actually, on further review, the best civ in the game is probably Lithuanians with these settings. You can’t kill the drush with villagers and you can’t kill villagers with a drush (both have 500+ hp), but that means the first person to get out military in the dark age is going to start idling their opponent near-indefinitely.
the winning strategy is to spam forward as many militia as you can until you grind your opponent’s villagers to a halt by constantly attacking them and forcing them off resources. if they try walling in villagers on the resources to keep them safe, just mob the TC with militia. rinse and repeat every time they make a new one, they’ll die eventually.
ironically the best civ in a game mode where nothing can feasibly die is the one with the most potent early aggression. if there’s a competitor for best in the game it’s goths, but they’d have to somehow clear their golds to start. maybe properly played goths even have an edge but it’s hard to tell how much the instant drush will do.
Or maybe they just ignore the drush completely? By the time the first villager almost dies you can just give it a farm under the TC to work on, or you could have your own military units out by that point.
Oh wait, I see your point. Yeah, constantly retasking every villager that gets attacked and starts running away would be super annoying.
Impossible. The amount of micro necessary to fend off a drush by retasking villagers indefinitely is huge. You can be sure that killing the militia is impossible as well, since that’s the same as idling the vills and giving your opponent an eco lead. The 500 hp militia would snowball from there.
the winning move is to have militia = villagers in your opponent’s base.
The move would be to wall in the militia. If the attacker insists on sending even more militia, they’ll eventually be behind too much economically, so you can get to Castle and convert them
Actually it might even end in monk civs benefitting the most, besides monks don’t get the bonus. But because monks would just be the best “damage” dealers in that setting.
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Light cav/Hussars can just run in and snipe the monks though. Even with Halbs, it’ll take them 8 hits to take down them down
O right, you can convert several units before getting taken down. Go Teutons for their conversion resistance, go full monks. Have barely any villagers and all your buildings protecting two gold spots.
EDIT: Wait, no, they were one of the exceptions… Sorry. Villagers too, so I was definitely underestimating the damage of a drush.
I don’t think that’s reasonable. one Militia denying a resource location with a wall-in is devastating.
When your drush gets someone to abandon berries even, that’s a massive win.
The only counterplay would be your own drush to attack their resources in turn, attacking the drush doesn’t work since they’ll ignore you, and trying to trap/wall militia doesn’t work because you’re stalling for a unit that also can’t kill the militia.
You’ll never reach castle age, drop that line of thought.
Do you mean just 3 militia? Because 3 militia is 100% wallable. If its hoang style militia, then yeah, you might also have to make some of your own
Okay, so here’s the legitimate winning gameplan from drush player
- Play lith
- Instant drush to deny any walls on the front
- Make Militia literally the rest of the game
as long is the base is open, you can raid resources and force walls on the camps to protect from idle time. once they’ve walled in all their resources, start attacking the TC. Keep pumping militia from 1 (eventually 2) rax until your opponent dies, which will be when:
- you’ve killed the TC, or
- you’ve idled the entire enemy economy.
If they don’t wall in their resources, you can raid them, and anytime they secure their resources, attack the TC. They should never be able to reach Castle age. Feudal is fine, it changes nothing.
Remember what Viper did with Goths when the Goth patch happened? It’s like that, except you can’t even kill the Militia, so what you spend on it is irrelevant.
TL;DR: High HP mods would affect earlier ages more, and eternal drush is uncounterable.
So its down to whoever scouts better… I could see this game plan boiling down to players walling in each others barracks, deleting barracks and repeating this process 
Yeah, no matter what this mode would be an absolute nightmare.