Strategies and General Feedback

[Eta Beta Pi]

Hiya . Obviously it is likely to fail horribly against Magic, but the Tech can't use their workers for attacking, so they are down to their tower and 3 starting units.

Alternatively, you can mine 120 gold and summon an extra daemon. Depends how fast you think the enemy will build a barracks.

Start summoning daemons and send your 3 acolytes to mine Gold immediately. When the second acolyte drops off his resources (so that you have mined 40 gold so far), promote him to battlemage. Promote each of your other acolytes as soon as they drop off their gold. Once they are finished, attack, even if you're still summoning daemons. Your summoner and the last daemon can tag along later if needed.

If you can, kill any enemies you find along the way rather than fighting them at the same time as you fight the tower. Once at the enemy base, kill any remaining soldiers, then focus on the tower. After that, kill any soldiers the enemy manages to build, and target any workers trying to build a barracks. Destroy any completed barracks (ignore incomplete ones), finish off the remaining workers, and proceed to trash the enemy base.

Continue to produce more and more daemons, sending them to attack as they come, and watch your opponent desperately try to fend them off. If he's spent to much time teching and what-not, you should get an easy win.

3. Turtling and Teching

Used against CPU (ultra), Magic, on One On One.

It took me a while to beat this set-up, mainly because in most games the enemy's initial attacks did too much damage and my economy was too shattered to recover. The key is to know when the enemy is about to attack, and have as many battlemages as possible ready for him. One huge advantage of Magic is that you can train some powerful units (battlemages) quickly and fairly cheaply for defence, as long as you don't mind losing some of your workforce. Compare this to the Tech, who's workers can't even fight.

But as I said, there are probably many other ways to proceed. Overrunning the enemy with scores of magic armor might be one thing to try. I haven't used either them or wicker daemons yet, so there are probably a wealth of untapped strategies involving them.

[firedeathbot]

nice!

[Nitecreeper]

the suicide attack is aptly named.... the first time I tried they had already built barracks. Not a good end result. Otherwise very flawless strageties.

[Eta Beta Pi]

Yes, you can only do it if the starting postions are close to each other (this is why I used it on Four Rivers). You also have to be fairly quick about it, not wasting more than a few seconds. Also, CPU (ultra) will build its first barracks faster than a normal CPU since it has more gold; against the normal CPU I think this should work most of the time, perhaps even on somewhat larger maps.

I really have no idea how to beat a tech CPU (ultra) in any other way; I've played it once on One On One and got overrun by horsemen. Still, I spent a lot on daemons and magic armor in that game, so perhaps favoring golems would work better. Horsemen can still get through Golems, though.

[Nitecreeper]

thats funny, whenever i play with cpu ultra on one on one it does the air things only... so plenty of time to kill em.

[Eta Beta Pi]

Really? Hmm, maybe I should give it another go then. Of course, you can get around this by making custom tech trees with just the factions you want to use, but that's not very user-friendly.

[Eta Beta Pi]

Well, I tried playing against a Tech CPU (ultra), and it did attack me before it got air units. I still managed to beat it though, with a similar strategy to the one I used against Magic.

You can actually build your second Mage tower right at the start! The enemy doesn't attack fast enough to take advantage of it, and it gives you a helping had in closing the resource gap.

P.S. In all my earlier posts, I meant "initiate" instead of "acolyte". Getting confused with WCIII.