Noob victory over Medium AI

[UnknownStuffs]

Hey all, I'm pretty new to the RTS genre, having only picked it up about two months ago and playing not too frequently, only about a couple hours every few weeks. Recently, I've been playing matches against 0 A.D.'s Petra AI on Medium and after losing 3 matches against it I managed to beat it pretty handily today as the Britons vs. Mauryans.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what I should improve on so I can take on harder AI and ranked online. I notice that I'm not too great at keeping units and buildings non-idle and I don't build things like barracks and houses soon enough. I also think I need to work on micro, which is kind of nonexistent for me right now.

commands.txt metadata.json

Edited November 11, 2019 by UnknownStuffs
specify petra bot for ai

[sarcoma]

watch replays of good players and copy, use follow player option

[happyconcepts]

Timing. Getting to know how long you need to do ____stuffs like building a tower, catching a pig, upgrades, and getting your army moved across the map or into position for a play.

But timing is just one area among many ... glad to hear you are enjoying RTS and 0 AD.

 

 

[badosu]

Nice one, keep it up!

[Boudica]

I might link the Road to Expert thread again, which might now be slightly outdated, but it still sums up many little things new players get wrong. On the other hand, learning to play a RTS is a lot like learning to play an instrument or drive a car. Someone can tell you what to do or not, but at the end of the day, you just really only need to practice for hours to get the intuitive feel of the timing. And even if you become a really good driver, you never know when a truck hits you and the driver runs away without giving you insurance details. I mean, sometimes the game crashes or someone leaves without resigning, but it's probably time to leave my metaphor now.

 

[faction02]

Congratulation on your victory!

 

Your main issues are the following (in order in which they appear in the game):

 - you send your women to food collection, however, thanks to treasures, you have already plenty. So it would have been better to send some either to build your first house or to collect wood.

 - making bigger batch at the beginning would help you to grow your population faster, also, you are likely not to be rushed inthe first few minutes of games (especially by Petra, Petra is nice). Since women are trained faster than men, you can increase your population faster by training only women.

 - buildings should be always training units until max pop, it is important to start as early as possible to train in your cc;

- for your wood collection, you might wait before making your first storehouse if you want to do something special with food. In this game, you won't be making fields anytime soon, thanks to treasure. Putting a first storehouse between wood and stones would have been nice. As brit you will want to have one there pretty early, so that one would have save some walking time to your units;

Around 2:00 - you started to make your fields too early. You still had plenty of food in stock and the emergence for better growth was to get the ressources you needed the more: wood. Getting more wood fast would allow you to make the wood upgrade earlier and potentially a barrack too. The first one would improve your wood income that you needed and the second one would help you to increase your population faster;

2:20 - when you women get out of cc, they were iddle. Click on you cand define a rally point on wood so new units will never be iddled. You can always redicrect them if you are not busy when new units arrive;

2:50 - you didn't have enough houses. That 's probably one of the main issue when starting the game. It delays your growth a lot. Some players keep 1 or 2 women on "house duty". Those women will always be building houses constantly. Having a few too many houses can be a solution too. A last option is to use units already busy somewhere to tell them to build a house, and then shift+click to assign them a new task just after they completed the house construction.

4:50 - you might want to make your barrack slightly further away from cc so you could put another field in that exact spot. Putting that barrack just slightly further would be better.

5:00 - you can see some elephants with your cav. Use it to throw one arrow to each of them, taking care that the éléphants don't get to close to you cav and kill it. Bring back you cavalry unit to your cc, the éléphants will follow. Use your dog then to kill the elephants safely andcollect the free food once the éléphants are dead using the cav.This is a quite fast way to obtain food with no investment (you don't need to invest wood or food to produce). Making a few more cav can be usefull to gather the food faster. Calvarly gather food much faster on hunt than other units, this is why players use them for chicken instead of women. The same apply to other hunts type.

6:20 - you went for an early phasing up to phase 2. It is usually better to invest those ressources into more units to have faster income. Also, economic upgrades are very important, especially the woodand food one. Pay attention to have your building continuously producing units.

6:30 - I noticed that you chose to put all of your houses in the same spot. Often people prefer to put them all around the field. So that in case of attack, you can "ring the bell" from cc. The Women then run to the closest house, which would then be quite close. You might also want to build houses in such a way that they would slow down an attack with sieges going to your cc and take the role of "natural obstacles" for enemy soldiers that would have lower range than your slingers (it is not the case here since you have archers as enemy)

12:00 - you have already plenty of wood in storage, you might want a second barrack to produce soldiers faster. Also you can notice that on this map, you have not so much wood available. It would then be a good idea to adjust your army composition to available ressources on the map. Replace skirmishers by slingers since those cost less wood and you have a second stone spot. Think about making a temple to train priest later. Those only cost wood, and can help you to save some soldiers later. Cavalry could also be an option to get a good military power at a low cost in terms of wood. Spearmen cost wood, but they have more armor and they can be used as meatshield later in game. They will help you loose less sligners an indirectly make you save some wood too.

14:00 - You might also start thinking about making trade with yourself to be sure yyou don't run out of wood later in game at this stage.

16:00 - you keep producing women. Usually about 50-60 women is a good number. You mainly use women for food production since htey are mor eproductive there. Then you also want to spread a few of them everywhere you have men working too. They will give your men a 10% speed bonus. However on this particular map with few wood, making so many women can be seen as an ok strategy since it gives you the possibility to increase your pop faster. You should also have made enough building by now to be able to phase to p3.

17:00 Notice ho your barrack became annoying for your women, they have to go around it everytime they want to bring back food. You should consider making a farmstead near the field which are not next to the cc, so women don't spend so much time walking back.

18:00 - Notice how much extra ressources you have saved , you should find a good way to spend it (more barracks, more soldiers, a new base forward, phasing p3+making fort, more upgrades...).

20:00 - For battle, it is usually better to get units in order. Formation could help you for that. You want melee units which have a better armor to receive projectile while range units target the enemy. You also want to group all your unit sbefore starting to fight so all fire at the same time. This will help you to kill faster the enemy and therefore receive less damage from the enemy too.

22:00 - you could collect the wood along the river simply by making a dock. You would reduce a lot walking time of your workers

27:00 - when attacking, it is usually better to bring with your sieges weapon to destroy building: rams from your fort. You could destroy towers while your soldiers kill units. Retreating was the best decision.

On your final fight, notice how Petra send its units one by one. With a good army size, well grouped, you can easily win the fight even if in the end you would be outnumbered. You can probably improve a lot at this stage by trying to improve on your eco.

Good players playing Brits can usually get to:

- 100 units before minute 8

- 150 units before minute 12

- 200 units before minute 15

Keep those numbers in mind to try to get an idea about how good you are doing with your eco. The main factors slowing down eco are usually:

- forgetting to make houses;

- not constantly training from buildings (you can select all your units production building and do "CTRL+2", this would allow you then to monitor more easily whether your building are producing or not by simply pressing "2")

- having iddle units. using SHIFT to queue more actions is the best way to solve this problem without too much stress;

The link provided to you above is quite good. You have also plenty of enterntaining videos on YouTube.

You can also get easily some advice while playing online.

hf!

P.S.

Also, if you see a truck driving near you, keeping a safe distance if possible. 

 

Edited November 23, 2019 by faction02