Well, it’s certainly accurate advice, I don’t know how helpful it’d really be though.
Most people wouldn’t consider counter-trushing an Inca as a viable strategy so I’d think it goes without saying.
I’m gonna repost my previous post because it has plenty of alternatives.
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One way to defend is vision : either scout ahead the enemy base and track his vills or set the scout forward on the access path to one side of your base and place a forward outpost on the other side. Once you see it come from afar you can redacted, changed to : “make some walls to” keep the Inca far enough from your base/make them take some time to get to you. Meanwhile expand on the other side. It also gives you time to wall up.
You’ll notice you don’t even need vision for this to work. Once you see you are against Incas you can simply start walling earlier, or placing an early barracks to make it harder for your enemy to tower. redacted. You can also expand your base in multiple directions doing those strategies, the more space you take the more towers he will need.
In any case remember one thing : he is on a timer.
Your brain should switch to a “I need to find a window to click Castle” mode.
The biggest mistake you can make is to forget he has idled his villagers so much and all you need to do is hold. People tilt very easily and that also applies to your opponents. Plenty of Inca Trush players have no idea how to play castle from behind.
The mental-game is a just another skill, like macro and micro. Practice it.
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Okay, so you changed your answer to the bold claim that towers are not needed, right? Just go for outposts and walls, and try to reach castle?
Then same challenge for you as for Woeistowho: Show me a pro game where an inca trush is defended this way.
Okay, since you continue to apply pressure to a statement I haven’t made because you failed comprehension, and after I’ve already specifically expressed that this wasn’t what I was talking about, let’s walk through every little bit so you can understand why you’ve failed basic comprehension and why I’m now annoyed at you for it.
THIS was the post I responded to, with
Note that I didn’t claim not to use vills or towers. That simply wasn’t how you:
because you don’t kill inca vills and/or towers with vills or towers. That’s inarguable. To act like I’m arguing otherwise, I don’t even know what to call it, but it’s pissing me off, stop it.
You need to delay and mitigate pressure until you hit Castle age. What form of action that defense shall take will vary from game to game, it’ll generally involve a mix of good scouting, walling, defensive towers in proper locations to defend vital areas, and yes, the occasional villfight when the Inca has overstepped and gone for a tower that’s too aggressive. But none of this is how you
which I remind you, is what I was responding to when you said
at which point I said:
Which is 100% accurate. You kill Incan towers with Castle Age options. Then, you come down with some totally unrelated, tangential argument with someone else and pin me to that discussion even though I hadn’t said anything of the sort:
At which point, I clarified exactly what I was saying (which I haven’t "walked back anything, as should be pretty clear, I was clarifying for your confusion, not for cleaning up my position’s hairy ends) for you here:
And yet you still find it reasonable to think that this is an appropriate line of questioning:
Seriously, if you aren’t capable of discussion with two different people at once, do your head-to-heads in DM’s. This is driving me absolutely mad. At no point did I suggest that Towers aren’t a useful, often necessary part of the defensive gameplay against Incas, and that should be clear.
pulling my hair out over someone who’s ascribing a completely ridiculous argument to me, then asking me to prove it.
Right. Why do you think the battering ram should have 5 melee armor? Isn’t that a bit excessive? I prove to you to find me a game where someone deserved to win and the reason why they didn’t was because rams have a negative melee armor statistic when it should actually be higher than a Champion.
Good lord.
Thing is
Thing is, inca opponent is forced to play the same strategy (since there is no other way to deal with trushes than using your own towers and vills). But incas have insane bonuses for this kind of thing, while you, as an opponent, have not. If both play perfect, incas are always going to come out on top.
Moreover, incas can afford to be much more aggressive with vills than you can due to their bonuses. At the same time, they are much better protected against raids in their base again due to the BS bonus.
So the point is, you are forced to play in the same way as incas without their bonuses. Delaying is not a solution, as most often inca can delay your castle age more than theirs as long as they do not overcommit. If inca are on a timer, so are you. I cannot see any logical argument to claim that this is fair game design. It is not. Incas always have the upper hand and both players play perfect, inca one will win.
