AOC DM Tutorial Part – 1
First 4 minutes of the DM – The invaluable duration
Introduction
DM is being played since the release of AOC by quite many players although the community was never as large as the RM. Nevertheless, I believe DM has always been an integral part of AOC community and it has a huge history & expertise developed over the years. Now that we have The Uprising DM tournament coming soon, I decided to prepare a simple “how to start DM” tutorial for those who are interested to play DM more regularly. I selected Huns war as the topic of this tutorial, because this particular war requires some of the very important DM skills, although not all, to be executed in a very precise and experienced manner.
The tutorial is prepared by assuming the readers are not completely new to the AOC, that they have some fundamental working knowledge on some important things like units, hotkeys, civs etc. That being said, still some of the information will be very basic to some DMers and some others to RMers. But still, I hope to attract and provide guidance to those who want to start and/or improve DM but does not know how to begin.
Please keep in mind that this tutorial is aimed to serve as only a “general guidelines”. You should not try to do exactly as written here simply for two main reasons. Firstly, DM is a very versatile style of AOC. The “best moves” are mostly need to be improvised during the game and you can find exceptional situations that could render every word, tip and trick of this tutorial ineffective or wrong. Secondly and more importantly, there are literally no “flawless” or “perfect” DM play. There are so many things that you need to control together and making mistakes are embedded in the very nature of DM. Therefore, do not lose your motivation for making mistakes. DM is about making the smartest moves with a decent speed and “lesser amount of mistakes”.
This tutorial will be about “the start” of a Huns war, which will basically focus on the first 4 minutes of game time. This part is very important because the course of most DM games are pre-determined by how the players perform their start compared to the opponent. To be able to play the first 4 minutes in a decent level is probably the biggest step of being a good DMer. I will try to explain this duration step by step with visual aid where necessary.
The beginning
As most of you know, you have a duration of 1-2 second of “black screen” between loading the game and actually starting it. It is this time you should already command producing your first villagers. So, when the game starts your TC should look like this.
How to do this?
During the black screen period, click your town center selection and villager production hotkeys (by default those are H and C respectively)
0 – 15 seconds
Ok, the game has started and you have your villagers in queue. Always keep in mind that, the start in DM is very important. You should use every second very effectively. Your primary is aim to build your army as fast you can.
What to do with the first 3 villagers? (Assuming no market strategy is used)
I will use a famous recorded game to explain the start (Jidba vs Viper, TA finals). I selected this game from the finals, because this map generation can be considered as a hard and challenging map for a DM game, since the player is born just ahead of the black screen, where he has really limited space to build military and eco back. For most situations, your map will be easier than this one.
The first thing you need to do is to make these 3 villagers work as soon as possible. So, make your very first buildings just next to where your villagers are born, so that they will not need to walk. Be careful, not to place the building on top of the villagers or too far from them, so that they do not walk at all before they start building. The usual start of a Huns war is with direct stables. You should always aim to use 1 villager per building. Achieving this will boost your building and army production speed. The time villagers loses between finishing a building and moving to the other one can be quite costly. The one exception to this you can choose to start building your very first building with 2 villagers, as shown in below image. I will explain in a bit why this might be good for certain cases. Immediately after ordering to build 2 stables send your hussar to the enemy base. Since the DM is played on explored map, you will easily find your opponent around the berry and the main gold. It is practical to assign a number to your hussar so that you can quickly trace it when it reaches the enemy base. As I will explain later, the initial hussar raid is very important to slow down your opponents start and it may even be possible to take out one of his villagers.
Ok, while our hussar is going to the enemy base, let’s go back to our villagers, especially those 2 villagers building one stable. Why this might be a good idea? The first is that, you are sending your hussar away, but so does the enemy! His hussar will be the first thing to arrive at your base and you have absolutely nothing to defend. Your best chance of killing it before it damages you significantly is to produce your first paladin before its arrival. So decreasing the build time of the first stable with two villagers is effective to achieve this. Unless the map is really close, you do not need to keep the 2 villagers in one stable until it is completed. You can take one of them and start doing the third stable. On top of these issues, ordering 2 stables with 3 villagers is faster than ordering 3 stables with 3 villagers, so your idle time is also minimized.
But keep in mind that, if the map is quite big and you judge that you can have enough time, you can also use 3 villagers to build 3 separate stables. The most important thing is that you make these villagers work and send your hussar away as soon as you can. Also bear in mind that, some players prefer to send their hussars first and do the first building later to maximize the damage their hussar will cause.
