With English (for understandable reasons) being the most popular civ to play since the game began, their playstyle affects other players enjoyment in a major way.
At the moment the English Abby into FC White Tower rush is very oppressive and unfun to play against. What I mean is the free King gives the English map control/ pressure for the start of the game. The English player can then use that as it’s sole unit to rush up a White Tower right in front of the opponents base. Win or lose, fighting a building and rams only kinda takes most of the fun out of a match for me.
Yes you can try to go all out in Feudal to take map control, yes you can wall up and do some preemptive towers. But it all feels so slow and seeing 20 villagers with bows rushing towards your base is always a depressing sight.
(Not to mention that it forces you to play one kind of strategy to prevent what the other player MIGHT do).
There was a reason that Mongal tower rushing has been nerfed multiple times. Because regardless of weather its effective or not, it’s not really fun to fight a building, especially if you play casually or if you want to get into the game for the first time.
I am gold 3/ plat 1 (where the majority of players are). I try to cope with it (mostly by playing Dehli). But seeing the same boring strategy again and again, can’t be good for the game.
I assume this will get changed eventually (like Mongal TC rushing was) but just want to voice my displeasure at the moment. AOE4 is still really fun over all and I am still enjoying ranked, except when I play vs English lol.
(Also I know that English win rate is pretty much 50/50. Don’t @ me lol. Again this is not about being OP, it’s about being unfun to play against).
What may seem little or unfun for you could be the opposite for someone who enjoys executing a risky all in (cheese).
And what do we do? Do we remove the cheeses from the game just because a group of players does not know how to deal well with a strategy?
The best thing to do is to learn to scout what that player is going to FC and when he sends the villagers, stop it successfully and when that cheese is less viable because the mid/low level players stop it better, you will see the strategy much less.
Scouting or not is the abysmal difference for that strategy to be oppressive or not.
The other thread seemed to be about how OP English are, this thread was meant to be about how unfun a particular strategy is to face. Happy to merge threads if people disagree.
It doesn’t matter if there is a way to counter or not. The point here is English is massively unfun to play against, and the large majority of commenters on the forums or reddit seem to agree with that. It’s not good for the game that the most popular civ is also unfun to play against, it will drive the player base away. This shit should be fixed and please don’t buff English ever again. There were sitting pretty at 50%, and they’re designed for newcomers. The civ design doesn’t fit with all the new possibilities that Abbey offers, because they’re already hyper defensive. Being both hyper defensive and have early map control/pressure is way too opressive.
English aren’t op?
The basically got ONE counter-civ out of 15.
And #### #### on almost all the other civs.
That one unfavourable matchup isn’t even that bad with 43.3% win.
Other civs got counters with 30/35%.
Slight nerf to the Abbey would be to make the king a bit STRONGER; giving it 19 melee attack; increasing the food cost by 40 and increasing the training time by 10s. This will make the King more of a knight BUT, the delay will give opponent more time to respond; AND losing the king will COST you more given the price & training time increase!
English being unfun to play against for people is nothing new and will continue to be so as long as they’re played so much more than other civs. LB rush? People ###### English turtle up? People ###### Now they go fc or 2tc with free king? People ###### The strat isnt unfun, its having to deal with it a lot more than other civs. If the strat gets nerfed, we just get more LB rushing. English having more than 1 strat is very refreshing.
The only civ they have a sub 50% winrate to is english interestingly enough, but yeah I think ayyubids are going to get some changes next patch. We rarely see a civ at 54%+ winrate in a patch cycle.
Fast castle build by starting vils on deer and going for abbey of kings, using king to harass and eng TC to protect vils if they get attacked, then age up to castle with white tower, trying to put it on woodline and having it within firing range of main enemy tc. The vils do enough damage with shortbow to kill small amounts of military, the landmark has 20 garrison slots if they try to counter attack it, and it has double production speed and can produce every unit type. Eng normally gathers wood with all of those vils to spam battering rams from the white tower, goes for a landmark victory ASAP. It’s a huge gamble, but is something that wins games. Very cheesy to play against.
I love novelty builds!! The white tower drop i think its cool. However once you learn the build order its too easily countered bc how much it is telegraphed. Starting on deer, slow feudal age up, all the villagers on food and gold. If you make 3 horsemen or 3 spears th king can’t keep your scout away from watching fo th villagers pull. Also once the villagers are pulled, the longer you can delay their building the better, to include pullng your own villagers along with some units, also you can prep on ram.
So personally i have no issues with such a strat bc there is counterplay, therefore by my definition of fun, it’s fun.
That, 2TC king semi Fc white tower into berk, though… that’s an automatic forced late game or gamble all-in counterplays. Not my kind of fun.
