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.
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