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[ENG] Civilizations #06: Poles · Start the game already!

• 0:18
  May the angels lead you into paradise.
• 0:21
  May choirs of angels receive you.
• 0:24
  May you have eternal rest. The choir recites the lyrics of
• 0:29
  the Gregorian chant piece in Paradisum, but in truncated
• 0:33
  version. This chant is still sung to this
• 0:36
  day during Catholic Requiem in the older form, the Tridentine
• 0:41
  or Traditional Latin Mass. Today we are visiting Eastern
• 0:45
  Europe and talk about the Poles. Christianity plays a major role
• 0:50
  in the history of the Poles and frankly even today, so it's very
• 0:53
  fitting that this chant has been chosen as their Jingle.
• 0:57
  The Poles have been introduced to the game in the second DLC
• 1:00
  for the Definitive Edition in August 2021.
• 1:03
  Together with the. Bohemians introducing new unique
• 1:06
  game mechanics and farm economy. Which I was very sceptical.
• 1:11
  Of when it got released, but now believed to be one of the best
• 1:14
  design decisions in the game. The Poles have played a key.
• 1:19
  Role in the later stages of medieval history for European
• 1:23
  history and across the Anas of history, few nations have stood
• 1:27
  A sturdier shield between the east and the West than the
• 1:30
  Kingdom of Poland to understand why the poles play the way they
• 1:34
  do in age of empires, we have to understand the soil they walked
• 1:38
  on. Poland's medieval story is 1000
• 1:41
  year transformation from a collection of forest tribes into
• 1:45
  the shield of Christianity. It all begins in the 10th
• 1:49
  century with a man named Mieszko.
• 1:51
  The first he made a move that changed the map of Europe
• 1:54
  forever. In the year 966, he didn't just
• 1:58
  convert to Christianity, he strategically chose Rome over
• 2:02
  Byzantium. In one stroke, he brought Poland
• 2:05
  into the Western fold, ensuring they weren't just conquered by
• 2:08
  their neighbors, but recognized as a legitimate sovereign
• 2:12
  Kingdom. But being a Kingdom in the heart
• 2:14
  of Europe and living with a target on your back?
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  By the 1200s, Poland was fractured, split into tiny
• 2:21
  Dutchies that were ripe for the picking.
• 2:23
  This was the era of the Mongol storm.
• 2:27
  Just imagine the terror as the Golden Horde swept across the
• 2:30
  plains, culminating in the bloody Battle of Lake Nietzsche
• 2:33
  in 1241. And yet the greatest threat
• 2:37
  wasn't the Mongols, it was a group they invited in to help in
• 2:41
  their war against the Prussians, the Teutonic Knights brought in
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  to help fight pagans. The Teutonic Order decided they
• 2:49
  like the land so much that actually keep it for themselves,
• 2:53
  becoming Poland's most bitter rivals for the next two
• 2:56
  centuries. However, every great story needs
• 3:00
  a hero of reconstruction. Enter Casimir the Great in the
• 3:05
  1300s. There's a famous saying about
• 3:07
  him. He found a Poland of wood and
• 3:10
  left it in stone. Kazimir was a visionary who
• 3:15
  built 50 castles, founded one of the world's first universities
• 3:18
  in Khrakov, and most importantly, made Poland a
• 3:22
  sanctuary for the Jewish people, creating a tapestry of religious
• 3:26
  tolerance that was centuries ahead of its time.
• 3:29
  But the real power up the moment Poland becomes the superpower we
• 3:34
  can witness in the mid game and Age of Empires 2 that happened
• 3:38
  in 1385. This is the union of Crevo
• 3:42
  through the royal marriage of Poland's first queen and
• 3:46
  protagonist of the polls campaign.
• 3:47
  In Age of Empires 2, Yadviga, the Kingdom of Poland and the
• 3:51
  Grand Dutchie of Lithuania joined forces.
• 3:54
  This wasn't just a wedding, it was the birth of a Titan.
• 3:58
  Together they're faced down the Teutonic Knights at the
• 4:01
  legendary Battle of Kunwald in 1410.
• 4:04
  It was one of the largest clashes of the Middle Ages, a
• 4:07
  true imperial age showdown that finally broke the orders back
• 4:12
  and paved the way for the liberty of Poland.
• 4:15
  This was the era where the Polish nobility, the Schlatter,
• 4:19
  began to demand more power, creating a unique noble
• 4:22
  democracy that would eventually define the nation.
• 4:26
  It's this blend of deep rooted agriculture, massive territorial
• 4:31
  unions, and a fierce independent nobility that gives the Poles
• 4:35
  their unique flavor on the digital battlefields today.
• 4:39
  I'd definitely argue that the Poles in the game are more on
• 4:42
  the later side of the grand timeline of medieval history
• 4:46
  compared to some of the other civilizations.
• 4:48
  So let's go. Ahead and take a deeper look at
• 4:51
  the civilization bonuses, the unique units and unique
• 4:54
  technologies of the Poles in a game where every second of TC
• 5:00
  idle time and every bit of food. Counts the poles.
• 5:03
  Bring a unique rhythm to the battlefield and.
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  It all. Starts with the full walk.
• 5:08
  This isn't just a mill replacement, it's a very new
• 5:12
  twist on food macromanagement. By granting an immediate food
• 5:16
  burst upon the completion of a farm.
• 5:19
  The Polish economy doesn't just. Grow.
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  It explodes. Fueling a mid game power spike
• 5:24
  that few civilizations can rival.
• 5:26
  Now on paper the fall walk is a three by three mil replacement.
• 5:31
  It's a bit beefier than a standard mill and takes 5
• 5:34
  seconds longer to build. But here's the twist.
• 5:38
  It's basically a house and a mill rolled into one, giving you
• 5:42
  5 pop space the moment it goes up.
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  Since fall walks cost 100 wood nowadays, this means you're
• 5:49
  getting a house for. Free.
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  Upon release of the poles the forewalks cost was 125 wood so
• 5:55
  it combined the cost of a mill and a house.
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  But this cost has been reduced to 100 wood with the release of
• 6:00
  the Mountain Royal Steel Sea. So what I like to do is to build
• 6:05
  the forewalk in time instead of my third house in the dark edge
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  and start collecting the berries because those berries are
• 6:12
  actively lay being my food economy.
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  Why is that, you may wonder? Well.
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  Well, when you see the farm within the fall walks 4 tile
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  aura, you get 10% of that farms total foods immediately
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  deposited into your bank. To maximize this, you want to
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  fit exactly 8 farms perfectly around that three by three
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  square. Since the fall walk is placed
• 6:36
  next to the berries, they are blocking one or maybe even two
• 6:40
  of your juicy farms. Also, geometry matters a lot.
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  The farm has to be placed entirely within that aura in
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  order to collect your instant food gratification.
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  Thankfully, the auto farm feature is respecting this and
• 6:54
  tries to place the farms neatly around your fall walk.
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  Though it's not just geometry, it's also timing that's
• 7:01
  important. The fall walk has to be standing
• 7:04
  before the farms have been built.
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  You can't just slap a fall walk down next to old farms and
• 7:09
  expect a payday. You've got to plan your layout
• 7:12
  from the start. Also, upgrades are important to
• 7:15
  consider since the bonus is giving you 10% of the farm's
• 7:19
  food, getting your mill upgrades increase the total food you
• 7:23
  would get. Because of these, upgrades
• 7:25
  increase the total amount of food on those farms.
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  It's always worth to get your mill upgrades before placing a
• 7:32
  farm, and I for one try to avoid dark age farms as much as
• 7:36
  possible and get horse collar before placing the first farms
• 7:39
  around my forewalk. The difference is notable.
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  Without horse collar, you get 18 instant food per farm.
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  It's 25 with horse collar. This is why the Poles really
• 7:50
  like to get crop rotation early Imperial Age, since they get 55
• 7:55
  food instantly per per farm instead of 38 with Heavy Plow.
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  Because of this bonus, the poles are pretty much the only
• 8:03
  civilization in the game to always benefit from early crop
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  rotation, whereas with other civilizations, it's said to be
• 8:09
  only worth getting when it's safe to say that the game will
• 8:12
  go on for a long time. Now, I know what you're
• 8:16
  thinking. If I build my farms away from my
• 8:18
  Town Center, my villages are sitting ducks.
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  But there is something you can do about this.
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  Just place your fall walk exactly 3 tiles away from your
• 8:27
  Town Center. This sweet spot lets you tuck
• 8:30
  your farms right in between both buildings, your TC, and the fall
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  walk. You get the instant food boost
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  from the fore walk, but your villages are still close enough
• 8:38
  to Garrison the second or Scout or Archer shows up.
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  This won't be true if you're milling your berries, but
• 8:45
  remember this trick for your second fore walk.
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  Maybe if my berries have spawned towards the enemy, I might even
• 8:51
  consider making a fast second fore walk close to my TC and
• 8:55
  start farming there and get back to my Berry fore walk once my
• 8:59
  base is secured. But anyway, there's one more
• 9:02
  thing to mention. If you plan on building your
• 9:05
  four ways close to your. TC then you should also do what
• 9:08
  most high level players are doing and place your two
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  starting houses right under your Town Center in order to keep
• 9:16
  clear of the farming space of future 4 works.
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  Best case scenario, you do this but into the direction or on the
• 9:23
  side of your Town Center facing the middle of the map.
• 9:27
  This feels super weird at first, but is extremely efficient since
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  you want to prioritize farming close to your fall works instead
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  of your Town Center. As you can see, it's quite
• 9:37
  important to envision your farming layout early on in the
• 9:41
  game and think about how much space you'll need and how to
• 9:45
  secure that space for your strategy.
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  Oh, and by the way, you. Can't stack this bonus so you're
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  wasting your bonus. If you try to put one farm right
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  between two fold works, it still only give you the food of 1
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  farm. And for the real micronurds out
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  there, or if you're playing team games, there are some wild
• 10:04
  hidden mechanics here since the bonus is tied to who finishes
• 10:08
  the farm. You can actually.
• 10:10
  Pull off a Tuten farm sling. If your Tuten ally starts a farm
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  taking advantage of their cheaper wood cost, and you
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  finish the construction as the Polish player you get the food
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  drop off. It's a high.
• 10:22
  Level. Play that can absolutely break
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  the economy in the team game, but it requires really good
• 10:28
  coordination between the team mates and also the Tuten player
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  has to be quite high PM in order to constantly seed new farms but
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  not actually finish them. And all that without neglecting
• 10:40
  his own economy. Also, if you're wondering what
• 10:43
  happens if you convert a Polish forewalk, it's basically the
• 10:46
  same as converting a house. You get to the pop space, but
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  you can't make use of the instant food collection.
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  Because the forewalk economy is the key to most of what the
• 10:56
  Poles like to do. They are also the target of
• 10:59
  early rushes and attacks. The Polish economy is kind of
• 11:03
  front loaded. They rely on that instant food
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  burst to click up to the next age or to mass units, so enemies
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  want to make your farms a dead zone.
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  Because forewalks are often placed away from the Town Center
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  simply because they require a lot of space, Polish farmers are
• 11:19
  usually vulnerable. A handful of scouts or Archers
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  in early feudal can force those villages off the forewalk.
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  Even if you don't get the kills, every second they spend
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  garrisoned or running is a second they aren't triggering
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  that 10% food bonus. If you mess up their forewalk
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  timing, you might just mess up their game plan entirely.
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  And this is the whole reason why I believe that the foreworks are
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  brilliantly designed. They are a significant eco
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  bonus, but they come with a cost.
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  They are not completely free because you are forced to expose
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  your economy or make sure to invest into securing them.
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  It's basically the opposite of a Khmer or Ketan farm.
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  And design wise, Khmerian Ketan farms are just a free super
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  strong eco bonus without any balancing whatsoever, whereas
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  the polls bonus for the faux walks is much more interesting
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  to me because of the risk you're taking when relying on them.