15 seconds – 1 min
So far, we have started to build 3 stables and sent our hussar away. Our 4th villager is about to come out of the TC in 10 seconds. We have very important 10 seconds to decide how to design our base. Although, it might be possible for very experienced players to judge how they want to play (aggressive, defensive etc) at this 10 seconds and change their build order, hereinafter referred to as BO, accordingly. But I will stick to the usual start and BO on this tutorial and will ignore any possible modifications that could be made to your BO according to the other variables such as map, opponent etc.
You should always consider two most important things when you design your buildings.
1- You must build your army as fast as it is possible.
2- You will be interrupted by enemy raid with paladins.
Typical amount of initial buildings are 3-4 stables, 3-5 barracks and 7-9 archery ranges followed by 3 siege workshops. You must build these as fast as you can with the least damage by the opponent. One of the important keys to achieve this is to design your building “symmetrically” around your TC. That is, buildings are not denser at a particular direction. Consider the below image. Blue lines indicates a good spot for your base design where you can fit all your buildings. But you should build homogenously from the red lines through the blue lines.
Why and how symmetric & homogenous building helps?
This has multiple advantages actually. Making your buildings homogenously spread around your TC means that your villagers will also be spread around your TC homogenously. This will allow them to work more efficiently as it will be easier to maintain 1 villager/building rule. Otherwise the density of the villagers will be higher at the locations where you have more buildings and will ultimately decrease their efficiency. Plus, stacking of villagers at an individual area, will make them much easier and more tempting target for enemy paladins which will come to your base within 2-3 mins. But we will get to that later.
Ok, now that we configured in our head how our base should look like, we are almost ready for the arrival of the 4th villager. This villager will be responsible to execute the design order we have in mind! But, to eliminate the idle time between the creation of this villager and giving the build order for the next building we should put a gather point for this villager. Most player prefer to give the first gather point from TC to the very first stable to use this small time to further speed up the build of first stable. See the figure below.
Now we need start giving build orders for our base with this villager. This step is also very critical. You need to place your buildings so close to each other that villagers will not walk too much between them, but not so much to cause them unable to move. The ideal gap between each building should be 1 tile. But do not try to be extremely flawless about this as it might not be possible for some maps and focusing on it too much can make you lose some time. Because the time you place your buildings might overlap (especially for close maps) with the time your hussar reach to the enemy base (also his to yours) and most of the times you cannot control all perfectly. Try to compromise! If you have your main gold very close to your TC, try not to make buildings around it where you will be placing two town centers approximately 3 mins later. While giving the build orders try to use hotkeys for barracks, archery range and stable. I would strongly recommend avoid using “ctrl” to make for instance 4 barracks because it usually takes more time to manage perfect spots while holding ctrl. In my opinion, use (let’s say your hotkeys for barracks are b-b) b-b, b-b, b-b, b-b etc. When it comes to the order of buildings, a suggested design would be to design your buildings around your TC and first 3 stables so that villagers will produce stables and barracks first, then the archery ranges. You will need fast paladins to raid and halberds to defend. But of course, since you will be building them homogenously, after a while barracks and archery ranges building work will overlap. So, your base should pretty much look like this by 1 minute of game time. Notice that the build order shown here is not perfect as usually it is not, it could be much better or worse depending on some other variables. Oh, there is the enemy hussar approaching btw...
1 min – 1.30 min
There are three things you should focus on during this time period.
1- Producing army from your buildings as soon as they are finished. Try not to lose any time before starting to queue your army (doing this is not actually limited to only 1-1.30 duration, do this for each and every building of your base).
2- Causing damage with your hussar
3- Preventing the damage of the enemy hussar
The first one is clear enough by the definition, so I will directly move the 2nd and 3rd issues.
