Koreans OP?! Koreans vs. Vikings on 1v1 Arabia ~15xx ELO

[@ivanstrydom8417]

The perfect Boere/Viking composition= Berserkers+ Skirmishers+ Rams . Use skirms to hold , Berserkers to flank and raid & Rams to push in a counter offensive. I love the use of the blood mod. I always play with enhanced blood textures mod.

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

28:49 What about making several barracks too in this situation, around the gold? Note that war wagons don't get a bonus against spearmen, so they actually do lower dps than crossbowmen. Sometimes you hear people (like T90) say that it doesn't make sense to go for pikemen against fully-upgraded hussar if you don't have halberdier, but those are often games where the player who didn't go for the counter loses. (Viking pikemen are better than most others, though.)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

To anyone who reads the Twitch chat in the video: war wagons don't have pass-through damage like Scorpions do, despite using the same projectile appearance. (So much of AoE2 is memorizing all these little details. War Wagons do 1 damage to rams; Scorpions do 4 damage to Battering rams though just 3 to Capped/siege rams; elite Chu Ko Nu do 15 damage every ~3.5 sec to rams; elite Kipchaks do 10 damage every ~2.2 sec to rams (before thumb ring).)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

31:58 a common late-game scenario. Slow infantry against fast cavalry. The solution is simple (again, I criticize all the expert players who don't do this either): slow the cavalry with walls, so they spend more time attacking walls (even palisade walls) and less attacking your eco. Walling from the bottom woodline to edge of the map: ~20 tiles. Between the two woodlines: another ~20 tiles, and ~10 for the northeast woodline to the edge of the map. Total: ~120 wood and maybe ~150 in opportunity cost. When you get to the point that you can ignore 2k resources you have banked, you can afford to spend 300 on walls that do nothing. Again, an advantage of walls (even palisade) is that opponent has to click them to attack, so they can't just have a rally point set outside your walls and expect to do anything. (If you have the cavalry and your opponent doesn't wall, I think generally the tactic is to have multiple groups, but one thing that might work is to have a few units that pass through an area to gather up all infantry in a chase, while your other units follow behind and attack eco. If you have zero attention to devote to it, you could maybe rally one stable to the distant edge of your opponent's base, so every ~23 seconds there's a distraction for all the pikemen who aren't on defensive stance. Doesn't work as well if there are castles in their base, though.) So you sort of did this at 32:31. But remember, the first villager builds faster than later villagers (3x as fast)! So it didn't help to make them all build the house first, because then they'll all build each wall unit at the same time too, so instead of effectively having 21 villagers building (7 × 3), you instead have 9 (6 + 3). (Or you could say, 7 villagers building vs 9/3=3; the first way is more useful for calculating opportunity cost of adding additional villagers.)

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11:12 TheViper deletes walls this way too, which I criticize just as much. The thinking: "an expert player uses buildings to wall, which saves palisades, so a base that's walled with buildings is a sign of an expert player." There's a slight excuse with military buildings because if you deleted one palisade wall and built an archery range outside your existing walls, if you tried to rally your troops towards your base the ungarrison tile might be blocked by a wall and they ungarrison on the wrong side. But this doesn't happen with houses.

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

11:56 if you seem to have overwhelming military advantage, there's little point in keeping your forces together. So you can scout with some units. Especially with archers, they can harass a woodline even if enemy is fully walled. One thing that even professional, or expert players don't think to do is use a villager to build walls to protect your archers next to enemy base. Think of them as forts, like they had 2000 years ago, or a motte-and-bailey castle (1000 years ago). It would mean you could continue to deny a woodline even if your opponent starts fielding knights, which can easily clear up a few isolated archers or even crossbowmen. Also think of all the games, even in high-level tournaments with names like Lierrey or TheViper, where one player assumes the other is fully walled so they never discover a hole. Even if there isn't a hole, as spectators we can often see how a gold etc. wasn't harassed when it could have been.

