ACL TheViper (vs) Vinchester

[pumukel]

Spoiler: Results

Game 1: MegaRandom, Byz, 31:22 - TheViper
Game 2: Arabia, Teu, 49:26 - TheViper
Game 3: Arena, Bri, 41:41 - TheViper
Game 4: Islands, Vik, 47:52 - TheViper

 

[MadmonkAoc]

Spoiler

Very 1 sided....how active is Vinch? Hard to watch, it was such a beating.

 

[_Andrew]

Spoiler

Very 1 sided....how active is Vinch? Hard to watch, it was such a beating.

Viper will do this to Tatoh and Fire as well if he's at all motivated. There's only a couple players who can take games off of him in a serious competitive format. Just my opinion, at least, and I've never been accused of being a Viper/Tyrant fan.

 

[Cutht]

Spoiler

Very 1 sided....how active is Vinch? Hard to watch, it was such a beating.

Viper will do this to Tatoh and Fire as well if he's at all motivated. There's only a couple players who can take games off of him in a serious competitive format. Just my opinion, at least, and I've never been accused of being a Viper/Tyrant fan.

Especially in a format like this. There are some players able to take some games off him in arabia and rm. But they won't be able to beat him when arena, MR and islands are on the table aswell.

 

[SMB360]

Whilst I agree Viper will be very tough to beat in this tournament, Vinchester very nearly won Islands. If he'd made a tower and/or some walls to stop Viper's counter-landing taking him completely off wood and gold whilst he upped to Castle then he'd have won quite easily in my view because he'd have been in Castle with 15 army, 2 ranges and a stable on Viper's island whilst Viper was completely off gold and stuck in Feudal with very few resources. At this point in the game a lot of people were calling it for Vinchester and rightly so in my view. If I remember correctly Vinchester saw the counter-landing early enough to make these preparations to protect his eco whilst upping.

 

[Gary Internet]

Some analysis I just posted on KC_Ereon's YouTube cast of the arena game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_NA7QGw0fI

If you're even remotely good at AOC it will not be anything you don't already know. I was posting in response to someone on KC's YouTube Channel who wanted some analysis of what made Vinchester's boom so good, clicking up with 94 villagers at 24:20.

============================================================

The standard 26+2 FC build order for arena is something like:

==1 scout==
6 sheep
4 wood
1 boar
4 berries
1 boar
3 eating boar
4 wood
2 gold
==Feudal Age== | Market & Blacksmith
2 wood

What Vinchester basically did (and I've tried this and it works) is instead of putting 2 on gold at the end of the dark age, put 2 on stone. At some point on the way to Feudal Age, you send one villager to take 10 gold without building a mining camp on gold. That gives you 110 gold in the bank. Once the market is built you sell 100 stone for 91 gold, to get a get a total of 201, and then you click up to Castle Age.

When Vinchester hit Castle Age he had 570 wood, 566 food, 1 gold and 310 stone. Remember that for Britons, TCs only cost 138 wood, and Bow Saw costs 150 food and 100 wood.

He pushed all 4 deer and had a total of 8 farms during the advance to Castle Age.

He immediately dropped 4 TCs, clicked Bow Saw and Wheelbarrow and started booming. He didn't build a monastery. That saved him 175 wood, which would have screwed his boom. It's interesting to note that he never got housed during the boom and never really had a break in villager production. I can't stress how never getting housed is an awesome thing for any boom on any map, but particularly on arena and black forest.

He had more villagers than Viper and way more food and wood than Viper. He got to Imperial Age 56 seconds ahead of Viper.

But Viper had the better transition to Imperial Age despite having a smaller economy and being slower. How?

He had way more stone than Vinchester. By the time Viper hit Imperial he had 3 Castles up and running and Vinchester only had 1. Viper also had 2 siege workshops already built with a ram and a mangonel in each one. He had enough longbowmen on the field, used in conjunction with the mangonels to eliminate the small threat posed by Vinchester's handful of crossbowmen.

Vinchester didn't have any siege workshops up and running and Vipers longbowmen and mangonels also halted the construction of Vinchester's first 2 workshops, which means he he was behind on massing siege.

Viper's advantage with the number of Castle's meant that he research yeomen early and could use his slight initial advantage in numbers and the initial small victory against the crossbowmen to bring trebs into play behind his fleet of capped rams. Vinch, with fewer, later workshops and Castles was doomed.

You might question whether Vinchester could have scouted Viper's stone and known that he was going for longbowmen. He definitely should have done that, but he shot himself in the foot and lost the chance at gaining that useful scouting information. Vinchester has a habit of luring his boars in dark age using the scout. This put his scout on 17 HP instead of the full 45. In early Castle Age, just as Vinchester was getting some really good information about the map, he encountered Viper's scout and retreated to his base and never left it again. At that point he had no clue what Viper was doing.

Vinchester had one relic inside his base. He did build a monastery in his base as one of the two Castle Age buildings needed to advance, and he made a monk to get that one relic. If he'd done that a bit earlier during his boom he could have also used the monk to heal his scout back to full health and then sent it out to learn about Viper's plan.

It sounds trivial, and people don't necessarily value scouting information on arena in the same way that they might on Arabia, but this game is an example of it essentially costing someone the game.

Arena is definitely a map that favours booming and if you understand how it works and you're good at it then you definitely have an advantage in many situations. However, being good at booming and being first to Imperial Age with more villagers, more resources and more technologies researched doesn't always mean that you're going to win.

Viper didn't have the best boom (not by a long way) and didn't have the best Imperial time, but he had the much better transition. By that I mean he had a plan. He knew what he wanted his Imperial Age army and attack to look like and so he set his economy up to start executing that exact planning as soon as he hit Imperial Age, even though he was 56 seconds behind. That's the massive lesson to be learned here.

Faster, smoother transition into a well thought out Imperial Age plan will always beat faster up times and better boom with no plan at all.

That, and scouting on arena is just as important as any other map, even if it doesn't seem so at first.