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  Everyone knows how strong the polls eco is if they're allowed
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  to farm. And if you've ever played as the
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  polls, you know the feeling of knowing that your opponent
• 12:22
  knows, and therefore you need to find the sweet spot of being a
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  little greedy and boomy, but not too much, which I find
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  interesting and. Very rewarding if I can get away
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  with it. We've talked about the stats and
• 12:34
  the strategy, but where does the forewark actually come from?
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  In Polish history, the forewark, derived from the German Forvac,
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  was a massive manorial farm system.
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  It wasn't just a family plot, it was an industrial scale
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  plantation designed for one thing, and that's export.
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  During the late Middle Ages, Western Europe was urbanizing
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  and hungry. They needed grain.
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  Lots of grain. Poland, with its vast fertile
• 13:05
  planes and access to the Vistula River, became the bread basket
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  of Europe. But here's the twist that the
• 13:12
  game hints at with the instant food bonus.
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  In the real world, the folwar system was the engine of the
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  Schlachter, the Polish nobility. As the demand for grain rose,
• 13:23
  the nobles realized they could make a fortune by taking direct
• 13:26
  control of the land. They moved away from just
• 13:29
  collecting rent and started managing these massive estates
• 13:33
  themselves. However, to make these estates
• 13:35
  profitable, they needed labour. This led to what historians call
• 13:40
  the second serfdom. The nobility gradually
• 13:43
  restricted the movement of the peasants, forcing them to
• 13:46
  provide days of unpaid labour on the Lord's full work in exchange
• 13:51
  for being allowed to farm their own small plots.
• 13:54
  In the game, when you see that 10% instant food drop off, it
• 13:58
  might just represent the ruthless efficiency of the
• 14:01
  system, the Lord. Well, that's you the.
• 14:04
  Player takes their share off the top the moment the work is done.
• 14:08
  The forework system is the reason the Polish Lithuanian
• 14:11
  Commonwealth became so incredibly wealthy in the early
• 14:15
  modern era. It funded the lavish lifestyles
• 14:18
  of the nobles and paid for those expensive gold trimmed suits of
• 14:22
  armour worn by the Wing Tassars. It was a system built on golden
• 14:27
  grain and the sweat of peasantry, turning the Polish
• 14:30
  countryside into a sea of wheat that fed the entire continent.
• 14:35
  If you're living in Europe, you've experienced this effect
• 14:38
  as well. When Russia invaded Ukraine and
• 14:40
  the global market of wheat got shaken up because Ukraine is one
• 14:44
  of the major nations to export wheat.
• 14:46
  All over the world, especially to other European countries.
• 14:50
  That is no coincidence, because the Polish Lithuanian
• 14:53
  Commonwealth also covered large parts of what is today's
• 14:57
  Ukraine. So when you're placing those
• 15:00
  eight farms perfectly around your full walk, you're
• 15:03
  recreating the very system that made Poland a superpower and
• 15:07
  eventually, through its internal social tensions, led to its
• 15:12
  greatest challenges. At last, I want to mention one
• 15:16
  very important aspect of the full walk that is quite dear to
• 15:20
  me, even though it's basically a disadvantage, and that's the
• 15:24
  fact that the full works have the same size as a farm.
• 15:27
  That's just something visually very pleasing about the full
• 15:30
  walk and perfectly placed farms around it.
• 15:34
  It's much more satisfying to see that regular mill, which is only
• 15:38
  two by two tiles in size because full works are bigger and you
• 15:43
  want to place many more than you would place mills to make use of
• 15:46
  the bonus. Your ego takes up much more
• 15:49
  space and is much harder to protect, so that's why it's
• 15:52
  actually a disadvantage. Still, I say it's worth it just
• 15:56
  because it looks so nice. Let's move on to the next
• 16:00
  civilization bonus of the poles and that one unless vampires do
• 16:04
  exist. After all.
• 16:05
  Has no inspiration. In reality, Polish villagers
• 16:09
  regenerate their health points over time.
• 16:12
  More precisely, it's 10 HP per minute in the Feudal Age, 15 HP
• 16:17
  in the Castle Age, and 20 HP in the Imperial Age.
• 16:21
  Most players, much like me, see this as a safety.
• 16:24
  Net a way to heal up after a scout trade, but in the hands of
• 16:28
  a pro it's not just a safety net, but a dangerous tool at the
• 16:33
  highest level. The fact that you regenerate
• 16:35
  your HP on your villagers. Changes the way they work with
• 16:39
  them. As an example, if you're playing
• 16:42
  pretty well, you keep track of all the villagers that have lost
• 16:46
  HP, maybe to a boiler or an enemy rush or even some wild
• 16:50
  animals, and send these injured villagers to safely farm under
• 16:54
  the TC. But with the poles, you don't
• 16:57
  necessarily need to do this, because by the time they hit the
• 17:00
  fuel age, that damage is going to slowly vanish.
• 17:03
  Instead, you can keep them on the front lines or whatever they
• 17:06
  were working on, minimizing eco inefficiency by not walking them
• 17:10
  back to the Town Center, knowing they'll be back to full strength
• 17:14
  in a few minutes. This also makes your enemies
• 17:17
  think twice before they attack your villagers, and if they do,
• 17:21
  they have to go for the kill. There's no point in weakening A
• 17:24
  villager and later come back to finish the job with a hair snipe
• 17:28
  if you don't kill. The villager, it'll just heal
• 17:30
  right back up and all. You did was lose HP on your own
• 17:34
  units. If you happen to find a Polish
• 17:38
  player walking forward with villagers in the early game,
• 17:41
  there is probably a tower rush incoming.
• 17:44
  Usually when you counter a tower rush the goal is to chip away at
• 17:48
  the villagers health so they have to retreat.
• 17:51
  Or. If you're feeling confident,
• 17:53
  batter down the tower with your own wills.
• 17:56
  Of which you. Should have many more as the
• 17:58
  defender and commit to will. Fights.
• 18:01
  If you decide to count a tower, you usually end up both
• 18:04
  repairing your towers and try to snipe the enemy's wills while
• 18:08
  they are repairing the tower. Against Poles, this is just so
• 18:11
  much harder to pull off. A Polish villager can take a
• 18:14
  couple of arrows or a hit from a scout, duck into a tower for 60
• 18:18
  seconds and come back out without with enough HP to
• 18:21
  survive another hit. It forces the defender to commit
• 18:25
  a full kill. Because wounding a Polish
• 18:27
  villager is literally a waste of your APM.
• 18:30
  The player is good at rotating their villagers around and
• 18:34
  monitoring with which wheels they engage in fights.
• 18:37
  They have a clear advantage in these kind of fights.
• 18:41
  We'll talk about the tower rush more when we'll discuss
• 18:43
  strategies, but let's sum up this bonus.
• 18:46
  Against Poles. You can't just harass the
• 18:48
  villagers, you have to finish the job.
• 18:50
  If you leave a Polish villager with one HP, you haven't done
• 18:54
  any damage, you've just given them a reason to take a short
• 18:57
  break. Again, it's hard to link this
• 19:00
  feature to something historical, but I came up with a theory on
• 19:04
  why the Poles of all civilizations in the game have
• 19:06
  gotten this bonus, and I think it's all about identity.
• 19:11
  The Polish civilization is built around the idea of the peasant
• 19:14
  noble divide and how the agricultural wealth has helped
• 19:18
  the Polish. Nobles to establish their power.
• 19:21
  I believe that by making the villages unique, the developers
• 19:25
  ensure that you, the player, feel the importance of your
• 19:29
  workforce. With every other civilization I
• 19:32
  treat villagers as expendable units, but with the Poles?
• 19:36
  They have a different psychological standing.
• 19:38
  It reinforces the idea that the strength of Poland didn't just
• 19:42
  come from its kings, which we'll talk about in in a moment, but
• 19:47
  from the indomitable spirit of its people on the forewarks.
• 19:51
  In the design of strategy games, HP regeneration often symbolizes
• 19:57
  some kind of hardiness of or vitality.
• 20:00
  By giving the polls this bonus, the devs are signalling that
• 20:03
  these are well fed, sturdy people who can endure the
• 20:07
  physical toll of medieval labour and warfare better than most.
• 20:12
  Poland was, for the longest time a frontier state.
• 20:16
  For centuries the Polish countryside was subjected to
• 20:19
  constant and brutal raids, primarily from the Crimean
• 20:24
  Tatars and various Mongol successor states.
• 20:27
  These weren't always full scale wars of conquest, they were
• 20:31
  harvesting rates designed to capture loot and slaves.
• 20:35
  Because of this, the Polish rural population became
• 20:38
  incredibly resilient and adaptable.
• 20:41
  Towns and villagers were burnt down and rebuilt with a
• 20:44
  frequency that would have broken other societies.
• 20:48
  The regeneration bonus reflects this bounce back.
• 20:52
  Ability. It represents a population that
• 20:54
  is used to taking a hit. Retreating somewhere safe and
• 20:58
  then returning to the fields to start again the moment the dust
• 21:01
  settles. I know this is kind of far
• 21:03
  fetched and I have no idea whether the devs.
• 21:06
  Were actually considering any of this, but I do.
• 21:08
  Think that from a storytelling perspective, the Poles are
• 21:11
  deserving of this bonus, even though it felt very alien when
• 21:16
  it first was introduced to the game.
• 21:18
  If you believe that near invincible villagers who also
• 21:22
  farms super efficiently is enough of an eco bonus.
• 21:25
  Then I'm excited to tell you that there's more.
• 21:28
  Now we're getting into the secret sauce of the Polish
• 21:31
  economy. While the forewalk handles your
• 21:34
  food, there is another bonus that often flies under the radar
• 21:38
  until you realize your Polish opponent has a massive army and
• 21:42
  three castles on your face. We're talking about the stone to
• 21:45
  gold conversion bonus. Every time a Polish villager
• 21:49
  mines stone, they generate gold at a rate of 33%.
• 21:54
  This has been nerfed from a formally 50%, and for good
• 21:57
  reason. Effectively, for every 3 stones
• 22:00
  you drop off, you get 1 gold for free.
• 22:03
  This isn't a trade off, it's an addition to the stone you've
• 22:06
  already collected. Your miners aren't any slower,
• 22:10
  and the stone pile doesn't deplete faster, it's just gold
• 22:13
  found in between the stone. This once again really changes
• 22:18
  your macromanagement in a unique way if you want to make.
• 22:21
  Use of the bones. There's different ways of making
• 22:24
  use of this bonus, and let me tell you, all of them are quite
• 22:28
  exciting. In the early game, gold is very
• 22:31
  tight and collecting gold is often a big decision.
• 22:34
  Usually if you want to go for an aggressive minute arms opening,
• 22:37
  you have to send a. Villager to gold.
• 22:40
  A Polish player can skip that by sending a couple of villagers to
• 22:43
  stone instead. They gather enough gold to pay
• 22:46
  for the minute arms upgrade, all the while stockpiling stone for
• 22:50
  maybe early towers or a faster castle.
• 22:53
  Or if you're going for a boom, approach early stone walls to
• 22:57
  secure your farm space. There are many reasons for the
• 23:00
  poles to gather stone, be it defensively or aggressively.
• 23:05
  Normally if you want to castle drop your opponent, your economy
• 23:08
  takes a big hit. You have to pull villagers off
• 23:11
  other resources to mine to the 650 stone needed for the castle.
• 23:16
  But as the Poles, you don't sacrifice gold income to get
• 23:20
  your stone. This means the moment your
• 23:22
  castle goes up, you already have the gold in the bank to start
• 23:26
  producing obochs or Knights immediately.
• 23:29
  It really helps out to stabilize the economy and makes collecting
• 23:33
  stone much less of a hit to the rest of the economy.
• 23:36
  Also, there's an argument to be made that the Poles simply have
• 23:39
  more gold together on the map than other civilizations.
• 23:43
  Kind of like the Mayas. Do with their longer lasting
• 23:46
  resources in the late game, stone and gold become rare and
• 23:50
  contested resources. When a Polish player secures A
• 23:53
  neutral stone mine on the map, they are securing A secondary
• 23:57
  gold mine as well. It makes the Poles incredibly
• 24:00
  gold resilient, which is very important for them because they
• 24:03
  rely on gold a lot. If you get pushed off your main
• 24:06
  gold and your secondary golds are kind of outside your first
• 24:10
  walls, maybe there's a stone pile inside your base which will
• 24:15
  still give you some gold to collect.
