[Anonymous Player]

I won a fair and square 1v1 Arabia match, but I’m concerned that sticking to the playstyle I used may hurt me in the long run.

I played as Britons and my opponents were Celts and Bulgarians.

In both games, I applied early pressure with MaA and archers.

In the first game, my opponent raided with knights and caused some damage, but I had a better eco due to starting my booming earlier.

I held a hill in the center with my army and built a siege workshop.

However, my opponent stopped my attempts at ramming through with woad raiders.

I decided to go imp and treb his castle down instead of going around it.

Meanwhile, he built a base right next to mine, which I failed to stop with some pikes, and he massed cavaliers.

He destroyed my trebs and castles in the center and side, and raided my base with cav, killing many vills.

I managed to drown him in halbs but lost all my xbows.

I massed longbows, while he continued small raids into my base.

In the end, I cleaned up his side base and won with a push of hussars, siege rams, and woad raiders.

The second game was similar, with my opponent doing significant damage with Konniks, but I held the center with archer mass and halbs until I won.

I did some light cav raids.

My question is how to protect my base from raids while holding the center.

Do I need to do so if I can continue massing my army despite the eco hits?

I would appreciate general analysis of the replays since I’m not sure where I went wrong in the first game.

My opponent had huge momentum from the flank and could have won by spamming more hussars into my base.

The game IDs are 090838 and 102407.

Thank you.

[Kingconquerorspod]

Without looking at the replays, are you playing gold pit or a map like that?

Some maps give massive rewards for controlling the center in which case you are playing the map exactly as it is supposed to be played.

Britons are famously very good defensively while pushing quite slow, so I wouldn’t worry to much about not keeping up with opponents that have mobile armies.

Defending your base could be improved by stone walling certain points.

It sounds to me though that you are winning based on your stamina in long games.

Perhaps try to go in for the kill in Castle age a bit more?

It’s a lot easier with a knight civ.

I would recommend the Portuguese as you can still open MaA + archers but then go double stable in early castle age to try and end the game!

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