Could the Healfortress Strategy work vs the Viper?

Or on some other super high ranked players? On a map like 1v1, Arabia, no special settings.

There are lots of guides on how to do this healfortress strategy.

  • Yes. It could work.
  • No. It could not work.

0 voters

1 Like

High levdl players would be up to feudal and castle faster and overwhelm him and his playstyle before it really does anything

3 Likes

It couldn’t even work for the Viper

7 Likes

Do you mean this strategy ?

No I don’t think it would work on TheLefty.

2 Likes

The philosophy behind it is to boom with little worry of danger, and once the opponent brings a force against you that threatens you you’ll utilize the cheapest costing measures to bring assured overcoming of that force, be it a castle, mangonels or pikes. Measure the threat, and react accordingly. When the opponent lets off pressure to boom when they find no opening, you boom twice as hard where they will need to play catch up. Knowing when to boom is key to outpacing the opponent, and knowing when to let off the steam to counter an incoming attack is another. There are many forms to practice in this art, and I have still not mastered them. Am I sure that someone could perfect it and proceed to take down top level players? Sure.

Will that person be me? Not likely, but maybe given dedicated perfect practice and even I could pull off such a feat.

Does it have a weakness to fast imp Turks? Yes, I still haven’t figured out how to counter it effectively, but I’m certain it can be done.

I lay the blame on any failings on my own failures, not the strategy, which is as flexible as needed.

2 Likes

The difficulty is that the opponent can usually outboom you building no wall if they scouted your full-wall-defensive style and overwhelm you with better economy - how do you handle that?

(For record, there are a few players that full wall in Feudal in 1800 elo - I usually can beat them with 3+minute uptime and have 3TC running while they are still in Feudal)

3 Likes

There is no full walls, and the small walls + tower don’t hurt the castle age boom.

Even if I add 3-4 more towers around the tc, the boom is well and able to be done, and I’m currently starting to encorporate an 8-10 tc boom to be upping to Imp by the 28-29 mark with, perhaps, 140+ vills depending on if the opponent is attempting to contest by a test of the booms. I believe it can be even faster than that.

Are we talking about the same viper? I 100% think he could make it work against the right opponent. not in a tourney. But he can make anything work😂

2 Likes

This strat can only work against Players that have way worse micro and especially macro than you.
It’s not a smurf or noob basher strat, it’s just off-meta.

3 Likes

I’ve fought players with similar of both, and it’s fun that way.

The tower itself worth much more than the towers tho.

I doubt you can do a 28min to imp with 8-10tc if you play full defensive at feudal. How about the woodlines?

And tbf I think most people can do 28min to imp in arena.

Of course it could!

Step 1: Get the Viper falling-down drunk, hide his mouse, and hire Toplo to delete his TC.

Step 2: Execute this or any other strategy

2 Likes

The time varies based on what the enemy throws at you, but so is the time of the enemy upping based on the same, so it doesn’t matter as much. - the wood line and stone line are generally safe with a single tower each and small walls coupled with enough room for emergency stone walls if needed.

Later woodlines may be controlled via tcs-castles-stone walls if needed based on the time in-game and the situation.

1 Like

No doubt you can protect the woodline using a tower, my concern is the cost - usually one tower in 2k+ games is already huge investment and can snowball to 10-20vill loss easily, how do you make up for the loss?

At the start of castle age I create 3 additional town centers and a fifth soon after - and keep adding in tcs as the farms and wood afford. - the boom itself tends to snowball with good speed and efficiency when done right and makes up for any setbacks early on, if there are any - I tend to go up at the 34th vill(35 pop mark) and set up 4 vills per tc creation with the exception of later tcs which may need to be built quickly.