• 24:18
  However, it's hard to only rely on the gold in coming from
• 24:21
  stone. So while it's probably enough
• 24:24
  early on, you will need to transition to gold in the castle
• 24:27
  age just to keep up your military production once you've
• 24:31
  started it. So why does mining stone gives
• 24:34
  you gold? It seems like a strange chemical
• 24:37
  trick, right? But if you look at the Polish
• 24:40
  economy in the 13th and 14th centuries, it makes perfect
• 24:43
  sense. The deaths aren't actually
• 24:46
  talking about stone, in my opinion.
• 24:49
  They have something very different in mind, something
• 24:51
  that had been called white gold. In the medieval world, salt was
• 24:57
  one of the most valuable commodities on earth.
• 25:00
  It was the only way to preserve meat and fish, making it
• 25:03
  essential for survival and trade.
• 25:06
  And Poland happened to be sitting on one of the largest
• 25:09
  salt deposits in the world, the Vilichka and Bochnia mines.
• 25:14
  By the time of Kazimir the Great, salt mining was so
• 25:17
  profitable that it accounted for 1/3 of the entire kingdom's
• 25:21
  revenue. So when you're mining stone in
• 25:24
  Edge of Empires towards the Poles, the villagers are
• 25:27
  symbolically tapping into this massive subterranean wealth.
• 25:31
  The gold you get isn't from the rock itself, it represents the
• 25:33
  massive trade value that Polish mining brought into the royal
• 25:38
  treasury. In medieval times there was a
• 25:41
  legal concept called the Regale. This is something that was
• 25:45
  established as law by the Holy Roman Empire in 1356 and
• 25:50
  documented in The Golden Bull. This law meant that everything
• 25:54
  under the ground, gold, silver, lead, and especially salt,
• 25:58
  belonged to the king, regardless of who owned the land on top.
• 26:03
  In Poland specifically, the king had the right to mint coins,
• 26:07
  build castles, hold markets, operate mills, run meat markets,
• 26:12
  protect the Jews, mine, hunt and fish, as well as control land
• 26:16
  and water transport routes. From the 13th to the 15th
• 26:20
  century, income from these privileges declined steadily as
• 26:24
  the king increasingly granted privileges that exempted people
• 26:28
  from paying taxes or sold the privileges altogether.
• 26:32
  But mining, coinage and market privileges remain in the hands
• 26:36
  of the king for a longer period of time.
• 26:39
  Because the Polish kings had such direct control over the
• 26:42
  mining industry, they were able to fund the central government
• 26:46
  and the military far more effectively than some of their
• 26:49
  neighbors. This is exactly what we see in
• 26:52
  the game. Your mining directly funds your
• 26:55
  schlaghter night production. The stone you need for your
• 26:58
  castles is literally paying for the army who defended them.
• 27:02
  Poland wasn't just a land of farmers, it was a land of
• 27:06
  sophisticated industrial engineering.
• 27:09
  By giving the Poles a bonus to mining, the developers are
• 27:12
  acknowledging that Poland was a centre of medieval heavy
• 27:16
  industry, using its natural resources to build a solid
• 27:19
  foundation for its golden age. Overall, I think this bonus is a
• 27:24
  great bonus, which in a way complements the other bonus
• 27:27
  because the stone gives you the opportunity to secure your base,
• 27:31
  and on the other hand it's impossible to use both eco
• 27:34
  bonuses fully at the same time. You're either trying to focus on
• 27:38
  getting your farms down, or you're doing an aggressive
• 27:41
  opening like a tower rush, but you're not able to do both at
• 27:44
  once. Which is why from an eco
• 27:47
  standpoint, the Pulse seem like a very versatile civilization.
• 27:51
  Which is probably also true for the tech tree, but we'll get to
• 27:54
  that later. Instead, let's discuss their
• 27:57
  last Civilization bonus, Bloodlines, and the Scout
• 28:01
  Cavalry line upgrades. Cost -50% Food.
• 28:06
  Bloodlines gives your Calvary units 20 more HP, and you're
• 28:10
  saving 75 Food thanks to this bonus.
• 28:13
  When researching this technology, you'll save another
• 28:16
  75 wood when upgrading your Scouts to Lightcap.
• 28:20
  And then one last time you'll be saving 300 wood when upgrading
• 28:25
  to Winter SAR, which we'll talk about in a minute.
• 28:28
  So basically you're saving 450 food, which is nice, but not
• 28:33
  that much, especially considering the fast food
• 28:36
  production of Poles with their four walks.
• 28:39
  This bonus is more of a timing based bonus, especially when it
• 28:43
  comes to bloodlines, even though I'd argue that for me personally
• 28:47
  it's mostly more about the cost of gold when it comes to
• 28:51
  bloodlines. Getting bloodlines is considered
• 28:53
  a heavy investment and is often used as an indicator by casters
• 28:57
  for a prolonged Feudal play because it delays the Castle Age
• 29:00
  uptime significantly. Getting a discount on that makes
• 29:04
  this tech more worthwhile early on in the game while your
• 29:09
  opponent is agonizing over whether to spend that food on on
• 29:12
  the tech or their uptime, You get to do both.
• 29:16
  You can have the tankiest scouts on the field and still hit
• 29:19
  Castle Age at a competitive time.
• 29:21
  Especially in a scout V scout war, the player with bloodlines
• 29:25
  almost always wins by making it 50% cheaper.
• 29:29
  The Poles force their opponent into a dilemma.
• 29:32
  Do they spend the full 150 food to match your bloodlines and
• 29:36
  fall behind in their race to the castle age?
• 29:39
  Or do they skip it and risk losing the entire army to your
• 29:42
  superior HP scouts? The discount creates A
• 29:46
  technological pressure that forces the opponents to make a
• 29:49
  mistake in their macromanagement, which I find
• 29:52
  strategically very interesting again and therefore a nice bonus
• 29:56
  to have heavy scout investment in.
• 29:59
  The fuel age also goes very well with the food eco of the poles,
• 30:03
  so you'll have a lot of incentive to get that upgrade.
• 30:07
  So why are the poles so much more efficient at training and
• 30:11
  upgrading their horses? It isn't just a random bonus,
• 30:15
  but a nod to the fact that historically Poland was one of
• 30:18
  the greatest horsepower houses in human history.
• 30:22
  The geography of Poland, particularly as it stretched
• 30:25
  towards the eastern Borderlands, was a vast open step like
• 30:30
  landscape. This was perfect terrain for
• 30:33
  large scale horse breeding. While Western European Knights
• 30:37
  were often limited by the high cost of maintaining a single
• 30:40
  massive War Horse in a cramped feudal estate, the Polish
• 30:44
  nobility had access to immense grazing lands.
• 30:47
  This abundance meant that horses were cheaper, more plentiful,
• 30:51
  and more integrated into every level of society.
• 30:55
  The discount on the scout line represents this economy of
• 30:59
  scale. When horses are everywhere,
• 31:01
  training a light cavalry force isn't a luxury, it's a standard
• 31:05
  and much easier and cheaper to maintain.
• 31:08
  Since they rely so much on horses, they probably had very
• 31:13
  advanced knowledge about horse breeding as well.
• 31:16
  Today, the Polish Arabian horse, which is called pure Polish,
• 31:20
  seems to be somewhat of a living national cultural heritage.
• 31:24
  This is somewhat speculative though, since I haven't found
• 31:27
  any reliable source highlighting any particularly special
• 31:31
  breeding techniques unique to the Poles.
• 31:33
  However, one source does mention that extensive European trade
• 31:37
  brought to Poland horses of all extractions.
• 31:41
  Hungarian horses, German, Dutch, Danish, Frisian, English,
• 31:46
  Spanish, Moravian, and Italian as well.
• 31:50
  Over time, as its advantages became better known, Oriental
• 31:54
  blood stock became highly, even obsessively, prized over all
• 31:58
  other strains. Purebred horses from the Arabian
• 32:02
  Peninsula, known then as today as Kuhailans, were renowned as
• 32:08
  light and swift, with even temperament and enormous
• 32:11
  endurance under the harshest conditions.
• 32:14
  Moreover, because they developed a singular breed, they were
• 32:18
  famed for their uniquely consistent, predictable way in
• 32:21
  which they passed on their qualities to successive
• 32:25
  generations. It is quite likely that the
• 32:28
  Poles use light cavalry more than other nations in Europe.
• 32:32
  While France and Germany were obsessed with the heavy armoured
• 32:36
  shock cavalry, Poland developed a hybrid style.
• 32:40
  They needed scouts and light horsemen to counter the
• 32:42
  lightning fast rays of the Mongols and Tatars from the
• 32:45
  east. They became masters of breeding
• 32:48
  horses that were a specific mix. They had the stamina of the
• 32:52
  eastern steppe ponies, but the size and strength of western
• 32:56
  mounts. This is exactly what Bloodlines
• 32:59
  represents, the breeding of a sturdier, more resilient animal.
• 33:03
  This kind of biological engineering may just have been a
• 33:08
  centuries old tradition, which is probably why the tech is so
• 33:12
  much more accessible to them in game to make their scouts line
• 33:18
  even stronger. The Poles team bonus gives them
• 33:21
  and their allies plus one attack against anything that has the
• 33:24
  Archer class, including of course Cav Archers, skirmishers,
• 33:29
  hand cannoneers, and unique units with the Archer class like
• 33:32
  the Fire Archer or War wagon. This is a great team bonus
• 33:37
  because despite the Poles being a cavalry sieve, they can play
• 33:40
  Archers in team games as well should you get them as a flank
• 33:43
  sieve and your pocket playing Cav would still benefit from
• 33:47
  this team bonus. All right, so we're through with
• 33:50
  the sieve bonuses and I gotta say, I think so far the Poles
• 33:54
  are just a very well designed civilization when it comes to
• 33:57
  giving them a unique identity based on historical context.
• 34:01
  But wait, there's more. I've been talking a lot about
• 34:04
  cavalry, so it's time to take a closer look at the Wing Tsar,
• 34:09
  the regional unique unit of the Poles that they share with the
• 34:13
  Lutheranians. And to be honest, it's more of a
• 34:17
  regional unit and less of a unique unit, which can be seen
• 34:21
  because for example, samurai who deal extra bonus damage against
• 34:25
  unique units do not do so against the Wing Tsar.
• 34:29
  The Wing Tsar is what the Poles get instead of their regular
• 34:32
  Hazar. It makes a lot of sense that
• 34:34
  they share this unit with the Lithuanians because of the
• 34:37
  Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. In general, the Wing Tsar has
• 34:42
  the exact same role as the regular Hazar has, being a
• 34:45
  strong and mobile cavalry trash unit.
• 34:48
  However, the Winged Hazar is a little bit stronger than the
• 34:52
  standard one because they do 14 instead of 12 bonus damage
• 34:55
  against monks, and they exclusively do plus four damage
• 34:59
  against gunpowder units. They are also overall stronger,
• 35:03
  having five more HP and two more base attack than the normal
• 35:07
  Hazar. Upgrading them is a little bit
• 35:10
  more expensive on gold, costing 800 gold, but because of the
• 35:13
  sieve bonus, they're saving 300 food.
• 35:17
  It's the perfect late game unit to have in front of your more
• 35:20
  valuable gold units as a meat shield or to go raid and and
• 35:25
  kill enemy villagers. Their rating capability is a
• 35:29
  little bit diminished because they cannot research the last
• 35:32
  armor upgrade for cavalry, ultimately missing out on 2
• 35:36
  armor. The Wing Tazars were one of the
• 35:39
  main types of Polish cavalry in Poland and in the Polish
• 35:43
  Lithuanian Commonwealth between the 16th and 18th centuries.
• 35:47
  Modelled on the Hungarian Hazars, Poland's early Hazars
• 35:50
  were light cavalry units of exiled Balkan warriors who came
• 35:54
  to Poland as mercenaries in 15 O3.