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Not at all. The inca player has committed upwards of 10+ villagers to not getting up to the next age via either gathering stone or literally walking across the map. The Incas need to make a dramatic amount of idle time to happen to compensate for that initial investment, especially given the fact that the Incas have to invest all these resources upfront, at a time where said resources are more scarce, and therefore, more valuable.
Saying “incas force the opponent to play the same game” asserts that the contribution to defense will be equal, when it very generally will not need to be.
How much they are capable of delaying you, compared to how much they delay themselves, is practically all on map generation. Who woulda thunk that in a game of randomly generated maps, having a bad map generate would hurt you? If you don’t like variance playing a part, AOE2 is not for you.
Sarcasm aside, this literally isn’t any different than any other civ matchup. Every civ has a window they want to exploit in matchups with which to win. Some civs have it earlier, some civs have it later, but all civs have a window.
and if you think that’s unfair, you must think all civs are unfair because all civs play within a timeframe for victory, unless you are arbitrarily ascribing to the game what windows of time are fair game and which ones aren’t. Which might be exactly what you are doing, and if that’s what you’d like to do, feel free, you just aren’t making an argument at this point, you’re just pointlessly foisting your opinion onto a discussion in which I will simply ignore it. Feel free.
Committing that many vills is an option, but not a necessity. Nothing stops from pulling your vills back to your base moreover, though it is of course gonna cost you some idle time.
Yes, but they also have the ability to dictate the pace of the game. Even if I spot right away the inca vills coming to my base, at bet i can rush up a single tower (probably to defend my stone, unless it’s in the back) and maybe some incomplete walls (which will be useless anyway). Incas have the upper hand since the very beginning.
That is true, but all of these other match-ups allow you to either prepare (e.g. the goth player need time to get to the goth spam) or use proper counter units to defend against their strong unit (e.g. spearman and walls will still block frank scouts). Against incas I have no time to prepare and no counter unit (since it’s my normal vills against inca stronger vills essentially).
My personal experience is that the main issue of a trushers is knowing when to stop. Most trushes can do massive damage (depending also on the map ofc) if the as a relatively small price (comparatively to the damage received by the opponet) as long as you know when to stop. Just wall in your towers, pull back your vills and go castle.
I disagree, simply because there is no proper counter unit to towers (or buildings in general) in feudal. If the opponent has good archers and i have bad ones, I can still fend them off with skirms. Same for scouts and spearmen. But against towers I have no other choice but to play his game of vills and towers, which I will be fighting at a disadvantage because inca have bonuses for that and I have none.
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Yes, but if you’re committing less than 5 vills to a trush, you aren’t really the sustained threat that causes problem from the Incas. Even if you’re just committing 5 vills forward, that’s ~10 vills of effectively idle time, because you need to send villagers to stone, which is not a resource you can spend on anything in feudal, besides towers. Any less than that, and it’s not even a threat worth considering.
You’d like to think you can get away with less, but you’re wrong. Committing to an Incan trush means playing with half an economy, practically every game.
As does anyone who’s up quick with a bonus that fosters aggression. You seem to have a complaint about this one in particular and you haven’t elucidated any reason why except that you think it’s dumb. You’re free to voice your opinion and it is my duty to ignore it until you have a point to make.
The rest of this paragraph is hypothetical at best… and foolish at the worst
More idle time, again you will have needed to do excessive damage over a very short period of time if you’re going to just walk a third of your economy to your opponent’s base, Idle them for five minutes, and then walk them back, not even counting the stone you may inevitably just sell to compensate for just how much you’ve set back your castle age time, if not just placing it defensively preemptively to stall out the crackback.
So what do you think is a proper counter to a Castle Drop in Castle? Say rams. I’ll be happy to lead the 11’s in chat.
Where is the difference in your mind between Trushes in Feudal and Castle Drops in castle? Both require you to tech up and address the problem with the proper counter in the next age, the only difference is one happens in Feudal and you’re frustrated enough by it to say it’s “unfair” and one happens in Castle with equally oppressive map control and area denial.
