I think the main way you should play Steppe Lancers is just mixing them with Knights. Knights are more resilient, while Steppe Lancers get to poke away more or less safely. Survivalist said/tested it and found that a nearly even split is the best, though I don’t remember the exact details.
I’d also say Steppe Husbandry for Cumans in a team game can make their Steppe Lancers usable, especially on more closed maps where you’re sending units into a meatgrinder, or more generally just need to produce fast. You can make all the cheap stables you want, but at some point you’ll run out of the room. And if you’re low on gold, you can just replace Knights with Hussars for same-ish effect.
The food cost means affordability is a big issue. This worked in this particular game because of that particular map and matchup. Meso civ opponent, a map with hill running through center working in favor of Tatars, extra sheep favoring Tatars and gold control outside the starting wallable area favoring mobility. All this enabled Lancer raids, favorable battles from hill. In general RM, standard maps this is very very difficult to pull against many commonly picked civs.
The crowd support for Tatoh was amazing. Being the underdog for a long time helps. Lierry kinda lost steam after shoals the map with lake in the middle. IN LAST GAME, Lierry just kinda gave up instead of putting down another castle nearby despite having resources. He could have prolonged the game. But Tatoh truly won it. Luck favored him as well that day.
Not at all. He had his best civ and he was trying to defend with monks and get eco lead to hit imp earlier and do elite eagles. But he took a lot of damage when Tatoh split his lancers and broke in with one group.
For what? After the castle was built he was dead. On that map, golds are outside the starting area. You can’t stay inside the starting base and go imp. After losing quite some vills, and losing control of the only gold, there was no win condition.
I had a great time with the Wololo! Everyone was in peak form and Tatoh played amazing and definitely deserved it. The crew was also on top of production and with lots of new bells and whistle effects that were lovely. Presenters were also fantastic, everyone was, really.
However I definitely preferred 5 to anniversary, I had a couple of complaints
Obviously the pre-top 8 bracket was drastically reduced in length by not being round robin and while that made it more digestible and made me more able to carry on my normal life the week of Wololo it definitely put a damper on things when players like Kingstone who lost but played impressively were never given their proper chance to shine. It was a much superior system to give players more chances to shine and also to see more players at their competitive peak clash with one another.
No English AOE1 broadcasts, I was really looking forward to experiencing and learning about the game, I wish there had been per-clarification that AOE1 finals would be the only broadcasted set
AOE3 not being present at an event billed as an Age of Empires series-wide tournament stunk. Even if it had the dinkiest prizepool and worse production I think it would have been fun and worth it. Frankly with it being so tailored around anniversary of the series I think it would have been nice to at least acknowledge the rest of the series at large (3, Mythology, Online, the DS games, and Galactic Battlegrounds (legality willing))
Lacking in skits and performances like last year with the Cobra Car, chess matches, Villager skits, getting players on horses, the fire show, the bat, etc
AOE4 receiving top billing only to receive the worst viewership and have the least exciting tournament.
Obviously a lot of this comes down to Wololo being forced to cater to marketing AOE4. So hopefully things will be better by the next Wololo/Red Bull shindig for AOE as 4 will presumably be dead. Would love to see it become 1/2/M+3 side event and see 1 get proper coverage next time.
Why so hate against AoE4?
I agree with you with the lacking of any AoE3 or even Mythology event… It is weird being working in a DE version and not start helping to rise the playerbase.
I mean… there was a AoE1 event just for one country and you left out Aoe3 and Myth?.. Non-sense
I really hope next RBW comes with an event for each game of the franchise. Even with more showmatchs, why not map creation competition, some TGs showmatches… more content in general… Except Idle Villagers, please…
I mean does it really need explanation at this point?
Microsoft releases AOE4
Immediately abandons all support for AOE2 with no major tournaments in the horizon
Half the pro scene takes money to play AOE4 and decry AOE2 (Hera, Nilli, Viper, etc)
Ends up playing worse than Age 2 by a lot, tanks in playerbase and tournament entry/viewership instantly
Microsoft still carries on for half a year pretending AOE4 is the only AOE game
After it becomes definitively clear that the game is struggling and dying do they finally announce a tournament with AOE1/2 ******except AOE4 has the premier timeslots and best prizepool by far
AOE4’s presence ends up eating into the production budget and causing fan favorites from last year like the skits, cobra car, fire show, etc to be nixed
All for it to receive the least amount of viewership and have a complete wet fart of a final
Does that about sum it up? I like AOE4 in theory, but in execution it needed another YEAR of development time minimum and Microsoft outright tried to kill AOE2 (again) to drive business to the sequel (again) so it’s no surprise fans of 2 hate 4. Just like with 3 time will pass and will have less animosity the less of a threat to our scene that it becomes.
“AOE4 is only good for AOE” in response to me detailing out exactly how and why AOE4 being shoved into the Red Bull Wololo cut content out of the show.
Why do you like so much to jump into conclusions with nothing backing them? They didnt try to kill AOE2.
Leaving AOE3 out, though, was a complete slap in the face of the community (I’d like to see AOM and AOEO also, but I guess Microsoft didnt want to make it happen before AOM Retold is released and hardly will do anything else to AOEO after giving its control to Project Celeste).
Well, after AoE 4’s release, there was KOTD4 in late 2021 as well as Wandering Warriors in January/February 2022, both considered S-Tier.
Of course, there was a drought on S-Tier tournaments throughout the first half of 2022 with e.g. no Hidden Cup 5 (which was more due to T90’s move to FB Gaming as he still needed to settle things) but from May on you had Resurgence, BoA 3, RMS Cup 2, T90’s Titan League, Deathmatch WC5 and RBW:L which were (apart from the DM Cup) all sponsored by Microsoft. And right now, with Warlords there is yet another AoE 2 S-Tier Tournament coming up.
Not to forget the non-tournament content which dropped with Dynasties of India in April. Microsoft consideres AoE 2 anything but dead.