New set : i4n

[Omega]

Cav will not be turning things around in i4n unless the person survives long enough to go indy and make them. Since a person trying to make them before hand will be utterly pwnt by a person who halb rushes, we can conclude no one is going to be making cav in the timeframe that is important (the first few minutes).

In this time frame, halb rush absolutely and utterly dominates. Not as much as persians in dark age, but damn near close. Your citizens are going to be 2 hitted and there is nothing you can do about it that is remotely effective. Yeah, you can make muskets, or gun cav, but these take quite a long time to bring down a halb, and they'll meanwhile be busy utterly raping your citizens. With your citizens down, and theirs still up, they'll be able to make whatever is needed to counter the few units you did manage to sustainably produce until all or nearly all of your citizens died abruptly.

Basically, there are just a few options if you want to try and win:
1) Wall, assuming you have a spot this can be achieved without you sacrificing the entire game to achieve it.
2) Do a very fast inf start with spain or byzantine rome, luring your hippos/seals to the iron mine you build a settlement on and get a tower up there ASAP, with your barracks in that area too for maximum clutter (and if rome, some partial walls in addition to that tower).
3) Halb rush them harder and better.

#1 is extremely rare for tl, so I won't even bother discussing it further as it has almost zero impact on gameplay.

#2 is good, and you won't even die initially due to lack of citizens! However, a good halb rush player is going to be able to isolate you from other resources you need or that would be beneficial, unless you happen to get like, a triple iron/gold/forage with elephants or with some other hunt right next to it. If they isolate your food, you're forced to make a tradeoff between citizens and producing army still--if you go the citizen route, they should be able to overwhelm you, and if you go the army route they should be able to hold long enough to get such a better economy that you're dead anyway.

#3 is halb rush. I'm not elaborating on this any more, since this whole post is about how it's going to turn into halbwars, which the mere existence of this point, and the fact it's clearly the best option, demonstrates all by its self.

Don't get me wrong, #2 has a high chance of success against your "typical" player these days, but it has an extremely low chance of success against say, an expert at liga.

If reveal map were off, halb rush wouldn't be nearly so devastating (and it's damn strong in imperial with reveal map off!). With it on however, they know exactly where their resources are from the start, and more importantly they know exactly where yours are too, and what your likely base setup is going to be, thus allowing them to get a perfect start, not have any of the delays of finding things, and get an ideal spot to make that forward barrack.

It'd be interesting as a setting if you banned the use of halbs or something.

Additionally, you might try "RTNA (Ren to Nano Age)", exact same stuff as you've got except starting in ren. Since in Ren, inf doesn't comparatively dominate cav as much (although cav is definitely sucky if you're looking at its comparative power in indy as the baseline), and NO ONE is going to forward pike rush anyone, because that's just retarded and will get utterly owned. Citizen rush is fairly strong in this case, but nothing unmanagable, and it's unlikely it'd get fully exploited just like cit rush in indy sh or grenwar isn't exploited (well, THAT often anyway).

[Elite]

I tried playing ww1-mod with no cc's awhile back. Similar situation, I think playing no cc's with reveal map and limited age sett is fun, but you still run into the problem of people who want to win in 10-15 f11 and therefore will stick to the same 3-4 civs as you see in liga. I personally think no settle rushing is gay as shit, winning the game in 4 f11 with 2 mili units is not fun at all unless you are trying to piss somewhere off. I think there are alot of civs like russia china japan USA that have interesting bonuses but never get used because they haven't got strong enough eco to survive the early game. I like the idea of a diplo game with indy or ww1 - mod/nano and no cc/reveal map. Diplo gives incentives to build up and play more cautiously instead of putting everything into killing 1 player before 10 f11...unfortunately most people are afraid of diplo for some reason.

[uIwehFx]

I could ban halb rush, but i dont really want to go for ren, because i wanted to stay quite close to the ww1...
I think easiest to do against halb rush , when you have a nice spot , build the tower on the right position with your first 5 cits. I played several i4n , but noone hlab rushed me , it is not like people go into the game and just starting halb rsuhing , sometimes it happens , sometimes it happens in indy tl either. If there is halb rush to often i will just bann it