The only thing you can remotely use as an argument is about timing. I’ll again, reiterate, you’re free to dislike strategies that start earlier than your arbitrarily conceived point in time at which “fair” strategies begin, and I am going to ignore you because it’s completely and totally irrelevant as to what you think is “too early” for it to be fair. You’re pulling it out of thin air on preference and it’s not a point to be discussed.
Well, i am deeply sorry for upsetting you like that.
All i did was to missunderstand a reply from you which was, lets be honest here, deeply missunderstandable. After you explained yourself, i had nothing more to say (my last response was directed at someone else, as you even pointed out yourself).
And now some honest advice: If it upsets you that deeply when a stranger on the internet mistunderstands a weirdly phrased opinion - ask yourself: Does this forum make you HAPPY? I am honestly kinda worried by your response…
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If it wasn’t clear, this is what annoyed me. Being confused by a statement at first is fine. When I’ve clarified myself already and then you practically say the same thing again it gets nauseating.
I’m still waiting on your example of the 5 armor battering ram being necessary. You’ve said it so you should have an example to prove it. That’s your challenge.
Ufff…i never said (you get it? :D) i expect you to uphold that challenge - as you explained well why you wouldn’t.
Btw i was serious. If the simple mention of your name incites that amount of anger, it might be healthy to think about another leisure activity.
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Aside incas, most people trush with 4-5 vills. Stone can still be sold at the market or even later used for a castle drop. For sure not optimal to be floating in stone, but FAR from having another 5 vills idle.
I have never say that it is dumb, those are your words interestingly enough. I have said that it is bad game design.
I have been telling you the same thing over and over again: to repel a trush you have to use towers and vills, and at that kind of play incas will always have the upper hand. Two civs have to do the same exact thing, but one does it better by default.
It is your choice to conveniently ignore points which invalidate your arguments. You call it duty (to who btw?), I call it being childish.
A castle is a massive investment which requires a lot of preparation. A forward castle requires a preexistent advantage, otherwise it will be denied. Going from castle to imp to treb down a castle is much easier than going from feudal to castle while most of your eco is being denied.
I (and a lot of other people here) are bringing forward logical arguments as to why the inca change is good. All you do is ignore those points, while putting words in people mouth. Instead of ignoring other people points or beating around the bush, try to address why you think they are wrong. I could summarize 95% of your posts with “I am right because I say so, you are wrong because I don’t like your opinion. Also I’m gonna ignore you because reasons.”. In reality, you simply cannot address the points made here and resort to childish denigration of other people arguments.
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Let’s ignore why we’re here
which is still 8+ vills committed to the task of the trush, because you still need 4-5 on stone to finance the towers. Doesn’t sound like you’re refuting the point. Sounds a lot like you’re acknowledging my point and assessing it to be mostly true, just without saying it.
Hairs being split on the microscopic level. Okay, so it’s extremely smart bad game design. Convince me it isn’t a oxymoron. I was summarizing your position. If you thought it was a bad game design, it would have to come from a bad idea (a.k.a. something that’s dumb) unless you’ve got another dimension of thought I’m missing.
It doesn’t matter how many times you say something, it doesn’t make it sound more or less true. You can only claim the Incas have the upper hand in a world where you forget the massive economic commitment towards the strategy and expect equal contribution from the opponent. In reality, both of these things are far from the truth. You can keep saying it, it doesn’t make your point any more salient.
You need to understand the difference between “points” and “opinions.” If you’re saying something offhand to which you have no real expertise or knowledge about, but you’ve got a feeling about it… that’s an opinion. I’m not ignoring any of the points you’ve brought up, I’m sidestepping your opinions, which however much validated you believe them to be, are irrelevant to discussion.
Like, a big chunk of villagers forward, villagers collecting stone? Sounds familiar. If anything the Incan trush is even more expensive and risky, because it’s a larger commitment when you’re earlier in the game.
Like, say, a bonus that makes it build quicker (sicilians, spanish, bulgarian krepost, etc.) or, maybe you snuck it on a flank?
