|
Late Castle Attack
This article shows how to pull off a late Castle
attack (26-28 min) to overwhelm your enemy while
leaving yourself with a powerful economy. The
general idea is to make a large strike that
overwhelms the enemy and catches him by surprise.
The key components are to focus your early time on
your economy and then turn this into a strong
military power that crushes the enemy. This attack
should give you a strong initiative even though
you will often have to move to the defense
initially. This initiative can be carried through
into the Imperial Age to give you the victory.
Civ Choice:
In my opinion the best race to power with, or as
you Age players like to call it - boom with, is
the Vikings. The reason I say Vikings is because
of the free wheelbarrow and handcart. Many players
don't know the huge advantage this gives the
player in the Castle age. The stronger infantry
and also a unique unit which is infantry also
helped my decision since I tend to prefer rams and
infantry (unique unit or longswordsmen) for a
strong Castle attack. There is really no reason
for me to be another good champion race since the
Vikings are hands down the best champion civ, if
not the best civ in the game. When you add
together the free econ upgrades, best infantry,
cheap docks and cheap warships, it just doesn't
get any better than that.
The Britons are a close second in my opinion. With
powering your main goal is to pump as many peons
as you can and you need Town Centers to pump the
peons. The Britons have the cheapest Town Centers
in the game; they almost cost less than a
blacksmith (TCs now cost 100 Stone)! This allows
you to get a lot of Town Centers up without too
much wood leaving you with extra wood to spend on
farms and such. If you really want to power
though, you will need to get the wheelbarrow and
handcart upgrades as well as the wood and farm
upgrades ASAP. They are just too important to be
without.
Start with the Defense:
I am sure that everyone knows how to power; if for
some reason you don't know how to power or boom so
I won't go into that. Also, you can just watch the
recorded games if you are still stumped. What you
are aiming for is to get a lot of villagers, I
prefer around 50 before I start massing my
offensive to tackle the enemy. However, while you
are powering you have to play defense, so it's
usually a good idea to get a monastery early if
you see knights and some knights/spears of your
own too (since the patched version of AoK and
AoK:TC won't allow you to survive by hiding behind
your TCs), as well as a Mangonnel. You do not want
to get crippled before you can even start your own
late Castle Age or counter army. The key here is
that you want to end up ahead of your opponent
economically because they spent resources to
attack while you focused on econ. However if their
strike allows them to get ahead of you then they
have the advantage, so preparation is a must.
There are mainly two things he can do: be passive
or aggressive.
The easiest to deal with is when you have a
passive enemy. Simply play your econ and then
strike. Once you get your strong army together,
knock through his barriers and take him out.
An aggressive enemy can be more difficult for many
players to handle. Now if the enemy is really
pouring the pressure onto you, you must build
somewhat compact and put up stone walls or wood
walls wherever it might slow down your enemy or
annoy him. Try to force his attack from one
direction and one direction only. Remember in the
Castle Age you will see lots of knights so get
monks early as well as some knights/spears of your
own. Adding a Mangonnel depends on the situation
but they are very useful in AoK:TC, either to kill
enemy units or take out his buildings. I will
leave that up you to decide though. Most important
though is to keep making villagers. Get your stone
mining going as soon as you can so you can set
down a castle. Once you have the resources for a
castle put it as far forward as you can without
the enemy being able to take it down when it's
going up or right after it's gone up. Between the
castle and your troops you should be able to hold
out until you get your military going. Just absorb
his attacks by trying to keep the battle in range
of your castle, then when you have a lot of units
massed up and 6-7+ rams, make your own attack!
Move to the Offense:
You should start making lots of rams once you
reach around 50 or so villagers; just queue them
up in the seigeworkshop so that he will have no
way of knowing how many rams you truly have. If
you're Vikings, use that castle to continuously
make Berserks, they are a very good Castle Age
unit. Also make use of your blacksmith to get
those upgrades for your units, they really come in
handy. While you don't want to worry about them
right away, by now you are in the later parts of
the Castle Age and getting those upgrades will
really be worthwhile once you have a lot of
troops. Along with your rams/berserks, you should
scout out to see what the enemy has and get
something to counter that, suck as pikemen/monks
if he has knights. You really have to be careful
to control your attack and not waste units. Keep
them together and always attack something. Also,
queue up more units and set the rally point to
where you will be battling. Finally, I also like
to bring a handful of builders to put another
offensive castle on my enemy while my masses of
troops are attacking. This way even if the enemy
has a lot of men and stops my attack, I will have
that offensive castle to show that I've gained
ground and more control.