The initial town centers are built close, so travel time is greatly reduced in contrast to traveling distances to tc other res elsewhere, so villagers will be created quicker, and boom more efficient up to 6 farming tcs may be made around 2 castles able to contain around 72 farms if needed doubled up, where as 48 is the normal number with the single castle - outer tcs may still be able to add farms if wanted/needed with timing or hill constraints,

I try to stop at a max of 10 town centers total, or 900 stone spent to keep stone cost down and for repairs and otherwise

If at any point I fall behind a 5 tc boom, I’ll catch up with a 10 tc boom, and I’ll have those tcs defended as well as possible so that if any villagers are lost, they may be quicky replaced.

The goal is to outboom, outpace, out vill. If you can get by with 170 villagers and siege defense to gather gold/wood needed for another composition after the initial defense, and to gain as much of the map’s stone as possible, do it.

Preferably purchase the market stone up to the 200 mark and force the opponent into a situation where they buy stone to keep up a castle to waste their gold supply.

Teutons tend to make the task easier, but it can be done even if you send 200 wood plus full tax to an ally to help them boom at the start of their castle age, so any civ can do it.

While Teutons are great for it, there are no doubt other civs that may be able to do it better, such as, possibly, the Vikings, Persians and, in an offensive vill rush sense, the Spanish villager imperial rush.

And if opponent somehow is ahead with a fast imp 2 or 3 tc boom, they will be quickly outpaced in short manner.

How do you do 35pop up while walling your base?

How do you defend from castle drop? can happen as soon as you drop the 5th tc, nvm prob i can drop castle while having 3tc boom as well

How do you compete with 25pop up 3tc boom? It is in theory impossible to compete if both players run at same speed but one has a head start (no walling ultra greedy strategy)

Any practical replay showcase your BO? Hoang proved celt rush to be viable, you didnt.

And your idea isnt new either I would say, but blind defensive strategy is basically decrypted to be unviable at 1.8k elo+.

Is there a non-Poop Lord video we can watch of the strategy? (Or a replay, I suppose?)

I read the description, and it sounds like a refined version of how I used to play as a teenager, so I’m kind of surprised this approach can even beat the hard AI. So I guess I must have misinterpreted something about it.

Does it have to?

Yes, it is. This probably means that using this strategy you’ll end up with a somewhat lower elo than if you were following the meta closer. And I think you can see that in the Poop Lord game. Fortress generally looks like the higher skill level there, with a better build order (the opponent’s first aggression is 8 men at arms when fortress is 35 vills and on his way to castle age, that is too late even for your first scouts or archers, even at 900 elo or so), better macro, better production, better unit control (just casually luring the enemy units into friendly mangonel shots) and more. The enemy is also surprised by the strategy and as a result does some things he might not have expected to work if he had some time to calmly think about it. he keeps sending unprotected rams into the strongest points of the enemy lines rather than exploiting the fact that these fortresses can’t by their very nature be everywhere at ones. We also see him build a lovely protective wall in front of his trebs at some point, which could have worked great had it been longer than a handful of tiles.

So if we were trying to coach Fortress into a higher elo we could find some points to be critical about here. We could for instance say he could have finished that game a lot quicker had he pushed at one of several times when he had the clear military advantage. But unless you’re trying to go pro elo gain is actually not important at all. At best it’s a motivation. The whole point of elo is that you can get matched with people you stand a 50/50 chance against.

Fortress could probably gain elo if he decided to learn to play more standard. About 200 points maybe? More? Possibly 800-900ish → 1100-1200ish based on the Poop Lord video, as old as it admittedly is? Although it feels like that is an extreme case, also because it was a game Fortress was proud enough of to send in himself. But he seems to be having fun. And that’s what a game is for. I only wish I would read about it on the forums a bit less maybe. O, hey, oops, here’s another post about it. My bad.

(Also, people have played defensive with castles against the Viper before. They’re usually a bit less dogmatic in their exact approach, but it’s not like castles are unviable.)

You are making the claim your strategy can beat the best players in the world who click their mouse like a machine gun. It’s ridiculous, and misinformation. Unless you can beat all the top players in the world with this strategy it is invalid.