tower rush vs archer rush?

[✚ Mariel ✚]

What are the pros and cons? I'm just getting into the game, I've only been doing hard campaigns and thinking about try to git gud. I've seen a lot of games but I don't entirely understand how tower rushing differs from archers rushing. Towers aren't mobile so in theory archers should be better, you can move them in a clump to focus down targets and put them where you please, and you can seperate individuals on stand ground mode to surround a base if you like and pull back ones that are threatened.

The only advantage I can think of so far for towers over archers is that although the towers are immobile, they are very tanky and resistant to arrowfire, and although men at arms can kill them they also kill men at arms quick if they have overlapping fire zones to target each others bases. This means they probably cant be pushed out until castle age. It might force a player who is trying to feudal rush you to focus on castling to get rams to clear them out and thus give you breathing room. Is that the gist of it?

As for why it works well on the AI, I assume its because they will waste their gold on archers to fight the towers instead of trying to castle? So if you get two towers on each gold then they cant castle, and then you can either finish with archers, a castle rush, or build more towers around the TC to strangulate them?

I'm gonna try to learn the tower and archer rush strats now and see if I can work out the pro and cons, but wondering what you guys think are the pros and cons? I did a google search but only found info on how to do it, not when or why to do it

[Lord Commander]

It's a high risk high reward strat: you first hurt your own economy by sending vills forward to build towers then you try to make up for it by hurting your enemy even more.
If you fail to do dmg with an archer rush you can go back, try to defend till you reach castle and upgrade to Xbows, while a failed tower rush could easily cost you the game.

Tower rush is usually used in two cases: Either your enemy has a bad map (forward stone / gold, hard to wall...) Or you have a bad map.

In the first case, maybe you can place a tower or two and deny all gold mine access from your enemy, or deny stone and he won't be able to counter tower vs your tower rush...

If your own map is bad, you can tower rush to make sure the fight happens in your enemy's base and not in yours since you can't defend your bad map properly.

It can also be used if your enemy has the better civ, and you don't want him to get to castle age with a good economy.

Tower rush has become very common in the current expert meta, maybe its a result of man at arms becoming more popular.
But i don't think it should be used too much by lower level players unless you practice it alot.
You have to control the forward vills and the men at arms, properly scout your enemy's base, choose tower positions, and manage your eco at the same time...

[✚ Mariel ✚]

I didn't realize man at arms were becoming popular. Is that drush -> feudal man at arms for infantry civs to make use of the early resource investment in militia?

[✚ Mariel ✚]

I'm not entirely sure what the militia line is actually good for tbh. I know you can put them in rams to move them up fast then eject them to do some high building damage but towers and castle clean them up fast. I also know they deal with spearmen and skirmishers pretty handily with a low gold cost but they do require gold for their tech and they die pretty fast to archers, onagers, towers, castles, and lack the speed to really overtake skirmishers before they retreat to defensive structures. Seems like knight line and archer line units together do nearly everything better and it saves you some tech investment. Only reason I can think is if the enemy is spamming knights so you tech heavily into spearmen and might as well get the militia line while you are at it to save resources on stables/archery ranges and tech for those units since you've already committed to infantry

[Lord Commander]

Originally posted by Kiri:

I didn't realize man at arms were becoming popular. Is that drush -> feudal man at arms for infantry civs to make use of the early resource investment in militia?

Not really a drush, and not only for infantry civs:
You make some militia (usually 3) while researching feudal, get them close to the enemy's base, then attack as soon as you get the man at arms upgrade.

It can be used with any startegy. Man at arms into archers or scouts or as support for a tower rush.

At expert level, going straight into archers could be risky, you could have man at arms harassing you before you could even finish building the archery range.

Originally posted by Kiri:

I'm not entirely sure what the militia line is actually good for tbh.

Other than drush and man at arms, they are not used much.
They can be used in imp with a Civ like goths, or situationally used with other civs to counter trash units.
And they can be used to counter eagles, but its not ideal coz eagles are faster.

[✚ Mariel ✚]

Ok I've given it some tries and the AI really rolls over. I had it on hardest but it died fast, I wonder if it was set to old AI? I guess it's hard to tell how effective the strat is unless I use it on a human but I have a lot of villager and scout idle time so I need to work on this more >.<

[✚ Mariel ✚]

Also the first time the AI didnt surrender til I castled and rammed its TC, and the second time it didnt surrender at all and made me destroy its buildings long after it stopped producing

[Ratio decidendi]

Lord Commander covered it pretty well. The most common reason to go forward is if you or the opponent have a bad map. Solid scouting in the Dark Age matters and the Feudal timing is also important; you could also lame to delay and maybe push your deers to get an earlier time up. Essentially, the purpose is to apply early pressure to hinder their eco.

The HD and Conqueror AI tend to have a vulnerability to rush, regardless of the difficulty level. If you want a slightly stronger challenge in single-player, I would recommend Resonance Bot and the Barbarian AI.

It's the current online meta as well, so it's worth perfecting the strategies in the long run. If you are just getting into the game, just take your time in multiplayer. Early pressure works very well in lower rated games and it should be gg rather quickly if the opponent doesn't know what to do. As you climb up the ladder, you'll find the need to work on other aspects like eco management, unit micro and counter-raid.

[✚ Mariel ✚]

Thankyou! I don't think I'll ever be particularly good but I do enjoy learning the strategies and watching how other people play

[✚ Mariel ✚]

Omg Bayinnaung 5 hard is evil. Never again >.<. I'd raher take more Gaja Mada 2 hard than do that again...

[Jenzu]

ai's aren't programmed to deal with tower rush but i think some youtuber made his own ai that seemed to be smarter than original ai