[Anonymous Player]

I got this game a month ago and have been playing it regularly.

I tried the Art of War, as recommended, and I got some advice from people on this same Reddit.

I was also encouraged to post replays so that more experienced players could analyze it and point out my mistakes.

I’m not worried about being made fun of for my blunders, as long as I’m also told what I need to do to improve.

So, here’s the replay – Magyars (L) vs Burmese – where I tried a Magyar scout rush following a build from BuildOrderGuide, but was countered by a rush.

I thought I had successfully repelled it, but I was wrong.

I tried to defend for a while, but I didn’t have enough stone for a second tower, and the first one was destroyed before I could finish it.

[raids_made_easy]

Disclaimer: I’m not a great player myself, so if anyone better disagrees with me you might want to defer to their judgment.

I also don’t know your elo, but looking at the gameplay I think I’m at least in a position to give you some pointers.

Anyway, from what I could see the biggest thing you can easily improve here is your eco.

Main takeaway is to keep TC working, keep vils working, and make sure you’re spending your resources.

So for starters, as I alluded to before you kept your TC idle WAY too much.

You had it idle for 20 seconds before every producing with it which is very bad.

You should always start every (non-nomad) game by immediately queueing up villagers.

Ideally using hotkeys – I’m always mashing H – Q – H – Q on the load screen.

As long as you build one of the houses with 2 vils it should be finished before the first vil pops out of the TC.

I was confused by you only sending 2 vils to wood, then I remembered you mentioned following a special build order.

I would suggest completely ignoring civ based build orders until you have a solid grip on the standard build orders and can execute them pretty effortlessly.

You suffered a lot from lack of wood which would have been greatly alleviated if you followed the standard scout build.

Your mill was late for lack of wood so you had a vil waiting idle while the wood came in.

As a result you also had a lot of vils on boar/sheep which leads to you running out of under-TC food well before your berries are processed.

Ideally you want both to finish around the same time to delay farms as long as possible.

Your opponent had far less idle TC time than you, giving him [an extra 5 villagers by the time you two reached feudal.](https://i.imgur.com/KKu74x9.png) One of his vils died so he’s only up 4 vils right now, but he produced 5 more.

You can see he also had far less idle eco in the dark age.

A strong dark age makes a HUGE difference in this game, so I would highly recommend practicing your dark age to bring those idle numbers down.

Too much grind can be a chore, so you don’t have to do it for hours – just a few quick practice runs against AI to the end of dark age before getting into ranked matches for the day could make a massive difference in the long run.

I would also recommend not trying to lure deer on open maps until you’re really confident in your ability to build without idle time.

Maybe practice luring deer when you roll arena, as it can easily mess up your build on arabia if you’re not confident in the build.

Too much idle time is generally considered to far outweigh the benefit of luring a few deer in.

So going into feudal, the biggest mistake I saw was that you weren’t prepared to use your resources in feudal.

Your stable wasn’t built until almost 4 minutes into feudal, which gave your opponent time to have an archery range + 4 archers before you even tasked a builder to make a stable.

You had enough resources when you entered feudal to drop a stable straight away.

You had a ton of food too which could have easily fed an army of scouts.

At the time you dropped your stable, your opponent was floating 55 non-stone resources, and you were floating 1246.

Even with this massive eco lead he had, you still cleaned up his army and had a good chance to press there due to his poor army handling.

Some upgrades would have really helped you out here too – namely bloodlines and the cavalry armor blacksmith upgrade.

He didn’t get fletching so his archers were only doing 2 damage to your scouts.

Getting the armor upgrade therefore would have halved the damage you took from them.

You also want to keep queueing villagers when fighting!

Your TC was idle for most of the time you were engaging with his archers, giving him an even bigger eco lead.

The enemy was up 8 villagers now.

At this point since you’re winning fights and have a decent enough eco you should be thinking about putting a few on gold to transition to castle, unless your plan is to go all-in feudal in which case you need to be dropping more stables and farms.

Getting the gold to go up to castle here would have given you a good position after wiping his archer army.

Of course you should be doing more walling too.

You should try to use as many houses as possible as part of your wall, so he can’t just run right in the front when he wants to harass you.

You definitely seem to have the right idea in general about using the woodlines and your production buildings for the wall.

The scout raid was a very good idea, but you ended up throwing away your army for little gain.

You weren’t in a good position to get villager kills due to his spears, but you could see he was massively overcommitting to army at that point.

He made (and lost) archers then followed up with a ton of spears and skirms.

That isn’t cheap, and spear + skirm isn’t very great offensively.

This would again be an excellent time for you to punish his poor investment by going up to castle to make knights, which would absolutely mop up everything he has.

Also, if you weren’t walled up by this point you DEFINITELY want to start walling now when you see he overcommitted to a feudal trash army.

Most importantly, though, don’t throw away your scouts.

By the time his army reaches you, you have a market built.

Don’t be afraid to use your market!

You still didn’t have gold for castle age, but you could have immediately sold a little bit of food or wood to click up to castle.

Even though you weren’t walled, spears and skirms are pretty awful at raiding so you should have easily been able to hold them off long enough to click up.

As mentioned before, knights would completely decimate his army.

He overinvested in trash army so he won’t be reaching castle soon.

And yeah, that’s pretty much the end of it.

The main things to stress are to work on your idle TC and eco time, spend your resources more when not saving for upgrades/ages, and get army upgrades.

Also, don’t underestimate the castle age powerspike!

Despite the lead your opponent had, you still could have gained a very solid advantage by using the resources you were floating to click up to castle sooner.

Oh, one last thing: an EXTREMELY helpful habit to get into is just routinely pressing the hotkey for “select all town centers” every 15-20 seconds followed by spamming the “create villager” key a few times.

This is crucial to booming in castle age, but also really helps in feudal age to keep the TC working even when you’re fighting without worrying about the camera panning away from what you’re currently doing.

When you only have 1 TC, “select all town centers” functions identically to the “go to town center” hotkey except that it doesn’t pan your camera.

[Unholy_Lilith]

Select all TC hotkey for sure.

Will help you from the first second.

Practise it so pushing it will become natural.

The advice above, stick to generic build orders, should be a good one aswell.

I only disagree with the deer pushing, pushing 1 or 2 deer means you train skills you need anyway AND your eco get’s smoother.

Also when you start with different BOs (like MaA – archer) you need deer pushing anyway 🙂

Last, focus on spending ressources early, but avoid overqueuing.

So if you reach a point where you have 5+ army queued in one building, just build a second military building.

[Author]

Posts