cool strat, id like to see if i can give it a try. iw as wondering if you could get some more recs of this strat and get them up on the forums

1. the german kills your hussars by TC/MM or free uhlans.

2. he sends 8 skirms after 6 aging skirms. then you are dead. i can micro my skirms good enough to kill halbs thanks to their slow speed. 8 more skirms and you are screwed.
In case I do a later FF with 3 SW I can also send jags ASAP or some other mercs which appear 1 min later.

3. If I send 700 gold, I can reach fortress with 17 vills and 1 TP @ 7:00 with 6 aging skirms. If i drop a rax and start making skirms you are screwed aswell.

I just wrote here what came to my mind when I read your strategy but I think your strategy isnt so bad and I might try it soon.
It might work vs other spanish players, I'm not sure. (good vs pike/lancer shipments but bad vs rods)
Against anyone with aging skirms it's probably not that good.

Someone did this against me a while ago. I was French. He got my tc but then got owned by my 14 skirms and 2 falconets with me taking almost no losses.

props for yobbo looking for a use for spanish UC.

the problem with this, is that it is not really better than vff->swiss pike.

swiss pike may take extra time to come, but they dont require church, and they are a lot faster and do a lot more siege damage than these halbs. plus 1k gold is faster to get than 1k wood.

killa -

1. Yes, your hussars will die, their only goal is to kill as many age up skirms as possible. You have to micro hard and fast to kill them with hussars, using halbs nearby to kill skirms pinned under attack from cav also helps.

2. I did say to kill their houses so they cannot send their 8 skirms shipment straight away. With the tp build you should be sending lancers/cannon after fortressing to counter his other shipments. Also, jags take 1 min to arrive, 13 halbs take 40 secs to kill tc - and this is after housing him to delay his first fortress shipment.

3. Indeed, I said at the top of my initial post how dangerous the german 700 gold build was to this strat. Also, most germans do stable FF, not an early barracks also. They usually rely on double skirm shipments, which you can defeat with your lancer/cannon shipments that you aquire at a higher rate due to your single tp.

Yes, I realise this strat requires tight timing and execution - especially against a german, but I think strat diversity is a good thing. One of the main bonuses for this however, is the suprise, as most players expect the standard spanish pike/cannon/highlander/swiss FF.

I haven't tried this against a fellow spainard but I'd imagine that halbs + massed cannons would be good vs them .

somme -
hmm.. french are probably the easiest to perform this against, as they are so slow (if they are FFing). I've also learnt to go for houses, not tc first, to falter pesky skirm shipments.

When doing this FF attack (it's not a rush), you really must be aware of where his villagers are and what he is doing. This is not hard with spanish, as you can utilise their explorer and dogs to track their vills and act accordingly (ie: hmm hes mining lots of gold for jags, hes chopping wood to get houses to replace the ones I razed, etc).

timbo- I'll try to get some decent recs

[This message has been edited by Yobbo (edited 07-09-2006 @ 06:00 AM).]

ulti - the main advantage the halbs have over swiss pikes is they arrive in seconds, instead of 1 min. Also, using 700 wood shipment instead of 2nd 600 gold shipment is marginally better.

But I do concede that a VFF-swiss pike is not really much different gameplay and eco efficiency wise .

[This message has been edited by Yobbo (edited 07-09-2006 @ 06:29 AM).]

You could always send both...halbs first for the faster attack, then lancers+cannon as your next shipments, now he has WW for your lancers, now you send pikes. It's not either/or, although if you go halbs first the pikes get delayed, of course.

French don't really ff slow and their villagers can escape relatively easily due to having more speed and hp and build houses offsite.

Oh, no. A strat to beat the German FF.

i like it!

im gunna do this as im bored with my in the base with 16 pike take house then back with lancer/falcs vs german strat.

however, if i was facing my german and someone did this to me i think i would be able to kill 4 hussars off with mm/uhlan/tc and then would have enuff skirms to kill the halbs, and housing is no really a problem for germans which send the house card which i do since i found out grunt does it, and chances are i would send 5 dopps as a hit fortress because spa dont have much to beat that.

My gripe with this strategy would be that by using 9 halberds as your primary siege weapon you are exposing yourself far too much. All the German would need is half a dozen well microed WW or to get his skirmisher shipment and your halberd investment is down the drain, along with victory.

it's 13 guard halberdiers, fantab. and you are supposed to get your other fortress shipments to counter his

somme: i still find the french are much easier than germans

[This message has been edited by Yobbo (edited 07-09-2006 @ 09:36 PM).]

I've never used it before!

In that case I can pay that, might even test it one day!

EDIT - Good luck with the rush, you'll need it. Granted I only tried a few times, but I found that Spain simply can't rush a decent German.

MM + 9 xbows + 6 skirms at the same time = one fkd group of muskets and rods and pikes

[This message has been edited by The Bob (edited 07-09-2006 @ 09:43 PM).]

This is pretty old... iamgrunt did this to me in 1.05 (matched up with me in QS). He had falcs there too...

Quote:

No!? Really...?

this happened to me a couple games ago.

when i saww the guard halbs i yawned and called up 20 strelets and 9 kalmucks.

he didnt like that.

i had the upper hand cause of that and opris but i was too dumb to build a second tc and he kept booming. i couldnt find any damn wood on bayou.

fruit bayou. i just think theirs tooo many ways to beat halbs. also the corselet tech slows down your rods. and those are your wildcard.

yeah that was me XD (yawning... c'mon). Didn't really work too well because i was experimenting with it but it wasn't too smart either because the entire map had barely any wood and i blew most of it getting the church, halberdiers, and 2 other tc's. I figure the halberdiers would be better more as a meatshield for cannons while other spanish support units go to work.

I was thinking that a power ff might be more effective. 16 villagers going into age 2. ship the 5 and 4 villager card while training 5 more vilagers. and you should get to fortress at 8:00 or so. If you have all villagers on wood at the time you hit the age up button it'll only take 28 villagers to get the exact amount of wood neccesary to build a church and ship halberdiers right after you hit up for fortress. use the 2 cannon card and lay siege untill he has a way to counter your force and by then you should have already had enough exp to ship and set up a fort and plenty of wood two build two more tc's and farm or two for your troops to fall back on. should be easy to boom from there then finish you assault with a mass of units.

this strat is like russian vff-opri.

the effectiveness decreases if it took to long, so it doesnt matter whether you seen someone do this before, if they did it at 10 minutes, ofcourse it will be useless. but at 8:00 it is a entirely different matter, if you can do it by 7:30, it is a bomb.

yobbo

Personally I think you need to work on the BO a bit more. you need to get rid of the extra stuff that you dont really need/may not need.

1, do you need or do you not need a market? market and +10% wood upgrade cost 100w+100f, that will take 1700w to pay itself back, so if you didnt chop 1700W before the halbs out, then it is better to not build a market.

2, whats the point of TP? 250W will slow you down by 30seconds on 17 vil, and you dont really need it for the halbs, once you take done the TC you get enough XP for next shipment anyways.

3, personally i think there are two approaches, you need to workout which one is better:

age2 with high vil count, possibly 17 or 18 vil and no TC idle time, better eco but much tighter age2.

or, age2 with minimal number of vils and dont ship 3 vils, go for fortress asap then ship 700w and 600w so you dont have to chop anywood.