A Complete Build Order Guide On The BEST Zhu Xi Strategy

Summary

In this video guide, Aussie_Drongo delves into the powerful Two Town Center Song Dynasty defense strategy in Age of Empires IV. This method boasts versatility, being strong against every type of attack while having no weaknesses. It begins with a straightforward village setup and advances to more complex tactics like resource management and defensive positioning, using landmarks and units strategically. Essential techniques include balancing village functions, managing wood and food resources, and optimizing imperial official roles for maximum efficiency. The video is a treasure trove for players looking to master the Zhu Xi strategy, promising strong defensiveness and the potential for resource-rich expansions.

Highlights

• Kick-off with three village setup at Town Center, moving villages to resources! 🌳
• Prioritize building a house and a mining camp after setting up potent food collection. 🏠⛏️
• Focus on resources like wood and gold and use strategic placements for landmarks! 🌾💰
• Manage your villagers for balance - decisive in transitioning to Song Dynasty. 🍜
• Establish meditation Gardens wisely to boost your resource game! ⛩️

Key Takeaways

• Master the art of resource management and position your Queens strategically! ♟️
• Early village setup is crucial; prioritize resources to dominate late-game. 🏡
• Utilize the Zhu Xi strategy for an unbeatable Song Dynasty defense! 🛡️
• Balancing act! Managing food and wood with precision is key! 🌲🎣
• Watch out for early-game threats - have a plan against Mongols and English! ⚔️

Overview

Aussie_Drongo takes us on a deep dive into the Zhu Xi strategy, unrivaled in its versatility and effectiveness as a Song Dynasty defense. This guide promises an unyielding stronghold against all adversaries, starting with a keen setup phase that plants you firmly on the path to prosperity.

The video emphasizes early strategic maneuvers such as villager allocation, resource management, and the use of Imperial Officials. You'll learn how to balance your villagers' workload between hunting, building, and resource gathering, ensuring a seamless progression to the Song Dynasty era with no idle moments.

Advanced tactics involve utilizing landmarks like the meditation Gardens and maximizing the potential of the unique Juku units to maintain relentless pressure against potential attacks. With these insights, you'll have the tools you need to rule with efficiency and power.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to the Strategy The chapter introduces a strategy for Legacy gameplay, focusing on the Two Town Center Song Dynasty defense. This strategy is portrayed as highly effective, with no apparent weaknesses. The initial steps involve managing villages by queuing three new ones, relocating existing villages to a straggler tree, and deploying a scout. Emphasis is placed on the simplicity of this opening strategy, noting that players need not rush to construct buildings immediately.
• 00:30 - 03:00: Starting Moves and Early Game Setup The chapter discusses early game strategy and setup, focusing on resource gathering and building placement. The priority is to collect wood to construct a mining camp, essential for establishing a second Town Center. The process involves tactical movement of villagers, including supervising tasks and optimizing resource collection from sheep, while setting up a mill for efficient gathering. The narrator offers insights on effective villager management and strategic oversight.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Advancing to Song Dynasty and Expanding The chapter discusses the challenges and strategies in managing resources in a game scenario, specifically mentioning the importance of evenly distributing villagers over sheep carcasses to optimize resource gathering. It also touches on personal anecdotes of dealing with recurring illness while handling responsibilities, such as managing little ones.