• 35:58
  Following the military reforms of Polish King and Grand Duke of
• 36:02
  Lithuania Stephen Battery, who reigned from 1576 to 1586, the
• 36:09
  Polish military adopted the Hazar unit and transformed it
• 36:12
  into heavily armoured shock cavalry.
• 36:15
  The Hazaria banners and units participated in the largest
• 36:19
  cavalry charge in history at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and
• 36:25
  ranked as the elite of Polish cavalry until their disbandment
• 36:29
  in the 1770s. This Battle of Vienna is
• 36:32
  probably also why the Wing Tsars has bonus damage against
• 36:36
  gunpowder units, because the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth
• 36:39
  had charged a contingent of Wing Tsars against the gunpowder of
• 36:44
  Ottoman Empire and won the battle.
• 36:47
  The city of Vienna was on the brink of falling to the Ottoman
• 36:50
  Empire. But then the hero of the day,
• 36:53
  King Jan the Third Sobieski, arrived at the head of a massive
• 36:56
  relief force. He led the largest cavalry
• 36:59
  charge in recorded history, 18,000 horsemen descending from
• 37:05
  the hills with 3000 wing tassars at the tip of the spear.
• 37:10
  They didn't just break the Ottoman lines, they completely
• 37:14
  shattered them in under an hour. It is said to be one of the most
• 37:19
  decisive military interventions in European history.
• 37:23
  If you like metal music, listen to the song Wing Tsar by Sabaton
• 37:28
  because it's about this very battle.
• 37:54
  Originally, the wings were attached to the saddle, then to
• 37:57
  the back armor. During the 17th century, the
• 38:01
  wings are said to have produced a clearly audible noise when a
• 38:04
  large unit rode at speed at a full gallop.
• 38:08
  The vibration of the feathers created a distinctive eerie
• 38:11
  hissing or rattling sound. In the case of battle, this
• 38:15
  could spook enemy horses who aren't used to giant noisy birds
• 38:19
  chasing them, and unsettle the infantry.
• 38:23
  Those wings served to frighten the enemy horses with the
• 38:27
  rustling of the eagle feathers, thus making them uncontrollable.
• 38:31
  The Hazar's horses were trained to the sound so that they would
• 38:35
  not shy away from it. The wings may have also served
• 38:39
  as protection against blows of to the back and prevented the
• 38:43
  Tatars from using their slings. The origin of the wings does
• 38:48
  remain a mystery and although I found lots of paintings with the
• 38:52
  wing tasales and some historical sources proving that they have
• 38:55
  been used in battles like the Battle of Vienna, it seems that
• 38:59
  they were not mandatory and were also used for parading.
• 39:04
  It's safe to say that the Wing Tasales were very impressive on
• 39:07
  the battlefield, and if you want to give them a little bore more
• 39:10
  of an oomph, there is a unique technology called the Lakitic
• 39:14
  Legacy that you can research in the Imperial Age.
• 39:19
  This tech gives the scout line 33% trample damage in a .5 tiles
• 39:25
  radius. Since it's the Imperial Age
• 39:28
  unique tech, you'll most likely always prioritize getting wing
• 39:32
  to tile 1st and then research this technology.
• 39:35
  This makes them so much stronger in meleophytes, since they do
• 39:39
  damage to the units surrounding them in addition to their
• 39:42
  regular damage. Think about that just for a
• 39:46
  second. Usually cavalry is single
• 39:49
  target. You click a vill, you click an
• 39:52
  Archer or whatever unit you're attacking, and your scout stabs
• 39:55
  that unit. But with Lackitic Legacy, your
• 39:59
  scout stabs that unit and the horse starts kicking all enemies
• 40:03
  around it. This makes this unit also much
• 40:07
  more efficient in fights against.
• 40:10
  Arranged units clumped up together like groups of obelisks
• 40:14
  for example. Usually you would you would if
• 40:17
  you get to touch those units, you would get there and hit one
• 40:21
  of those units once or twice. But with this, even hitting them
• 40:24
  once would deal damage to the surrounding obelisks as well,
• 40:29
  and if they're stacked well enough you might just damage all
• 40:32
  of them. In the late game when gold runs
• 40:35
  out, it's all about the trash units like Hazas, skirmishes and
• 40:39
  halbedies. The winged Hazar is already a
• 40:43
  beast, but with Laketich Legacy they become a lawn mower.
• 40:48
  If your opponent tries to protect the trebuchets with a
• 40:51
  wall of halberdiers, your hazars don't just hit the front line,
• 40:54
  they shred through the density of the formation.
• 40:58
  You have a much greater chance of sniping those traps before
• 41:01
  the Hazars go down, and you stand a much better fight
• 41:04
  against the Halps. In historical and linguistic
• 41:07
  terms, Lekitic refers to a specific subgroup of West Slavic
• 41:12
  tribes. While other Slavs moved S to
• 41:16
  become the Czechs or Slovaks, the Lekitic stayed in the
• 41:20
  lowlands of modern day Poland and eastern Germany.
• 41:23
  This group included the Polands, from whom Poland gets their
• 41:27
  name. So by naming the tech Lekitic
• 41:30
  legacy, the developers are referencing the thousands of
• 41:35
  years of continuous habitation and cultural evolution that
• 41:39
  turned the these loosely affiliated tribes into a unified
• 41:43
  and formidable European power. The word leketich comes from the
• 41:48
  Lech Lech, a figure of foundational myth.
• 41:53
  According to the legend, three brothers, the Lech, Czech and
• 41:58
  Ruse, were hunting in the wilderness, seeking a place for
• 42:02
  their people to settle. Lech followed a fierce white
• 42:05
  eagle to its nest atop an oak tree set against a red sunset.
• 42:10
  He took this as an omen, founded the city of Nyesno from the
• 42:14
  Polish word Nyazno for nest, and adopted the white eagle on a red
• 42:19
  field as his banner, which remains the Polish coat of arms
• 42:23
  to this day and is the civilization icon of the Poles
• 42:26
  in the game. So in a way, this unique tech
• 42:30
  represents the legacy of that founding spirit, the fierce
• 42:34
  protective nature of the people who stayed in the fields, which
• 42:38
  is the literal meaning of Pole in Poland.
• 42:42
  With all that being said, when is it really worth to get this
• 42:46
  unique tech? I think the answer is clearly
• 42:49
  pretty much every time you can afford it after you've upgraded
• 42:52
  to Winter SARS. It's 750 food and 550 gold to
• 42:57
  research. But again, food really shouldn't
• 42:59
  be the issue with the late game of the polls.
• 43:02
  Gold is always a bit of a different story, especially
• 43:05
  because Husar is usually something you tech switch to
• 43:08
  when gold is starting to run out.
• 43:11
  As a cavalry sift, you kind of want to 1st spend your gold on
• 43:15
  Cavaliers. However, with this unique tech,
• 43:18
  there is an argument to be made that the Wing Tsar is by itself
• 43:22
  an extremely strong unit that is worth tacking into earlier than
• 43:26
  usual. Since the unique tech is what
• 43:29
  really sets it apart, make sure to tack into it early enough.
• 43:34
  We've now covered the Imperial Age Unique Tech, so it's time to
• 43:38
  talk about what's probably mostly associated with the Poles
• 43:41
  and Age of Empires 2. Apart from their amazing food
• 43:44
  eco of course, and that's the Castle Age unique tech.
• 43:47
  Schlachter Privileges. If you've ever played against
• 43:51
  the Poles and wondered how on earth they sustaining a horde of
• 43:55
  60 Cavaliers while you're struggling to buy a single
• 43:59
  trebuchet, you've met the power of this unique technology.
• 44:03
  Schlachter Privileges slashes the gold cost of Knights so
• 44:07
  drastically that you can flood the entire map with Knights in a
• 44:11
  way that feels almost like a cheat code.
• 44:14
  The gold cost of producing a night is cut by 60 percent. 60%.
• 44:20
  That's 30 gold per night instead of 75.
• 44:24
  This sounds insanely strong. However, it's actually a tech
• 44:30
  that's hard to master. In some situations it may also
• 44:33
  be kind of a trap because the initial expenditure on a castle
• 44:38
  and then on the technology itself are resources that are
• 44:41
  lacking on the front lines. If you're going for the cheap
• 44:44
  Knights, it feels very wasteful to produce Knights before you
• 44:49
  get this unique tech, but being that greedy involves a lot of
• 44:53
  risks and you might get beaten before you get to start your
• 44:56
  flood of Knights. The gold that you collect from
• 44:58
  stone will not be enough to sustain an army of Knights as
• 45:01
  well, so managing an eco that tries to hit this tech early on
• 45:06
  and lets you produce Knights is very tough.
• 45:10
  Schlachta privileges is often described as a power spike
• 45:13
  technology. It doesn't necessarily make your
• 45:15
  unit stronger it it it doesn't do so at all, but it makes your
• 45:19
  army endless. In fact, Polish Knights are
• 45:23
  somewhat scaling badly. They can only upgrade to
• 45:26
  cavalier and current upgrade to paladin, and on top they're
• 45:30
  missing out on the last armour upgrade, a key upgrade in the
• 45:34
  late game. If you're not able to get
• 45:36
  Schlachta privileges, I'm not even sure the cavalier upgrade
• 45:40
  is worth it, At least not if you're not already having a lot
• 45:44
  of nights and you might want to pivot towards wing Tsar.
• 45:49
  I think it's not that hard to actually play a game, be greedy,
• 45:55
  get a castle up and research that unique tech.
• 45:58
  But what's hard is to then make use of it to then be able to
• 46:04
  produce that endless amount of nights as well.
• 46:07
  Then again, you mostly do get to this technology one way or
• 46:12
  another. Because Polish stone miners
• 46:14
  generate gold, you naturally want to mine stone for a castle
• 46:18
  anyway. This unique synergy makes the
• 46:20
  transition into this tech feel almost natural in the late game
• 46:24
  when gold starts to run low on the map.
• 46:26
  This tech essentially turns your Cavaliers into somewhat of a
• 46:30
  semi trash unit. You can trade your Knights much
• 46:34
  more aggressively than your opponent can trade their
• 46:36
  expensive paladins or camels. Just remember that you easily
• 46:40
  die to arbalest and castle fire because you're missing that last
• 46:45
  armor. If you're going for this tech,
• 46:48
  you're basically favouring quantity over quality.
• 46:51
  You aren't trying to win by having the toughest units,
• 46:54
  you're trying to win by having three times as many units as
• 46:57
  your opponent can afford. Again, it's actually quite
• 47:00
  costly to get this technology. Your eco gets set back by
• 47:04
  investing into mining stone. You need 650 stone for the
• 47:08
  castle and 500 food and 300 gold for the tech.
• 47:11
  You need 5 or more stables and the food and gold income to
• 47:15
  produce the army of Knights. Getting all of this done early
• 47:19
  in the game is just super tight, especially because you'll be
• 47:22
  forced to play greedy. So this is probably something
• 47:26
  you only want to do behind well fortified walls.
• 47:29
  Maybe not at the beginning of the castle age, but once you
• 47:32
  feel secure enough and have a great enough eco in all other
• 47:36
  cases, don't get too tempted by the discount.
• 47:39
  Invest in an army to protect yourself and once you're secure
• 47:43
  enough and actually have an eco to sustain the night flood, then
• 47:47
  go for it. What inspired the developers
• 47:51
  this time for this technology? Well, for starters, Schlachter
• 47:56
  is a term describing the Polish nobility.
• 47:59
  In most medieval kingdoms, nobility was a very tiny club,
• 48:03
  maybe 1% of the population, mostly even less.
• 48:07
  But in Poland we're talking nearly 10% of the people being
• 48:11
  part of the schlachter. There are different kind of
• 48:14
  nobles, of course, and the most powerful were also the fewest.
• 48:19
  But still, Poland had a unique society.
• 48:22
  You could be a noble even if you were poor and plowed your own
• 48:26
  field. As long as you had your family
• 48:29
  name and your sword, you were legally equal to the wealthiest
• 48:33
  nobles. This was a nobles Republic after
• 48:36
  all. The privileges in the tech's
• 48:39
  name refer to the legal contracts these nobles forced
• 48:43
  upon the king. Basically the king would say I
• 48:46
  need to go to war and the Schlatter would reply fine but
• 48:50
  only if you lower our taxes and give us more power.
