Everything you can do with relics in AoE4

[Music] hey guys spirit of the law here in this video we're going to be taking a look at relics and age of empires 4. not to be confused with relic entertainment who developed aoe4 we'll go through some basic facts about relics the various things you can do with them and all of these civilization specific bonuses buildings and exceptions let's check it out to start with the basics the number of relics on the map varies not based on the size of the map but in fact on the number of players the general pattern is three neutral relics on the map plus one for each player if the map isn't bugged you can expect five relics and a 1v1 up to 11 in a 4v4 that means civilizations getting an extra benefit from relics may need some cooperation from their allies to share them as the number of relics per player actually decreases in larger games this is especially true on maps like archipelago where the player number plus three rule is especially clear with a single relic on everyone's starting island and then three relics dispersed on the neutral islands so what can you do with relics and are they even worth getting the first and simplest thing you can do with the relic is place it in a religious building at a monastery you can create a monk to grab relics from around the map and the most convenient way to do that is to select the building and hold shift while first right-clicking the relic and then right clicking a second time on the monastery that'll send a monk that you create to go pick it up and walk it back automatically though be careful that the monk will stand beside the building with the relic until you specifically tell them to drop it off you can either use the drop off button or just right click on the building if you see the orange triangle once inside the relic generates 100 gold per minute which it pays out in a trickle every 10 seconds you can improve that payout though with the tech tithe barns at the same building which adds a trickle of food wood and stone on top of the regular gold with the tech for each relic you end up getting around four villagers worth of value while taking up no population space and being fairly resistant to raiding for specific civilizations though relics can be placed in various other buildings for a variety of different sometimes quite powerful effects in fact five of the eight civilizations have something notable about their relationship with relics we'll start with the holy roman empire as they have the greatest number of options and while it's nice to have options it can also be a little confusing as relics are really woven into their intended playstyle arguably their best option is to place relics in their regnitz cathedral which is one of the landmarks you can build when going up to castle age any relics placed in that building give triple the usual gold income up to 900 gold per minute with three relics which is all the building can hold that's the equivalent of around 20 unupgraded gold miners their alternative castle age landmark is the burgrave palace which trains units in batches of five but the relic benefit of ragnan's cathedral at least with the current balance is generally considered the stronger option from an economic perspective your best play on paper is always to put your first three relics in the redness cathedral if you built it but what if you built the burgrade palace or you have more than three relics instead of putting them in a regular monastery another option is to place them in dogs they'll still generate the regular 100 gold per minute the same as a monastery but give the added bonus of increasing the fire rate of your ships you can only put one relic in each dock but by putting relics into multiple docks you can stack the effects several times after four relics here you can see they're firing around 25 faster obviously that's not terribly helpful on land maps though yet another option is you can put a single relic into one of your defensive buildings it still generates the regular gold income but also gives a variety of positive effects for the keep outpost or tower on your stone walls including armor attack sight and range not only is it keeping a relic in a safe place but can even help cement your hold on a particular area of the map with all of these options and the relic generating at least its regular 100 gold per minute the question is then should the holy roman empire ever place relics in a regular monastery honestly i can't really think of a good reason to ever do that i double checked and tied barnes despite saying it only works on monasteries actually applies to all of the other buildings we've seen so there's no advantage to using the monastery as holy roman empire to store your relics besides maybe being in a safer location the best thing from an economic perspective would be to make sure you're filling the pregnancy cathedral if possible followed by keeps or docks depending on the situation so that's the holy roman empire and now let's move on to china with their unique building the pagoda this is a unique building unlocked in the ming dynasty which involves essentially paying for imperial age twice you need both the great wall gatehouse and spirit way to unlock it and if you were already in the yuan dynasty it also means trading in 15 faster movement on basically all units for 10 greater hp on just your military units in many cases it feels like a strict downgrade and considering the large upfront investment this is not something that every player will choose to do that said if you commit to the ming dynasty and control a few relics the pagoda does have some pretty nice upside you can build up to three of them at once with each having space for one relic when garrison in addition to the 100 gold per minute you get 100 of every other