What Can I Do to Respond to Spanish in This Situation?
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I am Nesque, and I had predicted my opponent’s castle drop strategy.
I made the necessary preparations, such as advancing my tech quickly, exploiting the market as Saracens, and idling my Town Center.
Despite my precautions, my opponent still managed to drop a castle before me, construct it faster, and destroy my economy with Conquistadors.
I lost the game for my team because of my disadvantage.
If someone could please review the replay and tell me what I did wrong, I would be very grateful.
Here is a download link for the replay: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XGwuP4y\_dsHbQevND1XQLFKlGW3-Vyiz/view?usp=share\_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XGwuP4y_dsHbQevND1XQLFKlGW3-Vyiz/view?usp=share_link).
You can either tower rush or make a few archers, as long they have fletching you can deny the castle.
If you are too late to stop the castle go for monk defense insted of defensive castle.
meso civ archer into xbow
kr trush if pro
Its a very aggressive all-in build without eco behind.
Standard answer is simply monks and walls behind.
That stops his initial push without a super big investment on your end.
Monks counter conqs in low numbers (sanctity!)
From there on it depends a bit how he proceeds, at some point you want a def castle.
Sometimes guard towers or skirms can be good, but especially skirms is a way bigger investment than people in this thread think.
For a overall not powerful unit.
So i would probably have gone double monastery and more walls.
Maybe a second tc with vills on stone.
Defend with monks against the early conqs and transition into def castle, buy your way to imp.
Open with monks + trebs and transition from there on.
You sacrificing all your eco for a def castle that doesnt even fully protect your base is not the right way in most cases.
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Now im not sure on what elo this game was played, and i get that conqs are way easier to play on such level than the monk defense, which relies a lot of being aware for conversion.
In that case it might be better to simply tower rush the caslte drop player, because no matter what, you will delay him as he is forced into def towers etc.
This way you atleast make sure conqs cannot dominate the game early on and in the end the pockets will become more game deciding, as you both will be delayed.
However towerrushing on arena does require some experience to not be completly useless.
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TL:DR:
1) rewall behind, maybe to tc, to buy time.
be aware of petards
2) double monastery.
get sanctitiy early on
3) get vills on stone to drop a delayed def castle.
Potentially 2nd tc
4) buy your way to imp
I send all my vills and fight the MF, also I get one or towers to shoot the builders, it has work a couple of times and it has fail a couple more
>I prepared
you prepared for the castle, but not for the follow up.
its arena, so you cant necessarily deny the castle drop, especially vs spanish.
one way to deny it is stay in feudal and make feudal army, but thats not really an enticing way to go about it.
most cases, you just have to accept the castle will be dropped and adjust accordingly.
your defensive castle was good, but then you didnt make any preparations for his army.
you figured a castle is enough to defend you, which its not.
what you could’ve done:
* add another layer of stone walls a bit further back from your starting walls, walling kind of from tc to top right of your base
* quickly add monks
* make a couple of mamelukes (you dont actually have to take the fight with them.just use them to have army presence, make him think you might take a fight, make him slow his push into your base by retreating periodically, basically to slow him down till youve stabilzied)
* once stabilized, buy imp for trebs or boom behind the pressure (keep in mind theres an option his pocket is massing knights to kill you while your pocket booms, as he probably should)also dont throw blames at your team.
you died, it happens.
thats an all-in arena game.
If they drop a castle and don’t do significant damage, you win by just having a better eco and getting to imp first behind.
Make more walls, drop another tc, and get eskirms to hold him off.
Should be a relatively easy game from there
Let him drop the castle.
Focus on food and wood.
No gold.
Make 2 archery ranges and go ekirms + university + ballistics.
You can deny all the annoying raids with conqus.
You won’t need stone and gold.
Gives you a advantage.
After you have about 15-20 ekirms, he can’t attack.
If he adds knights, micro them down with skirms.
And move your eco away from castle fire.
I’ve played the conq rush a lot because it’s my favorite UU.
If you know his strat going in (a Spanish player will do this castle/conq strat like 99% of the time on Arena), start making skirms asap.
Let him beat you to castle, his early group of conqs (4) will have a headache againts even 5 skirms.
While he is wasting time micro-ing his attack and not getting much payout for his food/gold, you keep building your eco and amassing skirms (with ballistics from university) and, in castle, ballistas (conqs can dodge mangonels easily if micro’d right).
From there he is stalemated and your eco/vill count should outdo his as skirms require much less food than conqs.
Drop a counter castle and proceed with horses or archers.
I’ve defended conq push with monks and sometimes skirmisher it works well
You can go up with market and stable instead of market blacksmith and deny castle with scouts, but you might have to pull in some vills too in case he makes spears
Same way you defend against it against any civ.
1) Make a second layer of walls out of reach of castle
2) Produce monks or mangonels behind.
In this case monks would be great.
He can’t do anything with his conqs if you do and his eco is much worse than yours now.
3) Only thing he can do is place another castle closer to the second walls.
You should block this by having your own castle.
The order is important here!
A defensive castle is only third on the list.
Also by doing it this way, your eco will still be pretty good instead of having 15 vills on stone immediately.
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You can start with point 1) in dark/feudal already by smartly placing your houses, blacksmith, market, …
in the direction where you expect the castle.
as someone who castle drops at 14:25 with Spanish on Arena: The most important thing for you is to find out whether they invest into Castle Age or try to go to imp.
1.
Building a defensive castle is not false.
Its good.
Together with an inner wall, so the Conqs cant run around.
From here on, when someone castle dropped you on Arena and it’s a stalemate between the 2 castles, in 90% it’s a race to imp now because whoever gets trebs out first, kills the other guys castle.
Small tip: 2 trebs can be outrepaired by vills, 3 can’t, except when they put like 40 vills onto that castle, in which case you should be able to win economically afterwards.
2.The reason, in my opinion, why Spanish is so good with that strategy is: They dont necessarely have to race to imp, their castle push can be devastating.
This brings the defender into a really tough situation, because he has to find out what the Spanish player is doing.
My best advise: Click on his scout when you see it.
When a Spanish player wants to push you in castle age and wants to go in with Conqs, he basically has to have Bloodlines.
Click his scout to find that out.
Alternative: Scout his Arena and take a look, sometimes you see the Stable, or at least the Barracks.
Thats gonna be your tell that he’s gonna try to kill you in castle age, so you cant rush to imp.
Other importan thing: Scout behind his castle while dodging the castle fire for a bit, thats where they usually place a siege workshop if they do wanna bring siege.
That’d also be your sign to stay in castle age and fight.
And sometimes they also place their Barracks/Stable there.
3.It’s still hard to defend the Spanish push when it comes.
I myself also sometimes died to it when someone else did it and it was super frustrating because I also knew exactly what was about to come.
My best advise is monks behind extra walls (beware of their Petards!) and a lot of army, probably your UU.
4.If you are sick of losing against Spanish castle drops, play some Italians on Arena.
Mamelukes are not that great in this situation, they lack the range and cost too much early castle.
Against this, with saracens, if you went with an archer rush you would have easily won.
Hide the ranges, wait till he commits and watch him call the GG.
Castle drops are powerfull, but if denied they can easily cost you the game.
It’s a weakness of castle drop civs.
This however doesn’t work if he notices, then he can just make it defensive, get conqs and petrad his way into your base, a bit slower but effective enough.
Go 19 pop or 20 pop towers if you are certain getting a castle dropped and you think you cant compete with the up time.
Issue is players who are one trick ponies and who are castle dropping in arena usually have good builds that goes up early around 14 mins.
So trush works most of times.
And while trushing, adding few archers also works well with saracens.
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