That's the thing with Zeus, he is so versatile that you can go any god.

Classic Fight vs Norse: Athena
2tc: Hermes for Cease
FM: Hermes, Apollo, Hephaestus

That's just general strats, but you could do Apollo FH vs Egyptian or something, or Hera FM (idk).

Zeus doesn't really have a "best" path, unlike Isis who has Bast, Nepthys, Thoth.

[This message has been edited by A_PunK (edited 02-11-2009 @ 10:06 PM).]

most of the time when I play greek, Hephaestus is a
no-brainer for me, since Collossi are so awesome ( and spamming them is so funny)

Hephaestus has to be one of the only auto decisions Zeus makes.

Why not dionysus in FM?

For underworld because in FM you want to be aggressive.

Well, I guess the bronze power is a very aggressive thing as well.

Quoted from A_Punk:

Classic Fight vs Norse: Athena

For classical fight vs Norse, both classical gods are equally viable. However the choice depends on your playstyle.

Go Athena if you want to just barge into his base with mainly tox and bull minos, winning the decisive battle by means of restoration, and then destroying everything. Hermes is the god to go if you want to ruin his economy by centaur spamming and heavy raiding. Both tactics are > Norse if executed properly, at least as far as Thor is concerned. I guess this also goes for Odin. Not sure if Loki's own rush abilities make him strong enough to stop the Athena rush and dodge the cent strangle with his fast hersirs.

Generally, I think you will want Dionysus more often than Apollo. The 5% on everything (including titans, myth, siege) are better than 10% on archers only, the myth unit is more useful in most cases (even though manticores are IMHO better than their reputation), and his god power is more useful than Apollo's UP in most of the cases (in 1v1, not in team games). Dionysus also provides a strong water myth and greatly improved cavalry, further emphasizing Zeus' versatility. In fact, Zeus' cavalry is not the faintest bit weaker than that of Poseidon; he just pays a little bit more for it.

IMHO FM is not that desirable for Zeus anyway. Zeus is good in mythic age, but he is at least as good in heroic age, because heroic is the strongest age of Greek anyway. Why wait for mythic, when the Eggy will have awesome catapults that outclass petroboli, when you can attack in heroic, when you have long-range petroboli and your Eggy opponent only has crappy siege towers?

In mythic age, I agree with empireofages and A_Punk. Hephaestus > Hera all of the times unless you are in it for the fun.

Siege Towers are not crappy compared to Petroboli.

Quoted from DeathAndPain:

Why wait for mythic, when the Eggy will have awesome catapults that outclass petroboli

That logic doesn't make sense - you are assuming that when you hit Mythic, your opponent will be in Mythic too, which is clearly not the case with an FM. He will probably try to get Mythic when he sees you've gone Mythic too but he might not ever get there if you attack early enough.

FM is done for the Colossi, Bellerophron, Plenty Vault (equivalent to 9-10 free villagers IIRC) and Myrmidons. The cheap armoury upgrades are useful a bit later on too because you should be able to upgrade your units much faster than your opponent. Underworld Passage is usually used too to destroy the opponent's home base. A Zeus FM is hard to counter as Egypt if you are not prepared for it.

It it indeed, but if you see it coming it's actually very easy to counter on the other hand, speaking from my own experience.

Anyway, 90% of the FM's done on my are usually through Apollo with his Kataskopos (sp?) putting UP right outside my base and charging in within seconds a bit after mythic.

[This message has been edited by Nirwanda (edited 02-12-2009 @ 10:23 AM).]

But do you have enough units to attack that fast, since you dont make units while in Classical/Heroic? Isnt it better to wait for all iron+ good amount of myrms? And if you expect a FM, how do you counter it?

But do you have enough units to attack that fast, since you dont make units while in Classical/Heroic? Isnt it better to wait for all iron+ good amount of myrms?

You can definatly make some troops while getting to mythic and still get a respectable FM time, especially while advancing. It's not like you need to UP the first second you hit mythic, but the longer you wait the better your opponent can prepare. But you should basically atleast go in with a couple of colossus and myrmidons/bella which doesn't take that long to train.

And if you expect a FM, how do you counter it?

There are multiple ways of countering this. Some basic stuff is making infantry counters (or archers) for his Myrms and plenty of heroes for his colossus.

Another strat which I did myself was that I made a TC and a forward camp outside his base, and the second he cast UP at my base I charged HIS base with a shitload of phants/ca/priests, and since I had supplied myself with plenty of gold I had some priests left at home and the ability to spam mercs he couldn't push through as easily as I could (I also had more troops ofcourse).

