To an extent rushing is not the dominant strategy at high levels, but it is still viable. Part of the issue is rush strategies tend to be more powerful at lower levels, so if rush ever becomes the dominant strategy at the pro/conqueror level, lower level games tend to be overwhelmed by that where it becomes the only way to play.
(see release English/French, or even current tower rush English/Mongol strats)
Basically Rush strats tend to be much more punishing to mid-level players, so if it’s ever strong at the top level, it’s usually really OP at mid-level.
At lower levels it’s pretty moot because people don’t properly stream villagers and they don’t raid well so it’s hard to differentiate strats.
Tech and boom are pretty much the same strategies in AoE4. If you boom you can produce a high number of low quality units after some time and if you tech you can produce a smaller number of high quality units. It’s all a sit back, turtle and outboom your opponent strategy with a clear lack of forced interactions.
They do have some similarities, but they are also quite different. There’s a vast difference in what happens when someone does 2 TC song or 3 TC abbasid vs going fast Imperial/FC
There’s a difference in build orders but there’s not much of a difference when it comes to the overlaying strategic layer. It’s all reactionary sit back strategies.
While they are both non-aggressive strategies, there’s a huge difference in being a 80 villager feudal age civ compared to a 50 villager imperial age civ in how the game proceeds
One strategy opens room building more structures due to the increased villager count and the other opens room for better upgrades due to next age. Apart from that they are both mainly reactonary sit back strategies and really not that different. As for the game proceeding from mid castle age onwards it mainly turns into a game of nutrition. Some raids here, some raids there, securing some ressources with defensive structures and that’s it. There’s no quick major strategic adaptions anymore but that’s something that can be observed for most RTS games I’d say.
In conclusion, the “Fast Castle” should beat the “Boom”, the “Bomm” should beat the “Rush” and the “Rush” should beat the “Fast Castle”, which is not the case
Water change were a big improvement. But sadly water is still very unbalanced as you van destroy an entire fleet of fishing boat with like 1-2 military ship. It needs defensive option on water like you have on land.
Concerning the boom rush thing it’s not really the triangle you mentioned.
Both boom and fast castle are in the same category of playing long term.
Rush is good against both of these if you don’t defend.
Turtling + either fast castle or boom will beat rush, but will delay your boom.
If you do pure boom with no army it will beat the turtling boom.
So the triangle is more
Rush → pure boom → turtling boom → rush
Concerning fast castle vs boom. They are both in the “boom” category. It will just change the “timing” at which you will have best advantage. Boom will usually take longer to gain the advantage while fast castle will have advantage earlier.
There is no pure boom because in order to boom you require towncenters which by definition are turtle buildings. It is simply not possible to do a naked boom in AoE4. It’s more like the decision between a turtle boom and a full turtle boom where you would add towers, walls and defensive landmarks.
Let’s say the devs would make the garrison and/or arrows mechanic an upgrade option for additional TC’s, then we could talk about having a pure boom and turtling boom. But this will most likely never happen since a turtle friendly playstyle then wont have a default advantage anymore.
Pure boom = only town center / villagers or trade, with no military units.
Turtle boom = You also make military units to defend + maybe some walls and towers.
Additional town center by itself is definitely not enough to survive all-in rush. It doesn’t change my triangle explanation even if “pure boom” doesn’t mean “perfectly pure”. It just mean as pure as possible.
A good example of this would be if playing abbasyd, maybe a pure boom would be eco wing 3 or 4 town centers before doing any military. While a turtle boom would be 2 TC + 3 military production. While a rush all-in would be Military wing, 1 tc and 5+ production.
*You must invest in production buildings, 300 of wood, almost half of the TC, example: archers and spearmen The time it takes the attacker to reach his base does not give him great numerical superiority; Tc and outposts defend it
*Unit like the knight is expensive 240, with three units costing almost the same as a TC; Furthermore, the lancer is so effective (so much so that even a seasoned lancer defeats castle knights with equal resources).
*The attack pressures the villagers not to collect resources but the new villagers in a little more than a minute have recovered their investment of 50 food (recollection of 38/min) therefore the boomer is ahead
The bomer is the one who is closest to moving to the castle era and if he has the resources to upgrade veteran units, or, best of all, produces men-at-arms who do not need to upgrade veteran units.
How? You can easily boom in Feudal, no need to age up, you would just delay the boom by going Castle Age, making you much more vulnerable to aggression. You don’t tech to boom, unless you’re the HRE going for the Palace of Swabia.
I think tech is more akin to a timed rush, instead of bringing earliest pressure, you come later with superior tech like heavy cavalry or infantry and siege units. The turtling/booming opponent should just crumble helplessly. For this you go naked FC with 1 TC, leaving you vulnerable to rushes.
The issue is that in this game booming is inherently turtly, if you know what I mean. You don’t have to turtle that much to beat a rush, while keeping booming and getting ahead.
Surely you can turtle without booming, but you can’t boom without turtling a bit. It’s hard to consider pure turtle a viable strategy in this game, it’s more of a reaction, unless you want to go for a Wonder victory… So pure boom doesn’t exist, where pure turtle does.
So in AoE IV the triangle (is) should be rush > tech > turtle/boom > rush.
Posting clips of booming beating rush plays doesn’t really prove anything. It’s not particularly hard to find clips where rushing strategies beat booming strategies either (not to mention ML was probably the best AOE4 player at the time), especially if the clip you are posting is Vortix overcommitting on trying to kill a TC.
It depends how hard the person rushing goes into military. In the posted clip, there was a very extended feudal age where the rushing player took a couple of bad fights and kept producing military instead of transitioning to age up.
The english player couldve easily chosen to go to castle age and stopped producing right before the clip, however he instead dumped 1000 resources into rams + additional resources to keep producing military trying to go for a finishing blow which didn’t work out. This was partly because of the matchup, where even if even on vills/military, the English are a much worse civ than Abbasids in castle age.
While the booming player does have a better eco, they usually have to invest significantly more resources into feudal age than the opponent.
For example - booming civ is much later to castle age and other civ makes a castle age timing push to win
Booming civ much later to castle (though game eventually goes to 200 pop)
Frankly hit’s kinda hard to find competitive matches that are different strats, because boom or military or tech are much more map dependent than they are one strategy being superior to others and it’s pretty rare for 1 player to make more TCs than the other. I didn’t bother including the last game of call to arms where Mongol tower rush destroyed beasty (frankly his spawn was pretty bad so the rush was really easy to pull off)
