GR(Game Ranger) is god awful.

[taco]

MW sword test goal: 50 swords level 6, 3 towers 4 houses OR 4 towers 2 houses. in f11 10.

Easy to get 60 lvl 8 even without double iron and the only hunt are 2 hippo's. (lately 3 since 1.5 has new plains.)

and yet im still to meet 1 good MW player

[taco]

actually on topic this post. ca expan has a few things going for them in this match up. u send out ur first 2 ca poke the iron mines as much as possible,kill the hunt, hes sword production is alot less. my usual way of dealing with a sword slutter was to take control of the pace of the game slutters are use2 having the first 15mins in control. if u make them on the defensive most ppl are thrown off their game, this only requires about 5 ca so ur base is pretty protected. my advice is just dictate the pace of the game and keep them from feeling comfortable maxing for 10f11. alot of expan ca players go wrong where they try to hard on expanding and not enough on army. if i was to defend against a sword slutter i know hes going to have alot of army and will attack before my eco kicks in so why waste those cits as collateral and spend it on massing ur army and keeping what cits u have alive.

[Arntzen]

Ras has never really been strong in SH. Sometimes his odd strategies will throw people off, but I've only seen it when he's on a stacked team. I'd only consider him above average in a conventional game.

He's really an TL player by heart. He also have learned Mod DM really well so his strongest SH IMO will be Mod SH. He's strategies more or less changed Mod SH on GR where the best players were Avant/Pope/Warrior/Revenge.

This being said, he's still really strong in Mid SH, I dno what era Omega and you are talking about but I remember i Ws days he was really strong there too. (Not like Dave of course). And he played really close to Lavanger one year ago in a couple of Mid sh's 1v1. Lav ended up winning tho.

Also, Megs wasn't your swords quite amazing? I remember somewhere on this forum it was the topic of the discussion.

[Arntzen]

MW sword test goal: 50 swords level 6, 3 towers 4 houses OR 4 towers 2 houses. in f11 10.

Easy to get 60 lvl 8 even without double iron and the only hunt are 2 hippo's. (lately 3 since 1.5 has new plains.)

and yet im still to meet 1 good MW player

MW is a training clan. Noobs join, get decent, move to better clans. Just a few have stayed. Also if you count "honorary members" aka players who have been MW so long their allowed to join other clans and basically do w/e they want like Pope of Dope, me and H0llygh0st (who's actually using MW tag right now) then there is a couple good ones. Also if u were in the Mid EEC scene 2005-2009 you'll have met people like Ace of Hearts and Sunnylee who were well respected by many even tho they were using MW-tag.

actually on topic this post. ca expan has a few things going for them in this match up. u send out ur first 2 ca poke the iron mines as much as possible,kill the hunt, hes sword production is alot less. my usual way of dealing with a sword slutter was to take control of the pace of the game slutters are use2 having the first 15mins in control. if u make them on the defensive most ppl are thrown off their game, this only requires about 5 ca so ur base is pretty protected. my advice is just dictate the pace of the game and keep them from feeling comfortable maxing for 10f11. alot of expan ca players go wrong where they try to hard on expanding and not enough on army. if i was to defend against a sword slutter i know hes going to have alot of army and will attack before my eco kicks in so why waste those cits as collateral and spend it on massing ur army and keeping what cits u have alive.

This sounds good an all, sometimes you're able to find weak-spots around sword players base, but if were talking equally skilled your enemy sword player could be doing the same around your base. By doing the same I mean harassing or just force you to groupspeed your citizens around specially from open gold mines. Not to mention leaving 6-8 swords around his base for LOS and prevent your CA to do w/e they want. Also you'll see often a swordplayer only getting 3 towers and by the time it's time for the 4th one he already see your CA so he'll use it for some walls as well.

But yeah, good tip and it certainly can help getting into your favor.

[taco]

i dont no 1 good expan player which doesn't make there base tight. a sword harass is much harder then a ca harass in this scenario the reason being that there's only so many towers a sword slutter can place. usually 2 on 1 iron(going to be hard to harass) 1 on the outside iron(easy and u should target it) 1 on the forage(same as b4). obviously different ppl place them differently but the outcome will be the same unless they have a really good map. there's always either an iron mine poorly defended or forage poorly defended. and im yet to hear of any good mw players

[herik]

Holly is the only good MW i can think of.

