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thephilosopher

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Posts posted by thephilosopher

  1. So, like a scientist I guess, I sought out turtlers for about a half dozen or so games the last couple of days to test some things out. I played mostly unrated games, because I didn't want any losses to mess with my rating (which is already sitting a bit too low b/c I lost a bunch of rated games back when I was new to the game). As a part of the experiment, I made no attempt to use my usual (and almost 100% successful, but super slow) strategy for dealing with turtlers - building defensive structures, encircling their territory, and taking them down in gradual waves.

    What tended to work: invading with elephant armies or large numbers of rams, supported by ranged units and swordsmen. Including defense against cav in the army.

    What didn't work: invading with large armies with 4 or fewer rams or elephants (i.e., or any other conventional strategy against boomers or rushers). Phase 2 rush (but that might be because I'm just not very good at phase 2 rushing). Cav rush at Phase 1.

    I won about half the games and lost about half. One particularly frustrating game ended in a stalemate, where I took out the opponent's fortresses and got the CC down to half power, before they were able to drive me back. I probably could've won that game, but it was going to take an hour or longer. I got so annoyed that I quit the game, which is the first time I've ever done that. Not my best moment, but I think we were playing unrated. I called an end to this little experiment after that game.

  2. A Phase 2 rush is another strategy I thought might work against defensive turtling, but I've never tried it. The idea would be to prevent them from going to Phase 3 and building fortresses. Turtlers tend to be hard to rush in Phase 1. At least, the ones I've seen build early military units so a cav rush won't be successful.

  3. If you think your rating is too low, there are basically two ways to "correct" it that I know about: only play against people rated higher than you and win about half those games, or rack up a large number of wins against noobs.

     

    The first strategy is preferable to the second one, both because it's a more true indicator of ability and because a fair number of "noobs" in the lobby are smurfs (far from all, but, to be honest, a number of them are).

  4. 1 minute ago, Sevda said:

    I think the Gauls are bad at turtling; the civilisations you must beware of are Carthaginians and Iberians. 

    I think this is probably true, esp. Carthaginians. But for whatever reason, turtlers seem to love the Gauls and people who pick Carthaginians seem to like phase 2 merc cav raids instead of turtling.

  5. This might be a kind of basic question, but I've noticed an uptick lately in players who use turtling as a strategy in 1v1 play. That's their right and everything. If they want to do it, they can. But I have to admit I think it makes the game super boring, at best, and it's sort of a cheap way to crank out wins in games you'd otherwise lose, at worst. I'd like to avoid joining games against turtlers b/c I think it ruins the game experience.

    Does anyone have tips for how to handle this in 1v1 games? Ways of setting up the game (specific pop limits/maps/civs) to discourage turtling as a strategy? Ways to quickly defeat players who turtle?

    I already know some of the basics - for example, I now avoid any 200 pop game against players who choose Gauls (or sometimes Romans). That's practically an advertisement that you're going to turtle. I also know how to defeat turtlers really, really sloooowly. But is there a way to do it much more quickly?

    • Like 1
  6. Cav aren't as OP as you're suggesting here. It sounds like the problem is that you need to work more ranged units into your army and not just spam out spearmen. tbh, I usually have zero or few cav in my army. I do perfectly fine fighting opponents who use cav, as long as I have a balance of units and get some military upgrades.

    • Like 2
  7. On 03/03/2022 at 4:29 PM, Philip the Swaggerless said:

    Skeptic - Non-military technologies -15% cost, but +25% research time.  There is nothing that cannot be doubted, including the fact that everything can be doubted.

    Also,

    Sophist - +100% research time, -90% pierce resistance.

    Jokes aside, I really like your idea for the Athenian bonus.

    • Haha 3
  8. 21 hours ago, Fabius said:

    I was strongly oriented toward defense in A23 and have seen the decline in its viability since. you need catapults to properly turtle, which we don't have in a functional form.

    My impression has been that the decline of turtling has looked a lot different depending on skill level. Most players under about 1300 rating still can't beat a player who can turtle, even when they can beat players who use other strategies. Most players over 1300 can easily boom and defeat a turtler.