• 48:53
  Why does a legal privilege make a night cost less gold then?
• 48:57
  Well in the game it's a brilliant abstraction of
• 49:00
  history. Historically the Polish state
• 49:03
  didn't have to pay for a standing army the same way
• 49:06
  France and England did. The Schlatter were the army
• 49:10
  because they held so much land and so many rights, they were
• 49:13
  legally required to show up to battle on horseback, bringing
• 49:18
  their own armor and weapons. So when you click the Schlachter
• 49:22
  privileges button in the castle, you aren't just researching a
• 49:25
  technology, you are essentially signing the Henrician articles,
• 49:30
  a permanent agreement made in 1573 between the King and the
• 49:35
  Schlachter. This agreement is worth reading
• 49:37
  up on since it's something I've never seen before.
• 49:41
  Let me give you an example. According to this agreement, the
• 49:44
  King was to be chosen by election by the Schlatter and
• 49:49
  his children had no right of inheritance with regard to the
• 49:52
  throne. The King could not make major
• 49:55
  decisions alone. He was required to convene the
• 50:00
  the the noble parliament at least once every two years for a
• 50:04
  period of six weeks. The king could not declare war
• 50:08
  or call for a national levy without the parliament's
• 50:11
  approval. But here's the best part.
• 50:14
  If the king violated the laws or the privileges of the Schlatter,
• 50:19
  the nobility was legally absolved from their oath of
• 50:22
  obedience. Essentially, the law gave the
• 50:26
  nobles get this a legal right to start a revolution to bring the
• 50:31
  king back in line. This era is sometimes also
• 50:35
  referred to as the Golden Liberty, and it was.
• 50:38
  It's just something very unique to happen in the mediaeval ages.
• 50:43
  This sounds amazing for the nobles of course.
• 50:46
  However, they do have to play their part.
• 50:49
  The king is basically letting the nobles run the country as
• 50:53
  long as they're paying for their gear.
• 50:55
  That's why the your gold cost drops from 75 to 30.
• 51:00
  The state isn't buying the sword, the noble's family estate
• 51:04
  is. When the king called, the
• 51:06
  Schlatter were required to show up because they were so numerous
• 51:11
  and so focused on cavalry as a status symbol.
• 51:14
  Poland became famous for flooding battlefields with
• 51:18
  horsemen. To a Polish noble, fighting on
• 51:21
  foot was basically beneath their dignity.
• 51:24
  The horse was a symbol of their privilege.
• 51:26
  This is why the text specifically targets the
• 51:30
  Nightline and not any infantry units.
• 51:33
  Am I overstating that the devs did an amazing job with the
• 51:36
  poles when it comes to their design?
• 51:38
  I think the identity of the Poles is really recognizable.
• 51:42
  Everything is clearly rooted in historical facts and the sift
• 51:46
  plays out in a distinctive and unique way, which is not OP at
• 51:50
  all and rather difficult to play, but when mastered, very
• 51:54
  powerful and dangerous. To be honest, I hardly play with
• 51:57
  the Poles, but that's just because I'm not good with them
• 52:00
  since they play out so differently compared to the most
• 52:03
  other standard civilizations. After doing the research for
• 52:07
  this podcast, I really want to change this and have some fun
• 52:10
  with them. But you know what?
• 52:13
  We're not even done yet because we need to talk about the Oboch,
• 52:17
  the Polish unique unit. The Oboch is a sturdy looking
• 52:21
  infantryman carrying what looks like a giant spiked warhammer.
• 52:26
  This weapon doesn't just deal damage, it permanently strips
• 52:29
  the armour from its victims, leaving even the hardiest tonic
• 52:34
  knight shivering and vulnerable. Every time an Oboch hits an
• 52:38
  enemy, he permanently reduces that unit's melee and Pierce
• 52:42
  armour by 1, all the way to 0 armour.
• 52:46
  It can't go below 0 though, and there is a way to get your
• 52:49
  armour back, but you'd have to heal your unit up to full HP for
• 52:54
  that to happen, which probably won't happen after you went into
• 52:58
  a fight with the oboch. Think about the math here.
• 53:01
  If you have a group of oboch fighting a group of paladins,
• 53:04
  the first few hits might not hurt that much, but after 5 or 6
• 53:09
  swings, that paladin, one of the tankest units in the game,
• 53:12
  suddenly has 0 armor. Your Archers in the back, hell,
• 53:16
  even your skirmishes are suddenly dealing true damage.
• 53:19
  The oboch is essentially a debuff on legs as long as they
• 53:24
  get to fight. I say this because they are an
• 53:27
  infantry unit after all, so they are vulnerable to everything
• 53:31
  shooting from a distance, especially Archers and Cav
• 53:34
  Archers and of course scorpions and manganels.
• 53:37
  With the oboch the Poles have a great unit that closes a few
• 53:42
  gaps in their tetry without the halberdiers upgrade and hand can
• 53:46
  nears. The Poles also have a problem
• 53:48
  with enemy halberdiers and infantry compositions in the
• 53:51
  late game. This is where the oboch comes
• 53:55
  in, which not only deals a lot of damage but also destroys
• 53:58
  enemy units armor with every hit, making it a powerful
• 54:02
  counter against Mali fighters with high armor and medium HP.
• 54:06
  In the game you shouldn't treat the oboch like a champion.
• 54:11
  They aren't meant to be your own unit, but they might just be the
• 54:14
  right support unit in some situations.
• 54:18
  You sent the oboch in first to soften the enemy.
• 54:21
  Once the enemy's armor is stripped, your Arbor lesters or
• 54:24
  your wing tassars come in to clean up.
• 54:27
  This requires some some amount of army control and since the
• 54:31
  Obuch is a melee unit, they have to be the front line, which does
• 54:35
  make them vulnerable. The Obuch has ATHP 8 attack in
• 54:39
  both 2 Piers and melee armor. They are quite cheap for the
• 54:42
  stats, only 55 foot and 20 gold and that's just 5 foot more than
• 54:47
  a champion. So how do you effectively use
• 54:50
  this unit? The Obuch itself is best used
• 54:54
  against units with high armor of course.
• 54:57
  Teutonic Knights and Husskals come to mind.
• 55:00
  You most likely won't win the fight against these kind of
• 55:03
  units, but you will make it so much more easy to kill them with
• 55:07
  defensive buildings or another type of unit.
• 55:10
  That's why we'll probably never see a mass of obuchs and much
• 55:14
  rather a situational usage of. Them.
• 55:17
  For example, when you combine the Obuch with the Schlachter
• 55:20
  Privileges Knights, you get a terrifying powerhouse.
• 55:24
  The Obuch breaks the armor and the cheap Polish Knights provide
• 55:27
  the finishing blow. This is of course very gold
• 55:30
  heavy and most importantly situational in use.
• 55:33
  But imagine fighting against the Slavs who use bow yards with
• 55:37
  their massive melee armor to counter your discounted Knights.
• 55:41
  Getting a couple of oboe in the fight to get rid of that melee
• 55:45
  armor would make a huge difference and actually swing
• 55:49
  the fight into your favour. But as far as I've seen,
• 55:52
  whenever I saw oboe, I mostly saw them combined with arbalists
• 55:57
  or even skirmishes. And that does make sense, right?
• 56:01
  Because using two melee units at once is making it very difficult
• 56:05
  to use oboe to weaken the enemy and letting the other melee unit
• 56:09
  finish the task. You want the obos to keep
• 56:12
  fighting and another unit to add to that damage from afar.
• 56:16
  There's also another use case that I hadn't thought about
• 56:19
  before, but it came to me during my research about this unit.
• 56:24
  Since it strips away both Malay and Pierce armour, it's actually
• 56:28
  amazing to stop a ram push against your castles, which is
• 56:31
  increasingly more popular these days, especially in the castle
• 56:35
  age. Rams are deadly against castles
• 56:38
  because they have such a high Pierce armour that the castle
• 56:41
  itself can't kill it, and they deal a lot of bonus damage
• 56:45
  against buildings, so they'll flatten the castle quite fast.
• 56:49
  But if you were to strip away the Pierce armour of the Rams,
• 56:52
  the castle would do way more damage against the Rams,
• 56:55
  especially if they keep firing at them with murder holes.
• 56:58
  Once they're under the castle, the obochs themselves deal mealy
• 57:02
  damage, which is also very effective against them.
• 57:06
  So next time you're playing as the Poles and your castle gets
• 57:09
  rushed down by some Rams, definitely add some obochs.
• 57:15
  All right, where does this weird hammer come from?
• 57:18
  The word oboch translates to the back of an axe or a hammer.
• 57:23
  In the 15th centuries, plate armor was becoming so advanced
• 57:27
  that swords were becoming useless.
• 57:30
  If you swung a sword at a Polish noble in full harness, the blade
• 57:34
  would just slide off. You needed something with
• 57:38
  percussive force. The Polish had different types
• 57:41
  of war hammers, especially the Obuch and the Naziak were
• 57:46
  popular that featured a blunt side for crushing bones and a
• 57:50
  long sharp beak on the on the back for puncturing helmets or
• 57:55
  cutting the enemy. Used from the 16th to the 18th
• 57:58
  century by the Schlachter, it often had a length of 18 up to
• 58:03
  100 centimeters and was carried like a staff or a cane and was
• 58:07
  often bound in velvet and gold twine.
• 58:10
  So basically the unit is named after its weapon.
• 58:14
  The in game unit actually wields A najak with outward pointing
• 58:19
  beak, not an oboch with curved inward pointing beak.
• 58:23
  They do look very similar though, and oboch is much easier
• 58:26
  to pronounce in my opinion. The weapon in game is also
• 58:30
  probably twice as large as in reality since it's larger than
• 58:34
  the soldier wielding it. The oboch especially was
• 58:37
  probably more of a decorative walking stick than a weapon,
• 58:41
  whereas the nutjack was used mostly in combat.
• 58:45
  But make no mistake, the oboch was very dangerous.
• 58:49
  In fact, it became so dangerous and so common among the Polish
• 58:53
  nobility that was actually banned in certain public spaces.
• 58:57
  Nobles would get into arguments at local parliaments and start
• 59:01
  cracking each other's skulls with these hammers.
• 59:04
  They eventually had to wrap the beaks of the hammers in leather
• 59:08
  or blunt them just so people would stop dying during
• 59:11
  political debates. All right guys, we're done with
• 59:16
  all the bonuses, unique texts, and unique units.
• 59:18
  So let's talk strategies and army comps for the Poles.
• 59:24
  First and foremost, it's safe to say that the Poles are a cavalry
• 59:28
  civilization. They can get to their wing
• 59:31
  Tasar, but they lack the last armor upgrade and Paladin.
• 59:36
  Their infantry is respectable. They get access to almost fully
• 59:39
  upgraded champions. The only thing missing is
• 59:41
  gambison, so they're missing out on one Pierce armor.
• 59:45
  However they can't upgrade their pikemen to helps, giving them no
• 59:49
  hard counter against other good cavalry service.
• 59:52
  Looking at the arranged units, you might want to consider going
• 59:55
  for cavalry Archers since they scale pretty OK.
• 59:59
  The only thing missing for arranged units is the last armor
• 1:00:02
  upgrade and for Cav Archers specifically Parthian tactics.
• 1:00:06
  But they do get bloodlines and some ring.
• 1:00:08
  And I think I forgot to mention that they can upgrade their
• 1:00:10
  crossbows to arbalists. Missing out on the last armor
• 1:00:14
  upgrade is especially painful for the skirmishes in the late
• 1:00:17
  game, so with subpath skirms and no helps, the pulse trash units
• 1:00:22
  are not very exciting. Aside from the wing to Tsar of
• 1:00:25
  course. Their siege workshop is pretty
• 1:00:28
  good. They get siege ram and onager as
• 1:00:30
  well as bomber cannons, but they can't research heavy scorpion.
