When spamming a single unit can be a good idea

[WindBlownLeaf]

I was playing against gurjaras and their army comp included camels, chackram throwers and skirms. I was berbers. Being caught up in doing 100 different things , I was scratching my head, thinking how to counter. The guy had all three of his bases covered. I started making genitours, for some reason. Predictably, they got murdered by the skirms and camels. Eventually, after almost losing and only managing to survive because of a few high ground tcs and castles, it clicked. He doesn't have any anti camel units! They beat skirms, chakrams and trade evenly vs. his camels. I massed a ton near the back of my base before doing a big push and managed to win (his army died under my castle).

This got me thinking-if I don't know what to make, I can mirror one of my opponents units that doesn't trade too badly vs. the rest of his comp. Like, if he's making men-at-arms and archers and you go full archers, you should technically win, because the archers even out and trade favourably against the men-at-arms.

Idk, I'm a noob, but it worked once.

[76561199244204429]

cool story bro

[76561199207062587]

nice

[Krosis Priest]

That's kind of what I told you in the unique units thread - having more complex counters means that you also have to spread more thinly to try and counter everything, and if you do it wrong, just brute force with one type of fully upgraded unit can beat a bunch of too scattered hard counters. This would be pretty hard to do if the game was more rock-paper-scissors, and it's why AoE2 is a lot of fun with very few (if any?) ragequit-inducing crutch units.

[WindBlownLeaf]

Originally posted by Krosis:

That's kind of what I told you in the unique units thread - having more complex counters means that you also have to spread more thinly to try and counter everything, and if you do it wrong, just brute force with one type of fully upgraded unit can beat a bunch of too scattered hard counters. This would be pretty hard to do if the game was more rock-paper-scissors, and it's why AoE2 is a lot of fun with very few (if any?) ragequit-inducing crutch units.

Hmm... you're right. However, I still like how AOE IV did it, replacing a generic unit with a unique unit like english longbows replacing bows and frank royal knights replacing knights. To me, there's still enough variation for this kind of 'efficient' countering.

Even if your enemy only has two units, like pikes and scout cav, you just make pikes and win.

Anyway, I'm not that experienced so I only 'got' this now. Before, I was making a bunch of different units, trying to counter everything the opponent has, but this kind of 'exploiting a gap' is pretty satisfying. Kinda makes me prefer a defensive playstyle, since you get more time to see and figure out the perfect counter.

[Vemonia]

Spamming a single unit should be a good idea anytime your opponent doesn't have a good counter to the spammed unit or is making too many different type of units.

In your scenario, spamming knights should work as well as the opponent doesn't have enough camels to beat effectively your knights, and your knights are very strong against the other two units he is doing. So it is like you have twice as many knights as he got camels. You should comfortably win this fight as well.

Genitours wasn't a good idea though. They get countered by all three units your opponent was making. Good that you figured out a good counter in the end.

[Xautos]

AoE1, heavy horse archers, fully researched, just nothing but heavy horse archers being rushed out. Ridiculous! xD
Those horse archers can murder everything in sight.

i used to spam nothing but skirmishers at one point in AOE2 and they murder everything in sight quickly but took out buildings fairly slowly. I'm not surprised other units now have strengths to counter type of thing, AoE4 highlighted it a lot more than previous games i played, i don't have any first hand experience with A2DE or A3DE to know if those were highlighed properly either, i hope they do, so single unit spam is not possible any more.

[Ducks on Fire]

This only really works though if your opponent isn't flexible. At low levels people will rely on one army comp and if it doesn't work they fail to adjust and just keep trying to fight with a now ineffective army. The reason you won in your example is because they didn't shift into anti-camel mode. If they threw down like 10 barracks and started pumping out pikes or halbs they could have stalled your push. The same thing could happen with your archer/man-at-arms scenario. Yeahm going full archers against that would win, but if your opponent shifts into skirms your expensive army is suddenly hard countered by cheap units.

It's all about balance, reacting, predicting, etc. As your full camel push gains the upper-hand you should start considering what your opponent is likely to do to counter it and start making a counter for their counter. Otherwise they can easily turn the tide by themselves going into a single unit push.

[KingKickAss]

Yeah, that's kind of how countering units works. If he doesn't think about the weakness to his own army, its his fault if he dies to a single unit being spammed like that. He probably figured his camels would be enough for any sort of cavalry you could make.

[Percussigant]

As a rule of thumb, I think it's generally better to strike first and dictate the pace of the game by aiming for your civ's ideal comp and force your opponent to go for counters rather than decide on an army comp based on what the opponent are making.

In the heat of the moment, very few people (at least in the 800-1200 elo bracket where the majority of the playerbase is) actually manage to properly react to 10 knights or 20 xbows suddenly attacking their base if they haven't scouted it. Sure, on paper they know that they should make pikemen or monks or mangonels or whatever, but in practice it's another story and it's likely that an opponent will make mistakes of some kind in their reaction (for example, not making enough pikes to stop a big ball of knights, producing mangonels after losing 10 villagers to xbows, etc).

It's much easier to be the one on the offensive.

[Flakstruk]

Originally posted by Xautos:

AoE1, heavy horse archers, fully researched, just nothing but heavy horse archers being rushed out. Ridiculous! xD
Those horse archers can murder everything in sight.

I remember being really disappointed when AoE2 came out that the horse archers were nerfed

[Xautos]

Originally posted by Flakstruk:

Originally posted by Xautos:

AoE1, heavy horse archers, fully researched, just nothing but heavy horse archers being rushed out. Ridiculous! xD
Those horse archers can murder everything in sight.

I remember being really disappointed when AoE2 came out that the horse archers were nerfed

they were sort of useful starting out with the mongols and somewhat with the huns in the conquerors, but outside of that, they were pretty much useless and expensive to produce. some civs had better tech towards horse mounted archers which made it worth some effort.



it was better just upgrading to elite skirmishers and pushing those out in large amounts from other civs with reasonable archery techs, at least food and wood are easy to get. better than spending a lot of gold on knights and xbows if you can get away with it and save the gold for another time when you need it, for example much later in a long fight where resources are alot more scarce to find.

some stone walls, a number of watchtowers and units within a castle or two behind that, knights and xbows stand no chance and neither do early castle age siege units. trebs are needed and that means working out to the imperial age and building enough of a force to deal with that menace.

It provides a lot of opportunity to do some scouting, wall and tower rebuilding and hiding a force nearby outside the walls. those trebs are dead in a hurry because your force is behind them and your units can travel to their base while the enemy are fighting your defenses after taking those trebs out.

[-SNiGS- JAM]

Originally posted by Flakstruk:

Originally posted by Xautos:

AoE1, heavy horse archers, fully researched, just nothing but heavy horse archers being rushed out. Ridiculous! xD
Those horse archers can murder everything in sight.

I remember being really disappointed when AoE2 came out that the horse archers were nerfed

Personally i despise that they gave horse archers such incredibly high frame delay

They feel terrible, like using onagers, and meanwhile berbers have camel archers that have an objectively more fun and smoother micro experience.

And no, im not talking about hard counters. Im talking about how good it feels to use the unit. Berber Camel Archers are what most cav archers should feel like imho.