[Captain Nemo]

I was talking 10 f11 yes (50ish should be accurate enough). And yes level 8 is sufficient, and 40 swords at 8f11 will kill any eec ca player, only thing that might save him is a fortress, tho it will die aswell it might save u anyway. But Unless u have an extraordinary cav map, it's simply impossible to strike down the attack around this time (not a complete kill, but very close to). I remember proving this point with... I think it was kazter and bones or someone else and had to realise the cavs simply just lost every time.

Haven't done tests for aoc, but as 1v1 can be played on medium that changes the entire picture.

Both me and kaz 1v1 ras swords vs cav, he won with us using elites strat, u really just need to have a incredible micro/good position of fortress. (This was some time ago.) And yes it was eec, and aoc mid is played on small map too, not on med

just need? So u don't need an awsome map? and whats elite's strat anyway?

And omega I can't remember that game, but sounds like something that could have happened. I also remember playing with ras in mid sh a long time ago where he had big trouble with defending his base vs swords. He was good with ca tho, since thats more like playing liga. In indy sh it was alot worse though, I got away with pretty much defeating both BE and ras 2v1 in indy sh once (wing died fast and killed like 3 units). Also lost an indy sh 1v1 to ras a long time ago tho, but my own fault let him get away with full walling base and sit with bombard civ. Took 2 hour f11 before I died, great game.
Point is I've heard these incredible fairy tales of ras beating experts in 3v1 and other stuff before and I just don't buy it. I refuse to fall on my knees for anyone really, and that includes goldi and krass too, who after all were just human players and plenty of players were better than both of them (all 3) in many setts. I don't understand your idolising (yes I take it that may not apply that much to u herik, but it does apply to alot of people on some level).

So back to what u said: Either ras had incredible map or u guys did some huge errors. I refuse to believe it's due to ras's incredible mid sh skills (he may be better than [put in pro ca player name] and still not pull it off IMO).

[herik]

Just to clear it up, ras didn't beat 1v2, he beat us each in a 1v1, I think the key was that he didn't lose any cits and build archery rangers well with the towers, so the rush failed, if i'm correct, correct me if im wrong kaz, but did he use 4 houses also? Anyway i thought his cav were quite impressive.

[taco]

reading bak a few pages to answer ur question elite. why you dont need btd on cav for expan its because they often build an early 3rd ranger. with btd u cant continuously use them while without btd on cav you can almost afford to be using all 3 all the time.

[Omega]

Ras has never really been strong in SH. Sometimes his odd strategies will throw people off, but I've only seen it when he's on a stacked team. I'd only consider him above average in a conventional game.

He's really an TL player by heart. He also have learned Mod DM really well so his strongest SH IMO will be Mod SH. He's strategies more or less changed Mod SH on GR where the best players were Avant/Pope/Warrior/Revenge.

This being said, he's still really strong in Mid SH, I dno what era Omega and you are talking about but I remember i Ws days he was really strong there too. (Not like Dave of course). And he played really close to Lavanger one year ago in a couple of Mid sh's 1v1. Lav ended up winning tho.

Also, Megs wasn't your swords quite amazing? I remember somewhere on this forum it was the topic of the discussion.

I'm talking like 2006ish. I remember because I hadn't played EE regularly for about a year at that point, as I was playing GW1. I suppose a lot of players thought my swords were legendary, but that was pre-april 2005 when I was actually playing EE on a regular basis. Well, if we count GR then during my short stint over there as Vanquisher / Sun Tzu a lot of people thought they were godly too, even if all I did was rally rush with no control, so I don't really count that even though I don't think I lost a single sword vs sword matchup there...

[[-Ts-] Tricky]

mid sh on EEc was Ws and ec was two best mid sh clans and not even one clan close in mid sh. And i think when ws was going they was even par with ec on mid sh so if ras is bad then guess all ec and others must be bad at mid sh too i remember many 4v4s from mid sh on eec and there was really nothing between them in mid sh days accept dave on wing who was gangstar.

But saying that i had a nice squad of mid sh players in symbols who could play anyone 4v4 and give a good game and be even par.

But dave was very very nice sword player but he wasnt one of the bests straight away at swords but he learnt fast. But im talking about when he just moved to eec side.

