Sometimes you can opt for a counter tower rush. It’s going to make the game extremely messy, but often opens up a good opportunity to come back into the game.
I agree, you can counter tower rush. However, that is like going scouts vs scouts or archers vs archers, not a direct counter. I think there should be a more obvious counter like spears or skirms against tower rushes.
There isn’t really an effective counter against the standard feudal scouts play either. At least in terms of actually killing them. Spears work technically, but that’s only if your opponent goes AFK for some reason. So most of the times you just wall, to keep them from killing your vills, which tends to be very effective, but it’s not really countering the scouts directly as a unit. (Not sure where I was going with this line of thought tbh, point is that the counter isn’t really straight forward in this case as it is on paper)
Indeed, in my experience, walls do the bulk of the work until you get the spears out. Either way, not sure where I was going with this anymore I just don’t think that there isn’t a counter to tower rushes, it’s just that the counter is usually not as straight forward.
They counter it. Same for archers. The prob is, that you usually don’t have them when you need them and to produce them when you see the enemy approaches takes to much time.
Against a common tower rush there are several strats, including:
Counter-towering. onion walling. Going up and making Siege. Mass maa and batter them down. If the enemy doesn’t make them close enough wait for anoportunity to batter them down with your vills. Making scouts or archers and make a counter raid.
Several of these strats don’t work really vs incas though.
Besides that I’m for a slight bonus for the militia line vs buildings, basically the goth bonus, but the inf civs lose arson in the exchange.
Not necessarily to stop tower rushes but also to have more utility in that line.
And I would buff walls in the exchange a bit, so civs with no eco have a chance to survive the first 20 minutes.
Yes, it’s more a counter strat and you try to adjust on whatever the tower rusher is doing. The key is not to overreact, as the tower rush is a quite big investment and very slow in the progress. Giving you time to be proactive yourself.
The counter to tower rush is not in units but in strategies.
Send some archers or scouts forward. They will usually force defensive towers and ease a bit of pressure. If you actively try to attack different areas, they will have to spend more on towers than you have done on your army. If they don’t defend you can kill/idle their villagers.
You can build your own towers to defend your resources and stop the creep of enemy towers. At a first glance this may look like you are mirroring the enemy strategy but it isn’t. Doing a tower rush is an aggressive strategy whereas building towers in your own base is a defensive strategy. Towers in your own base are much stronger. You can garrison and repair at the same time and with more villagers than they can. You can garrison multiple towers simultaneously. You can opportunistically attack and take down their tower with your villagers if they leave one alone. You opponent can’t most of these without committing even more villagers forward.
Just one fact many people may not know: Towers are fairly ineffective against houses and walls. It costs much more to take them out with towers than to build them.
It can be quite effective to just slow the tower rush down with houses and walls (don’t repair, just build new ones) + make few archers so the enemy vills+ maa can’t use the opportunity to break in. Also don’t allowing to increase the obtained territory much by building additionel towers.
I’d say a lot of current strategies against tower rushes only work when the tower rusher decides to trush on a map where not much can get done. Like if you’re trushing someone when their golds and stones are on opposite sides of their base idk what you expect to happen except for them to wall and move to the resources on the opposite side.
The problem is when the map does facilitate a tower rush it’s a scramble. The offender only needs to cancel access to gold or stone and its a nightmare because alternatives don’t really exist. If they cancel access to stone, they can continue their trush and expect to inflict a lot of damage. If they cancel access to gold they can expect a lot of counter-towers or a much less effective castle age requiring market use.
So villagers and towers being the best response to villagers and towers is a mess on two fronts. Strategically it sucks and it’s not fun being forced into a mirrored strategy and I made a whole post about this before. Balance-wise trushing becomes way too map dependent on if the map is friendly or unfriendly to a trush. Offenders can’t justify including M@A to make progress against defensive towers on ‘unfriendly’ maps and on ‘friendly’ maps defenders can’t use M@A to supplement a denial of stone.
It’s just strategically uninteresting all around and turns the game into a micro-fest.
They’re 80-90% the same strategy though. You’re still building towers against towers, the fact that it happens to occur next to your economy doesn’t change your strategic options all that much. Sure you get a villager advantage but you still have to be careful not to over-react. If you over-react and they see it they can just pack up and go home having lost very little or gained some.
It’s not, you are in your city, you have more vills to put into building the tower, so most likely will be up sooner and you would be able to shoot at the building vills.
It would also be easier to repair the tower, because you will have more vills in the area.
So it’s more like countering scouts with an higher number of scouts.
Also, vills too have a bonus damage vs towers, if you can bring them under the tower, so you don’t have to go for M@A.
I just don’t think that there isn’t a counter to tower rushes, it’s just that the counter is usually not as straight forward.