Causing damage with your hussar
This is an often times neglected but an important aspect of a good DM start. You should aim to give maximum damage you can with your hussar. That is to either kill a villager or delay his buildings as much as possible. Where you should attack with this hussar can depend on many variables. Some questions and observations that will pop into your head will be, “is the opponent have his stable finished yet?, “how far are the working villagers from the TC” “what kind of start does he make? Market,stable, barrakcs?” etc. If the enemy has not yet completed any stable, directly go to his villager working on the “almost finished” stable to further delay his first paladin production. If he can manage to garrison this villager before dying to his T.C, go to the next villager etc. But most of the times, the opponent will have finished his first stable when you arrive. In this case, you should compromise between the direction you come from, the location of the stable built and villager farthest from the T.C Ideally, you want to hit villager that is closest to you so that you can already start attacking sooner, farthest from the stable so that his first paladin will need time to reach you, and farthest from TC so that you can still hit and perhaps kill while the villager is trying to go into the TC. It is possible that, you can catch a villager that is in a spot of that is good for all these three options, or none at all. It should be your best and instantaneous judgement to attack a particular villager. Most often, the villager being attacked is the one closest to the hussar. If you have by no chance to kill the villager and your hussar is almost dead with low HP, move it rapidly to another location away from your base direction where he will chase you with his first 1-2 paladins. As I will explain later, these 1-2 paladins are normally supposed to come to your base, so by making them chase your hussar, you delay these paladins arrival to your base and you will be able to defend against them easier as you will have more army every second. Now that we know what things are important to use hussar efficiently, we can use this information to minimize the damage of enemy hussar.
Preventing the damage of the enemy hussar
Let’s start with the rare but the worst case scenario where you have no finished buildings but enemy hussar is already arrived (this happens more often in tg than it is in 1vs1 as the maps are much closer in tg). This is a really bad situation and you will definitely get some solid damage. But the best thing you can do is not to panic. Normally, when hussar starts to hit you, you garrison your villager into your TC so that your villager does not die. But for this scenario, try not to garrison your villager to your TC after first hit. For the Huns hussars, it requires 4 hits to kill your villager. Seconds are very important here, if you garrison your villager with 1 hit, then he will move on to the next and the next and will completely destroy your start. Instead, allow his hussar to take 2 or 3 hits to your villager before you garrison it, so that you win 2-3 more seconds to finish your stable.
On a more likely scenario, you will have stables built or maybe even a paladin already produced. Now, you want to eliminate the hussar as soon as it is possible. So, once you spot the hussar, ideally it is best to estimate hussars direction and move your paladin to your closest estimation to interfere hussar, instead of directly clicking to it. Direct clicking can sometimes make your paladin choose the bad way and left behind the hussar. Ok, you have a paladin ready to interfere the hussar. But this still does not mean you are completely safe. The hussar will search and spot the “easiest to hunt” villager very soon and move towards it while you are chasing or start hitting the hussar. Let’s take a look at the below image.
The enemy has caught the best villager possible that is farthest from your first stable, paladin and the TC. You should instantaneously garrison your villager to TC. Assuming that you managed to save it, your base should look like below.
On the black circle, your paladin is hitting the hussar while the hussar is looking for another villager and you have a garrisoned villager inside your T.C. You should immediately release your garrisoned villager to work at the safest building farthest away from the hussar as shown with the arrow. This will minimize the idle time of your villager inside TC. At the same time, if the enemy hussar is still on high HP, you should immediately garrison the villager towards which the hussar is headed (shown in red circle). Allowing hussar to make you more than one hit is not advised unless you have no buildings finished. Because if you have your first building finished then it is most likely that your villager will go work on a spot farther than TC, so you might not have enough time to garrison it back if you wait the 2nd or 3rd hit.
01.30 min – 04.00 min
So far, you are building your military buildings located with the best possible design, producing units as soon as they are finished, raided the opponent with your hussar and eliminated the enemy hussar.
What should you do next 2.5 mins?
1- Keep producing army as soon as buildings are completed
2- Keep an eye on maintaining 1 villager/building rule
3- Send paladins to raid villagers at the enemy base
4- Be prepared for the possible incoming of the enemy paladin
5- Understand the map & set-up your strategy
6- Start to build at least 1, preferably 2 TC around your main gold
The first two of these items are self-explanatory and were dealt with previously in this tutorial. With more experience and practice, this will be easy for you to achieve.
Let’s move to the item 3.
Send paladins to raid villagers at the enemy base
As soon as you eliminate the hussars start sending paladins to enemy base to raid some villagers. This time your primary purpose is really to kill the villagers as paladins are much stronger than hussars and can easily kill the villagers. How much paladin you should send to raid is really hard to explain simply, that would depend on many variables such as the map size, market factor, effectiveness of your first paladins, map generation etc. You will have a better understanding of the paladin raid with more experience. But I can say that normally, 4 to 8 paladins are good enough, any less might be insignificant, any more might be a waste unless some other factors come into play. As you will realize in time, the line between putting pressure on your opponent and wasting your army is extremely thin in DM.
Let’s assume you will send 6 paladins. But sending is not enough, you should really care about controlling these paladins. There are many ways and tricks to use these paladins very effectively. I will mention some of them here.
