AoE 102 By _Dr_Katz_ aka...(_10K_Lord_Byron)
As promised here is the much anticipated and slightly delayed AoE 102! The three main topics to be covered here are defending the tool rush, dealing with shitty maps�really shitty maps (not the ones where you don�t have more then 2 sf�the ones where you don�t have any forest), and the art of winning on shallows maps.
First off and most importantly is the defense of the tool rush. There are 2 basic approaches to this, the passive and the aggressive. Both can work and lead to success and both can fail miserably and ruin you for the game. Every time you can see you are going to be tool rushed, (you have scanned for buildings, they tool early and have largest army) ask yourself this question, �How much help, if any, is my team going to give me?�. If you are getting no help from your team, go with the passive approach. I know it may sound weird to not do anything and let him own your town with no chance of help coming, but believe me you are better off. If you are going to get help go with the aggressive defense.
The passive defense calls for walling, running, bronzing quick, and sometimes (if necessary) boat defense. As soon as you tool wall your wood, sometimes this is easier said then done but it can be made to work with any map. Around your wood in stone build barracks and houses then build market, in tool fill in the gapes between these buildings with wall. Try to build them far enough out that bowmen cant hit your woodies in every place they stand. If this is totally unfeasible, run your woodies to somewhere far off. With the food keep getting some and run from place to place gathering it. I sometimes find that going to the middle of the map works well, his bowmen are usually all over your town and trying to get in wood, so your food will be safe for a small time. If food is low don�t even get wood chopping just save up so you can get wheel and build at least pump 2 ranges for ca. Once bronze just ca the hell out of his bowmen, the distance the ca has is greater than bowmen and you shouldn�t lose 1 ca when fighting them. After I bronze, sometimes I delete my tc and put it in a safer spot by res so I can build back up quicker. With the CA I send them next to rushers base and keep 1 or 2 back cleaning up enemy ranges, if the fool tried to tower you, take about 10 villys and raze the damn thing. Though weak initially you can really bounce back strong with the passive approach. For an example just ask Zeus (Cold_Terror_) how well his tool rush did against me�total of the game he got 7 kills (not all 7 on me =P) I finished with 122.
However in some cases the passive approach sucks, usually this is when you have good res map and he is trying to take your turf�fuck that, bite him back. Beg for donation first and foremost, 100 food does help, believe me, so unless your ally is a complete inter (which some GPs are) give him the food or wood and cross your fingers. If you know where he is building and you tool, take about 8 guys there and attack his builders and tower the range. Micro that tower like nobodies business, attack his bowmen as they come out so they are already weakened for combat. Next build archery range either 1 or 2, if you cant mine stone and wall woodies easily, then don�t bother and just put the ranges close to wood. Have your bowmen go out and hunt his down, at this time unless you completely suck and are being overrun, make a market and start to farm. I say farm because you now control that part of the battlefield with bowmen and it�s easy to protect. I always boom and counter rush at the same time. Send some bowmen over to the enemy and let him deal with you for a change, I have found that in most cases the enemy failed to boom or even wall in certain cases, due to either cockiness or some lingering newbie habits. Bronze when you have over 30 villys and his rush cant do shit now. Your econ owns his and in some cases his base is already toasted oats.
Warning: both of these strategies can and have failed in the past. The worst-case scenario for passive is you can�t bronze, and your wall defense is weak and he kills you. If you cant get help from your team you are fucked. With the aggressive failure, you make too many units and are just too slow to bronze, in which case either the rusher or his ally comes with CA and screws you big time. Though both defenses can be risky they are safer then doing a rush yourself and therefore I recommend defense early.
Okay, on to topic number 2, dealing with the crappy map. A crappy map is one where you either have no trees or very small forest, which is unwallable, and a bunch of open highland with mainly antelope and lions. If you find yourself in this type of map there is a good chance you will lose if you are playing someone with a decent map, but that�s no excuse for quitting the game. The game can still be won and you can prove to be a valuable asset to your team.
The first thing you can do is either stone or tool rush an enemy. If you are middle don�t even think about stone rushing but if you are on an edge and your middle guy is good, go for a stone rush with about 16-20 villys on the enemy nearest you. Though you may even lose the stone fight, a good rush can severely slow his progress or even kill him for the next 30-40 min, depending on how well things go. The tool rush is slightly safer but might not be as effective, especially if he quick bronzes you. But if you can force him to run from res you can boom and steal them for yourself and subsequently take over all his good res to bronze big.
