With the uprsing of Hamstering the game lost a lot of early game strategic interaction. But I think it won’t take a lot to get it back and even exceed the former state. Red Phosphorus already opened up a new path of strategy - unfortunately the current state doesn’t allow to make it a healthy stable. There are 2 main reasons for that. A) It’s currently limited to selected civs which can execute strong phosphorus and B) There is currently no adaptive counter strat.
Which is btw the key part of what I try to achieve. When we have enough different strats, some of them can be adaptive from others. Meaning when you can scout the opponent and their strat, you can switch up your own to get a better strategic matchup. This is absolutely intended to finally make deer pushing less attractive by actually revarding getting intel about your opponent. In order to achieve this it’s ofc essential, that we get enough competitive strats and they have differenttly strong matchups. Which means that even the generally strongest openers need to have counter strats.
There are currently 7 viable openers on Arabia. And all it needs to enable what I have in mind is one more strat. A strat where you add some additional eco early (new mechanic) and try to use that with a slower FC than the phosphoru strats, but with a super strong eco.
This strat is specifcallly designed to counter phosphorus. And therefore encourages to scout the opponent if he goes for it. Whilst phosphorus are generally good against the standard freudal rushes, when you scout the opponent, see he’s going for a Phosphoru you could switch to the Eco-FC strat and counter it very effectively.
Here is a possible counter strat table, a value of +3 is somewhat a 65 % winchance and -3 accordingly 35 % (in optimal theory), so about 5 % per point.
I have listed the strats from “worst” to “best” for Arabia (scrush is the best, but overall with like a 51-52 % winrate). Note: if you summarize the sheer + and - of each strat, it would indicate that the Phosphoru would be the worst strat. But Phosphoru and Trash are solid, as they “counter” the two best strats in Archers and Scouts. The worst strat in Eco - FC is defined by countering Phosphorus and Trash openers - so it is encouraging to try open with Scouts and Archers, but scout the opponent to see if they go for a Phosphoru (or trash) to be able to adapt to an Eco - FC build. The downside ofc is that you can’t initially push your deer and therefore hurting the feudal timing - also the adapted Eco-FC build will ofc be a bit worse than one specifically designed.
| Eco - FC | Trush | Phos | Trash | Drush | MAA | Archer | Scrush | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eco - FC | 0 | -1 | 5 | 4 | -2 | 1 | -4 | -4 |
| Trush | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | -2 | -1 | -2 |
| Phos | -5 | -1 | 0 | 1 | -3 | -3 | 2 | 4 |
| Trash | -4 | -1 | -1 | 0 | 0 | -3 | 3 | 2 |
| Drush | 2 | -1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | -2 | -1 |
| MAA | -1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | -1 | 0 | -2 | -1 |
| Archer | 4 | 1 | -2 | -3 | 2 | 2 | 0 | -1 |
| Scrush | 4 | 2 | -4 | -2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
There will be some changes needed, mostly to the militia line as I actually plan to make this the basic “Phosphoru” available for all civs (yes, that’s right. The militia line, that is currently the worst in the midgame. It’s actually not that hard to achieve that, and I will explain that in the next post.
For this opening post I would like to elaborate the new “Eco-FC” strat a bit.
In order to achieve the goals I set before it would be optimal if you could just spend some of the collected food to get some additional eco. My idea would be to spend something like 250 food for 2 immediate villagers. This could be a one-time tech available at the TC from the game start. Ofc you only can effectively use this when you are out of the initial start phase of the game, evn a civ like Lithuanians can’t click it immediately without accumulating TC idle time.
The idea is ofc that when you scouted the opponent on a feudal rush to be able to easily adapt to a Eco-FC. And the ressource you are mostly on at that stage is food, which you don’t need at that time when going for a FC. On the other hand you could get the extra eco even faster on a specific eco - FC buildorder.
This deign also makes it not really viable for Phosphorus, as you would spend you most scarce ressource (food) to get extra economy and sacrifice your biggest strategic advantage (timing) for this. Same is for all earlier rushes to some degree. Some of them though will give you the option to add this extra eco at a later stage (1 range archers is an example, when you can stabilize the game). And in general there might be a tendency to try get that eco boost whilst going up to castle age if possible. But otherwise it’s unlikely it would change the playstyles on maps that don’t encourage going FC too much.
Ofc it’s very likely that this will be used on almost every FC on maps like Arena. Though it could enable some counterplay attempts with stuff like super fast castle drops.
Ofc civs with early eco bonusses can click that extra eco button a bit earlier, but I see it at most like 2 vills earlier, which would result in something like 40 res more collected. It might give some already strong civs even more, but I don’t think this would break the game and can then easily be adjusted with some nerfs.
This all is because I took me some time to reflect about Trash (Skirmisher) and Phosphoru openings. And came to the conclusion that they are strategically countering the standard feudal scout and archer rushes. The way I see it, to keep them in a healthy state whilst making those traditional rushes the gotos again is to specifically counter them with a new strat/mechanic. If we would nerf them too much, this would have terrible impact on the game. Like nerfing Skirms and Archers can easily become OP, or nerfing Phosphorus as a whole could kill some other FC strats aswell. And instead of getting more viable strats that interact we could actually reduce it to only the few meta strats being viable and games becoming repetitive and snowbally because of very slim advantages in mirroring strats.