Since you want to hit the enemy as early you can, you do not usually wait 6 paladins to be produced. You send them as soon as they are produced as a single paladin or with groups of 2 or 3. Let’s assume you send them in three groups with 2 paladins in each group. Send the first paladins directly to enemy base from the closest road possible and try to raid some villagers. You will notice that naturally, the opponent will bring most of his forces to encounter these paladins. This is where you hit him. While he is busy trying to kill your initial paladins, you are on the way with other groups to hit the lands where he emptied and take out his villagers.
The most important is how you control the very first paladins arriving his base. What I would advise is to kill the villager if you catch a good one. If you cannot, use these first paladins to distract his army away from your upcoming paladins directions so that they can hit the villagers easier. As a good example for this occasion, have a look at the below image.
While the blue player is dealing with the 1 red paladin, the other 4 red paladins are on a clear path the kill other villagers.
Similar to the hussar, when all your paladins, are dead or with very low HP, try to distract its army to far away locations by sending your paladins away. If the opponent is not careful, he can chase you all the way and can have a very distracted and divided army where you can kill one by one with bigger troops you are producing. One thing you should be careful about distracting his army through the map is that you should not make him chase you through the important parts of the map such as gold piles, hills etc. Because within the next minutes you will want to have a map control and probably start building castles to those places. So you do not want to see opponent forces there.
Be prepared for the possible incoming of the enemy paladin
If you have followed a clear homogenous build order as told before, your villagers will already be a hard target. What you should focus on is to take down incoming paladins effectively and without allowing them to create distraction. Do not follow 1 paladin with overrated armies. There is one important thing that many people use and can help you to minimize paladin raid damage. Normally in DM, you use gather points for military buildings to grow your army at a particular location, usually just in front of your base. For the first 2.30 mins, do not use gather points. Let the units be produced instantly where your buildings are. Since you have homogenously distributed buildings, your units will be created and placed homogenously around your base, so you will be ready for incoming paladins from every possible direction.
Understand the map & set-up your strategy
This is a very important task to accomplish. The sooner you do this in the game, the more advantage you have. By the time between 2 and 4 mins you should have already looked at the map in detail while managing other stuff as told before, and set-up some strategies in mind. Of course, keep in mind that, DM contains a lot of variation, your every move and strategy is subject to change within minutes. But still, understanding the map will allow you to control the game, eliminate the possible surprises, and do what you need to do before it is too late. For example let’s take a look at the following mini map.
Having looked at the maps, players usually decide which parts of the map are important for them and set-up their strategies. From a quick look some of the ideas might be going around players’ mind are more or less like this (of course the ideas can vary a lot between players and how the game proceeds etc)
Blue player
1- All my golds are in front. It is a must for me to take the hills 2 and 3 otherwise most likely I am dead. So, I have to play it really offensive because if I allow him to push and take the map control, it will be only a matter of time for him to kill.
2- I should try to take the hill 1, which I can collect the stone there, acquire map control on that side of the map, and raid his golds around the hill 5. If possible, I can push in time to the hill 5 which he will claim to have very soon.
3- He will most likely do his defense at hill 4, so I should either push really good and effective or be careful about not to waste there.
4- I should be really fast about the relics and take the three close to me, but first try for the 4th one on the bottom right corner of the map.
Red player,
1- His gold are all in front, I can have a really good edge here. I should try to push for hill 2, while building defense on hill 4 which I can use as a fail-safe, if I cannot push through the hill 2.
2- If I get hill 3, I can strike his two golds over there.
3- I should try to take the hill 1, which I can collect the stone there, acquire map control on that side of the map
4- I should be really fast about the relics and take the two close to me, but first try for the three relics closer to his base, perhaps I should send one paladin to each relic to delay his capturing those.
And much more…
But having those ideas does not necessarily mean that you are going to achieve all this, some of which you will probably will not be able to. A lot of things can go different in actual game, but it is mandatory to read and understand the map to make the smartest moves for your growing army.
So far, it is almost 4 minutes. You must have completed your military buildings, at least must be started to build siege workshops. Around this time try to build two town centers around your main gold.
So far, that is all for the first 4 mins of AOC DM hunswar. I am sure there are quite other things that I missed during writing (which I discover now that is not easy task :D ), so if you have any other contributions we can update the tutorial.
I hope to write more in the future about what comes next after a good start (Making good fights, army control, eco balance etc).
I hope that this tutorial will be helpful for at least few people who wants to try out DM..
