Walled off every single pass and was peaceful until Imperial Age. When Imperial was reached soon, thanks to my vilager discounts, I sent some camels and a few armored elephants to breach the enemy walls, and destroyed a Burmese castle without hassle, but things start going crazy later.
The Burmese massed Arambai, Hussars, and many Trebs, while the Malay player spammed Karambits, some elephants, and also Trebs. I was able to hold off the Arambai and Hussars for a short while, but later on, I cannot stop their large numbers, even with my fully upgraded Imperial Camels and Hand Cannoneers. My Spanish ally made paladins, hussars, halbs, and bombard cannons, and although they can stop the Burmese Hussars, they were overwhelmed by Karambits and Arambai! As a consequence, the Spanish player’s main base was beaten to a pulp, and I was the next.
Black Forest often comes down to who has the stronger eco skills, so that’s my best guess in absence of further evidence. All we can really do is speculate though unless you feel like linking to a recording.
in general many low elo player fail to realize the game starts before Imp. More specifically, in Feudal most civs are on even foot army-wise, so generally the player with a better strategy/micro wins or at least gains an edge since you are often playing generic Scouts or generic Archers at that stage.
Should the game go longer and should you not want to play Feudal for some reason, now army compositions are a tricky topic, so I won’t explain how you know what to make with every civ, but based on what you wrote, I would say Hindustanis Handcannoneer and Bombard Cannon would have been good choices. Hussar meatshield or pure Hussar always helps, too.
In general you shouldn’t assume that just because it says “Camel civ”, you should make Camel in 100% of cases. Hell, in low elo I’ve even seen people make Camel vs Meso civs
Last, you can roughly estimate if you should be attacker or defender based on 2 criteria:
do I have the faster/slower civ in Feudal/Castle age? Faster here means faster at getting an army lead, which can be the result of anything from an early uptime (Mongols) to extra resources + a combat buff (Ethiopians). If you are slow, you are generally the defender, if you are fast you should try to be the aggressor since that’s your army bonus. There are exceptions to this rule though, and in general you should always scout the opponent to understand what they are up to lest you get surprised. For example, Byzantines in 1v1 Arabia are 1 of the most defensive/slowest civs to get going, but they have a very aggressive forward into trash spam that can be hard to stop and you should be aware they can play this way also.
who has the better civ in Imp? If they have the better civ in Imp, you should try to end the game before that, now Hindustanis is quite good in Imp, but also has a few weaknesses, notably lack of Knight-line. Burmese is a decent Imp civ, probably not as good as Hindustanis.
Spanish is excellent and Malay is horrible in Imp so in theory yes you could wait and fight in Imp, but you also need to make the right army (which you didn’t and it sounds that was the reason you lost). Also there is a merit to playing the game before hitting Imp, both because it’s more fun, and because this is how you learn AoE. Late game micro + macro (drop farms, spam Hussar) takes skill for sure, yes, but you also want to know how to play Castle age, where you need to deal with Monks, Pikes, Knights etc. because not every game the opponent will allow you to boom to Imp and if you never played full Castle age aggression you probably won’t make the right units the first time. Likewise for Feudal.
In theory, hc/imp camel//bbc/paladin/halb can win vs karambit/ele/treb//hussar/arambai. It mostly depends on how well you can protect your hc/bbc, and if you manage to catch the arambai from time to time. Imho spanish should have made some conqs, but your comp was fine.
In practice, more beats less. Early imp this means whoever had the better boom can spam more units, later on, its more about trade (where your team should have had a huge advantage) and macro.
From the little info you gave us, it sounds like macro was the problem. If hussar overrun you on bf, you simply dont have enough production. If you watch pros, exspecially on bf, they will follow up each push with production buildings. Pushed half a screen? Place 20 new stables, so your reinforcments dont have to walk that long to get to the fight.
Sorry but thats horrible advice.
First, as I wrote, the unit composition probably was not the deciding factor in that game (hard to tell without replay).