Another way to deal with it is tool rush and force enemy out of his land and try to wall the land for yourself. Then boom like a mother and donate lots of res to your team. This strat can�t be used all the time because 1, many enemy pos cannot be walled or their base cant be taken, and 2 many players don�t like donating tons of res to their team early. Let me tell you if you can do this, DO THIS. Instead of bronzing on a weak map sometimes it is better to give your ally all of your res. Imagine have a teammate instead of having 200 food when he bronzes have 1000 food. He is gonna roll them if he is a true expert. I would love to have someone with a shitty map instead of beg for res and pull off a half ass tool rush and lose his base, give me all of their res and try to boom on their land.
A third way to deal with this is run to an allys land for res. Use this one only when necessary and don�t take all his res�there is no reason to weaken 2 players econs when you can do something else like rush an enemy. Running to an allys land can be successful for wood, and staying on your land to fight and eat the food. Usually food is less of a problem then wood since it can be found in many ways. I often find the irony of crappy maps is best expressed in the quote from Samuel Taylor Cooleridge �Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink� (That�s a paraphrase). Meaning you are granted with a lake in your map but you have no wood so you can�t take advantage of it. This shit goes down a lot when I get no trees, so afterwords you look worse because you lost despite having a lake, the enemy surely won�t understand the no tree problem and you don�t look as good as you are�. I�m ranting now, but this happened a few times and it pissed me off.
Anyways enough with crappy maps, the truly bad maps only occur once and awhile all other maps are mostly comparable. The final area I will be addressing here is the art of winning on shallows maps. The shallows game is one of common occurrence inland maps, it seems to me they occur more than 1 huge land mass games (which are better imho) There are 3 types of shallows maps, the 1st and most common is where everyone has their own land, the 2nd is team shallows, and the 3rd and most rare is where some ppl have a team shallow and the others are on individual shallows�this doesn�t happen too much to me so I will only address the first type of shallows game, individual shallows.
For individual shallows you can do several things, build on them, go boats, build on yourself, build on ally, iron rush, etc. But to simplify things I�ll just tell you what I do. Let�s say that you are on an edge (not the middle man) and you are next to an expert. There is no lake involved or no trees, just standard map. What I would do is pretty standard, build on myself, bronze fast, make the mother pay. Dock block at the shallows from him and always dock block on his side to push him back a little, though not much. I sometimes make just a few fishing boats and always take the fish he can sf from his side first, to stick it to him. The goal here is to get big enough to keep a defense and not lose your land but to also balance res with econ so you can boom first and iron. I find that boats work damn well at defense but sometimes don�t go for them until later, especially when 2 of my enemies have boats. Always encourage your allies to make war ships to own the water. The tranny can be effective but I find it tedious, ineffective, and over used. The AI pathways that allow the CA to get into a tranny are pathetic at best. Many a time I have ordered CA into a tranny only to see the tranny go one way as the CA go the other, this shit cannot stand in an important game. If you are serious about an attack make a ton of ca and charge his wall, don�t dick around with trannying CA over to his base. However if you think you are safe and have war ships don�t pump ca off your land instead tranny a few villys over and build archeries by the coast, this way you have your initial archery range on your land and are safe earlier from tool rush but now you can pump ca on his land. This way you can have your cake and eat it too. However this can be all for not if you aren�t making more villys then the other guy a worse econ and slower iron can lead to a failed attack and a lost base. The imperative here is to get iron and take over his land, not to hurt some of his stuff early only to lose the water and the race for iron. Keep priorities in check at all times or disaster could strike later in the game. The boom is key to shallows games and should be priority number 1. I think control of the water is priority 2 and finally land army priority 3. I say this because it�s easier to damage to multiple enemies with boats than it is with CA on a shallows map. The rest of what I would do is pretty much summarized in my AoE 101 strategy about standard games. The only slight difference is stress on boats, but even then victory can be achieved after you lose the water it�s just much harder to defend from mass ca.
Well that�s about it for now, I apologize if it gets boring and slightly rushed near the end but I wrote this all in one sitting with no proof reading so the quality is suspect. Still there is some good stuff in here especially in the first 2 sections. AoE 103 will come in the future and what I will cover there is not yet set in stone but, probably booming stuff and advanced iron age fighting. Until then, ciao.