Best of luck ! 8-)
First 4 minutes of the DM – The invaluable duration
Introduction
DM is being played since the release of AOC by quite many players although the community was never as large as the RM. Nevertheless, I believe DM has always been an integral part of AOC community and it has a huge history & expertise developed over the years. Now that we have The Uprising DM tournament coming soon, I decided to prepare a simple “how to start DM” tutorial for those who are interested to play DM more regularly. I selected Huns war as the topic of this tutorial, because this particular war requires some of the very important DM skills, although not all, to be executed in a very precise and experienced manner.
The tutorial is prepared by assuming the readers are not completely new to the AOC, that they have some fundamental working knowledge on some important things like units, hotkeys, civs etc. That being said, still some of the information will be very basic to some DMers and some others to RMers. But still, I hope to attract and provide guidance to those who want to start and/or improve DM but does not know how to begin.
Please keep in mind that this tutorial is aimed to serve as only a “general guidelines”. You should not try to do exactly as written here simply for two main reasons. Firstly, DM is a very versatile style of AOC. The “best moves” are mostly need to be improvised during the game and you can find exceptional situations that could render every word, tip and trick of this tutorial ineffective or wrong. Secondly and more importantly, there are literally no “flawless” or “perfect” DM play. There are so many things that you need to control together and making mistakes are embedded in the very nature of DM. Therefore, do not lose your motivation for making mistakes. DM is about making the smartest moves with a decent speed and “lesser amount of mistakes”.
This tutorial will be about “the start” of a Huns war, which will basically focus on the first 4 minutes of game time. This part is very important because the course of most DM games are pre-determined by how the players perform their start compared to the opponent. To be able to play the first 4 minutes in a decent level is probably the biggest step of being a good DMer. I will try to explain this duration step by step with visual aid where necessary.
The beginning
As most of you know, you have a duration of 1-2 second of “black screen” between loading the game and actually starting it. It is this time you should already command producing your first villagers. So, when the game starts your TC should look like this.
How to do this?
During the black screen period, click your town center selection and villager production hotkeys (by default those are H and C respectively)
0 – 15 seconds
Ok, the game has started and you have your villagers in queue. Always keep in mind that, the start in DM is very important. You should use every second very effectively. Your primary is aim to build your army as fast you can.
What to do with the first 3 villagers? (Assuming no market strategy is used)
I will use a famous recorded game to explain the start (Jidba vs Viper, TA finals). I selected this game from the finals, because this map generation can be considered as a hard and challenging map for a DM game, since the player is born just ahead of the black screen, where he has really limited space to build military and eco back. For most situations, your map will be easier than this one.
The first thing you need to do is to make these 3 villagers work as soon as possible. So, make your very first buildings just next to where your villagers are born, so that they will not need to walk. Be careful, not to place the building on top of the villagers or too far from them, so that they do not walk at all before they start building. The usual start of a Huns war is with direct stables. You should always aim to use 1 villager per building. Achieving this will boost your building and army production speed. The time villagers loses between finishing a building and moving to the other one can be quite costly. The one exception to this you can choose to start building your very first building with 2 villagers, as shown in below image. I will explain in a bit why this might be good for certain cases. Immediately after ordering to build 2 stables send your hussar to the enemy base. Since the DM is played on explored map, you will easily find your opponent around the berry and the main gold. It is practical to assign a number to your hussar so that you can quickly trace it when it reaches the enemy base. As I will explain later, the initial hussar raid is very important to slow down your opponents start and it may even be possible to take out one of his villagers.
Ok, while our hussar is going to the enemy base, let’s go back to our villagers, especially those 2 villagers building one stable. Why this might be a good idea? The first is that, you are sending your hussar away, but so does the enemy! His hussar will be the first thing to arrive at your base and you have absolutely nothing to defend. Your best chance of killing it before it damages you significantly is to produce your first paladin before its arrival. So decreasing the build time of the first stable with two villagers is effective to achieve this. Unless the map is really close, you do not need to keep the 2 villagers in one stable until it is completed. You can take one of them and start doing the third stable. On top of these issues, ordering 2 stables with 3 villagers is faster than ordering 3 stables with 3 villagers, so your idle time is also minimized.
But keep in mind that, if the map is quite big and you judge that you can have enough time, you can also use 3 villagers to build 3 separate stables. The most important thing is that you make these villagers work and send your hussar away as soon as you can. Also bear in mind that, some players prefer to send their hussars first and do the first building later to maximize the damage their hussar will cause.