This forced him to return to his base via his UP. I retreated that battle back to my FB eventually, but I stood my ground, contained him and won the game with basic mapcontrol through 4-2 TC, simply because I wasn't caught by the element of surprise.

[This message has been edited by Nirwanda (edited 02-12-2009 @ 11:51 AM).]

IMHO FM is not that desirable for Zeus anyway. Zeus is good in mythic age, but he is at least as good in heroic age, because heroic is the strongest age of Greek anyway. Why wait for mythic, when the Eggy will have awesome catapults that outclass petroboli, when you can attack in heroic, when you have long-range petroboli and your Eggy opponent only has crappy siege towers?

Siege towers are not crappy.

He will not be mythic.

You will not be using petroboli in mythic.

---

Sometimes you need to scare the lambs,
tell tales of evil bad wolves.
Because if there is nothing to fear,
they might think for themselves.

Quoted from Nirwanda:

You can definatly make some troops while getting to mythic and still get a respectable FM time, especially while advancing. It's not like you need to UP the first second you hit mythic, but the longer you wait the better your opponent can prepare.

But if you plan on attacking him with units that you made in the earlier ages the instant you reach mythic age, then I wonder why you went FM in the first place. If there is to be any sense in FM, then it is to train mythic-age-units and attack with these. I mean, with Hephaestus you are not aiming for a game-ending god power to accompany your onslaught with.

You already said yourself that you would like to have a couple myrmidons and colossi as well as Bellerophon before you attack. But in this case, you could as well go Dionysus and attack from the front. You will not be able to pop up in his rear, but in return you will get a bronzed army with +5% hp on all units (including your myrms and colossi), and I consider that vastly better for your mythic attack. And while you are training your mythic units, you may as well consider making 2 additional armories and quickly research Hephaestus-discounted armory upgrades in three armories simultaneously so that you have them when your attack takes place.

Quoted from Sam Ham:

Siege towers are not crappy.

They do their job, but petroboli are better as a siege engine because they can attack from safe range. Things may change in mythic age when siege towers benefit more from the Engineers upgrade than petroboli do, but as a matter of fact petroboli are easier to employ, which more than makes up for their weaker attack.

A key advantage of siege towers is that they spawn from ridiculously-cheap siege camps that can quickly be built anywhere (well, not really quickly construction-speed-wise, but with little material investition) while petroboli must be built in expensive fortresses. But the petrobolos unit itself is better, giving Greek an edge in heroic age that they lose in mythic.

Quoted from Sam Ham:

He will not be mythic.

You hope he will not. But by going FM yourself, you are basically giving him time in which he is not being attacked. He may just go FM as well, in which case he is in mythic, too, and you have lost the Greek advantage of heroic ranged siege without even trying to exploit it. The alternative is that he uses the time and money to mount a heroic army and attack you before you have accumulated your myrms/colossi/armory ups.

Quoted from Sam Ham:

You will not be using petroboli in mythic.

I agree that catapults vastly outclass petroboli, but that does not mean that the latter can no longer be used in mythic age. As Zeus you can use hops or myrms as an alternative, but Eggy is an excellent race to counter these with both axes and chariots. Colossus spam is an option, yes. But why not also put some stress upon your opponent by attacking him somewhere with a couple petroboli besides a fortress? They may not do that much damage, but he still cannot ignore them if a migdol or even TC is the target.

Helepoli are not the alternative, IMHO. They have crappy range and still are not stronger than catapults or siege towers attack-wise.

The thing that makes helepoli good is their 650 HP, unlike siege towers it takes villagers a while to kill them.

DaP, ZEUS PLAYERS go FM against Eggy because they get Colossus, Bellerophon, Plenty Vault, Myrmidons, Underworld Passage and cheap Armory ups (if they actually have favor to do it)

They don't even have the resources to build Fortress+Catapults...

You already said yourself that you would like to have a couple myrmidons and colossi as well as Bellerophon before you attack. But in this case, you could as well go Dionysus and attack from the front. You will not be able to pop up in his rear, but in return you will get a bronzed army with +5% hp on all units (including your myrms and colossi), and I consider that vastly better for your mythic attack. And while you are training your mythic units, you may as well consider making 2 additional armories and quickly research Hephaestus-discounted armory upgrades in three armories simultaneously so that you have them when your attack takes place.

You mention the bolded part like it means nothing, when infact it means everything.