But even if it was, you would never go pure hc vs burmese. You realize that both their hussar (they have +5 attack…) and their arambai just annihilate hc, right? A few hussars as meatshield are not enough, you need the imp camel there to keep the arambai at distance as a single volley can kill your hc mass. If you were to change anything in the mentioned compositions, id actually say you replace the HC backline with HCA or spanish conqs, as they deal more dps vs most targets (only to the karambit, the HC is best) and are much, much more tanky.
I don’t think it’s fair to say my advice was horrible. Based on the units he listed, HC makes sense. BBC is always good on closed maps. The +5 attack Hussar is of limited impact on BF, and even so, HC from Hindustanis has extra range. You can obviously mix in a few Camels if he has overwhelming numbers, which is why I said “hard to give 1 recipe”.
Arambai also don’t annihilate anything, spread formation is your friend here.
Also I’m pretty sure Conqs and HC do comparable DPS
Yes, but id prefer spanish bombards over hindu ones. so him going BBC might not be bad, but its not really needed.
Which hardly helps vs mobile melee units…
So instead of going HC/camel like he did, you now say he should go HC/camel? Make up your mind. Your advice is either terrible because its wrong or its terrible because its not actual advice.
It helps, true. However, you either clump up your HC to have a chance vs the hussar or you spread them out to not die to Arambai. Both at once is not possible. And even if you are somewhat spread out, Arambai still are more than happy to take the fight and they will trade very well.
Instead of beeing “pretty sure”, you could just check lol.
Vs targets with no native armor (only bs upgrades), conqs do 4.8 dps and hc do 3.8. The gap gets slightly bigger vs more PA targets.
Ofc you could say thats “comparable” (the word is rather weakly defined…), but its still a lower.
I am gonna mute you because you are a very toxic opinionated guy, and also you are arguing literally about nothing because OP didn’t attach a replay or something of the sort to judge “yes here we go camel, here instead we don’t”.
The only thing we know is that OP is low- or mid-elo at best since he lost late Imp vs Malay with 2 top tier BF civs.
I don’t need to check, I did the math in my head, and yes, Spanish get the civ bonus of firing faster but overall the difference isn’t huge. You conveniently omit that Conqs cost more resources and need Castles, I suppose this is irrelevant in the decision of going HC vs going Conqs right?
But rly I’m gonna mute you, I hate toxic people who harass like you do.
If you like, you can post the .aoe2record file of your game so we can take a look at it.
Judging from your description, you should have been agressive before Imp.
Honestly it speaks volumes about you that the second someone criticizes you you call them “toxic”. The only thing that one might consider toxic (if we really, really stretch the word…) is my wording of calling your advice “terrible” instead of saying its “suboptimal”, “probably wrong” or something else.
What I wrote was not toxic; it was just calling out wrong advice as what it is. If anything, your style of always bringing up new subjects and basicially refuting your own point without beeing explicit about it is toxic. Want an example?
OP started with saying he went for
to which you said
and you added
So the only difference between your proposed army comp and the actual army comp in the game that had been played was that OP went for camels, while your advice was to go hussar (as Bombards were provided by spanish ally).
When i pointed out that camels are absolutly needed, you added:
Which is weird because it argues directly against your first reply (that making camel/hc instead of pure hc or hussar/hc was not only bad, but even the reason they lost the game). When i point that out to you, instead if admitting you just contradicted yourself, you added
Which in itself is a fair point, but its very funny how in your first post you not only knew what the better army comp would have been, but you even suggested that this was the defining mistake in the match. So again, make up your mind - are we able to judge the match from the rather barebone description OP gave (in which case my critic is correct) or are we not able to (in which case your first post seems pretty pointless).
If you want to help others learn, and learn yourself, you need to be consistent with what you’re saying and not flip your opionion from post to post. And you need to learn that making mistakes is not something bad, only denying them is; in this note, i just realized i forgot to factor in spanish faster reload when talking about conq dps
This is completely wrong. Check it in aoe2 database before posting false information
I am sorry but he is not the first time who keep flipping the opinion and mute other people when he cannot give enough evidance to support his cliam. I am not sure why those guy is still in this forum
Sorry but this is awful advice instead. You can easily mass 7+2 range Hand Cannoneers as Hindustanis, you’re reliant on Castles as Spanish. HC dominate this match-up. Replacing HC with HCA makes no sense.
