes major problems to chinese.

Overall despite all the negativity surrounding the chinese I certainly don't consider them OP. Admittedly the first 10 minutes they are very strong because of cheap units and call to arms but from that point out then average out and are by far the weakest in lategame.

[tangoman 999]

also scout cavalry is the most population/cost effective unit in the game BUT it gets killed easily by pretty much anything and doesnt have good line of sight so no use for raiding.

[GrizzGolf]

The Norse are pretty good vs the Chinese right?

[ZhouCong.Art]

Originally posted by ATB_Ubermode:

also scout cavalry is the most population/cost effective unit in the game BUT it gets killed easily by pretty much anything and doesnt have good line of sight so no use for raiding.

Chinese scout cavalry have severe myopia. One solution is we stack 2 scout cavalries together and use spread formation, they will scout like a greek Kataskopos (but more vulnerable to building arrows because of their 30% pierce armor vs kataskopos 70%)

Chu-ko-nu is bit more deadly than greek toxotes, specially behind the wall against infantry.

@GrizzGolf
For me it seem like Chinese human units have serious advantage vs Norse units in several ways:
- Cataphract are fast and they counter all Norse infantries.
- Mounted Archer is almost as fast as Raiding Cavalry, they counter all Norse cavalries - preventing raiding from them.
- Immortals are easy to spam at early game, they are very good to defend against Loki Hersir rushes.

Many times I used an army of Cataphract + Chu Ko Nu supported by Mounted Archers, Immortals and Fire Lances to overwhelm a Norse army of equal or even larger size. What Norse have advantage in is their Myth units, specially Giants and Battle Boar.

One thing they could have done is to make General a Hero instead of normal unit, because Generals are almost as expensive as Mythic age Greek Heroes, but far more vulnerable: less hp, vulnerable to myth units special attacks, infantry, counter-cavalry units. They often dies too fast if left fighting in front line.

[Loggy]

It's pretty evident from the game files that generals were originally intended to be heroes: they're named "Hero Chinese General" in the proto after all.

It's curious that Shennong can't get call to arms but has much less difficulty dealing with buildingspam than the other two.

[LNC_GoldenAxe]

Do you guys know if Imperial Examination speeds up building a titan gate?

btw, the dev did an amazing job making them and their really fun playing.

[Hagrit]

would also like to mention halberdiers. Hoplites, murmillos and ulfsarks get no bonus vs cavalry. spearman gets 10%, and halberdiers get a whopping 30% bonus vs cavalry.
statistically compared to a hoplite, hoplites are 90 resources, haberdiers are 70, halberdiers have 5 hp less than hoplites and 1 attack less. halberdiers also train faster, and move 0.10 faster. (except zeus hoplites ofcourse.)

compare halberdier to each equivalent from every civ, you will notice that its practically better than every one of them.

[Loggy]

Originally posted by LNC_MostFeared:

Do you guys know if Imperial Examination speeds up building a titan gate?

Game files make no distinctions about what is affected: it simply improves the build rate of Chinese villagers by 40%. A quick editor test shows it works too and titan gates aren't weird for some reason. It just won't work on converted norse infantry, not that it matters much.

[Cyber]

this 2.7 is so cruel with chinese the monk is useles now and firelancer is weak and miss the shots and fire rate is slow.

[Cyber]

Originally posted by Ubermode:

Chinese are considered OP because Chu Ko Nu are extremely strong early game to the point of being almost uncounterable especially with a meat shield. With Nu Wa even more so because of the cheapness.

Chinese is extremely strong vs any kind of rush due to cheap and easily make-able heroes, very strong and cheap ranged units plus year of the goat can provide 1800 food in classical, plus gardens makes them very hard to starve of any resource. They also don't need much gold for any of their classical units.

Their myth units suck, vermillion bird has been nerfed really hard so is pretty useless now. Generals are good, but overpriced imo. As you point out they don't have good siege so are pretty powerless against noobs who just like sitting their and spamming buildings (I played an Oranos the other day who literally maxed out on palaces, towers and mirror towers then just made a titan and wonder and there wasnt much I could do because all the fighting was on my 3rd tc so I was at a population advantage). They also don't have a regular unit that can be buffed to be good against buildings; all they have is archer with flaming pitch. Greek get myrmidon/zeus hoplite/gastraphetes/hetaroi, egypt get horus axemen and atlantean get contarius with lance of stone or destroyers.

Monks are decent but only really present a problem against high population units eg elephants but are easily picked off by chariot archers. son of osiris causes major problems to chinese.

Overall despite all the negativity surrounding the chinese I certainly don't consider them OP. Admittedly the first 10 minutes they are very strong because of cheap units and call to arms but from that point out then average out and are by far the weakest in lategame.

I totaly agree