[Arntzen]

@ Taco:
True it's harder but it can be done. BONES and your brother are people who comes to mind when I think of players who did this with success. I'm mostly thinking of the second goldmine and being annoying (not some kind of slutfest where you're able to kill a ton of citizens) while keeping swords alive.
Also leaving idle swords around the base really makes it hard for a CA player to do to much damage until 15+ f11. At this point he should be dead anyway.
About the MW-thingy. If H0lly/Pope/Ace/Sunnylee doesn't count as good then it depends who you consider MW. Samuel was even in MW for a short amount of time for example.

@ Herik:
H0lly is in my eyes the best as well. And CA player always use 4 houses. The way he beat me was with fortress. Also he used a civilization without CA range but HP instead. He argued he did not need range against CA because he only went CA on a map where he was able to get early balistas without getting out-microed like shit from crazy CA players.

@ Taco2:
Elite don't use BTD on expan-civilizations. If I'm not mistaking the question was: "Whats best vs sword a)CA Expan b) CA BTD aka CA no special power civ with BTD".

@ Omega:
Well alright you beat Ras first 5 f11 in 2006ish. I'm guessing this was just one game? I'm also pretty sure there was a lot of other factors that makes this "research" of his skill pretty weak. (How were the map etc). Let's just say I'm as doubtful to him being horrible the first 5 f11 aka can't handle the first 21-ish swords as you probably are to me when I'm saying he's the best I've seen in TL.
Thinking back I'm sure it was Binary who said your swords where the best he had seen.
And yeah there has been a lot of GR-gods. Not sure if you remember "King of Boom" and "King of Rush" or even the fake RoK who were all "unbeatable".

[tool]

lol dude you've played ee for like 2-3 years? i see no merit in any of your wild theories of the days of old

[ben55]

my personal experience from playing with and against ras is he is much weaker early game compared to late game. kind of like an eec enigma. so i don't find it hard to believe an excellent sword rusher would dispatch of him quite easily.

not saying he can't rush, he is one of the harder players to play in dark age liga imo -- but he is a much better boomer/late game player than early from my experience.

[Omega]

First, I wasn't really commenting on Ras's overall skill at all. I was using an anecdote to explain why I was skeptical of any SH-strategy played against Ras, using that anecdote as proof that [insert whatever here] is accurate. The very same weaknesses of the anecdotal evidence I put forth has the same weaknesses of the anecdotal evidence which was being used to support the conclusion regarding CA vs. Swords.

Secondly, it should be pretty obvious to everyone that Ras's strong setting is not SH anything. He just hasn't had the experience with it a lot of older players have, nor does he really have much of a passion for it. I don't see why it would be somehow taboo or incorrect to say that Ras really isn't that great at SH, relatively speaking of course (he's still much better at it than 90%+ of players today). The same is true of say, SlipKnot (and especially slippy and mid sh). Slip just totally fucking blows at Middle SH. He's still better than a lot of the current players, sure, but if you tried to play Middle SH like he plays Middle SH in the 'prime time' of the setting in an all experts game, you'd get your ass handed to you. You'd probably just get your ass handed to you just by using one of his sub-par mid civs (which he did eventually update to suck less, to his credit). That doesn't mean slipknot is a bad player, nor does it mean that he's really all that bad at Middle SH. But you could probably crush him with a Barbarian/Viking mix against CA, if you were a strong sword player and you both had average maps (and the main reason for this would be he's way too focused on walling). That doesn't lend any credibility to Barbarian/Viking mix being any good against CA though.

Finally, it should be obvious that Ras does well in late game, because any late-game SH, because frankly, late game anything is pretty similar except for civs--it's about the eco, the army control, and in some settings, building placement. The first two of those are things Ras does well. Ras doesn't do so well at the early game though.. Early game SH on the other hand... Not so much. He's still of course better than the majority of players now in early game SH, but that doesn't really matter. It'd be like saying you could transport a low-ranked MW back in time to 3 days after release. He'd probably kick everyone's asses. Then he might lose to some totally crappy strategy, because he's really not a very good player on an absolute level, even though on the relative level of the time he was totally godly. If you're going to make inferences from gameplay, you have to do so at an absolute level, and not at a relative level.

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EDIT: This post appears to be a fucking rambling mess at points. But whatever, I'm tootired to give a shit at this point.