• 1:00:34
  If you're facing a good cab archersif like for example the
• 1:00:37
  Huns, Churchens or Tatars, you might get into trouble in the
• 1:00:41
  late game. No heavy scorp, weak squirms and
• 1:00:44
  Knights without the last armor upgrade don't really give you
• 1:00:48
  many options to face off a mass of good cavalry Archers.
• 1:00:53
  Having extra attack against them on the hussars may sound good on
• 1:00:56
  paper, but is denied when your enemy starts microwring their
• 1:01:00
  Cav Archers. In that case, your best chance
• 1:01:03
  may be to overwhelm the enemy because CA have to be in a big
• 1:01:07
  group as a death ball. If you attack from different
• 1:01:10
  sides with lots of stables, you may not kill the CA but instead
• 1:01:14
  the eco of your enemy. If you have no choice but to
• 1:01:18
  fight the cavarchers, go with wing tsars and skirmishes.
• 1:01:22
  While the cavarchers are busy kiting your wing tsars, the
• 1:01:25
  skirmishes provide the actual cane power.
• 1:01:28
  This trash duo of Fasar and Skirms, it's extremely difficult
• 1:01:32
  for a Cav Archer player to gold sustain against in the long run,
• 1:01:36
  especially if you're raiding him from the sides with your
• 1:01:39
  expandable cavalry units. This requires a lot of attention
• 1:01:43
  though and a good economy. So when it comes to playing with
• 1:01:46
  the Poles, I think they are a civilization best played by more
• 1:01:50
  advanced players. But we're not done with Tetra
• 1:01:54
  yet, so let's get back to that because I'd like to discuss the
• 1:01:57
  one and only design mistake I can find with the Poles, and
• 1:02:01
  that is their monastery technologies.
• 1:02:03
  For a civilization that is deeply rooted in religion and
• 1:02:06
  even starts the game with a religious chant, they are a bit
• 1:02:10
  underwhelming when it comes to their monks.
• 1:02:12
  Not saying they're bad, but they lack heresy which lets your
• 1:02:16
  units die instead of converting to the enemy, and also atonement
• 1:02:20
  in the castle age so you can't convert enemy monks.
• 1:02:24
  This especially feels weird to me for many reasons.
• 1:02:28
  First, historically Christianity is well known to be aggressively
• 1:02:32
  trying to convert pretty much everyone they can find, and a
• 1:02:36
  sieve with the background of the poles should definitely
• 1:02:39
  represent that accordingly. From a gameplay perspective, the
• 1:02:42
  Poles are a very interesting civilization for closed maps,
• 1:02:45
  and giving them atonement would add to their castle drop
• 1:02:48
  potential a lot. It's not like you can afford a
• 1:02:52
  castle drop into night span with a unique tech and a monk push at
• 1:02:56
  the same time, so it would give a bit more depth to what the
• 1:02:59
  Poles can do. I also don't think that giving
• 1:03:02
  them atonement would make siege monk pushes against the Poles
• 1:03:06
  impossible when you're trying to punish the Polish fold work boom
• 1:03:10
  because the enemy should always have the timing and number
• 1:03:13
  advantage when the Poles are booming in the imperial age.
• 1:03:17
  There are also missing out on one monastery technology because
• 1:03:21
  they cannot research illumination, which is a
• 1:03:23
  technology that reduces the time monks need to recover their
• 1:03:27
  faith after a successful conversion by half.
• 1:03:31
  Missing this tech is fine I guess, but I'd still like to see
• 1:03:35
  the Poles having all techs from the monastery at their disposal
• 1:03:38
  just because of their religious background.
• 1:03:41
  Their university and defensive capability is pretty good.
• 1:03:44
  They're getting all important upgrades from both the castle
• 1:03:47
  and uni with the exception of architecture, but they do get
• 1:03:51
  masonry and hoardings. They can also research all the
• 1:03:55
  tower upgrades which is very important for the tower rushers
• 1:03:58
  and tower defense. They can't research heated shot,
• 1:04:02
  but that's something you don't want to need anyway since you
• 1:04:05
  don't want to play the poles on anything that involves water at
• 1:04:08
  all. Looking at that water tech tree.
• 1:04:10
  They have decent upgrades I guess, but they can't get to
• 1:04:14
  heavy demo or elite cannon galleons, and they're also
• 1:04:18
  lacking both shipwright and dry dock in late game, so there's
• 1:04:22
  really no point in going heavy on water.
• 1:04:25
  All of this remains true in the water rework we've seen so far,
• 1:04:29
  but they do get caracs, so you'll be able to fully upgrade
• 1:04:32
  your hulks to warthogs and then to caracs.
• 1:04:36
  So far the post could not research Caravel, hull nor
• 1:04:39
  siphons, but we know that they are making changes for the
• 1:04:43
  release of the naval rework in February 2026.
• 1:04:46
  But I'm very confident that the Poles will see no changes to
• 1:04:49
  what we've seen so far. If you are playing a hybrid map
• 1:04:52
  with them, don't forget that you do get fast fire and regular
• 1:04:56
  cannon galleons. But again, they might look all
• 1:05:00
  right ish when it comes to the tech tree.
• 1:05:02
  But with every civilization, when you're playing with water,
• 1:05:05
  you really want a water bonus, and the Poles have nothing that
• 1:05:09
  plays into their hands. Let's talk army compositions.
• 1:05:14
  The Poles are very good at playing Knights and skirmishes
• 1:05:16
  together. The food economy is excellent,
• 1:05:19
  favouring these two food heavy units.
• 1:05:22
  Similar upgrades also allow them to switch between skirmishes and
• 1:05:25
  arches, which are also a good option for the Poles.
• 1:05:28
  However, it should be noted that this composition has a problem
• 1:05:32
  with ranged units in the Imperial age.
• 1:05:34
  Here siege weapons or the strength of the Poles.
• 1:05:37
  Simply more cavalry should be added.
• 1:05:41
  Due to the long term weakness of Polish Knights, it is often
• 1:05:44
  advisable to go for obelisks which only lack the final armor
• 1:05:48
  upgrade. This allows you to accumulate a
• 1:05:51
  bunch of gold units while the wing tassars serve as a meat
• 1:05:55
  shield with rate potential, especially against civilizations
• 1:05:59
  that rely on infantry and ranged fighters.
• 1:06:01
  Mixture of oboch and oranges can be strong in the Imperial age,
• 1:06:07
  the oboks can more than hold their own in many close combat
• 1:06:11
  fights and your ranged fighter problem is solved by onages, but
• 1:06:16
  this requires a lot of micro and you need to make sure not to hit
• 1:06:19
  your own units if necessary. Against bombat cannons, the
• 1:06:23
  composition can be supplemented by monks with redemption and
• 1:06:28
  block printing, and of course your own bombat cannons.
• 1:06:31
  In theory, as long as there's gold to collect, the poles
• 1:06:35
  should be perfectly fine. It's in trash walls that they
• 1:06:38
  might struggle a little depending on the map and their
• 1:06:41
  position in the current state of the game.
• 1:06:43
  If I were to choose my favorite composition with the poles, it
• 1:06:47
  would be Winged Tsars with Arbalists and Bombard cannons.
• 1:06:51
  Wing Tsars would serve as a meat shield and a rating unit, while
• 1:06:55
  my ARB stay close to my Bombard Cannons to protect them and let
• 1:06:58
  their DPS work some magic. This comp sounds great of
• 1:07:03
  course, but first you need to get there.
• 1:07:04
  So let's discuss some openings for the Poles.
• 1:07:08
  And there's actually a lot to choose from.
• 1:07:10
  The Poles are of course ideal for playing scouts in tonight's
• 1:07:14
  in the classic way thanks to their food economy.
• 1:07:17
  It is important to first use the aggressive opening to secure the
• 1:07:21
  area where you plan to farm on and wall yourself at the right
• 1:07:24
  time later on. The castle should not be over
• 1:07:28
  prioritized for the unique tech as the resources invested in it
• 1:07:32
  can often lead to a great disadvantage on open maps.
• 1:07:36
  Just make sure you're safe and you have a good enough eco.
• 1:07:40
  Create some military to get there and once you're all good
• 1:07:44
  and done then go for the night span.
• 1:07:47
  Opening with minute arms with an Archer follow up can be
• 1:07:51
  unexpected, but also a strong opening for the Poles.
• 1:07:55
  This opening has great potential to keep an opponent busy at home
• 1:07:58
  just long enough, allowing you to build up your own farming
• 1:08:01
  economy behind defenses without being immediately driven away
• 1:08:05
  from the farms and berries. After that you can either switch
• 1:08:09
  to cavalry or continue playing Archers since those scale quite
• 1:08:12
  well. The ability to carry over your
• 1:08:14
  army from the feudal age makes it easy to build a castle for
• 1:08:18
  the unique tech earlier than after a scout opening, as you
• 1:08:22
  don't have to put all your resources into a new army right
• 1:08:25
  away. Instead of Archers, Minute arms
• 1:08:28
  pair particularly well with towers for the Poles.
• 1:08:31
  It can put a lot of pressure on the opponent if they wall early
• 1:08:35
  or on more closed maps such as Hideout.
• 1:08:38
  Thanks to their ability to generate gold from stone, they
• 1:08:41
  don't need to go for gold in addition to the villagers who
• 1:08:44
  collect stone for towers, yet can still afford 3 Militias,
• 1:08:48
  Loom and the Men at Arms upgrade.
• 1:08:50
  Add to that the HP regeneration of the advancing villagers and
• 1:08:55
  the very efficient economy thanks to the farms, and you
• 1:08:58
  have one of the most dangerous tower rushes in the game,
• 1:09:01
  enabling you to reach the castle age behind this much faster than
• 1:09:05
  is conceivable for other civilizations with this
• 1:09:07
  strategy. And if you've gotten that far,
• 1:09:10
  there's really nothing keeping you from upgrading your towers,
• 1:09:13
  building a castle, and maybe even go for the unique tech if
• 1:09:18
  you don't like Minute Arms. The economic advantages and HP
• 1:09:22
  regeneration also apply to a normal tower rush without Minute
• 1:09:26
  Arms. However, this can be played a
• 1:09:28
  little earlier than you would do with Minute Arms.
• 1:09:31
  I wouldn't recommend doing a naked tower rush, but if you're
• 1:09:35
  feeling confident you should probably be bring a couple of
• 1:09:38
  extra those for some fighting power and to build multiple
• 1:09:42
  towers at once. Also, this enables you to rotate
• 1:09:45
  between your villages and ensuring that there's time for
• 1:09:49
  some villagers to go back from the fight, maybe Garrison inside
• 1:09:52
  a tower and heal up. I'd also recommend building your
• 1:09:55
  first tower somewhere safe and unseen by the enemy.
• 1:09:59
  Even if it doesn't immediately deny any enemy resources, it's a
• 1:10:05
  good place to fall back to and to continue the tower creep.
• 1:10:09
  If you want to know more about the Poles tower rush, go back in
• 1:10:12
  the podcast feed a couple of years ago.
• 1:10:15
  I've interviewed a guy named Sweet Lou who has been
• 1:10:18
  terrorizing me with this Strat on the ladder for quite a while
• 1:10:22
  and I think he still does it. If you're feeling safe, like for
• 1:10:27
  example on Arena, the poles can play a special boom after doing
• 1:10:32
  a fast castle in which they go for a stone to collect gold for
• 1:10:36
  the castle age. Afterwards a fourth or even 5th
• 1:10:39
  town centre can be built directly from the collected
• 1:10:42
  stone to start the boom. Thanks to the forewarks, food
• 1:10:45
  for villager production also comes in faster, and if
• 1:10:48
  necessary, excess collected stone can be sold.
• 1:10:52
  This is a particularly strong boom, but it's easy to punish
• 1:10:56
  for an enemy, so staying on stone is advised in order to
• 1:10:59
  build a counter castle. You might also want to build a
• 1:11:03
  castle before adding the 4th or 5th TC, just to be sure.
• 1:11:08
  The night all in works similarly to the boom.
• 1:11:11
  Here too, stone is collected to reach the castle age.