• 05:00 - 07:30: Economic Strategies and Meditation Gardens The chapter discusses strategies for managing villagers and resources in a strategy game, specifically focusing on economic development and military preparations using the Chinese variant civilization called the Juicy Legacy. The author stresses the importance of efficiently allocating villagers to food and building infrastructure like houses and mining camps. There's also emphasis on scouting for berries, which are crucial due to the unique benefits provided by the civilization's Meditation Gardens Landmark. This allows the player to optimize resource gathering and maintain a steady growth of their economy without missing vital in-game opportunities.
• 07:30 - 10:00: Defense and Second Town Center Deployment This chapter focuses on the importance of strategically placing meditation gardens near berry resources, particularly on a map called 'Gorge.' It emphasizes scouting strategies that avoid directly engaging the opponent early in the game. Instead, it suggests scouting the middle of the map and looping back to find strategic positions. Additionally, the chapter covers optimal resource allocation with villagers, specifically instructing to have seven villagers on food and three on gold, with continued efforts to rally toward food resources.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Adaptation and Flexibility in Build Order The chapter discusses strategic adaptation and flexibility in the game, focusing on build orders, specifically addressing the placement of structures and effective use of resources. It highlights the importance of proximity between the mill and the town center for safeguarding resources and increasing efficiency with the Imperial official. The narrative illustrates managing the timing of transitions and making intentional slow transitions in villagers for learning purposes. Emphasizing that mistakes are part of the process, the chapter encourages learning through actions, even when the actions are not optimal.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Mid-game Transition and Military Focus In this chapter, the focus is on strategies for the mid-game transition in a gaming scenario, with an emphasis on military maneuvers. The speaker discusses the optimal number of villagers to send for a specific task, suggesting a single villager initially but advising on using three if building closer to home. The importance of accumulating 170 gold is highlighted, which involves monitoring and counting villagers assigned to gold collection.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Late Game Goals and Upgrades The chapter discusses strategies for late-game goals and upgrades in a gaming context, particularly focusing on resource management. The speaker highlights the importance of timing when to cash in resources, specifically mentioning a mechanism that caps at 40 gold. They advise against shifting resources from one material (stone) to another (wood) prematurely and suggest strategic timing for these shifts to optimize economic efficiency in the game.
• 25:00 - 30:00: General Tips and Matchup Considerations In this chapter, the focus is on strategies for managing villagers and resources in the early stages of gameplay. The strategy involves moving villagers off food and onto stone resources, specifically when you have enough resources to advance to the Song Dynasty. The chapter emphasizes the importance of building landmarks like the Janang Tower and the strategic placement of a mining camp by one villager. Additionally, the role of the Imperial official in overseeing these tasks is highlighted as a critical aspect of the strategy.
• 30:00 - 32:00: Conclusion and Further Learning Resources The chapter emphasizes the importance of rapid supervision for maximizing efficiency. It describes the strategic relocation of villagers from gold to wood, maintaining only two villagers on food. The meditation Gardens, which generate 64 food per minute, serve as a vital resource, supplementing food needs effectively.