I’d say that depends on where the castle is, and further you’re representing the occasion where the incan trush is maximally efficient, not moderately efficient. I mean, you can say that it’s easier to get up in the face of a castle drop pressure, but I can say that it’s way easier to get up to castle age in the face of an Incan trush. We’ve got different opinions on the subject, howbowdah.
Not logical arguments, personal opinions. Everything you’ve stated that’s an affirmative to be argued (or, a “position” so to speak) has been refuted directly. If you’d like to point out anything I haven’t directly answered at this time, go ahead. If it’s not an opinion, I’ve answered it, unless I’ve simply made a glaring oversight (which I don’t believe I have)
No I don’t, I haven’t. I’ve been ignoring your superlatives and your personal opinions but I’ve taken very good care to answer anything that even looks like an argument.
I didn’t put any words in your mouth. The fact that you think a bad design is not the result of a dumb idea is the finest of hair-splitting jobs and to make it out like I’m strawmanning you as a result is hilarious.
Again, if you’d like to point out anything I’ve missed, I’ll happily quote to you anything in my previous statements which has already been written to refute that point (because I’m certain I didn’t skip anything, you just don’t like the answers you’ve been given) so that you won’t feel mistreated as a result of me simply ignoring good points. Go ahead.
Hey pot.
Hey kettle.
Accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty, strikes again. Maybe you need to read over what’s been said again and walk some of that back.
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@Exradicator and @WoeIsToWho you are talking past each other. One is commenting on how the trush dynamic is bad game design and the other is talking about how the trush is balanced.
For what it’s worth they’re both reasonable arguments. I made a post about how being forced into mirroring like 60% of what your opponent spends on towers and villager fighting is noticeably different than any other counter-strategy in AoE2.
The castle drop analogy is interesting, they are pretty similar but players do seem to ‘respect’ castle drops more than tower rushes. Probably because castles cost 4x the resources of a tower but only denies like 35% more area. Also you can mitigate the damage of a tower rush, but you can outright stop a castle drop. So between those two things they feel different enough that one could be considered bad game design while the other one isn’t. Tough call though.
I’ve seen plenty of games (not inca rush games but game with trush in play) where a player comes forward, drops the tower foundation on a woodline, gets spotted, sees the enemy tower being built by 11 villagers, cancels before finishing, and relocates the tower, sometimes even multiple times, before actually retreating with just the stone investment from the opponent in pocket.
Incan rushes are resilient, which makes them much harder to preemptively stop, but when you’re trying to tip over a castle that was successfully dropped, that requires far more resources invested into dealing with it, aside all the infrastructure you can have denied by one well-placed castle (one on the front can easily deny a mine, if not two, control a main hill, deny any farms that may be around a mill that were on forward berries, and/or constrain the use of multiple production buildings nearby) which all adds up.
In reality, these two strategies work to do the same thing (constrain your enemy) with buildings in different phases of the game, and generally Trushes have always been the exceptional ones that get hate. But when you start cutting trushing options, it’s just going to make Castle Drops more prevalent as the means to that end, with no boogeyman for those disgruntled with it to hold their tongue.
Also… It just seems weird that they’d release the Sicilians, then decide abruptly that they don’t want a bonus like the Incas around. I mean, maybe this is me assuming a bit much, but I don’t think it’s crazy to say that they probably had a trush idea in mind with Donjons upon release. With the fact that they’ve just released a civ that makes a tower that makes a unit that makes more towers, to take a hard stand against what was the best Trush civ in the game seems to me like they don’t have a concrete design philosophy. These two changes are a confusing contradiction one after the other.
Maybe they want the Sicilians to get a spike in order to feel out the new changes, and they’re worried that Inca play will stifle that? Maybe.
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I see what you’re getting at in that trushes can technically be stopped, but doesn’t it feel odd that stopping a trush feels almost identical to mitigating an already occurring trush? Like it’s the same units and similar tactical decisions, only early enough to nip the trush in the bud. It’s usually pretty balanced in that either side can win but design-wise something feels off.