15 seconds – 1 min
So far, we have started to build 3 stables and sent our hussar away. Our 4th villager is about to come out of the TC in 10 seconds. We have very important 10 seconds to decide how to design our base. Although, it might be possible for very experienced players to judge how they want to play (aggressive, defensive etc) at this 10 seconds and change their build order, hereinafter referred to as BO, accordingly. But I will stick to the usual start and BO on this tutorial and will ignore any possible modifications that could be made to your BO according to the other variables such as map, opponent etc.
You should always consider two most important things when you design your buildings.
1- You must build your army as fast as it is possible.
2- You will be interrupted by enemy raid with paladins.
Typical amount of initial buildings are 3-4 stables, 3-5 barracks and 7-9 archery ranges followed by 3 siege workshops. You must build these as fast as you can with the least damage by the opponent. One of the important keys to achieve this is to design your building “symmetrically” around your TC. That is, buildings are not denser at a particular direction. Consider the below image. Blue lines indicates a good spot for your base design where you can fit all your buildings. But you should build homogenously from the red lines through the blue lines.
Why and how symmetric & homogenous building helps?
This has multiple advantages actually. Making your buildings homogenously spread around your TC means that your villagers will also be spread around your TC homogenously. This will allow them to work more efficiently as it will be easier to maintain 1 villager/building rule. Otherwise the density of the villagers will be higher at the locations where you have more buildings and will ultimately decrease their efficiency. Plus, stacking of villagers at an individual area, will make them much easier and more tempting target for enemy paladins which will come to your base within 2-3 mins. But we will get to that later.
Ok, now that we configured in our head how our base should look like, we are almost ready for the arrival of the 4th villager. This villager will be responsible to execute the design order we have in mind! But, to eliminate the idle time between the creation of this villager and giving the build order for the next building we should put a gather point for this villager. Most player prefer to give the first gather point from TC to the very first stable to use this small time to further speed up the build of first stable. See the figure below.
Now we need start giving build orders for our base with this villager. This step is also very critical. You need to place your buildings so close to each other that villagers will not walk too much between them, but not so much to cause them unable to move. The ideal gap between each building should be 1 tile. But do not try to be extremely flawless about this as it might not be possible for some maps and focusing on it too much can make you lose some time. Because the time you place your buildings might overlap (especially for close maps) with the time your hussar reach to the enemy base (also his to yours) and most of the times you cannot control all perfectly. Try to compromise! If you have your main gold very close to your TC, try not to make buildings around it where you will be placing two town centers approximately 3 mins later. While giving the build orders try to use hotkeys for barracks, archery range and stable. I would strongly recommend avoid using “ctrl” to make for instance 4 barracks because it usually takes more time to manage perfect spots while holding ctrl. In my opinion, use (let’s say your hotkeys for barracks are b-b) b-b, b-b, b-b, b-b etc. When it comes to the order of buildings, a suggested design would be to design your buildings around your TC and first 3 stables so that villagers will produce stables and barracks first, then the archery ranges. You will need fast paladins to raid and halberds to defend. But of course, since you will be building them homogenously, after a while barracks and archery ranges building work will overlap. So, your base should pretty much look like this by 1 minute of game time. Notice that the build order shown here is not perfect as usually it is not, it could be much better or worse depending on some other variables. Oh, there is the enemy hussar approaching btw...
1 min – 1.30 min
There are three things you should focus on during this time period.
1- Producing army from your buildings as soon as they are finished. Try not to lose any time before starting to queue your army (doing this is not actually limited to only 1-1.30 duration, do this for each and every building of your base).
2- Causing damage with your hussar
3- Preventing the damage of the enemy hussar
The first one is clear enough by the definition, so I will directly move the 2nd and 3rd issues.
