How do I Beat Back Rush Tactics?

[LoloMo]

First of all, if a potential rusher offers you a NAP, by all means, take it! ;-)

From my perspective, a rush strategy that quickly takes out one enemy capital is doing well. Rushing a second enemy normally does not happen. So a rusher will look around and attack what he views as the weakest enemy.

If you took good scales, you need to project enough strength that the rusher will seek weaker prey. A good rusher will definitely be able to defeat a good scale strategy, but if the war drags on before he is able to defeat you, then he has lost also. So just being able to present yourself as a difficult opponent will entice him to form a NAP with you and attack others.

[AlgaeNymph]

thejeff said:
[T]rampling Minotaurs[.]

The one of the things I'm having problems with. Any suggestions on holding back the running of the bulls?

[Baalz]

DryaUnda said:

The one of the things I'm having problems with. Any suggestions on holding back the running of the bulls?

Gah, I should almost certainly refrain from answering that at the moment, but I'd suggest looking through the fairly comprehensive list of suggestions for dealing with elephants and see if any of them seem likely to translate well to minotaurs. A lot of them won't, but some should.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=540554

Gah, I can't catch it, it's slipping out....

I'd set everybody towards the back of the battlefield and have your Augurs use body ethereal, body ethereal, then start with the evocation spells. This should hopefully buy you the time you need to bring down the minotaurs.

Shadow blasts should work reasonably well.

Flaming arrows will effect all those javelins.

[theenemy]

One tactic I like to use against rushers is the scout spam(maybe someone here has mentioned it already, I haven't read all posts). Like Baalz mentioned, rushers tend to be aggressive so they PROBABLY invest most of their resources into steamrolling you. They mostly don't care about PD.
So what I like to do is to build a lot of scouts and them into the rushers territory. Remember: An undefended province can be taken over even by a scout.
Then I buy some PD in the newly conquered provinces and laugh an evil laugh.
Hopefully this will get the rushers attention and make him turn back his armies to reconquer his provinces...unless of course he thinks that he can steamroll you anyway.
This is not some kind of perfect plan, but it has worked for me a couple of times.

[thejeff]

Baalz, I suspect you've got a particular situation in mind, so those may be valid suggestions there, but I keep seeing things like this suggested for dealing with rushes.

As I understand the term, a rush is real early. First year, at least.
Flaming Arrows, Shadow blasts, etc, require quite a bit of research. Those are great mid-game counter for Minotaurs, etc, but they're hardly going to be available in time to stop an early rush.

[Baalz]

thejeff said:
Baalz, I suspect you've got a particular situation in mind, so those may be valid suggestions there, but I keep seeing things like this suggested for dealing with rushes.

As I understand the term, a rush is real early. First year, at least.
Flaming Arrows, Shadow blasts, etc, require quite a bit of research. Those are great mid-game counter for Minotaurs, etc, but they're hardly going to be available in time to stop an early rush.

True, I was referring to a particular scenarios (he's EA Ermor around the beginning of year three), but to be honest I don't really see minotaurs being a viable rush (as in first year) option. The reason is because they really need critical mass to be effective. They have no shield, light armor, and no defense to speak of. They've got decent hitpoints, but they have to inflict a lot of damage real fast so the battle is over before those hitpoints run out. Heck, 10 minotaurs probably can't take out the PD on most people's capital (compare to 500 gold worth of other units used for rushing). For the same reason this means minotaurs are poor choices for initial expansion which makes them very difficult to mass in the first year. Minotaurs come into their own when you can field groups of 30+ buffed by haste though. Against human sized opponents this is really where you need a counter, before that point they're not terribly scary.

PS, thought of another counter for EA Ermor (and others) - don't they have fairly high defense cavalry? Won't help you at this point as your capital is sieged, but having the minotaurs run into those first should stop the trample and buy you the time to inflict damage.

[Agrajag]

theenemy said:
One tactic I like to use against rushers is the scout spam(maybe someone here has mentioned it already, I haven't read all posts). Like Baalz mentioned, rushers tend to be aggressive so they PROBABLY invest most of their resources into steamrolling you. They mostly don't care about PD.
So what I like to do is to build a lot of scouts and them into the rushers territory. Remember: An undefended province can be taken over even by a scout.
Then I buy some PD in the newly conquered provinces and laugh an evil laugh.
Hopefully this will get the rushers attention and make him turn back his armies to reconquer his provinces...unless of course he thinks that he can steamroll you anyway.
This is not some kind of perfect plan, but it has worked for me a couple of times.

I'm guessing that most players buy at least 1-3 PD in each province (and all players should), which should be enough to repel a single scout. And even if your method works, he'll just buy another point or two of PD (after he sees one province conquered, that is.) in every other province and the scout rush has been averted.
I don't even think the rusher will be in any financial difficulty, since he did use his rush strategy to capture a lot of surrounding provinces which gives a nice boost to your economy.

[llamabeast]

I'd say the scout rush tactic has a reasonably chance of working simply due to carelessness on the part of the other player, but since it can be stopped by only 1PD it certainly is a bit risky.

I say this because I often forget to build PD and often lose provinces to enemy scouts. Grr!

[Agrajag]

llamabeast said:
I'd say the scout rush tactic has a reasonable chance of working simply due to carelessness on the part of the other player, but since it can be stopped by only 1PD it certainly is a bit risky.

I say this because I often forget to build PD and often lose provinces to enemy scouts. Grr!

Maybe you should try it against monkey PD, even 100 monkey PD can't stop a lone scout
And yeah, I can definitely sympathize with carelessness :S

[sector24]

Can't you attack the rushing army head on with a scout set to retreat and have a chance of forcing him to stay in his province? I'm not sure what the odds are, but they're greater than 0 if it works, and if you do it every turn you're bound to stein the opponent at least once.