A Complete Build Order Guide On The BEST Zhu Xi Strategy Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 good day fellas and welcome to a juicy Legacy guide video in this video we're going to be going over their strongest strategy and that is the two Town Center Song Dynasty defense this strategy is weak against absolutely nothing and strong against absolutely everything so let's get into it we're going to start by queuing three villages in the Town Center we're going to move all of our Villages that we've got here over onto a straggler tree and then we're going to move our scout out it's a really simple opening uh you don't have to worry about building any buildings really quickly uh
• 00:30 - 01:00 but we will have to worry about the mill so the reason why we do this is We Gather up this wood because we're going to be using this wood to build a mining camp when we're looking to get our second Town Center down uh so we need that mining camp so what we're going to do is we're going to start by just putting the blueprint here moving the Sheep across supervising and then this villager is going to be right clicked onto this Mill move all of the villagers here onto the mill and then that first villager if you can do it get him over onto this other side to start killing these sheep now you might hear my voice you might here that it's a little bit uh
• 01:00 - 01:30 how do I say a little bit scruffy I guess you could say uh and that is because I'm once again sick yes uh I we recovered from the last sickness and we got sick almost immediately after about four or 5 days so such is life having a having little ones running around so one of the things you you'll see one of the things you'll notice here is that I've got the three sheep down I've already taken all of them out really important we want to make sure that we spread our Villages evenly over these uh these sheep carcasses so if you got seven villagers which we do here it's going to be 2 32 the best way to do it so once
• 01:30 - 02:00 you've got the seven villagers on food then you're going to be dropping down a house and a mining camp with your eighth villager that is really really important because that means that we're not going to be getting hous remember that we are playing a Chinese variant civilization the juicy Legacy so they do build houses faster so we don't have to worry about you know missing out any of that time on the town center now behind this one of the other key factors that we're looking to do is make sure that we are scouting out for berries berries are the really big thing that we want to be looking for as the juicy Legacy just simply because our of our meditation Gardens Landmark
• 02:00 - 02:30 it's a really important Landmark that we get those um that we get the meditation Gardens nearby the some of the berries on this map in particular this is Gorge uh really good map for your uh for your meditation Gardens so always be looking to try and find them but I I think the most important thing you can do is Juicy Legacy early on avoid scouting your opponent you can definitely Scout towards the middle of the map but make sure you loot back around and make sure you try and find somewhere nice so now that we've got seven villages on food three villages on gold we're going to Rally once again back towards our food and you can see that our Imperial
• 02:30 - 03:00 official because our uh our Mill is right next to the town center and we we always want to do this it means that all of our sheep are safe but it also means that our Imperial official doesn't have to walk very far so we don't miss any of those drop offs coming through once more sheep are in we're going to be hitting the villagers we using the villagers to hit the Sheep really important and now we're looking for that uh that age up now I've been really slow with my uh villager transition out here but there's a reason why and that is because I want to show you that it's possible for you to make mistakes here if even if and and
• 03:00 - 03:30 still achieve a a really really good timing here so we're only sending one villager out in this situation uh and I would advise you if you're going to be doing this and maybe building it close to home let's say if you wanted to throw it down right here you could go with three villagers instead just because this Landmark does pay itself off very quickly uh but for the moment one villager is all you need and then from here we're going to continue to cue villagers inside the town center and the magic number of gold that we're looking for here is 170 so when we're doing this basically we're counting the villagers that are on gold and we're counting the
• 03:30 - 04:00 tax that's in the mil so normally we're just waiting until the the mil reaches 40 gold and then we're going to cash it in just cuz it's a nice even round number and of course that's the maximum that the imperial official can hold then we hand it in you can see we're approaching 130 so naturally there's going to be 160 coming in shortly and then we're going to have that little bit extra left over on it so once we've got that we're going to be moving these Villages here we're not going to put them onto Stone we're instead going to be putting them onto wood so you might be thinking oh maybe I should send them over onto Stone that's going to be a big mistake and the reason why is because if
• 04:00 - 04:30 these villagers come out over under Stone they're not being supervised by the Imperial official and that's what we're going to be doing a little bit later so now that we've got enough to age up to Song Dynasty we're going to take two Villages from food and we're going to build that Landmark don't worry we'll do that soon uh and then we're going to take out eight villagers here over onto Stone so you can see that we've dropped down right now we've got the two villagers building the landmark the janang tower uh and then we've got the eighth villager dropping down this mining camp right here now one thing to note is that we're bringing that Imperial official across really really important you need