    It also depends on pop max. 200 pop max seems to be much, much better for turtling than 250 or 300.

  9. 10 hours ago, KKaslana said:

    Out of all of the smurf speculations I have observed so far (at least 20 cases), there had only been 2 correct guesses; all of the other attempts were wrong, a 10% accuracy. An interesting observation was, the speculators themselves were absolutely convinced with their reasoning and refused to listen to other player's guesses. The deduction reasoning of the smurf speculators roughly follows these 3 paths:

    1. Who does this playstyle resemble?

    2. Who could invent this name?

    3. The style of language used by this smurf. 

     

     

    For the record, if anyone ever sees someone in the lobby named "the_sophist" who plays Sparta like a 1250ish player and starts talking like the Aristophanes version of Socrates, I'm probably smurfing. Or someone's playing a joke on me.

    • Haha 1
  10. 20 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

    Splash damage? Sounds like they become the horrible unit-killers again like in A23. What about just buffing them against buildings?

    I assume the objection to buffing them only against buildings is that it would make them too similar to rams? Presumably the ideal function of catapults is that they're OK but not great at killing units (i.e., better than rams, which don't kill units at all) but not as good as rams at knocking down buildings?

  11. I prefer 1v1 personally, but the lack of players and options makes the TG more attractive. Playing 1v1 often means having to choose between either a good format that gets old after awhile (mainland map, standard settings) or someone trying to play tricks on me (e.g., by choosing a weird map that few people know how to play, by choosing weird settings that most people aren't used to, etc.).

    • Like 1
  12. 5 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

    Some people just can't lose and they rely on knowing the dude behind the keyboard to predict their strategy and give themselves an advantage in balancing.

     

    This is probably true. It still doesn't make sense to me why people try to manipulate their rating in this way. The higher their rating goes, the more they're going to get upset about losing when a better player comes along.

    • Like 1
  13. On 20/02/2022 at 7:02 PM, Yekaterina said:

    Seems like atila1752 is the mvp here, huh?

     

    I agree with your point that the scoring system gives eco too much weight and military not enough. Noticing exactly that problem is one of the things that tipped me off a few months ago that I needed to do a much better job managing resources and troops while playing the game: I was losing games even while winning the score!

    But going back to your original example, I don't think it's a very clear one. Three players on your team scored in the 17000s. That's way too close to judge MVP by score alone, and no one should expect that level of precision from the scores. So, it's not at all obvious to me that I should expect atila1752 to be the MVP in that game judging by score alone. Usually if I see scores that close, I'd say the MVP isn't obvious and I need to look at the details to decide the MVP.

    I'd have been a lot more unimpressed by the scoring system had atila1752 scored, say, 5000 more points than a player who bagged 800+ kills. Or if I looked at the detailed stats and found that someone other than epemeune was the best player on Team 1.

  14. I think the answer to your question is probably about balancing the civs. Sparta has a much, much better melee unit you can access at Phase 2 (skiritai commando). I play Sparta a lot, and I usually use hoplites to protect the CC from enemy rams. When I want to put together an army to attack, I use skiritai as my melee unit.

     

    Also, Sparta does have skirmishers. They're not very strong, but you can make them a lot stronger by selecting Brasidas as your hero in Phase 3.

  15. Like others said, women are commonly overlooked as an anti-ram unit and can be really seful. Especially since lots of players try to send in sneaky rams without protection. As a bonus, if you're playing the Spartans, women have an extra hit point and basically function like low-end swordsmen. They can be used as either anti-siege or anti-cav in a pinch.

  16. My list of personalities would be pretty boring. I had a few run-ins with some of the more infamous characters in the lobby back when I started playing. One time I joined a 1v1 with a dude who only plays noobs and talks @#$% to them the whole game.

     

    The worst player I've ever seen in terms of skill managed to kill only 1 of my units before I wiped them out. My rating is in the 1200s, and I'm not very underrated or overrated, so if you're losing to me that badly you need to go back to playing the AI for awhile before joining rated games.

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