This is my appeal to the Age of Empires community to adjust a legitimately broken Mexican Gold trickle strategy. I am not as smart or well versed as many of the Age of Empire 3 online community so I can’t articulate via statistics why this is an OP strategy but I think the video proof is all you need to see what I mean. I hope that as a community, we can work together to improve the game experience and reduce toxic behavior during this uncertain period in the game’s lifespan. Thank you for your time!
Why This Is Mexican Strategy Is Op or That Ethiopians Are Under Powered
Even with 5 extra cows Ethiopians still lose
The Mexican infrastructure and gold income is massive at just 10 mins (cant be stopped)
Shotel Warriors are countered completely eviscerated by the Mexican revolution units and salon units to an staggering degree
Even with control of TP line throughout the game there’s no overcoming the Mexican gold trickle
Maybe European civs can handle this rush but for native civs this is just a no win situation
considering this looks like a sub to 1k elo game I think you did pretty well tbh.
Your micro is not great especially with the shotel and you took a lot of bad fights especially trying to take down TPs (which I argue is not needed, your real goal would just be to prevent a trade monopoly and potentially preventing them full trade eco). You need seperate control groups for the shotels, they were really not able to charge in properly often times. The attempts at drag box micro was good. The one good fight you did was because of controling the shotels seperately (though you went after the fake guns, if you targeted the skirms that would have been more decisive.)
You also got baited really hard with the walker’s illusion, your opponent never had any actual cannons, only culvs which didnt do any real damage to your units but u threw ur units in there instead of using your shotels to clear the bandidos.
Your build order was also kinda confused.
Going somali age up is normally what you do for a rush build, but you attemped to get TP control during age up and also got stagecoach, against Baja that is very very ill advise since you know they will have a short term rush of units that will be able to contest the closest TP (which is exactly what happened)
You also used the 1 of the 2 wagons for a war camp but then decided to build a second war camp, with your eco not really being able to sustain the production so you kinda wasted res there. U also used on of the wagons for a native tp, which might have been fine as a denial move, but then you also try to train the chkram native, which feels really off since you didnt even try to max out the Somali dervisher yet
your macro also needs some work, vil production wasnt not consistent, and your production in the war camp also got mismatched due to this (1 camp having 2 group of 5 in queue while the other one has 1). This is more probably down to how you are setting up your controls and you may want to look into changing how you press to queue units (often spaming clicks to queue is better then shift-queueing)
Baja is not easy to play against but I think you did pretty well tbh. If you taken a few better fight and try to age instead of trying to take centre and maybe get the mortar (instead of throwing units against the saloon) you probably would have won.
This is the kind of post I always refer to when people say Mexico is broken. No one ever uploads any evidence because it would show that the problem isn’t the civ but the player.
Firstly, thank you for the notes on how I can improve. I agree that I’m not an amazing player by any means and those pointers are factual and helpful. And yes, my build order was wonky. My ELO is 1250 to 1400, with 3k games under my belt with 2k-ish with Ethiopia. Can I ask you the same question? What is your ELO, and how many games have you played and what is your main? That said, I think your overall take is as off as possible. Can you please provide some video proof of someone using Ethiopian beating the Baja rev?
What I found in this community and why I blocked my user tag is that this community is VERY set in its ways. The most popular civs are protected even if they’re OP. If I took your premise and aged - even though I can’t because the eco of Ethiopia is SO bad I couldn’t possibly do so - how could my mortar be protected? Mexico is spamming anti-artillery FOR FREE. And every lost unit I have is cash for Mexico. What you are suggesting is not based in reality nor possible.
In summary, this matchup is broken, and either the Mexico Gold Trickle strat is OP or Ethiopia with its horrible eco is underpowered. If you have any proof showing otherwise, please present it. If not, maybe we can do the same matchup as you being Ethiopia and me being Mexico to show you what I mean? What are your thoughts?
I won most of the battles, controlled the TP line, collected all of the cattle, please explain what you mean because based on that criteria I should have won. If anything I just proved why this is OP.
My highest like like 1500 with China but I havent played ladder in a while, take that however you want.
I do want to clarify the scope of my comments. I am purely commenting on the gameplay I am observing rather then anything about the matchup broadly. I am also not commenting whether Baja is OP ( I think its annoying as shit and at high levels incredibly strong, Treaty is broken but that is not within the scope of the comments)
I am commenting that given your own plays in the game observed and that of your opponent, you had a chance. The fight at 15 mins showed that our opponent was at full pop and you won that fight, you can hold them off, but you stopped making vils consistently for a while at this point so your eco was also not keeping up.
And as I already noted, you tried to go stage coach eco against an aggressive strat using a very aggressive age up, and looking again you also didnt go for abuns to max out your own eco either
And I also cant see your deck so I dont know what your plans were going into this game but it all seems very confused like I dont know what you were planning. You also opened up by going shotel against Baja which also feels very strange. Its a revolt that turns your vils into musks, you can scout your opponent’s deck to see they have the cuatrero card, you know they can have a lot of anti-cav early and make cav into it.
like looking at the game, it looks like your opponent had a better build order then you did ( kinda has to be with baja, its a build order play , if you dont do things in the correct order it fails badly). They went for greed, they planned it so that the hacienda vil card came in after the revolt so they will get a vil batch after it.
Baja might actually have a super OP matchup against ethiopia, but your game is not a great example of why that is
We can play if you want. I am not a good ethiopia player but we can try
Yeah but that is kinda the win condition for baja often, they trade insanely well and if they have map control you are completely contained and whittled down
Its kinda of like russia age 2 on steroids
Dutch does have a better time against baja cause of the way their eco works and access to age 2 skirms.
I think harrison has commented on this before where if the civ have access to “good” age 2 light infantry that isnt xbow then they can sorta handle baja (it was that one game of lakota vs baja) cause after the charge attack the bandidos arent pop efficient against normal skirms, which is also why we are seeing a lot of baja build go for a stable before revolt to get chinacos
Which unironically would make ethiopia have one of if not the worse possible matchup against against baja. Ethiopia would have to go outlaws or age 2 Port to get the cannoneer to have a decent unit against baja. Would that be a viable answer? who knows.
IMO if baja was a bit slower and say 100 pop instead of 200, we would be completely fine and it would still be pretty strong, it would be even ok for it to have the outlaw pop reduction card to allow it to scale later.
