Feudal All-in against FC all-in

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

I thought of idea that can beat FC all-in push like Phosphoru rush.

“man at arms & archer all-in in early feudal”

You go maa & archer in early feudal. Don’t make villagers.

How to?

  • click up in 20 pop with lumbercamp & mill

  • make a barrack and militia

  • 9-10 for wood, 6 for sheep or berries, 3 for gold (total 19 vils)

  • rescerch axe and maa, make range

  • make maa & archer (not villager) and raid on enemy base

  • if having enough wood, make blacksmith or farm

  • if having enough food, make villager

  • rescerch fletching if you can

  • deny enemy’s castle if you can

  • if against skirms, you should make skirms too

  • sometimes you should turn to normal play with making villagers regularly

I’ve not tested on ranked, but there may be a possibility to win with this strategy.
Have a nice aoe2 time!

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2

I don’t think this would work super well honestly, Phosphoru already has at least general ways to handle this, usually along the lines of vill fighting the M@A until archers arrive, oversaturating resources to take them quickly, towering the stone if needed, and then dropping the Castle such that it’s impossible to deny. If you aren’t even making the militia until you click Feudal, there’s no way you’ll make it to their base in time to get much damage, they literally click up to Castle only a minute or two after you hit Feudal, at which point they likely have most of the res for a Castle (or will get it on the way up).

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3

Pooplord has a number of Feudal all-in strats (things like quadruple archery range). I don’t know how well this specific build would do (I suspect you could do a faster build for greater effectiveness - and timing is important for a MAA rush)

I think the basic idea would actually work reasonably well - all-out Feudal aggression does counter fast castle, and if you do it right, the opponent won’t be able to get the resources for a castle (or if they do, they won’t have an easy time getting it up and won’t have the resources to build much from it). Castle Age is a hefty investment (1000 res and TC time), and if you deny their resources, they won’t have the ability to do anything with it. Stopping villager production isn’t really necessary, but can be done with a good build order (idea being you stop villager production to get a larger army than you could have otherwise at that point in the game - but you need to invest everything into the attack for it to be worthwhile)

With Khmer specifically, I think you’d be better off skipping the barracks and just going straight into archers (or scouts). Then deny enemy resources and harass their vils as much as possible. Romans on the other hand have a perfectly fine feudal MAA/archer all-in (though the build is different, since you especially want the infantry armor upgrade)

4

It would only work against the FC all-in, so you would have to be absolutely certain that the opponent is going FC for it to work.

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5

In my (limited) tournament experience (I’m at around 900 ELO), all-ins tend to work fairly well. From what Hera says, it is easier to attack than it is to defend, and all-ins exploit that. And Pooplord has gotten it to work at reasonably high ELOs (1600+).

My own experience also says that the best counter to an all-in strategy is a counterattack (usually in the form of a counter-raid). A counterattack can cut steam from the attack (either the all-in-er pulls the army back; loses reinforcements; or sacrifices their eco, thereby preventing reinforcements)

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6

I think if we want more full feudal play we need to add something to feudal that can somewhat compensate for the tech advantage,

i said for a long time that I think all civs should get a (more expensive) 2nd TC in Feudal. Only Cumans would have their current 2nd TC, probably even with shorter construction time.

This could work as an adaptive full Feudal against all-in Castle plays, as the 2nd TC will allow to protect more Vills from the opponent army - and ofc allow to gradually get such a good economy tto be able to overwhealm the opponent all-in (probably with scout spam). At higher levels this ofc would then trigger either an full-on siege rush or castle drop or an attempt to add eco themselves. But idk if these kind of games can ever get to an “even” state or are so volatile one side will be always winning one way or the other.

But I think this kind of stuff could work, especially as I said for a long time already, that Feudal is missing something to be competitive against faster castles. And I see the option to add eco instead of aiming for the direct up to Castle age as a very good solution for that issue.

7

Depending on the map and style of all-in you’re facing, this is not always possible. E.g. 23 pop FC with a castle in between their main wood and gold pumping out unique units and their TC defending farms (if they even have any) similar to the YouPudding style. Simply not possible to do any counter damage in that situation unless you camp archers just out of the castle’s arrow range but even then it will be difficult to micro that as well as defend the all-in pressure at home simultaneously. And his unique unit will be able to clear up your archers easily. Best chance is to fast feudal all-in early pressure while he is still on the way up to castle.

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8

Not all-in, you want to get a competitive castle timing. We’re atm very lucky, as Sotl covered a showmatch between HOANG and Phosphoru, where HOANG shows concepts that can work against the strat, against the atm possibly best player (and kinda inventor of the modern form) in it.

Here the Playlist, atm 4 of 7 games are visible:
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Usually HOANG tries to go Archers against that strat in early feudal, also with tower rushes associated (though the towers often just don’t really provide a lot as it seems). But it’s not a lot of aggression, just enough to keep phosphorus eco idle. If phosphoru wasn’t such an amazing defender (and I think he’s probably one of the best defensive players in the game atm, when it comes to early defending) he would for sure also lose some vills, but he surely has a lot of experience with this situation and keeps vills alive that probably even lots of pros would lose already.

But the strat from HOANG is definitely only to herass Phosphoru, get down the defences (towers) and then get to castle and beat him with better eco. This definitely can work, and this is also shown in the very first game of the series. Against Portugues, which are actually atm probably the best to perform that Phosphoru strat, as Organ Guns are just melting feudal units. But HOANG made it work.

The issue with the archer opener is ofc, that archers are terrible against most Castle age units, so you should never make too many of them. Especially as in most situations you want to pivot to cavalry later on. Because the next thing that comes after the UUs is usually forward Siege.

And that’s the point which makes it so tough to defend in Feudal against it. You don’t have an answer to a high-DPS UU plus Siege. The best thing is probably scouts, but even scouts often just die to the initial opening, as their health pool isn’t that amazing. And for scouts you need an absurd amount of farms, which costs eco investment - and are also in that mass often very exposed to being sniped. Ofc you can buy food, but at some point the price is just absurdly high. Therefore usually the archer opener is chosen over the scouts, even if archers will fall very quickly to the UUs - because they allow to get up to castle age way quicker.

For me that’s rn the biggest issue. If there wasn’t the issue with feudal having no answer to Siege + high DPS unit, it would be way more managable with a full feudal. Possibly even with archers, as they can be garrisoned to increase the damage of your towers - which doesn’t helps a lot against Siege.

Possibly one idea would to buff Towers just a bit against Siege, so they can be used to shoot down the low numbers siege when garrisoned. Ofc only enough to deal with lower numbers, as more would lead to griefing strats, which we don’t want.

This is btw independent of using UUs or Knights/Xbows/CA as castle age all-in strat. The moment Siege is added it becomes extremely difficult to deal with in Feudal, especially Archer civs struggle as they often don’t have bloodlines for their scouts, but it’s also tough for cav civs - I wouldn’t even try an Feudal all-in with Georgians against it.