Let me begin by stating that I harbor no opposition towards any particular strategy in the game. However, I do find it frustrating to invest time in a match, especially when I sense that I’ve sufficiently crippled my opponent and victory seems inevitable. In my view, stubbornly refusing to resign under such circumstances amounts to griefing.
Yesterday, I engaged in a match on the “Hideout” map against a player utilizing the Portuguese civilization. My victory in this match was primarily facilitated by the devastating power of Shatagni hand cannons. Had I been playing as any other civilization, the likelihood of emerging victorious would have been exceedingly slim in the late game.
I understand that the counter is to attack early but it is not always possible.
My opponent adopted a defensive stance, constructing extensive walls and focusing on advancing to the Imperial Age. Despite maintaining an economy of around 60 villagers and only a handful of fetorias, they proceeded to construct an elaborate maze fortified with bombard cannons and castles. This defensive setup presented a formidable barrier, making it nearly impossible to breach their defenses.
The Portuguese’s unique abilities, such as ballistics for their bombard cannons and their gunpowder bonuses, made engaging in direct confrontations a losing proposition. Furthermore, with seemingly infinite resources at their disposal, the game devolved into a battle of attrition, with my opponent attempting to prolong the match until I exhausted my gold reserves. It’s unreasonable to expect trash units to effectively counter a well-equipped gold army.
These matches often dragged on for two to three hours, leading me to believe that adjustments are necessary for the Portuguese civilization:
Implementing a nerf to walls, perhaps by losing fortified walls as a technology.
Introducing limitations on the number of fetorias that can be constructed or slowing down resource gathering rates as the game progresses.
Addressing the issue of seemingly infinite stone and other resources, which currently tip the balance too heavily in favor of defensive strategies.
Imagine someone like Pooplord getting a hold of this strategy.
For a visual representation of the gameplay and the challenges posed by the Portuguese strategy, you can refer to the following video: [Link to YouTube video]
In team games this is not a big issue, since massed trade carts are far stronger. I don’t think this person broke the rules. But there could be other ways to nerf this strategy. Adding Gaia Markets on more maps, not just Market Place. Add Sacred Sites (from AOE4), which work like a feitoria (generate all resources), but don’t cost pop and can be captured.
Maybe even make Sacred Sites slightly faster than Feitorias.
Your suggestions are spot-on. I found it frustrating to endure an opponent’s refusal to resign despite having virtually no army, villagers, or Town Center. It felt like a needless waste of another 30 minutes. While I enjoyed the challenge of overcoming such an improbable strategy and ultimately winning, I believe some adjustments are warranted. It’s important to recognize that conceding defeat when victory is clearly unattainable is an act of good sportsmanship.
From the wiki, Feitorias generate 1.6f/0.7w/1.0g/0.3s per second (equivalent to 9 villagers). This is equivalent to 96 food, 42 wood, 60 gold, and 18 stone per minute. The gold generation is equivalent to 2 relics. Feitorias cost 350 gold and 300 stone. So a Feitoria takes ~16.67 minutes to pay back its stone cost and ~5.83 minutes to pay back the gold cost.
In the short term, building Feitorias builds economy faster than building TCs does (mainly because you don’t have to build farms to maintain villager production - building a Feitoria is roughly equivalent to producing from ~5 TCs, though Feitorias do cost more than TCs). However, once the opponent has developed their economy, the Portuguese player is at a significant economic disadvantage because the Feitorias take a little over twice as much pop space. After that point, the Feitoria is a disadvantage until gold runs out.
With the replay, there were a number of things that you could have done better (ex: Grand Trunk Road is a relatively cheap technology that you should have gotten much earlier). You also were floating a lot of gold with the early pushes (and there was still gold left on the map, so running out wasn’t a concern then), which were mostly just Hussars (which is a great meat shield and very spammable, but also not very powerful). I suspect a gold unit backline (including some long range siege units of your own) could have made those early pushes a lot harder to deal with. I will note that the Portuguese player had quite an impressive k/d ratio. There were also a number of things you did well: cutting through the trees around the walls was good, and hussars were a great unit choice (they just needed something to go along with them).
Perhaps Feitorias can follow the law of diminishing marginal effects, just like Gurjaras’ sheep. As the number increases, although the total output still increases, the output of each individual decreases.
But as others have mentioned, the income per population of Feitorias is already lower than that of villagers and trade carts, so it is open to debate whether the change should be applied.
On closed maps with chokepoints where you could turtle and take good trade and wither down opponent gold units it can be very powerful. And once wood on map is finished, not because of lumberjacks but by cutting with onagers then its not possible to win. This probably wont work on higher elo.
I can respect this post because the OP eventually won. If feitoria were strong enough to win this, there would be no problem, since it’d be up to the OP to resign earlier.
This does strike me as a specific case of ‘losing player doesn’t resign’, my preferred solution to which would be to enable wonder victory in 1v1 ranked. (Make the wonder 2 or 3 times more expensive in ranked if necessary to avoid unfun winning wonder gameplay.)
Definitely some things the Sicilian player could have done better here. He could have walled his own base up (shouldn’t have been so easy for PoopLord to send the occasional raid out). He also could have denied the gold/stone outside of PoopLord’s base. He could have relied more on trebuchets (Siege Engineers) and used light cav (or some other unit) to snipe any BBCs that come out to attack the trebs. Still wouldn’t be a fast strategy, but It takes a long time for Feitorias to produce a long-term advantage.
I wasn’t able to see his villager high, but a Sicilian 5TC over-boom would be an effective counter strategy. And once the Sicilians player was fully teched up, he could suicide his villagers by trying to gather the gold/stone just outside of PoopLord’s base. If they die, it frees up pop space. If they don’t, then the gold/stone are both denied to PoopLord and added to his stockpile (and then the villagers could be deleted or suicided in some other way - like battering down the walls).
The tower spam does address PoopLords lack of pop space, but with how slow Feitorias produce stone, they would be difficult to replace. The Sicilians player was relying on large pushes, but I think a sustained push (with trebs) might have been more effective (certainly would have prevented PoopLord from rewalling so easily).
“I understand that the counter is to attack early but it is not always possible”
I would add to this point. I don’t like how in a lot of cases, the counter is to rush and attack early. There should be late game counters as well. I’m very much a turtler and can appreciate what your opponent did, but it shouldn’t be impossible to break. I want my defense to also be a challenge. Perhaps they should add in Sappers/Tunnelers as a late-game siege option to break down these defenses (several scenarios already use them, so they basically exist).
As a defensive player like your opponent, I would appreciate the challenge that would bring. The entirety of the Portuguese civ just seems OP (between the Fortified Walls, endless resources, and Organ guns, it’s too much). It’s like you are playing on Hard mode and a Portuguese player is playing on Easy mode.
Feitorias are actually pretty good at building an economy quickly. Though if a Portuguese player goes fast-imp into Feitorias, then an early rush would be effective. But the biggest weakness of Feitorias is pop-inefficiency. So building your own economy, getting to 200 pop, and then sending forth a strong, sustained push will generally kill a Portuguese player relying on Feitorias.
I’ll also note that Sappers is a technology in the game, which gives villagers bonus damage against buildings. Somewhat situational, but can be useful if you’re fully boomed with a lot of villagers (enough that you can afford to send them out on the map to mine risky resources, some of which may already have an enemy mining camp right next to them).