• 04:30 - 05:00 to be supervising this as quickly as you can uh to maximize the efficiency you can see that we're getting beautiful drop offs coming through there and behind this we've got the three villagers that were on our gold that have come over to Wood and we're rallying our town center to Wood and you can see that we've only got two villagers left on food all this time and these villagers fortunately will be supplemented by the meditation Gardens the meditation Gardens of course has got food nearby it generates 64 food a minute so Works about as half as fast as one and a half villagers uh which is pretty damn good so if you've got a nice
• 05:00 - 05:30 little barrier like this built up means that you can afford to have more villagers on wood instead of on food so once that meditation Gardens is finished you can see we've got the 16 food straight away we can bring this villager back he's going to come and jump on some of the uh on the sheep and then we've got ourselves in a really good position because we're about to hit that song Dynasty and we're working towards uh that that uh 2tc timing so we're looking for about 5 minutes 10 to 5 minutes 15 if you can get that sort of timing you're in a really really good spot uh even up to 520 and you're you're
• 05:30 - 06:00 definitely on par anything later than that and you're probably going to have uh you're a bit delayed so even at this stage 510 you can expect to see like a French Knight coming in at around this time maybe a little bit earlier depending on how aggressive they went but this is a pretty quick second Town Center as you can see we we can afford to put it down right now so now that we've now that we've got to this point I'm just going to pause the video cuz I just want to break this off okay so this right here is is the most important part of the build once you've learned how to to do this it's pretty easy from here
• 06:00 - 06:30 but basically the the important thing to note is that this is where it gets flexible so you can choose how you want to play this you can say do I want to go to Castle age do I want to stay around in feudal age do I want to build a third TC and that's definitely an option for you three TC's with the juicy leacy is are 100% a viable strategy so make sure uh that you're scouting out your opponent you're seeing what they're up to and you're looking to do it here now I'm not doing that against my opponent here I'm playing against the easyi and that's just to preserve the state of this game and just make sure that we're
• 06:30 - 07:00 not going up against uh anything that we're not expecting you know like a man- at- arm rush or a Spearman Rush In this case against uh the Chinese so that that's essentially it so now what we're going to do we're going to look to prioritize putting down this town center uh we've got eight or seven Villages here building the town center and we're making sure that we've got more villagers on food this is really important because we want to have enough food for the villagers once this second Town Center comes up so ideally we want 7 to eight villagers on food and we also want to be working towards a second Imperial official ideally you'd love to have him out as soon as this this Lumber
• 07:00 - 07:30 Camp comes up but you can't always get it perfect now because we've got these so close as well to the main Town centers what it means is that we can essentially have a whole bunch of gold in our back pocket without ever going and collecting gold now we will eventually move villagers out there and you can see from the way that we balance things uh that we will eventually do that but with the spare go that we've got early on we're going to be looking to get double broad axe because it doesn't cost wood and any of that wood that we're going to be getting what we're going to be doing is we're going to be turning that into archery Rangers and the idea here is simple we're taking
• 07:30 - 08:00 advantage of the Xiang N Tower the xang Nang Tower and at 6 minutes our first archery range comes down the xang Nan Tower allows us to build a defense uh with poor macro essentially if you have too much wood you simply place down more archery Rangers and eventually you'll be able to use those uh but in the meantime you'll just get yourself a free zuku so that's really really nice and you can see it queuing up right there we're going to move forward now because you know look to be honest there could be long bows up here you're going to have yourself a tough time against the English against as the juicy Legacy
• 08:00 - 08:30 you're always going to have a tough time uh but we're looking to secure this uh this gold so we're going to throw the Outpost down on it if you're playing in more aggressive matchup uh then to be honest you probably wanted to Outpost that a little bit earlier or you might be thinking about maybe throwing it out here maybe looking to run some villagers down over to the bottom side uh lots of different options for you you don't always have to go for this main gold uh but all we need is a handful of villagers on gold that's going to allow us to produce our zuku it's going to allow us to get our Imperial officials so you can see we've got the second one out and now we can start working towards
• 08:30 - 09:00 building that mass so now that we' we've got our town centers pumping over time uh and that is the key here so the reason why I'm doing this video is because I often when I'm coaching over on patreon uh often when I'm coaching the Jui Legacy I refer people to a video but I don't overtly show them the build order I'm just like oh yeah you can see the build order kind of here and so I wanted to come in and I wanted to you know actually demonstrate how this build order is done cuz we did the fast Castle back when the juicy Legacy came out but we never covered this build order this one's been around for a while though I'm
• 09:00 - 09:30 yet to see anything that can get a town center faster than 5 minutes hand with Song Dynasty it seems to be the quickest but if you've seen something quicker let me know uh cuz we can always do an update uh but the the at the moment the main macro focus is just going to be about making sure you've got plenty of bills on wood stacking up those villagers on food as well and when you hit about 122 that's when you can peel off five villagers and bring them over onto the gold and then we're rallying from here you can see that're we're double stacking out over onto food for the moment so I'm going to pause it here the 8 Minute mark