• 1:11:14
  After that however, a castle is built to research the unique
• 1:11:18
  tech and directly span Knights. To do this, you should actually
• 1:11:22
  switch from stone to gold, because the Knights may be dirt
• 1:11:25
  cheap, but you're planning on building lots of them at the
• 1:11:27
  same time, so you'll basically need an endless amount of gold.
• 1:11:32
  This is also possible on open mamps after you have gained map
• 1:11:36
  control in the feudal age, with maybe some scouts to build up a
• 1:11:39
  little borrow economy. This also makes it particularly
• 1:11:43
  suitable for team games where the feudal age army can allow a
• 1:11:47
  teammate to put a castle forward, which can open the way
• 1:11:50
  for the Knights that fall. I'd say in team games you
• 1:11:53
  probably want to play as the Cavalry civilization in your
• 1:11:57
  team when playing as the Poles. However, once in the Imperial
• 1:12:02
  Age they are suddenly very poor despite their numbers due to a
• 1:12:05
  lack of the important armour upgrade, as this greatly
• 1:12:09
  diminishes their role as a shield for meal or as a meat
• 1:12:13
  shield for ranged units. In this respect they are almost
• 1:12:17
  better suited as an arch civilization in the long run,
• 1:12:20
  but they can hardly keep up with a really good arch assist.
• 1:12:23
  Also you're not really making use of the food eco when playing
• 1:12:27
  playing Archers in team games, so the Poles are kind of
• 1:12:30
  difficult to fit into the meta for open maps and team games,
• 1:12:33
  which is why you will hardly ever see them being played.
• 1:12:37
  They have much more to offer on close maps though, where greedy
• 1:12:42
  booms and all. In castle age, floods are much
• 1:12:45
  more realistic because you have team mates who can buy you the
• 1:12:48
  time needed for those strategies.
• 1:12:51
  This requires great team synergy but is extremely rewarding.
• 1:12:55
  Back when I was playing team games with Felix he was the one
• 1:12:58
  deciding most of the strategies and he had this build down with
• 1:13:02
  the poles on arena that was absolutely mind blowing.
• 1:13:07
  He started a very powerful boom in the castle edge to get just
• 1:13:10
  enough eco to sustain the knight flood out of seven or eight
• 1:13:14
  stables. With the unique tech of course.
• 1:13:16
  And all I had to do as his mate was to keep him safe enough and
• 1:13:21
  to open the base of an enemy so he could rush in with his
• 1:13:25
  Knights and kill them off. I can still remember how baffled
• 1:13:29
  I was by how fast he could get that flood going and keep up the
• 1:13:33
  flood. If I remember correctly I think
• 1:13:36
  you could do this with something between 50 and 60 bills and it
• 1:13:40
  was a Strat completely based on timings.
• 1:13:43
  That game also taught me just how crazy the Poles food eco
• 1:13:47
  was. It may sound easy, but it's
• 1:13:50
  actually a very tight build and it's useless if you don't have a
• 1:13:53
  teammate that gets to open up the enemy's base.
• 1:13:56
  So if this is something you want to try, don't do this on the
• 1:13:58
  ladder, but find yourself someone to practice this with.
• 1:14:02
  However, the Poles can leverage most of their advantages on semi
• 1:14:06
  closed maps like Hideout. These maps allow them to play
• 1:14:09
  toward the Castle Age power spike while retaining the option
• 1:14:13
  for specialized Feudal Age strategies, for example, the
• 1:14:16
  Tower Rush. Their weaker late game often
• 1:14:19
  plays a minor role here, as opponents find it difficult to
• 1:14:22
  avoid decisive engagements during the Castle Age.
• 1:14:26
  In contrast, while the Poles do have certain advantages on
• 1:14:29
  closed maps and are among the strongest civilizations there,
• 1:14:32
  they must play very precisely towards their power spikes to
• 1:14:36
  avoid being overwhelmed later. For inexperienced players, this
• 1:14:40
  can prove to be quite difficult. I think there's much better
• 1:14:44
  civilizations for closed maps like Arena with more foolproof
• 1:14:48
  strategies that are less risky in when we once.
• 1:14:51
  But in team games, if you're maybe not the biggest fan of
• 1:14:54
  late game, you can get very creative with the pulse to avoid
• 1:14:57
  it. On Nomad, hybrid and water maps,
• 1:15:00
  the poles are quite poorly suited as they can rarely
• 1:15:04
  utilize their forward bonus and lack other advantages to
• 1:15:08
  compensate for this. I'd even say they are a bottom
• 1:15:11
  tier sieve on these kind of maps.
• 1:15:14
  Conversely, they perform comparatively well on maps that
• 1:15:17
  focus on map control like Gold Rush and Golden Pit, where it is
• 1:15:21
  common to build an early castle. In these scenarios, the Poles
• 1:15:25
  generate gold while mining stone, providing them with a
• 1:15:28
  superior economy compared to other civilizations.
• 1:15:32
  Simultaneously, they continue to save gold on their units thanks
• 1:15:35
  to their unique tech, and Knights are the perfect unit to
• 1:15:38
  secure maps because they are both strong and mobile.
• 1:15:43
  Due to their massive Catholics power spike, they can secure map
• 1:15:46
  control effectively and are less hindered later on by their lack
• 1:15:49
  of late game upgrades and options.
• 1:15:51
  Furthermore, they benefit from the fact that many of these maps
• 1:15:54
  are easy to wall and are well suited for scout openings, all
• 1:15:59
  of which plays directly into the hands of the Poles.
• 1:16:02
  While the Poles are generally well suited for open maps and
• 1:16:04
  offer plenty of options backed by a strong economy, they face
• 1:16:08
  an early game dilemma. Their economy becomes highly
• 1:16:12
  vulnerable if the follow up bonus is fully exploited, so
• 1:16:15
  maximizing their bonuses always puts them at risk.
• 1:16:19
  On the other hand, they rely on this momentum to gain an an
• 1:16:23
  advantage before reaching their relatively weak late game.
• 1:16:26
  As you can see, the polls are not an easy to play
• 1:16:29
  civilization. They are easily punished and
• 1:16:32
  they are similar to the Burgundians when it comes to
• 1:16:34
  enticing the player to play greedily.
• 1:16:37
  Both early and late game are hard to execute, but they have a
• 1:16:41
  strong mid game in which you strive to overpower your enemy.
• 1:16:45
  Again, I find this incredibly hard to execute, which is why
• 1:16:49
  the polls are a hard to master civilization in my opinion.
• 1:16:53
  This of course should not be a problem for the pro players.
• 1:16:57
  So let's move on to take a look at how the polls have performed
• 1:17:01
  in E sport history. And I'm afraid that's really not
• 1:17:04
  that much to say. Since the polls have come out in
• 1:17:08
  August 2021 with the second DLC for the Definitive Edition.
• 1:17:11
  They are a rather young civilization, despite this being
• 1:17:15
  4 1/2 years ago. In these few years, the Poles
• 1:17:19
  did not really manage to have a real impact on the matter.
• 1:17:23
  There has been a short period of time when the Poles had been
• 1:17:25
  considered dangerous, about two to three years ago during the
• 1:17:29
  RMS Two Cup and the Grand Melee, where we've seen the Poles being
• 1:17:33
  mainly banned early on in the draft.
• 1:17:35
  But ever since then, the Poles have hardly ever been considered
• 1:17:38
  for tournaments. One of the reasons for this is
• 1:17:41
  that most tournaments of the past few years have had a very
• 1:17:45
  mixed map pool, and the poles kind of depend on very specific
• 1:17:49
  map generations. You need space for farms, but
• 1:17:52
  you also need to be able to easily wall your base.
• 1:17:55
  You need a good amount of stone and you don't want any water on
• 1:17:59
  your map as well. The polls win rate on the ladder
• 1:18:02
  is also pretty bad across the board for most ELO ranges, and
• 1:18:06
  it's also true for the top players.
• 1:18:08
  So the pros are probably already making bad experiences with the
• 1:18:12
  Poles in their everyday grind, so they might not come up as
• 1:18:16
  often when it comes to preparing for tournaments.
• 1:18:19
  However, I just don't believe that there's a hidden aspect or
• 1:18:23
  strategy of the polls that hasn't been discovered yet.
• 1:18:27
  Their strengths are pretty much figured out just like their
• 1:18:29
  weaknesses are. And as much as I tried, I can't
• 1:18:32
  think of a single map or game mode that puts the poles in a
• 1:18:36
  top three position. There's just always a couple of
• 1:18:40
  better options. I'm fairly certain that this
• 1:18:43
  won't change anytime soon. Looking at their change log, the
• 1:18:46
  poles haven't really been changed that much.
• 1:18:49
  For a brief time their food bonus was nerfed by 2%, but it's
• 1:18:52
  back up to where it started, which is an indicator for the
• 1:18:55
  polls not being as strong as people initially thought they
• 1:18:58
  would be. The rest of the changes are
• 1:19:01
  minor, and there's not a lot of them.
• 1:19:03
  The only real reason to give the polls some major changes is that
• 1:19:07
  their win rate is pretty low and that they aren't very prominent
• 1:19:11
  in tournaments. To be honest, I'm not sure if
• 1:19:14
  that needs to change though. I think it's totally fine to
• 1:19:17
  have a couple of civilizations in the game that are just hard
• 1:19:20
  to master and not seen that regularly.
• 1:19:23
  The polls are kind of like the Dark Souls of Age of Empires 2,
• 1:19:27
  where lots of people fail with it, but once you've gotten the
• 1:19:30
  hang of how to play it, you feel fantastic.
• 1:19:33
  And before we get to the campaigns, there's a recent
• 1:19:37
  tournament game I'd like to tell you about.
• 1:19:39
  As an honourable mention. Just recently, in December 2025,
• 1:19:44
  we had an amazing final between Hera and the Viper in the King
• 1:19:47
  of the Desert 6. This tournament is played on one
• 1:19:51
  map only, Arabia, hence the name King of the Desert.
• 1:19:55
  The version of Arabia in the tournament was different from
• 1:19:57
  the Arabia version on the ladder at the time.
• 1:20:00
  It was more open, had less hills and incentivized lots of
• 1:20:03
  aggression and even laming. None of this calls for Poles I
• 1:20:07
  know, which is why nobody ever picked them except for Hera in
• 1:20:11
  this final. Because he had a special
• 1:20:14
  strategy prepared. So Hera played as the poles and
• 1:20:18
  Viper chose the Incas to fight against him.
• 1:20:21
  In my opinion, especially considering the map, the Incas
• 1:20:24
  are favored in this match up. Both clicked up super fast and
• 1:20:27
  Viper tried to pressure Hera as soon as possible.
• 1:20:31
  Hera however got his eco upgrades early and started
• 1:20:34
  farming around his forewalk, which he secured with an early
• 1:20:37
  tower. This of course made it hard for
• 1:20:39
  Viper to find damage. He took the advantage of Viper's
• 1:20:42
  open map and raided him with scouts while he started to
• 1:20:45
  secure his base and walled up, forcing Viper's army back.
• 1:20:50
  It was really such an aggressive play style by both of them that
• 1:20:54
  I recommend rewatching it if you've missed this game.
• 1:20:57
  So Hera kept producing scouts and he never stopped.
• 1:21:00
  So most of the time he was running around with the 10 plus
• 1:21:03
  scouts and he didn't stop even while he was on his way to the
• 1:21:07
  castle age. However the moment he clicked up
• 1:21:10
  he started full stonewalling his base and used a lot of rules for
• 1:21:15
  that to make sure those walls go up.
• 1:21:18
  This Strat is actually something you can't do with that many
• 1:21:21
  civilizations just because the poles food economy is so fast
• 1:21:26
  that they can constantly produce scouts and still save food to go
• 1:21:29
  up. With all those scouts he could
• 1:21:32
  maintain map control and be safe from counter attacks, and once
• 1:21:36
  he got up to the Castle Age, he immediately tucked into the
• 1:21:40
  light CAF technology and expanded his economy from there.