Thinking about it a little more, I’d say castle drops are a reflection of good game design while trushes are not because:
- Trushes involve lots of unintuitive things like villager combat (in towers or attacking towers) and a conspicuous lack of military units most times.
- The game design encourages countering trushes with towers. Generally people mirroring a sizeable chunk of the opponents strategy in real time is a red flag design-wise.
- Castle drops are a much smaller part of overall strategy of their respective age than tower rushes.
The last one is I think the key issue. Trushes are way more “all in” while they are occurring and this amplifies the mirroring problem. Even if you mirror a castle drop with a defensive castle it rarely snowballs into a repeat of only that dynamic for the next 5-10 minutes. Both players tend to be building other units, counter-attacking, you’re able to build new TCs which makes relocating easier, etc. Feel free to tear this apart though, they’re similar enough that this is a hard question to answer definitively.
I agree about the Sicilians. It indicates they haven’t made up their mind with respect to whether they want everyone to be on a level playing field, or if they have some interest in making tower rushes advantageous for some civs. Teasing tower rushers into choosing Sicilians is actually plausible. If I were working on balancing the game I’d want people good at the strategy to try-hard with it for feedback.
I practically agree with much of your point here, just a few snips I want to touch on:
Let’s say we agree on all this. I’m touch and go with “unintuitive” as a tag here but we’ll gloss over that (villagers have garrison attack strength for a reason, Sappers for a reason, Supremacy’s been around for almost a cool two decades, so unintuitive maybe in the general case, but I think it’s clear the game had such an option in mind during design) for the sake of the argument:
This sounds like a deposition of Trushing, generally, and not the Incan trush. Which we can have that discussion, but if that’s the case, why does Sicily exist. Not even arguing my position. If we agreed on this, we’re arguing at an absolute brick wall, because in the world where we agree on the whole of your premise we’re now at odds with the Designers.
We understand the limited nature of the strategy involved with trushing at large. Therefore, we’d expect them to address trushing as a whole being a problematic strategy. They aren’t. They’re picking and choosing the winners of this strategy, not deciding that there shouldn’t be an advantage pushing players towards a strategy that causes mirroring. That means either they don’t agree that the mirroring aspect is a serious concern, there are other parts of the game at play which become the imbalances in a trush war even when the strategy on each side seem similar. Or, that means they simply haven’t considered it.
I think they believe (like I do) that the trush is a net positive for AOE II. It’s an important tool for punishing overly passive play in the general sense, with some civs being able to take it further. The argumentation against the blandness or the restrictive strategy surrounding trushes apply to every civ, not just the Incas. The Incas just happen to be much, much harder to stop outright or to find value against defensively. Are they too good at it? Some may make that argument, but if they are, what good is taking away the full bonus that made their push so viable in the first place?
We know what the general trush looks like, and the Incas will still have a decent trush with the discount. What good does it serve us to have another civ that trushes like the rest if we’re trying to evaluate a new civ that doesn’t trush like all the rest? So while I think it’s possible it’s literally a change just to pump Sicily for a bit, it’s going to remove any reference point we could use for evaluation from the map. Which I think would be an unwise change, even if I thought that was the plan. There was a lot of ways to adjust the Incan tower rush without taking away all of it’s punch and resilience, and the fact that they didn’t just seems like a serious overreach in the context.
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The main difference is that a castle drop can be stopped. You can just send your army and kill the vills. So if the castle goes up you a) lost mapcontrol and your army or b) have poor vision.
And inca trush on the other hand…well its hardly possible to kill those vills in early feudal.
I think its important to remind us that the proposed patch will nerf inca trush, NOT trush overall. Nerfing the inca trush actually gives design space to both buff inca midgame and trushing. Until now, neither was really possible.
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Perhaps they are talking from personal experience It doesn’t see difficult at lower mid elo because build order doesnt dominate game play . If your expecting it just wall up asap or send 2 or 3 off to a far side gold or send archers up to their base. It didnt seem that bad to me.