I keep getting owned by AI moderate

[Cyber_Wizard]

My friend keeps having to cover me/mass exdous of villgers to his keep. Its been.....frustrating these last 50 hours lol, I keep rushing to the next age, mostly focusing on economy and not military. AI rushing near the 30 min mark.

I dont get what I am doing wrong.

Also I tried builting walls and towers but no go.

[-Dare Devil/x/]

-Try posting a recording that people can watch, usually this is the easiest way to point out mistakes.

[Cyber_Wizard]

Originally posted by -Dare Devil/x/:

-Try posting a recording that people can watch, usually this is the easiest way to point out mistakes.

How do I post?

[Nova]

If you want to beat the moderate AI, and you haven't yet learned an earlygame strategy with any civ (scout flush with Magyars/Mongols, archer flush with britons/viet/malay) your best bet will always be sending a villager out early in Feudal (as soon as you reach it when possible) to wall up and protect yourself from raids. Boom up, then build an army to counter what they've shown (the moderate computer is very bad at tech-swapping to deal with your counters and will spam trash if you bring an effective counter usually) and you should be able to push it back.

The moderate computer will usually only make ~60 villagers regardless of the game, so it's really really easy to outboom it and flatten it if you survive the initial push.

Learning a fast castle build (can easily find one on Youtube, there's at least five videos on this kind of build) compliments this turtle strategy quite well, but until you're extremely comfortable with it, I'd suggest you play on Black forest, which is an easily-walled map and encourages this type of playstyle.

Learning flushing can be done in a very similar fashion, and very often you can take a moderate opponent out of the game before he gets military up by harassing his gold and woodline with scouts or archers. If that's more your style, by all means try it out. Scouting is more important for Flushing than it is for FC strats (on most maps), so if your scout micro is bad you'll probably be better off trying the FC strategy (though scouting your initial resources, as always, will be super important).

I play with one of my friends versus moderate AI's pretty often, and if you want to play a few I wouldn't mind if you'd like someone solid to practice with. I'm not a top-tier player by any means but I play the hard CPU casually and can win with any strategy. Feel free to contact.

[Cyber_Wizard]

I see what you mean lol. Already looking up some built orders.

[Diema]

If I can make a suggestion here, depending on exactly what civ you're playing, a dark age rush can be effective against moderate AI.

The trick is that dark age rushing ("drushing") is not about killing villagers outright -- it's about setting back their economy worse than you've been set back by spending the resources to build militia. You can often do this simply by attacking a villager or two and delaying them from gathering resources by running across the map with your militia while the villagers chase you. If you're able to kite a handful of villagers away from resources before the opponent can get to Feudal, this can be a massive setback for them and drushing can sometimes lend really well towards a fast-castle. This will not work in all cases and definitely not on every map type (it's not really possible on Islands, for example).

Imagine the damage you can cause doing this: you delay 5 villagers away from food for just 3 minutes. If they're on forage bushes by the time you drush, that could be up to 300 food (!) they're missing out on. That's 6 additional villagers the AI can't build yet. It will be even worse if you delay them off of a boar; if you take them away long enough, you could possibly even rot out the boar and that's 350 food unusable and gone permanently.

[Nova]

ZeroEmpires did two separate videos on Fast Castle strats, I'm going to try and link them, and we'll see if steam community forums eats links or allows them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JlANuLzzL0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kHXnXjkA5s

The first one is a "What is a fast castle, and when should you do it?" and a rough build order for how you'd go about fast castling in your average game. The second one is a video dedicated to a very specific fast castle build that works with any civilization, and watching both videos will give you a good grasp of what it's good for and how to pull it off.

For Flushing, he has a video about the Feudal Age and that's mildly useful, but there's not much in the way of build orders since flushing is very heavily Civ dependent and you would be better off trying to find build orders for civilizations you like if you want to go down that route. Either way, I'll link that as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok48ctwIsU8

Good luck!

Edit: Wow, Steam community forums are friggin awesome. Special video links and everything. Color me impressed.

[Cyber_Wizard]

Wow! thanks for the info everyone