Hopefully this strike catches your opponent
entirely unprepared. Few players will have that
much of a military defensive at home. The ability
to keep your troops inside your buildings really
makes it difficult for the enemy to know how many
troops you have and therefore how much defense to
get. When you launch the attack you are aiming to
overwhelm your enemy. With the large number of
rams and support troops you should cut through
your enemy like a tidal wave.
Cleaning up in the Imperial Age:
You'll want at least 55-60 villagers or more
before going to the Imperial Age; don't rush it.
You want to make sure that you have a strong
economy so that you can keep the pressure on your
enemy. In the recorded games you will notice that
I had 100+ villagers before I went to the Imperial
Age and this gave me all the resources I needed to
keep a strong attack moving. You can usually get a
respectable Imp time of 35ish or less depending on
how much time and money you spent on your late
Castle attack.
With the Vikings, after I have done my late Castle
attack and went Imperial, I prefer to throw down
huge numbers of barracks. I go for the infantry
upgrades to get to champs and also to get those
troops fully upgraded all the while mass producing
infantry from the numerous barracks (see why you
will need a strong economy?). If I have the gold,
I also get arbalests or perhaps elite skirmishers
if the enemy has arbalests. Of course you should
add trebs into the mix and start leveling his
base.
If you have done your late Castle attack right,
your opponent should be reeling from the assault
and will quickly fall from your attack, so the
Imperial Age is just a matter of chasing them down
and not giving them a chance to rebuild. It is
very hard to counter a large army once it is up
when you don't have an army. So a key point here
is to try and not let him amass a force. Keep
pushing him so that he never regains the
initiative.
Even if your attack fails, your economy should be
booming because of the time you spent powering up
before the strike. You will have a lot of
villagers and should be able to adjust
accordingly. This is the whole idea behind waiting
so long to attack; you will have a huge economy
and can adjust to whatever you need to do.
Using an Archery Civ:
If you have an archer as a unique unit, you can't
really use them as the bulk of your attack since
they are so horrible vs buildings. Using archers
along with knights, rams, and perhaps a few monks
however is a very good Castle Age army. So many
players make pikemen like mad in the Castle Age
and archers will simply eat them alive. However,
again make sure you have massed rams to knock down
buildings and knights to protect those rams in
melee combat.
After you have gone Imperial you can either get
the archers from the castle (ie. Longbowmen or Chu
ko nu) or from archery ranges. The best bet would
be to get cavaliers and arbalests or perhaps elite
Longbowmen or elite Chu ko nu. This combo is very
difficult to stop but is also very gold intensive
so you have to be careful. It is usually a good
idea to switch to champions when your gold starts
to run a bit low since champions are the best unit
for the amount of gold they cost. The
knight/longbow attack is a great combo if your
enemy reaches Imperial before you and tries to
champ flood you. Longbowmen and Chu ko Nu work
over champions especially with knight/monk
support.
Longbowmen and Chu ko Nu are simply amazing if you
use them right, but do not waste them - they are
too costly. Keep them near castles/TC's or other
units in your army. Bringing in a bunch of
villagers and pushing forward with TC's with
archers next to them was a very effective tactic
before AoK was patched. If the enemy tried to kill
your archers, you simply had to put them in your
TCs and you wouldn't lose them.
Water divided Maps:
If you are playing on a map which either separates
two players by water or a game that has only a
narrow crossing, you will most likely have to use
the transport. There are two ways of doing this.
First you could transport over early and start
making your army on his side. The drawback of this
is the fact that he will see that you are
preparing an attack and he can build his own
defenses.
The other type of attack is to make your huge army
on your own side then get 4-5 transports and sail
over to him. The danger is that you obviously
don't want those transports to be sunk in route.
As long as he doesn't completely own the seas or
possible if it's a rivers or highland map where
you can lay down a castle near the edge then use
that to protect your transports, you will be safe
doing this.
Often the enemy won't know what hit him if you
land with 8-10 rams and 15+ infantry of some sort
(I prefer unique units from the castle since it
will be going up regardless). You will need to
bring villagers across as well to start a forward
base to keep the pressure on. If it is just a
narrow crossing you might be able to bypass the
transport and just ram the front. You must be
careful though because if he has a stone wall
there and then quickly produces mangs before you
can get through the stone wall you could be in
trouble (so why not use an AoK:TC Petard and get
the wall down in a blink?). It is usually worth
transporting at least a few knights to take out
his mangs and or/villagers that will be repairing
his stone walls if you don't want to transport you
huge army over or risk getting your transports
sunk.
|
