And all these different stances and stuff… how do I access it
Welcome to the gooey center of Age III. Best of luck to you! :)
-Tom
You talkin’ gooey like a delicious treat, or gooey like you just stepped in a puddle of dog poo? Or is this like most of AoEIII and it’s a bit of both?
The latter, of course!
-Tom
Again: i don’t think Age of Empires 3 is the game for you :). It’s not the kind of game where you have a recharging superpower that will destroying five minutes worth of your opponents production at the push of a button. If you haven’t planned ahead and don’t have a strong enough economy to be flexible, you’re going to lose.
If you insist on trying to master it, you have promise to do a few things for me.
Firstly - no more walls! Yes, i build them occassionally, but you have a bad case of turtle-itis that needs to be treated. Walls lose you games if you depend on them. Age 3 is like most RTS games about map control. Since buildings are expensive and weak, map control comes from your army. No army = no map control = gg thx no re! Ask yourself; why am i building walls? If the answer is because you have no idea how to stop your opponent from destroying you, it ain’t a question of brick vs. rammed earth that’s the problem.
Second; RTS games are about getting in your opponents face and going down on their ass like junior high were going out of style. I’ve always likened it to getting hit by a 2x4 piece of lumber … in the head. You want to him to know he sucks, and make sure he knows you know. Being as absolutely insanely aggressive as you can is almost enough. Of course being polite to a fault at the end of the game is just the final course in a meal of ownage :).
So in this case; why are you waiting for that punk Russian player to send a horde of cavalry, that were born to eat wooden buildings like candy, to your expensive building based defences? You need to think to yourself “i’m going to own this noobs ass.” Russians are extremely vulnerable to cavalry in the second age - they have no direct counter! So hit him with cavalry sent on your second card. Then build a stable and make some more. As long as you can keep him pinned down at home, the game is yours.
If he builds an army of Oprichnicks, don’t panic, just think. They are one of the weakest Cavalry against melee troops. So build melee cavalry! And send your Spahis to do the real damage amidst your Hussar horde - saving them for the decisive battle where they’ll do good work. Build a few cav archers (preferably the ones from a Native outpost) if you have a little gold to spare. If you can’t do even this, don’t run around in circles following him. At some point he’s going to attack a valuable building, and he’ll have to fight your Jannisaries.
So third - plan ahead to your opponents strengths and weaknesses! Getting six layers of walls destroyed by a unit designed to kill them is like complaining that your archer armies keep getting destroyed by archer counters. If you can’t seem to make your opponent fight them, it’s because you’re letting him dominate the flow of the game. Press the attack on his town and force him to fight you on your terms. Build what he fears the most and has the hardest time countering, and then shove it in his face.
SuperHiro, I think Tom’s gone all gooey on you. There’s a melee button (crossed swords) when you select any unit that can melee. Just click on it and on the units you want to melee with. That should take care of it.
This is the single most important piece of advice in all of Gene’s excellent summary.
RTS games are about the fighting and they want you to get to it as soon as possible. Walls cannot protect you, and if they can destroy your walls easily it means that there is not nearly enough cover to deter them in any case. Outposts are expensive and your infantry can’t be everywhere.
Walls are for giving you a little more time but not a lot, and are therefore best used (if at all) to persuade opponents to use a less obstructed path.
Walls are a colossal waste of wood - the games most precious resource - unless you can keep them up. Every unit has a counter, even oprichniks. You want to see oprichniks killed? You should play as the Russians and see what others do. I learn more by losing than I do by looking at unit specs.
And I lose a lot.
On that note, I’ll be up for a few games this weekend. Though I like BfME2 a lot more.
Troy
Right now I’m up for either bfme2 or aoe3. I seem to be getting good with the goblins in bfme2, and I’m still decent with ottomans in aoe3.
Great post, btw, Gene!
Boy, I don’t know what to say with all the BfME2 love in the air! I don’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s as if all the RTS players I trust most have gone crazy! Better than AoE3? Yikes! I’m absolutely flummoxed!
woo! Finally won with the Ports!
I never said I wanted a super power that recharges every 5 minutes that lets me blow half the enemy’s base away.
I just want cards that make a significant differance. You keep reframing that into me requesting god powers or something silly.
Yes I know walls just buy time and I did have an army. The problem was the army was the army could not chase the calvary even though they were supposed to be anti-calvary. Sure if it was a head on match where he engaged my army, he would have been destroyed. But he was smart. He didn’t.
I never fought a russian player before so I had no idead that unit even existed. Oh and to counter it (and proabbly still sustatane massive damage) I would have needed a huge army of calv archers. Of course if I made that, I would have very little to no offensive power. Kind of a catch-22.
I do not have a ‘bad’ case of turtleidus. I am a very very good RTS player. I know that turteling will not win. In our short lived TA matches against everyone, I always won.
This was one of those no rush 35 minutes games. I had plenty of time to do whatever. Why not build walls? Its just one pesant and I had like 7000 wood.