[@andom5522]

Sending a villager across the entire map in the early game just to wall in a few archers is not only risky but a big economical disadvantage. The time it takes to run across the map / build and idle time is simply not worth it. You might even lose the villager on the way or you might even just set yourself up for a trap walling your own units in.

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

@@andom5522 And yet people still win by TC dropping in dark age or even feudal age. Clearly, the economic disadvantage can be worth it. Sometimes players don't get Double-bit Axe because it would delay their military; this is the same thing, making your military more effective. You can't trap your own units with walls, unless they're melee units. Ranged units will continue to shoot, and they wouldn't move even if there were no walls unless to chase. But anyway, a gate would usually make the more sense. Not only can units leave, but you can also add more units. Example: you do this for a while, and opponent adds skirmishers. So you move the unit away for a while, maybe attack somewhere else, before coming back. Same principle as forcing opponent to invest in multiple spearmen to defend against scouts. Of course, walls don't help if your opponent is going entirely ranged units. But assuming your opponent will act stupidly will make you lose as many games as it makes you win.

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

@@andom5522 Making walls for ranged units is also something that makes sense in late game, where people literally execute villagers to get more pop space because they have plenty of resources. There are games where a big ball of ranged units push into an enemy base. In some of these games, especially team games, that ball of ranged eventually gets wiped out by armies that include lots of melee units. In many cases (mangonels complicate it), the invading ranged units would have done much better if they were surrounded by stone walls. In this game, Odette notes at 39:10 that she has a lot of arbs. She probably could have pushed into opponent's base, maybe taking some losses. But what then? You see all the time in games, usually during Castle age when you have more time to micro, that a bunch of crossbowmen shoot through a palisade wall and force enemy villagers to flee. The crossbowmen move on to some other part of the base looking for villagers to kill, and villagers at the first place just go right back to work. Because ranged units are balanced to be weaker 1v1 than infantry or cavalry, especially with no micro (which the AI does automatically for every individual ranged unit). Ranged units that split up from the ball will eventually get picked off. But not if you have 1) walls to protect the ranged units; by Imperial age, stone walls do a lot better even if stone is more scarce by then. And 2) Good enough vision in your opponent's base that you can spot mangonels before they arrive. Suppose Odette had done this in this game (which I still haven't finished watching~). The challenge would have been to destroy opponent's eco before they could switch to full skirmisher production. (Odette could have started added Viking light cavalry to counter this, though, even without bloodlines or last armor upgrade. Still significantly better than pikemen against full skirmishers, and could run from champions.)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

37:58 a bug! I used to notice this happen on HD, which I think might have been caused by converting trebuchets with Siege Engineers when you didn't have it, or something; maybe related to a trebuchet being killed while packing or unpacking. A ring of visible area in fog of war. (This theory might help anyone who wants to report the bug and get it fixed.)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

It's remarkable how people don't make militia against skirms if they don't have a stable available. Maybe the skirms will mostly just run away (and this isn't as good against Lithuanians for that reason), and this is definitely harder to do if opponent has Fletching and you can't afford first melee armor, but if the skirms are running away, either you should be able to do something with your archers then or you shouldn't be making archers. Militia are also cost-effective against spearmen, which are often used to protect skirmishers. (Of course, any unit stops being cost-effective if greatly outnumbered.)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

26:51 rams are an underused counter to trebuchets. So many games where there are two castles near each other, one player gets to Imperial first and starts trebbing the other castle, and the castle-age player acts like there's nothing they can do about the trebuchet just because it's sitting under a castle.

[@thefirenation3080]

great video, keep it up!