• 09:30 - 10:00 and the reason why we're pausing it here is because we're actually transitioning out to the mill here I know a lot of pro players in particular when they play Chinese and the juicy Legacy are not a big fan of putting the The Mill close to the town center and to be honest I'm kind of surprised it hasn't caught on because 8 minutes into the game there's a lot that can happen in that time and if you're planning to go for two TCS like this it means for the first 5 minutes of the game you don't want to be exposed uh and that's why putting the mill next to the town center makes a lot of sense it makes it easy for you to micro your Imperial official it also makes it so that you're safe from any
• 10:00 - 10:30 potential raids if a man at Arms comes through I mean not if a man at Arms comes through it's not really going to be doing too much damage against you here um but um you know maybe a long bow or something like that comes in on the front that's going to be a problem for you uh and this mitigates that completely at 8 minutes you've got 37 villagers 50 wood it's not a big deal for you so just make sure that when you're doing this in your own games don't risk it by putting the mill out on the berries you can always expand to the berries later as we do here at the 8 Minute Mark and then eventually we will
• 10:30 - 11:00 transition over to Farms we'll go for a nice little farm expansion so we'll keep on moving on and at this stage all we're doing is we're just pumping out zuku we've got four at a time coming in we got Town centers that are both producing Villages and this is essentially the goal from here what we're looking to do is just Mass zuku that's all we need right because we're playing defensively Mass zuku trying and avoid Idol stronger if we can as well that would be lovely uh we're massing juk and then we're going to be working towards our blacksmith upgrade so we always want to be thinking about those they can be a bit difficult to remember sometimes blacksmith upgrades cuz you just want to
• 11:00 - 11:30 spend your gold on other things at the moment we've only got two Imperial officials out so we do start to have a little bit of gold stacking up in each of these production buildings you can see more than 40 gold already stacking up here another thing you'll note is that we don't go for early wheelbarrow and the reason why is to go for the early wheelbarrow it actually requires a lot of early gold and while you do get a rebate on these Technologies uh as as the juicy Legacy it's not as significant as with the Chinese because you don't have the Imperial Academy so I neglect the uh the wheelbarrow quite often in
• 11:30 - 12:00 these games I think a reasonable timing is probably around 50 Juku it kind of makes sense just because your win condition is I make two Town centers and then I want to survive and then once you once you're at survival point then you can consider going into that wheelbarrow so that's the way I like to think about it but once again we're just continuing to stack up more and more zuku we're at how many are we at we're at 28 at the moment uh we're now looking to pick up our Imperial officials so when you you're doing uh when you've got your own games going on with your Imperial
• 12:00 - 12:30 officials my advice is the following one imperial official on a mill a second one on a lumber Camp a third one is going to be collecting tax and the fourth one is a flex Imperial official so that Imperial official could be supervising a blacksmith that Imperial official could be supervising a uh Barracks maybe your opponent's got lots of Cavalry so you throw down a barracks and immediately start pumping out Spearman or perhaps you expanded maybe maybe you've looked to expand your food like I will shortly with a granary and that Imperial official can go down supervise that Granary I would encourage you to avoid
• 12:30 - 13:00 supervising your mining camp you've only got five Villages and remember it does give a 20% bonus it's not very big five or five Villages 20% bonus it's only the one effective villager so really not worth it compared to you know the 24 Villages over here which are becoming uh what what is it 28 plus Villages 20 20 almost 29 Villages actually more than 29 Villages uh well actually no it's not it's it's slightly less anyway uh so here we're flexing the Imperial official out to the blacksmith we're looking to
• 13:00 - 13:30 pick up early upgrades uh and here what we're also doing is we're putting our blacksmith next to the jangan tower because the xangan tower acts as a drop off point for our Imperial officials so we can research a technology and immediately so have a look here we research the technology and then we can immediately pick up the gold that's generated from it and throw that back into the next technology so that's always something that we look to try and take advantage of uh as as long as you're uh as long as you're on the ball uh so now that we're up to the 51 aukuu number uh we can start to think about
• 13:30 - 14:00 moving into that wheelbarrow as well but as you can see it can be tough to find the gold around this timing the most important things is thing is that you just pick up all of these upgrades because these are are going to be what uh make you survive because that that's essentially it you just want to be able to survive through any aggression and the video that I initially posted doing this strategy it was called the juicy Legacy uh break rock paper scissors or break RTS games I think is what it was called and this is 100% it right like when you think about RTS games it's very much rock paper scissors Rush versus turtle versus boom each one counters
