How to Stop a Hard Enemy AI’s Mass Archer Attack on My Village at the 15-20 Minute Mark
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As a beginner player, I play on the Arabia map.
In the beginning, I focus on creating my first 15 villagers, with 4-5 being allocated to chop down wood and 10-11 gathering food.
My opponent AI reaches feudal age at the same time as me, where I create around 10 more villagers to gather resources like gold, wood, and food.
However, at around 15-20 minutes, the AI launches an attack on my village with 30 archers and other troops.
Despite trying various strategies like building walls and towers to defend, creating a large army, and attacking first, I seem unable to stop the AI’s attack.
I even attempted to use soldiers who throw spears, but this strategy didn’t work either.
As a result, I’m running out of ideas of how to defend against the AI’s attack and struggling to find solutions online.
I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong regarding my build order or if I’m using the wrong units to attack.
Yes you’re doing something wrong in your build order.
If you can get somewhat close to Hera’s BO then you will easily beat the extreme AI https://youtu.be/NKSehBJYYI8?t=174
Try AI vs AI to see what the AI does, and observe the game in the replay.
That’s what I did, I let a game run on AI vs AI, and observed.
So in Me (Franks) vs AI (turk) in map Arabia I created skirmishers and placed a tower along the possible attack direction, and played defensive until I was able to capture the ridges and placed castles there.
The rest was to capture the enemy town.
There’s two quite divergent answers to this depending on what your goal is.
If your goal is just to beat the hard AI, the easiest solution is to build towers at the front of your base.
The AI has a particular exploit where it tends to have all its archers/skirms attack the tower and die to it.
If your goal is to get better as a player, and improve at strategies that could work against human players, then I would practice a more conventional counter play.
If it’s mostly archers, you can go for a skirm defence, if it’s archers and skirms, then you can go for a skirm and scout defence.
I would try and avoid walling too much and staying relatively open, as it will really force you to improve your eco timings and ability to maintain defence under pressure, as the hard AI like to pump out decent numbers for an early raid.
I should note for the latter approach, a tower to counter archers/skirms isn’t a terrible idea against a human opponent, as it is a hard counter, but it’s an expensive investment, that should only really be dropped by your important and hard to defend resources.
Or if you are planning a 1 TC play, you can drop a pre-emptive map controlling one if you really want to.
That said, I wouldn’t practice it against the AI, as you won’t get much learning from it.
It can be worth remembering for games against real opponents though.
Skirmishers (spear throwers) and cavalry are good against archers, but you need to match their numbers.
No unit is cost effective if they are outnumbered.
Less idle tc time.
Pretty much anything you do with 0 idle tc will beat hard ai
If you’re 10 vils into Feudal Age and haven’t accomplished anything, you should have been in Castle Age already.
And then it’s way easier to kill mass archers, as you have knights and elite skirmishers.
siege might work?
Against the AI you could advance a little earlier (go heavier in food in dark age, you don’t need 5 in wood, not even 4) and then stone wall your base and go fast to castle age and make knights.
The usually AI invests a lot in feudal army and stone walls stops them completely and then 6 knights clear them out
I had the same struggle.
So the way to counter is scout and understand which army the AI is doing.
And then make a counter army.
Either with more archers to be aggressive or with skirmish and towers to defend.
If the opponent is spending resources in army, we have to too.
If we under react, you would not be able to maintain your economy and over come it.
what AI level are u playing?
Instead of just doing economy you need to initiate and disrupt their economy with a scout rush or something similar.
You can also wall up but not needed at all for hard ai.
Idea is to not let them build so many archers and hit their economy early
Build towers.
The AI will usually not respect them and run inside their range, so you can garrison villagers inside for extra arrows and massacre half their archers that way.
The easiest way is to hit him with a Feudal Age rush, thus pre-empting the attack.
I wrote up a description here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/11b5c1w/struggling_against_ai_on_hard/j9z0l9j/
However, if you are only focused on stopping the archer rush, this should be straightforward.
As soon as you hit Feudal Age, build two Archery Ranges and make as many skirmishers as you can.
Try to research Fletching as well if you can.
Skirmishers will obliterate archers, without any gold cost.
Don’t make militia unless you are planning to attack their base.
Infantry are decimated by archers, they are only needed for destroying buildings at this stage of your game.
Focus on skirmishers; during the battle, select them all and focus down the archers one by one.
I would try and be a bit more aggressive.
Attack the AI with scouts then wall.
Until you play extreme AI, the AI has a vil cap.
They manage their eco very well, so you have to keep making more vils and more production buildings.
That is oftern a problem for new players.
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