Causing damage with your hussar
This is an often times neglected but an important aspect of a good DM start. You should aim to give maximum damage you can with your hussar. That is to either kill a villager or delay his buildings as much as possible. Where you should attack with this hussar can depend on many variables. Some questions and observations that will pop into your head will be, “is the opponent have his stable finished yet?, “how far are the working villagers from the TC” “what kind of start does he make? Market,stable, barrakcs?” etc. If the enemy has not yet completed any stable, directly go to his villager working on the “almost finished” stable to further delay his first paladin production. If he can manage to garrison this villager before dying to his T.C, go to the next villager etc. But most of the times, the opponent will have finished his first stable when you arrive. In this case, you should compromise between the direction you come from, the location of the stable built and villager farthest from the T.C Ideally, you want to hit villager that is closest to you so that you can already start attacking sooner, farthest from the stable so that his first paladin will need time to reach you, and farthest from TC so that you can still hit and perhaps kill while the villager is trying to go into the TC. It is possible that, you can catch a villager that is in a spot of that is good for all these three options, or none at all. It should be your best and instantaneous judgement to attack a particular villager. Most often, the villager being attacked is the one closest to the hussar. If you have by no chance to kill the villager and your hussar is almost dead with low HP, move it rapidly to another location away from your base direction where he will chase you with his first 1-2 paladins. As I will explain later, these 1-2 paladins are normally supposed to come to your base, so by making them chase your hussar, you delay these paladins arrival to your base and you will be able to defend against them easier as you will have more army every second. Now that we know what things are important to use hussar efficiently, we can use this information to minimize the damage of enemy hussar.
Preventing the damage of the enemy hussar
Let’s start with the rare but the worst case scenario where you have no finished buildings but enemy hussar is already arrived (this happens more often in tg than it is in 1vs1 as the maps are much closer in tg). This is a really bad situation and you will definitely get some solid damage. But the best thing you can do is not to panic. Normally, when hussar starts to hit you, you garrison your villager into your TC so that your villager does not die. But for this scenario, try not to garrison your villager to your TC after first hit. For the Huns hussars, it requires 4 hits to kill your villager. Seconds are very important here, if you garrison your villager with 1 hit, then he will move on to the next and the next and will completely destroy your start. Instead, allow his hussar to take 2 or 3 hits to your villager before you garrison it, so that you win 2-3 more seconds to finish your stable.
On a more likely scenario, you will have stables built or maybe even a paladin already produced. Now, you want to eliminate the hussar as soon as it is possible. So, once you spot the hussar, ideally it is best to estimate hussars direction and move your paladin to your closest estimation to interfere hussar, instead of directly clicking to it. Direct clicking can sometimes make your paladin choose the bad way and left behind the hussar. Ok, you have a paladin ready to interfere the hussar. But this still does not mean you are completely safe. The hussar will search and spot the “easiest to hunt” villager very soon and move towards it while you are chasing or start hitting the hussar. Let’s take a look at the below image.
The enemy has caught the best villager possible that is farthest from your first stable, paladin and the TC. You should instantaneously garrison your villager to TC. Assuming that you managed to save it, your base should look like below.
On the black circle, your paladin is hitting the hussar while the hussar is looking for another villager and you have a garrisoned villager inside your T.C. You should immediately release your garrisoned villager to work at the safest building farthest away from the hussar as shown with the arrow. This will minimize the idle time of your villager inside TC. At the same time, if the enemy hussar is still on high HP, you should immediately garrison the villager towards which the hussar is headed (shown in red circle). Allowing hussar to make you more than one hit is not advised unless you have no buildings finished. Because if you have your first building finished then it is most likely that your villager will go work on a spot farther than TC, so you might not have enough time to garrison it back if you wait the 2nd or 3rd hit.
01.30 min – 04.00 min
So far, you are building your military buildings located with the best possible design, producing units as soon as they are finished, raided the opponent with your hussar and eliminated the enemy hussar.
What should you do next 2.5 mins?
1- Keep producing army as soon as buildings are completed
2- Keep an eye on maintaining 1 villager/building rule
3- Send paladins to raid villagers at the enemy base
4- Be prepared for the possible incoming of the enemy paladin
5- Understand the map & set-up your strategy
6- Start to build at least 1, preferably 2 TC around your main gold
The first two of these items are self-explanatory and were dealt with previously in this tutorial. With more experience and practice, this will be easy for you to achieve.
Let’s move to the item 3.
Send paladins to raid villagers at the enemy base
As soon as you eliminate the hussars start sending paladins to enemy base to raid some villagers. This time your primary purpose is really to kill the villagers as paladins are much stronger than hussars and can easily kill the villagers. How much paladin you should send to raid is really hard to explain simply, that would depend on many variables such as the map size, market factor, effectiveness of your first paladins, map generation etc. You will have a better understanding of the paladin raid with more experience. But I can say that normally, 4 to 8 paladins are good enough, any less might be insignificant, any more might be a waste unless some other factors come into play. As you will realize in time, the line between putting pressure on your opponent and wasting your army is extremely thin in DM.
Let’s assume you will send 6 paladins. But sending is not enough, you should really care about controlling these paladins. There are many ways and tricks to use these paladins very effectively. I will mention some of them here.