• 14:00 - 14:30 each one is counted by the other uh whereas when you go for this strategy you're doing two at the same time you're booming but you're also turtling because you're you're very close and safe and you don't have to move out for resources anywhere and because of that it breaks the counter system anyway that that that's that's my theory uh so at this stage we're starting to stack up a little bit of the gold so it now becomes reasonable for us to move into the wheelbarrow the farm transition is well and truly happened uh we want to make sure that this transition happens ideally you want to want it to happen before the berries run out I I left mine
• 14:30 - 15:00 a little bit too late so I I think ideally I or realistically I probably made two errors this game the first one would just be the uh meditation Gardens and the second one would just be the delay in The Granary uh coming on or the The Granary transition the farm transition coming online so now that we've got our um our zuku Mass that's built up we're starting to build up a surplus of wood we can continue to farm transition or we can throw down some battering rams it's up to you how you want to play this of course you can think about going Castle age as well there's lots of different things that you can do you can convert that uh you
• 15:00 - 15:30 can we could take you know all of these we could take 20 of these Villages and just bring them over here the B the berries you could take that if you wanted there's lots of different ways that you can play this uh but the the easiest way is always just going to be put them on wood transition uh into a farming based economy is always going to be a safe bet add in more production facilities wait until your opponent ages up then you can follow up after them so now we're up to 70o it's a pretty decent mass of units now this replay will end at 15 minutes uh but we can start talking about some some goals once you
• 15:30 - 16:00 reach the castle age so one of the big goals is going to be relics if you can secure three relics you'll do you're going to be doing really well for yourself um but ideally uh not ideally but most commonly you're probably uh going to be picking up fewer of them probably not going to be reaching that three uh number unless you do manage to get up before your opponent does um other than that we when we age up it's really important we need to get our upgrade straight away so that means the veterancy upgrade for yuku as well as plus two ranged attack and ranged armor so I would recommend using your Imperial
• 16:00 - 16:30 officials pulling them off say you've got an imperial official down here working on your uh your Granary as you age up in fact as soon as you're dropping that age up Landmark move the Imperial official to the blacksmith move the Imperial official to an Archer range that's close to the blacksmith so all you have to do is just click click and then just click and then that way your texts are going to come in instead of going to be 1 minute it's much faster I think it works out to be like 20 seconds or 25 seconds something much much faster so that would be my advice in in that
• 16:30 - 17:00 regard that's your best uh that's your best timing and then with regard to your wind condition it's simply about having a bigger economy and better units or more more units than your opponent as you can see we're approaching 95 zuku at the moment up to 168 population we've got 70 villagers we're having ourselves a very good time here and I think what makes this such a a strong uh play style is there's a lot of things uh that are in favor of us right here number one is the very fast second TC number two is the flexibility ility of the Xiang Nan Tower in providing a solid defense for
• 17:00 - 17:30 us uh number three is going to be the Juku an incredibly effective unit against pretty much everything in the feudal age with the exception of maybe the French Knight that's probably about it just because if they've got good micro they can pull them back and get them healed up but other than that there's really not much uh that that the Juku can't handle maybe the long bows as well is probably probably the other thing where you're going to need to use outposts together with zuku to defend instead of just using only zuku uh but that's going to be it the replay will end here uh and we'll just we we'll
• 17:30 - 18:00 quickly reveal it not that it it uh it tells us anything here but overall this is a a solid defensive strategy that you can use in your games it's rare that you're going to come up against someone who is going to be able to counter this effectively the difficulty that you will have is playing against people uh that do attack you in the Dark Age so playing up against the Mongols might be difficult or playing against the uh the Ottomans also might be difficult because if there is a um a Spearman that is on your stone outcropping and is harassing your villagers you can see that Our Town Center doesn't cover our Stone
• 18:00 - 18:30 outcropping which means that we're going to have to try and fight him or ignore him and you don't normally want to ignore the Spearman and if you do try and fight him then he might bait you away uh so you you want to try and trap him if at all possible and that's going to delay your town center so accept that and expect that uh the last thing is just going up against the English uh it's going to be a little bit more difficult against the English because you're going to have long B at your doorstep at probably 4 minutes 30 4 minutes 20 somewhere around that maybe a little bit later than that uh but it it it is difficult as the juicy Legacy to play against the English and I would
• 18:30 - 19:00 just recommend it going fast Castle against them so in every other matchup this is in my opinion the best build order to do as the juicy Legacy better than the fast Castle better than the all-in Juku Rush this will beat the all-in Juku Rush the numbers are just way too good for it um unfortunately it's it's it's very very solid uh but that is essentially it so we'll leave it there if you got any questions leave them down below uh if you want to see more coaching content make sure you check out patreon plenty of free coaching content over there if you want to see the juicy Legacy though that is behind the P so just keep that in mind anyway we'll leave it there and we'll
• 19:00 - 19:30 catch you guys in the next one thank you so much for watching