WTB a game where I can ‘script’ the AI of my units myself. So I would’nt have to micro manage every unit on the map.
You got out-microed by cavalry dancing. Welcome to Age of Empires. I’m not saying this in an insulting way; it irritates me too, and I suck at micro.
Incidentally, because of all you bastards, I just ordered Battle for Middle Earth II. I’m looking forward to it. I will now buy nothing else until Rise of Legends. I feel like a moron, buying a couple of RTSs (admittedly for $40 total for the two) one month before Rise of Legends comes out, but a man’s gotta act the fool sometimes. :)
I’m flummoxed, too. But flummoxed by how much more enjoyable BfME2 is.
Some of it could just be the complete change of pace it represents in the RTS world. No micromanaging of peasants and no worrying about three different resources.
If anyone is up for a BfME2 free for all this coming weekend, let me know.
But if people would rather play AoE3…I can do that.
Troy
I’ll play some bfme2, but is there a way to add people to the friends list without them being in a chat room?
I think the reasons why I enjoy bfme2 a bit more then aoe 3 are, multiple tricks you can pull out in pinch: last night I was the men of the west and I used the 2nd type of archers volley attack to decimate a few groups of swordsmen. Or using wormtongue(?)'s lvl 10 power to steal a hero away. There are plenty of things you can do change the flow of the battle, and army size isn’t as important then in aoe3.
Clearer defined RPS. I know that calvary are going to destroy most infantry, and each side has unique enough units that an dwarf warrior unit is completely different then a goblin warrior. Also it’s just plain easier and quicker to get a base going, one type of resource helps and the build times aren’t as bad.
That isn’t micro. Micro is attacking with an army, moving your archmage out of harms way, getting your warriors in shield mode to handle the archers, then aiming a good blizzard, and healing your units with your pally. Thats micro.
Selecting your army and just moving them around a base, not ‘dancing’ with other units is not micro.
No, micro also consists of having the ability to take a cavalry force, have them damage something, and then move them on when infantry gets close enough to damage them, doing it over and over again while simultaneously managing your economy.
Unless you’re saying he sent his cavalry in to attack, and they just evaded your infantry time and again on their own while he continued to manage his economy.
The cavalry dance (and other forms of dancing) is a well known bit of micro. It’s even better when he’s doing it with multiple smaller forces of cavalry. Bonus points if he does it with 10 groups of 2 horses each just to make your entire minimap light up with attacks for shits and giggles.
How did you have “7000” wood though? Man, i never have spare resources. I wish i had them that last game!
After i made the above post i lost to an Ottoman. :) It was a close run, but i was new to the Spanish (lvl 4 vs. lvl 14), and he managed to survive to get Industrial Jannisaries. When i reached to upgrade my Lancer cavalry, i upgraded my stupid Dragoons by accident instead. Oops, there goes 2000 resources. We wailed on each other a few times and he said after the game he thought i was going to win until the end. I just couldn’t get a break long enough to raid his economy significantly, and i think the cheapness of the Jannisary (only 25 gold) really started to pay off as the war of attrition dragged on past the point where we mined all the gold on the map. Oh well live and learn.
But yea, Slyfrog, Age 3 really isn’t about Micro in the common RTS sense. Go play Warcraft 3 if you want to experience a game in which wins and losses are 75% decided by micro.
Anyway, best of luck DeepT. I’ve done all that i can and care to do. Age 3 is just one of many games out there. If you can’t make it fit, try on something else.
I still want to give it another chance, but I lent my copy out to a friend, so I can’t play it for a while. When you have 35 minutes of no combat, 7000 wood isn’t hard. As ottos, I do not need much food for teching. I did not need to make military units, so food was a low priority. I had like 11 pesants on food sources, and like 25 on wood. I wanted to harvest all the trees near the battle lines first so I didn’t have to worry about deforesting the close by trees.
The spanish do not have the Domolition guys on horseback. If the russian guys didn’t do seige damage they did, they would be fine. If they moved slow, they would be fine. The combo of speed and high siege power is the unblancing part. The double damge vs pesants is just pouring salt into an already open wound.
I do plan on getting BFME2 sometime soon considering Ill the good things I hear about it. I wish I had chosen it over AoE III.
See, 35 minutes of no combat is newbie talk. No offense. The industrial game i summarized took about 40 minutes and we had hundreds of casualties on both sides by the end - with hardly any of that being villagers or buildings.
I’d go the other way. I’d say that Warcraft 3 is so over the top, it is obviously more micro heavy than AoE3.
But I disagree as to how microheavy AoE3 is, particularly when I’m looking at games like Kohan, Rise of Nations and the like. The AoE games (to my knowledge) have focus fire, manual healing, odd countering systems, etc., that makes them far more microheavy that the more recent RTSs (at least that I am used to). I suppose that Dawn of War is an exception to that.