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

40:56 Imagine you had a Watch Tower in the middle of these stables and houses, where there are no Keeps. Imagine four of your arbalests inside (fifth would not add an arrow; or three arbalests with Thumb ring + one villager, for the same four extra arrows). Of course, you would spend 40 stone to build stone walls around it, with an open tile on each side to protect the villagers building it and make it more difficult for capped rams to damage it with aoe. This is pretty much safe from melee, and fires enough arrows to deter skirmishers too. (Actually only 1 damage per hit. It turns out Vikings do get Arrowslits, but that would just make it 2 damage per hit because apparently a fully-upgraded (except Guard tower) Viking Watch Tower doing 3 damage per hit to a skirmisher was overpowered and they had to change it. Edit: also 1 damage to Elite War Wagon, which would do 11 per hit to the tower.) But the point isn't the tower; it's that having the tower lets you build barracks and stables and siege workshops and so on. Almost-not-really like a castle drop for controlling an area. Doing this would be possible because you had ranged damage upgrades and ranged units to garrison in a tower. So, once you built the tower (~60 seconds with several villagers) and several military production buildings, in whatever order the situation required, you could then begin sending military directly into the eco you see at 40:57. Towers are best next to enemy farms tbh. (Like, NE of the barracks at 40:58.) It denies them, and you might also be able to make them your farms if the game continues long enough for it to matter. But maybe an actual human would react with a counter-tower in that situation. If you could deny the counter-tower, you didn't have THAT much need for a tower at that location.

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

34:17 It's always hard to say, but I think it would have been better to go for your opponent's base (or other eco if you scouted it), instead of the castle. Your units were slower, so opponent could avoid fights if they wanted to. Even if you took out the castle, you don't win the game by fighting around the entire map if your opponent's eco isn't there. There is no big army you can chase down and kill, because you wouldn't be able to catch it. (Except the one you killed a few seconds earlier.) Basically, when you have slow units, you want them to attack something they can catch, which does the most damage to opponent if they lose it. This is usually villagers and TCs surrounded by lots of farms. One TC surrounded by 10 farms costs 50% more than a castle, even if the villagers who were working on the farms immediately find productive work elsewhere, and TC has half the HP of a castle and otherwise easier to destroy. Just a random criticism, Viking scouts can still scout! And not upgrading to Light Cavalry means they're slightly faster. If you could see your opponent's base, you might have prioritized attacking it over the castle. (I've heard that 1500 DE is about 1800 Voobly, which is good)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

14:31 I wonder how many players (including expert players) would be surprised to learn that in a situation like this, they could protect their woodline with just 20 wood (and maybe 80 seconds in villager building time, worth ~25 wood). You just wall outside your woodline. Maybe relocating is easy. You would have had to refresh that lumbercamp for better efficiency. But it often happens that players have to abandon a newly-built lumbercamp, that costs 100 wood, when they could have spent just a bit more to protect that investment. So many of my suggestions (to anyone who might listen) are about walls, because walls are cheap, durable and effective and can therefore drastically change a game's outcome (compare TheViper losing to you in the Battle Royale event. It's really hard for better micro to let you win with 40 paladins against 80). In games where you can't use walls, like said Battle Royale mode, I might give different suggestions like "lead the gaia units away from the buildings, such as towers, and then head back to capture them", but a lot of it is just about being faster and making better decisions in the 1 second you have to look at a certain part of the map and do things there. Maybe someone would do better if they had looked at a certain part of the map at a certain point in the game (I think maybe you and TheViper might have both missed a gaia camp in your corner), but it's a lot harder to generalize. "Build walls further out when facing ranged units" is a suggestion based on simple criteria (or a simple criterion).

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19:17 Since you described it as a 'meme strategy', you probably haven't faced massed war wagons often and it was a learning experience. I don't think I would have done better here myself than you did, even if I had a mouse. But I'm trying to compare what you did in this fight vs what the best players do. Point: the best players make it a point to check if their opponent has ballistics. I guess this is because not only does it affect what they can do leading up to a fight (whether they can run away from a fight, especially with cavalry), but also what they do during the fight. So, with this fight: think about whether your opponent has ballistics. In both cases, you'll do best in the fight if you can pay attention to when your opponent is going to fire. This is the kind of thing that let TheViper win in in galley fights in AoC against other top players. Maybe DauT didn't pay attention to it when he started playing when game latency of 500~1000 ms was common, but now everyone can learn to do it. If they have ballistics, then you want to be moving when they fire, then immediately switch directions. Of course, this is easier when your opponent has all their units fire at once, and you might have to resort to just spamming different formation keys like you might see Liereyy (everyone spells his name differently lol) doing. If they don't have ballistics, you want to keep moving in the same direction after they fire. In neither case do you want to be standing still from the moment they fire until their projectiles hit you. Like I said, I wouldn't have done better. But this is how you could do better, if you think about what happened.

