Yesterday hera made a Video about Trushes and how they fell out of the meta. He also tried to find the main reasons from his professional perspective:
In general, I support the idea of reviving strats and concepts that have fallen out of the meta in the development of the last years. Though I personally think a lot of it comes from two main factors: Content creators and devs tried to push “early agression”, whilst what they actually mean with it was the standard feudal rushes (+drush) for the most part. This lead to nerfs to Walls, more consistant scripts that allow for super optimized buildorders, but also in general Maps that are actively leading the players to play the meta openers. They are intentionally design in a way to support certain opening playstyles.
This indirectly and directly narrows down the competitive opening strats - and as trushing was never part of this development it naturally fell of. Though we still see trushing more often than a lot of other basic concepts like sneaking or forwarding without laming or trushing.
What I try to say, that imo trushing is only one single of a lot of strats that have fallen down the cards and I hope to see more pros speaking about this issue and asking how to bring these strats back.
What would I do to bring back Trushing?
First, I wouldn’t bring towers back to 1020 HP in Feudal. I think this would also just revive the noob bashing strats. Instead what I want to try here is to specifically adjust towers so they are more useful at higher elos whilst only minorily boosting them for lower elos. But ofc this is a personal perspective and I might not find the perfect adjustment.
I would increase the Range of Towers by 2, but heavily reduce the Accuracy in tradeoff. I speak of Acc values of 40 % or even lower. In fact, so low, that at maximum Range, when a Tower attacks a house only about half the shots hit.
What this shall achieve is making it less damaging if your defence against the trush isn’t optimal. As you will take damage, but at a way lower rate than atm. On the flip side at high elo, the higher range means a bigger radius for map control, which increases the strategical potential for tower placements. It’s especially also interesting for Castle age, as with this increase there might be situations where you would chose trushing over castle drops there, as you could cover bigger areas with less investment.
Some other stats that could be adjusted would be just the base damage, a smal bonus against Cavalry (as cavalry is the counterpart for taking map control on more open maps) and/or a reduction in the building time to be more competitive with the optimzed super fast standard buildorders.
Lastly, towers are atm unnecessarily weak against Siege and Casltes in the midgame. In a previous thread I proposed to add a “Belfry” tech that would give them some sicilian-like resistance against bonus damage.
In my opinion that could change drastically the meta. I m not stating that is necessarily bad but now a days (as commented on the video) towers are implented mainly to delay castle age agression. Its resourcefull but not a protagonist. Tweking the way it behaves and buffing cav may end up devastating archers civs.
I think that it has a role that none other unit/bulding does, without leading to a “must go for” in every game.
Don’t agree with that at all. The towers have higher Range, therefore they can protect a bigger area.
You also need do know that the accuracy is actually always higher than the given value, especially at closeer range where it approaches 100 % anyways. So whilst the value going down to 40 %, the towers will still be like 60 % accurate or something like this at the current maximum Range.
Also the high dispersity makes it actually harder to micro against tower shots. Whilst in the current state it’s often just necessary to keep your units traversally moving when there isn’t ballistics in yet, with that inaccuracy their will be stray shots hitting them - making it actually harder to stay under defencive tower fire than currently.
Ofc only when you are able to do that atm, which is again a question of still. Which is also again intentional, to compensate for the fact that immovable units at higher elos fall down heavily.
So it’s only worse in defending when your opponent makes the mistake to stay under the defensive fire. Which is a mistake either way. Maybe it will damage less, but it will still be a bad play for your opponent.
Nevertheless in sense of defensive tower placements, I forgot to post one idea:
All Towers get the Teutons garrison bonus inherently (Teutons bonus will be on top of that).
Cause as far as I’m concerned that is atm the most hindering point for playing defencive towers in the midgame. You make them to protect your eco, but as they only have 1/3 of the garrison capaciity of TCs it’s often just not worth it in comparison. Having 10 Garrison makes it way more interesting to try defend with towers. Wouldn’t have as much of an impact in trushes, as it’s already quite an investment to bring 4 vills forward, we rarely see more for a trush anyways. But ofc would be a tactical option and interestning to see if someone tries such an all-in strat then.
Who’s buffing cav? I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Ofc, making towers any more interesting hurts archers more than cavalry. But that’s why one of my additional ideas was to give towers a small bonus (like 2 or so) against cavalry as compensation.
