I have been reading a lot on the internet that the AI doesn’t know how to react to tower rushes. This doesn’t seem like my experience, as the AI will destroy any tower in their vicinity with villagers and military. Since the tower has minimum range, they are quite easy to take down. (Talking about hardest AI and above). Of course you can set the towers farther away but that defeats the purpose and does not really affect the AI economy. Am I missing something here? I usually don’t do tower rushes but sometimes I just like to test different strategies.
Two toweres, both in range of each other will do the job. AI sends all vills, all free kills. If the AI notice it, it just went back and forth and to nothing.
Note: Recent patch had an update for the AI against tower rushing. Maybe now it reacts better.
They’re not free kills, though. They massively outnumber your forward vills so can completely wipe you out along with your towers. Lanchester means they trade very well due to their massive numbers advantage, but it sounds like they don’t send as many in the latest patch, I haven’t tried it with this patch yet.
What I have done on Hideout is first build houses in front of the gates. I get my 6 forward vills and put two of them six tiles back from each gate, then in rapid succession get them all to build a house in front of the gate. The AI didn’t know to delete its walls to get out, so with the previous patch this successfully blocked them in and left you free to surround the base with towers, at which point it was game over due to the small area the AI has left to work in.
For other maps, you’d need to get good at quickwalling to stop the mass of vills from getting to your vills and towers.
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Killing the extreme AI with a tower rush used to be a piece of cake. Then, in a patch, they corrected it and let the AI send all nearby villagers to destroy the tower. However, you could easily abuse this and slaughter his villagers when he does this. In the most recent patch the AI was improved again, but I didn’t try it out yet.
This is indeed what happened with one tower. It just tries to rush it down.
The challenge against the AI is to make two towers, before the rush them down. If you succeed, the AI freaks out. Your way is such way to succeed.
Note: This was previous patch, not current patch and its behavoir is changed.
Right, I am talking about open maps; I tend to see that AI has problems with closed maps and coastal maps that they don’t become a challenge to the player. In hardest and extreme AI, even if you have a tower or two up, they send pikemen to take them down at close range. They will also take out any houses and walls you try to put up near their base.
That means you already have military (i.e. archers to be specific as the villagers will kill scouts in large enough numbers) to slaughter his villagers. I don;'t get think would need to tower rush in this case. At extreme AI, this also means the AI will have tons of skirmishers and pikes at this stage, which makes the tower rush even less effective (as they will slaughter your villagers when you are trying to build).
A tower rush normally means quick to feudal, before the AI really has military. Pikemans are even Castle age units. If they already have pikes then your tower rush seems to be way too late.
Sorry, I mean spearmen, not pikemen. What I mean is if we go to the AI base with military to kill villagers rushing to kill your tower, they will alreayd have military waiting.
You seem probably too slow. You arrive too late in feudal age. If you go for a tower rush, you will be up with pretty less villagers, so you can build your first tower before the AI has army. If he already has multiple spears, it is most likely already 12-13 minutes into the game. You want to hit feudal age already at 10 minutes.
In my experiende, if you hit the AI with any form of early attack before he has an army, he is dead. Towers, archers, M@A, … What doesnt matter. He is just dead if you hit him that early.
I hit feudal in slightly under 10. What i mean is if I bring military (let’s say 3 archers), WITH villagers - in order to kill his villagers when they come rushing in to take out the tower, it would be about 12-12 and a half mins to reach his base, by which time he would have spears and skirmishers. (Hardest/extreme AI).
If you want to try an experiment, make your archery range at the enemy’s base to avoid so much time passing between making the military and building the tower. I haven’t tried that myself but I know the AI still cheats a bit by knowing how much military you have, so it’s possible it’s reacting to you making the archers at your base, and the time it takes you to walk across the map gives it time to make its own military. Or as another experiment, don’t make military but just delay when you start building the towers to the same time as if you had archers, and see if it still has military, and that will show whether it’s just always making military by that time, or if it’s reacting to knowing you’re making military.
Will take a look. But either way, if the AI can counter tower rush, it is good!