Arambai are really strong in mass, but they need to get close. Spread formation and you take even fights (keep in mind Arambai are squishy), which you can easily outmass both because of Ranges and having Spanish trade.
It sounds like the game was at a lower level too, so easier unit to micro > Arambai/Hussar spam.
You’re falling into semantics when Green4uu’s main point was to focus on Hand Cannons + Hussar, not make AI army and tech into everything. This way you’re going to end up with no army, or nowhere near a good army size.
@OP if your ally learns how to do a Spanish Castle drop, it’s one way of ending a game early. Players tend to overreact and fall apart at the sight of Conqs. At lower level, their monk micro isn’t good enough either.
In addition, not knowing the map, if there was only a few chokepoints you could have walled your side and defended with some army while focusing more on your ally’s side. If the map is open, you should’ve tried to play Feudal/Castle instead.
If Hindustanis don’t have a Knight-line, what’s the point of putting 20+ stables? To mass produce Hussars?
That. I was about to suggest Monk rush next time you play. Aim your Monks on converting Arambai and Karambit Warriors. Malay does have Heresy while Burmese doesn’t. Heresy prevents a unit to be converted to your color. Hindustanis don’t have Heresy but your ally did.
That is indeed one advantage of the HC, but mobile backline units with good armor and HP are not that much of an issue to mass - because they will not die. For example, some burm hussar that reach your HC mass will kill a HC in just 4 hits; burm hussar that reach a conq backline need 9 hits to kill a conq. So yeah, massing/replacing conqs is more difficult, but KEEPING the mass is a lot easier.
Well, they deal slightly higher dps than HC (against generic armor, vs higher armor HC indeed is better; note that this is before factoring in accuracy/overkill, both things that heavily favour HCA). And just like conqs, they have huge advantages in tankiness and mobility over the HC (which yes, have +2 range, but thats just not enough to compensate for all the other disadvantages).
But actually, this stuff is beside the point. The important thing is that you (intentionally or not) cut my quote in a weird way. Here it is in its entirety again:
So I actually do NOT advise to change the composition! I only mention that you could boost backline DPS and survivability a bit with some changes, and if you absolutly were to make changes than this would be the better change than replacing the all important camels.
What? Do you even understand what “semantics” means? He, too, wanted OP to tech into camels (after I pointed out that otherwise he cant keep the arambai at distance). That was my point: That it was weird for someone to first advise to not go camels, just to then say mix in camels anyways. He very clearly said that, everyone can read it, this isnt “falling into semantics”…
Also its very weird to call a comp with 2gold+1trash units “tech into everything”; making 3+ different units is very, very common in lategame BF. What exactly did you mean there?
This was more of a general remark; if you push, put down production. That way you will have more army in the next fight (because your army is already at the battlefield, not just on the way to get there) and you can push further.
But yes, in the case of hindustanis you want forward stables to spam hussar/camels from. Ill admit that its a bit less important with cav units than with infatry/archers because of the higher speed.
What kind of monk rush hits late enough for heresy to be possibly in? oO
this is not true at all, flank pushes are very common, the only thing that really stops you in your tracks is a defensive Castle and you can often deny that by being faster to Castle age than the guy going to stone.
I sense this is ironic, clearly it always depends in AoE2, but the point I was trying to make is that even on BF, the game doesn’t start once people reached 130 vills and teched into the unit of their choice. If you learn how to play Feudal/Castle ages, it makes you a better Imperial age player too, by raising your APM, improving your decision making of whether you should counter a Hussar spam with Halbs, or walls/castles, and stuff like that.
If you are only willing to fight at 200 pop in Imp, you will always have a narrow vision of how the game is played, and of what transitions are, and at reading the game in general.