Since you want to hit the enemy as early you can, you do not usually wait 6 paladins to be produced. You send them as soon as they are produced as a single paladin or with groups of 2 or 3. Let’s assume you send them in three groups with 2 paladins in each group. Send the first paladins directly to enemy base from the closest road possible and try to raid some villagers. You will notice that naturally, the opponent will bring most of his forces to encounter these paladins. This is where you hit him. While he is busy trying to kill your initial paladins, you are on the way with other groups to hit the lands where he emptied and take out his villagers.
The most important is how you control the very first paladins arriving his base. What I would advise is to kill the villager if you catch a good one. If you cannot, use these first paladins to distract his army away from your upcoming paladins directions so that they can hit the villagers easier. As a good example for this occasion, have a look at the below image.
While the blue player is dealing with the 1 red paladin, the other 4 red paladins are on a clear path the kill other villagers.
Similar to the hussar, when all your paladins, are dead or with very low HP, try to distract its army to far away locations by sending your paladins away. If the opponent is not careful, he can chase you all the way and can have a very distracted and divided army where you can kill one by one with bigger troops you are producing. One thing you should be careful about distracting his army through the map is that you should not make him chase you through the important parts of the map such as gold piles, hills etc. Because within the next minutes you will want to have a map control and probably start building castles to those places. So you do not want to see opponent forces there.
Be prepared for the possible incoming of the enemy paladin
If you have followed a clear homogenous build order as told before, your villagers will already be a hard target. What you should focus on is to take down incoming paladins effectively and without allowing them to create distraction. Do not follow 1 paladin with overrated armies. There is one important thing that many people use and can help you to minimize paladin raid damage. Normally in DM, you use gather points for military buildings to grow your army at a particular location, usually just in front of your base. For the first 2.30 mins, do not use gather points. Let the units be produced instantly where your buildings are. Since you have homogenously distributed buildings, your units will be created and placed homogenously around your base, so you will be ready for incoming paladins from every possible direction.
Understand the map & set-up your strategy
This is a very important task to accomplish. The sooner you do this in the game, the more advantage you have. By the time between 2 and 4 mins you should have already looked at the map in detail while managing other stuff as told before, and set-up some strategies in mind. Of course, keep in mind that, DM contains a lot of variation, your every move and strategy is subject to change within minutes. But still, understanding the map will allow you to control the game, eliminate the possible surprises, and do what you need to do before it is too late. For example let’s take a look at the following mini map.
Having looked at the maps, players usually decide which parts of the map are important for them and set-up their strategies. From a quick look some of the ideas might be going around players’ mind are more or less like this (of course the ideas can vary a lot between players and how the game proceeds etc)
Blue player
1- All my golds are in front. It is a must for me to take the hills 2 and 3 otherwise most likely I am dead. So, I have to play it really offensive because if I allow him to push and take the map control, it will be only a matter of time for him to kill.
2- I should try to take the hill 1, which I can collect the stone there, acquire map control on that side of the map, and raid his golds around the hill 5. If possible, I can push in time to the hill 5 which he will claim to have very soon.
3- He will most likely do his defense at hill 4, so I should either push really good and effective or be careful about not to waste there.
4- I should be really fast about the relics and take the three close to me, but first try for the 4th one on the bottom right corner of the map.
Red player,
1- His gold are all in front, I can have a really good edge here. I should try to push for hill 2, while building defense on hill 4 which I can use as a fail-safe, if I cannot push through the hill 2.
2- If I get hill 3, I can strike his two golds over there.
3- I should try to take the hill 1, which I can collect the stone there, acquire map control on that side of the map
4- I should be really fast about the relics and take the two close to me, but first try for the three relics closer to his base, perhaps I should send one paladin to each relic to delay his capturing those.
And much more…
But having those ideas does not necessarily mean that you are going to achieve all this, some of which you will probably will not be able to. A lot of things can go different in actual game, but it is mandatory to read and understand the map to make the smartest moves for your growing army.
So far, it is almost 4 minutes. You must have completed your military buildings, at least must be started to build siege workshops. Around this time try to build two town centers around your main gold.
So far, that is all for the first 4 mins of AOC DM hunswar. I am sure there are quite other things that I missed during writing (which I discover now that is not easy task :D ), so if you have any other contributions we can update the tutorial.
I hope to write more in the future about what comes next after a good start (Making good fights, army control, eco balance etc).
I hope that this tutorial will be helpful for at least few people who wants to try out DM..
Best of luck ! 8-)