• 1:21:44
  Wiper soon realized that he was too far behind an eco and had no
• 1:21:47
  chance in putting pressure on Hera because of the walls in
• 1:21:50
  time to catch up to him, so he just had to resign.
• 1:21:54
  It was honestly a great game to watch, but certainly nothing
• 1:21:57
  that can be done easily or consistently.
• 1:22:01
  So it made sense for him for Hera to save this strategy for
• 1:22:04
  the final round to surprise his enemy.
• 1:22:06
  I highly doubt he would get away with this a second time though.
• 1:22:11
  For the end of this podcast, we should turn our attention to the
• 1:22:15
  Polls campaign, which is Yadviga, named after the
• 1:22:18
  protagonist of this campaign. June the 15th, 1399 You can hear
• 1:22:26
  a distant bell tolling as the first light of dawn glitters on
• 1:22:31
  the Vistula River. An industrious Friar somewhere
• 1:22:38
  in the outskirts of Krakow hailing the arrival of the new
• 1:22:43
  day, long before the priests in our own cathedral have risen
• 1:22:47
  from their beds. It has been a long time since I
• 1:22:51
  knew it has been given three swords so it's labeled as a hard
• 1:22:54
  campaign. Yedwiga lived a short life from
• 1:22:57
  1373 to 1399 and is one of the most beloved and significant
• 1:23:03
  figures in Polish history. She wasn't just a queen, she was
• 1:23:07
  a sovereign monarch, a diplomat, a patron of the arts, and
• 1:23:11
  eventually was made a St. in 1997, close to 600 years after
• 1:23:15
  her death. There are 6 missions in this
• 1:23:18
  campaign telling her whole life story.
• 1:23:21
  And if you have ever wanted to play a campaign in Age of
• 1:23:23
  Empires 2, this is the one to go for, as it's widely recognized
• 1:23:28
  to be the best one in the game. I'd like to add that The
• 1:23:31
  Chronicle's campaigns are actually superior to the Adwiga
• 1:23:34
  campaign, but they are so different from the standard
• 1:23:37
  campaigns that a comparison just feels very unfair among the
• 1:23:42
  standard campaigns. However, this is still to this
• 1:23:44
  day the best campaign in the game.
• 1:23:47
  What makes the campaign so great is that both the storytelling is
• 1:23:50
  compelling and the scenarios are innovative.
• 1:23:54
  Most other campaigns can be easily completed by basically
• 1:23:57
  booming and then overwhelming the AI, but that is not the case
• 1:24:01
  in Yadviga. You start off in the first
• 1:24:03
  mission with the 11 year old Yadviga and her royal escort in
• 1:24:08
  order to escort the Princess to a cathedral in Kharkov in order
• 1:24:11
  for her to get married to an Austrian Prince.
• 1:24:15
  However. There are two Dukes who also
• 1:24:17
  wanted the Polish crown and therefore try to snag the
• 1:24:20
  Princess. Once we reach Krakow, we will
• 1:24:23
  need to fight against the Dukes and get them to stop their
• 1:24:27
  advances. Then A twist.
• 1:24:29
  Suddenly a new suitor arrives, Yogila, a Lithuanian Prince.
• 1:24:34
  After that, this young couple has now brought together
• 1:24:37
  Lithuania and Poland and they need to start rebuilding their
• 1:24:41
  Kingdom. Of course, there are nobles to
• 1:24:43
  fight and rebellions to stop, but the mission gives you lots
• 1:24:46
  of other mechanics to play with. You can fortify allied villages
• 1:24:50
  with castles, which grants you additional pop space, or you can
• 1:24:53
  convert Lithuanian peasants to Christianity, which puts the
• 1:24:57
  church on your side but makes the peasants angry.
• 1:25:00
  No matter though, you'll need to find a Pagan shrine, destroy it,
• 1:25:03
  and thus appease the villagers. This is just an example on how
• 1:25:07
  much variety and secondary objectives these missions offer.
• 1:25:11
  Whenever you do finish these secondary missions, you will
• 1:25:14
  receive rewards that feel meaningful and rewarding, which
• 1:25:17
  cannot be said about all other campaigns.
• 1:25:20
  It also conveys a great sense of what's happening on a narrative
• 1:25:24
  level because you clearly feel your power and influence growing
• 1:25:27
  by completing these little quests.
• 1:25:30
  In the next scenario, Ugala needs to fight his cousin for
• 1:25:33
  control. Over Lithuania in this third
• 1:25:37
  mission, there are 9 towns on the map and you must control 8
• 1:25:40
  of them simultaneously in order to win.
• 1:25:43
  You start with three of your choice and your enemy gets 6 as
• 1:25:47
  well as some reinforcements. This is unique because the game
• 1:25:51
  actually allows you to choose three out of the 9 cities you
• 1:25:58
  you want to start off with. This has never been seen before,
• 1:26:01
  and kind of allows you to replay the mission in different ways
• 1:26:05
  depending on what you think is the best strategy.
• 1:26:09
  Your forces are stretched thin across the frontier.
• 1:26:12
  You'll be fighting a war of manoeuvre, striking several
• 1:26:15
  locations at once to dismantle enemy strongholds.
• 1:26:18
  You won't be building a sprawling empire here.
• 1:26:21
  Instead you'll rely on the logistical support of the Polish
• 1:26:25
  Crown, which sends steady shipments of resources to fuel
• 1:26:28
  your campaign. With no ability to build new
• 1:26:32
  buildings or get some villages to get an eco, your success
• 1:26:36
  depends solely on how effectively you wield the 200
• 1:26:40
  population strong army at your command.
• 1:26:43
  This was such an intense scenario to play, and definitely
• 1:26:46
  one of the harder ones from this campaign.
• 1:26:49
  In order to control a city, you need to destroy the castle
• 1:26:52
  standing in it. However, your enemies will do
• 1:26:55
  the same to your cities, and you'll end up taking and
• 1:26:58
  retaking these cities until at some point you'll have 8 out of
• 1:27:03
  nine. To make things worse, the
• 1:27:05
  Teutonic Order will also send units to attack, making things
• 1:27:09
  even messier. This mission alone is pure fun.
• 1:27:14
  The 4th mission is about the siege of Vilnius.
• 1:27:17
  In 1390, Vitaatas Yugaila and Yadviga joined their forces to
• 1:27:22
  fit to defend Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, from the
• 1:27:26
  many waves of enemies sent by the Teutonic Order.
• 1:27:29
  Once again there is an interesting twist that has been
• 1:27:32
  reused in some other campaigns later on, like for example the
• 1:27:36
  Chronicle campaigns, a day and night mechanic.
• 1:27:40
  The Teutonic Order will only attack during the day, whereas
• 1:27:43
  at night you can start putting up your defenses again and go
• 1:27:46
  counter attack. This cycle is 10 minutes long
• 1:27:50
  each and was at the time completely new.
• 1:27:54
  In order to win, you'll need to destroy a couple of supply cards
• 1:27:57
  that help the Teutonic troops in their siege, which will trigger
• 1:28:00
  one last giant attack that you'll have to defend with some
• 1:28:04
  reinforcements. Defending the city is no easy
• 1:28:07
  task at all, but feels great when successful.
• 1:28:10
  Mission 5 is also pretty cool. In this scenario, you play as
• 1:28:14
  Vitautas and the Lithuanians as you ally yourself with
• 1:28:18
  Tokthemish to help take back the lands of the Golden Horde near
• 1:28:23
  the Dineepa river. After a while, you take on the
• 1:28:26
  Tatar capital as well as their allies in Crimea.
• 1:28:29
  Then, just when you think you've done it, the Golden Horde shows
• 1:28:33
  up, led by allies of Tamer Lane, which is the cruel hero of the
• 1:28:37
  Tatar campaign. You'll have 10 minutes to
• 1:28:40
  prepare for this massive attack, which puts you under a lot of
• 1:28:42
  pressuring once again, and once you've destroyed a couple of
• 1:28:46
  their castles, you'd think you've finally done it.
• 1:28:49
  But no, there's more enemies and you're forced to retreat.
• 1:28:54
  The last mission is based off the Battle of Kundwald, in which
• 1:28:57
  the Polish Lithuanian forces fight the Teutonic Order one
• 1:29:02
  final time. This is quite the jump in time,
• 1:29:05
  as this happened in 1410, which is 10 years after Yodviga's
• 1:29:09
  death, who dies just after giving birth to her child.
• 1:29:13
  However, this mission is very important story wise.
• 1:29:16
  Yodviga's story is a tragedy, after all, she dies young.
• 1:29:20
  Never seen the total victory at Kundwald, but the campaign makes
• 1:29:24
  it clear that the victory was only possible because of her.
• 1:29:28
  Once more, this mission is packed with side objectives that
• 1:29:31
  are important to complete as many of as possible within a
• 1:29:35
  timer in order to weaken the Teutonic Order and to help you
• 1:29:39
  in your fight against them. You can buy the help of
• 1:29:41
  mercenaries, you can destroy Teutonic fortresses and trade
• 1:29:45
  workshops or Prussian town centers in order to get
• 1:29:48
  resources. Then a final massive battle will
• 1:29:51
  start, concluding the mission. It's short and sweet, very
• 1:29:55
  fitting as an end for the Yed Viga campaign.
• 1:29:58
  Each of the six scenarios is different from one another, and
• 1:30:02
  the campaign as a whole was well reviewed when it came out.
• 1:30:06
  Not only does it tell a compelling story, but it also
• 1:30:09
  serves as a great introduction to the polls as a civilization.
• 1:30:13
  I mean you get to play with the obochs against Teutonic Knights
• 1:30:16
  which showcases their armor stripping ability.
• 1:30:18
  You get to play lots of fold works and see how powerful their
• 1:30:22
  food economy is. The missions include diplomacy,
• 1:30:25
  multi based management, intense battles stretching across the
• 1:30:29
  whole maps, an epic scale warfare and the fulfilment of
• 1:30:33
  Yedwiga's vision through many many side missions.
• 1:30:37
  This is all framed by great narration and a protagonist that
• 1:30:41
  is actually likeable and not your usual mass murdering
• 1:30:45
  bloodthirsty psychopath. Again, this campaign is for sure
• 1:30:49
  the best they've done and it's worth playing it even if you're
• 1:30:53
  not that much into campaigns. And that is my take on the Poles
• 1:30:58
  and Age of Empires too. I had a lot of fun researching
• 1:31:02
  the civilization and stand by my verdict that this civilization
• 1:31:06
  is well designed, hard to play, and draws its inspiration from
• 1:31:10
  real history. Despite them not being played
• 1:31:13
  that much, I see no reason to change much about them.
• 1:31:17
  If we were to change something, I'd give them more monastery
• 1:31:21
  texts and that's all. The Poles are just a very well
• 1:31:25
  designed civilization. Thank you all for listening to
• 1:31:28
  this podcast. It's been one of the longer ones
• 1:31:31
  for civilizations and if you appreciate it, you can support
• 1:31:36
  the podcast by giving me 5 stars on Spotify and by recommending
• 1:31:41
  this podcast to your friends, community members on Reddit, or
• 1:31:46
  wherever you see fit. For me, whenever I do a podcast
• 1:31:50
  like this about a civilization, I want to play the shit out of
• 1:31:54
  the sieve for a couple of days before I start turning my
• 1:31:57
  attention to another one. But with a pose it's a bit
• 1:32:01
  different. I played the Yadviga campaign
• 1:32:04
  when it came out and instead of playing the pose on the ladder I
• 1:32:08
  think I just might want to replay the campaign again.
• 1:32:11
  Or maybe I'll start a skirmish against the AI on A maybe
• 1:32:17
  ludicrous sized map with the easiest AI.
• 1:32:20
  Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to do.
• 1:32:22
  I'm going to place a full work and neatly place 8 farms around
• 1:32:26
  it. But then I'm going to place
• 1:32:28
  another full work and place eight more farms around it, of
• 1:32:30
  course, very neatly placed once again.
• 1:32:32
  And I'll definitely make sure there won't be a single gap
• 1:32:35
  between them and. You know what?
• 1:32:37
  Why not a couple of more full works and farms and then I'm
• 1:32:41
  going to watch the food count rise.