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

You might say on your Twitch stream "no suggestions about play improvements" but I don't see any such note on this video. If it makes you feel better, I criticize expert players too for obvious mistakes like not walling their trebuchets. It would have helped a little to garrison wounded archers in TC, like you saw Hoang do with his militia in the game he lost. But that's minor; a bigger thing is that palisade gates are really weak by Castle age, especially vs archers. Far too many players expect a palisade gate to offer significant resistance. The war wagons took it down amazingly quickly, though, in part because they get +5 against 'standard buildings'. It turns out this is the one that can't be blocked, so war wagons still do +5 damage against stone walls. But palisade gates are still a lot weaker than stone gates against war wagons, as well as against archers in general. By castle age, if a gate is supposed to protect against more than just one or two units, it should be a stone gate (deleting the palisade gate is not necessary, since two gates can be used to trap units). Stone gate in Castle age dies to 393 (correction, 306) hits from a War Wagon with fletching; palisade gate dies from just 31 hits. Against crossbowmen with bodkin arrow, stone gate takes 2750 hits, while palisade gate takes 80 hits. Since palisade gate has the same resource cost as stone gate since DE, there's even less reason not to make stone gates. Extra 40 seconds of construction time is worth ~13 resources. Apparently, the only time when palisade gates (with 2 pierce armor and a larger surface area to attack) are better than palisade walls (with 5 pierce armor) is against Tarkans, since Tarkans do not do +10 bonus against palisade gates like they do against palisade walls. Basically, they're good for trapping units, in the dark and feudal ages, and when you really just need the function they're described to have in the tooltip or tech tree of "slowing enemy units down" instead of stopping them completely like stone walls do. (Ok, stone walls have same description of slowing, but palisade walls "warns you of [enemies'] approach".) Like all walls, they're best when you can reuse them, by rebuilding just a small part after an enemy force that breaks through is dealt with or leaves. If you don't want to make a mining camp or TC on stone, you can plan ahead to have a little more stone resources by using the 'resource dropoff when constructing certain buildings' feature. Send four villagers to stone when you plan to build a lumber camp close to stone (works for mill too). When they all have 10 stone, make the lumber camp and they'll drop off the stone. This should work as long as they start moving towards the construction site before it finishes, so if you want to be efficient and can keep track of it, you can send one to stone, and then about 20 seconds later send the other three. When the first has 10 stone, they start the lumber camp; once the others have 10 stone each, you send them to help building the lumber camp, which should be finished before or shortly after they arrive. The downside is that it means you have unused resources; the exact reason why it can make sense to sell stone to get to Castle age, only to buy more later. But you can also do this when you need to make an extra TC. If you spent 30 stone on a gate, send 3~4 villagers to stone 40 seconds before you need the new TC. After they each have 10 stone, build a farm, which also makes villagers deposit their resources of any type when they finish building it, then build your TC next to the farm with the stone you just got. A bonus with Vikings (free handcart) is that the farm is still making food for you while the TC is being built, based on Spirit of the Law's latest farm videos. (Imagine someone trying to say all this in Twitch chat while you are playing a game)

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

35:56 the villager chopping here let the champions in at 36:42, haha Imagine the misogynist comments from some pro players if they noticed it happen in their game

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

26:05 perfect farm placement

[@italianlawyer1993]

GG :))

[@RiskyDramaUploads]

7:55 Could have trapped them. Place palisade gate behind them, then after you're sure it's positioned right, delete wall so you can build it and another palisade wall if necessary. This works because you have to click to attack walls or gates. (AI attacks them automatically, just like monks convert automatically.) quoteinvestigator.com/2015/02/03/you-can/

[@kingpietro1279]

should hae gone full archers instead of skirms you didn't uprade you're pierce armor