Summary: I think Poles vill fighting is a legitimate strategy on Socotra, I have been trying it out and the vill regen health + instant food from farms + gold from stone mining means you can win even when you’re behind in vills.
I’ve played a good number of games now with Poles on Socotra and I’ve won most of them and not always from super favourable positions for example in one I lost my elephant to a Mongol player at the start. In another at 26mins in the game I have a negative eco KD of 8 - 25, yet we have the same number of vills.
Some people hate it, but some people hate persian douche and it’s considered an actual strategy now. I think the vill regen health is amazing for this, you don’t need to do insane damage you just need to keep chipping away at their vills health, destroy houses, create a mess, get them to garrison TC. Eventually you’re fighting a lot of weak vills and hopefully had some of you’re recover at home.
Anyway what do you think? If you hate the strat that’s fine, feel free to say so. If you think it’s actually viable try it out, it works for me and I find it super fun.
Here’s a screen shot of the eco KD but same vills game. The opponent was really good at trapping my vills and vill fighting, we’re ~1500 so it’s not just people not knowing how to handle vill fighting.
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yeah, regenerating vils and stone mining bonus make Poles an amazing socotra civ
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gets countered by full walls
Well every strat should have a counter… If you’re full walling on socotra before your lumber camp is up you’re probably not going to win against someone who isn’t vill fighting you. So I actually see that as a positive, a trade off to wall or not to wall will help or not help.
But also not entirely, it’s the best way if you can get them down and keep them down. But I don’t think you realise how early I’m sending vills over to fight and how many. One thing the opponents struggle with is wood, since I’m usually attacking at or before they place their lumber camp. So you need to get me out of your walls 1st, then keep them up all while still gathering food and wood.
Either you outnumber the attacker and you’re not gathering res or your fighting even or worse fights which poles can win with health regen.
And walls are good, better than houses, houses still go down to this many vills attacking.
I just won another game vs mongols who took both eles and lamed my zebra.
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socotra isn’t reall a map where full walls go up very often. usually a tower and lame fest
Yes poles is arguably the best socotra civ. Even if you don’t go for vil fights or aggressive tower play it’s a really good defensive bonus. Also poles are really nice for tower defense into better uptime to castle age.
You can’t wall vs dark age vils. That’s way too early for that to work (especially since you usually delay lumbercamp and put more vils on food as you want to take elephant and push deer asap).
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