resource as well with all three of your pagodas holding relics that's the equivalent of adding 20 to 30 villagers worth of production depending on upgrades all while taking up no population room freeing up more space for military i double checked and it's not impacted by tide barns which for chinese only affects their monasteries i think the comparison to tithe barns is a very natural one and you can see pagodas end up being a supercharged version of what's available to most civilizations albeit with the very large upfront cost of the necessary landmarks next let's take a look at the ruse and their abbey of the trinity this is one of their castle age landmark options and functions as a monastery while creating warrior monks at half the cost like any monastery you can garrison relics inside of it and also improve it with tide barns but the main advantage is how it helps you secure relics in the first place having cheaper and faster monks along with often a ton of scouting information in the early game means roos are in an especially good position to gain control of relics even just not having to worry about wolves killing your monks takes off a good amount of pressure when grabbing relics on top of everything else you're doing somewhat related to this idea is the deli sultanate now while they don't have a specific relic bonus they will almost definitely have their scholars out before other civilizations have a monastery since it isn't unlocked until castle age to protect this from being exploited delhi scholars actually can't pick up relics before castle age but you can certainly speed up the process by having them already trained and in position for when you hit that age having earlier access to cheap monks already on the map at the start of castle age means delhi is in a similarly advantageous position to roost in being able to secure relics early if that's a priority for you or even to grab them for a holy roman empire teammate of course the holy roman empire themselves are in a similar situation as they're able to grab relics with their prelate immediately at the start of castle age while another civilization-hidden castle could be just starting to build their monastery in that situation now one last civilization with a potential relic advantage is the mongols this one's a little more obscure but at a prayer tent built inside the influence of an ovu mongols can research an improved version of tithe barns looking at the descriptions it's very unclear what you're getting as both the regular and improved versions say they do the same thing at face value it appears you're paying 500 stone to research it 20 seconds faster so it looks pretty terrible unfortunately or in this case maybe fortunately none of the numbers it gives are actually correct if you get the regular thai barnes tech then garrison relics generate 30 food wood and stone per minute as it does for any other civilization but after you get the improved version for the extra 500 stone cost that increases by 50 to 45 food wood and stone per minute for each relic that's around an extra villager worth of production so if you have a lot of extra stone that is one way to spend it also it's just a side note in case you're wondering there's no advantage to placing relics in a prayer tent within the influence of an ovu in this case unlike pastors the influence zone doesn't give an economic boost so that was a lot of information and to summarize all of those civilization advantages here they are at a glance it's a mix of some direct economic bonuses unique buildings upgrades and some hard to quantify advantages that have units able to secure relics more easily the holy roman empire like i said are the main civilization that comes to mind with relics but as you can see many civilizations have something unique going on there is of course one last thing you can do with relics which is mass conversions for a monk holding a relic you can initiate a six and a half second countdown after which every enemy unit in the circle even on the edges is instantly converted if doing that would exceed your maximum population of 200 after the conversion then any extra units are killed to keep you at that maximum the monk or equivalent unit can't be moved while doing this though it can be bumped and afterwards there's a two minute cooldown the monk is of course very exposed while doing this and losing the monk and battle can cost you control of the relic that he's carrying so there's definitely an element of risk still it's a great play that can swing the momentum of the game if you can pull it off there's also a strange glitch that's been reported which is hard to do intentionally but if the monk dies just as the conversion timer ends then the enemy units are converted but not to your side the converted units just turned neutral which i'm sure is unintended but sort of a funny way the game tries to split the difference between a successful and unsuccessful conversion and one more thing just because they haven't been mentioned in the video while ambassads don't have anything special for relics per se they can convert units one at a time after researching their culture wing tech faith of course they can still do the regular mass conversion with a relic as well so that's everything related to relics in age of empires 4. as you can see it's a pretty in-depth mechanic compared to previous age games of course many players are still going to ignore them as it's just one of many things demanding your attention but at least now you hopefully have a bit better idea of what they do thanks for watching i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Spirit Of The Law

Views: 107,310

Keywords: aoe4, age of empires 4, sotl, spirit of the law, relics, guide

Id: ZdHgywCAWUY

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021