If you send a couple of colossi accompanied with some tox/myrms you at your enemies homebase in a split second and he has no troops there (because his slow priests/phants hang out at his FB) you will be able to shread the major part of his economy down and win the game. Heck, 80% of his food income alone might be gone all of a sudden. Then you can enforce a camp by quicly sending vills through your UP and even create a TC on top of where his was.

If the egyptian player decided to try to run back and defend his base at this point he will most likely get there too late and lose the game. Especially if he has not prepared and only has a standard eggy heroic army (when infact he should have prepared with a few rax and more priests etc).

You mention the bolded part like it means nothing, when infact it means everything.

except that you made too much bold so he actualyl does say it like it means everything

and what is even funnier is that you + dap are wrong as it means nothing

+5% kind of sucks seeing as you overkill on attack at the last blow most of the time, so what would normally take 10 hits would now take... 10 hits, and very rarelyl 11 hits

of course colossi take more hits but 5% more on ein colossus means nothing

uw > bronze + bacchanalia

if you are cav heavyl then ofc dionysus gets uber

+5% kind of sucks seeing as you overkill on attack at the last blow most of the time, so what would normally take 10 hits would now take... 10 hits, and very rarelyl 11 hits

Not true.

There are so many possible damage variables that can come out of an attack so that it makes it virtually impossible to know that.

Yes, most blows are overkills ofcourse (10 damage done means that 9/10 the attacks are overkill statistically), but not that many attacks are overkill by 5%.

5% more on ein colossus means nothing 5% more hp on a colossus

[This message has been edited by Nirwanda (edited 02-14-2009 @ 09:34 PM).]

But UW.

Quoted from i r n00b:

+5% kind of sucks seeing as you overkill on attack at the last blow most of the time, so what would normally take 10 hits would now take... 10 hits, and very rarelyl 11 hits

This is nonsense. You do not typically overkill, except for focus-fire with ranged units (which are the small minority of the attacks). If you mean the last blow of a single unit, which depletes the remaining hp and has a couple overkill attack points left, well, these are rarely enough to eliminate another 5%. For instance, those 5% for hops are 6 hp. Since hops have 35% hack armor, this is the equivalent of 9.2 hack attack. Few units in the game have an attack that is so high that they overkill at more that 9.2 hack. (I consciously ignore armory upgrades, because for every armory attack upgrade of the enemy unit the hop can have a corresponding armor upgrade. In fact, armor upgrades are even slightly more effective than attack upgrades. The only valid attack upgrades in this respect are line upgrades.)

But even if the above was not the case, your logics would still be flawed. In some cases, it may make no difference, but in other cases the loss for the attacking unit is even greater. You can understand this by looking at the following parallel:

If you drive through town in your car, and the guy before you is slightly slower than you, then you cannot proceed faster than him in most cases, even if overtaking him is no problem: At the next red traffic lights he will catch up again and stop right behind you. The edge that you gained on him after overtaking him is being lost at every single traffic lights. That would be your logics.

However, in a few cases you will just be able to barely catch the traffic light at green, and in these cases, it will be red by the time he gets there, i.e. it will have turned red right in front of his eyes. He then has to wait for a full lights cycle while you are gaining distance. This rare gain easily makes up for all the small losses. In average, your speed benefit is exactly the same as if there were no traffic lights.

Likewise, say 10 tox suffice to kill 1 unit, and the enemy focus-fires. In most cases, he will just use what tox he has and not take care that exactly 10 of his tox fire at your unit. This means that some tox overkill at the last shot. In this likely case, a slight gain in hp for the target unit would just mean less overkill and therefore have no benefit for the target. This is your point.

However, parallel to the traffic lights example, there are a few cases in which these few additional hp take the target unit beyond the limit, so that it survives the volley that would otherwise have killed it. This means that a full additional volley will be fired at that target, even though a single tox hit would have sufficed to kill it! These cases are the minority, but when they happen, the loss for the attacker is correspondingly higher, because in this case, all tox shots but one are wasted thanks to the hp upgrade.

In average, you get what you paid for: 5% more durability.

And 5% on everything are much better than 10% better attack for a specific unit and nothing for all the rest (unless you are using some kind of mono-unit army).

Quoted from i r n00b:

5% more on ein colossus means nothing

5% on a colossus mean a lot, because these 5% mean 55 additional hp, protected by 80% pierce armor! Colossi have a high attack to use the additional time. This really makes a difference.

Likewise, these 5% are a big deal for titans. 5% for a titan are 350 hp protected by 90+% armor against all damage types. In other words, thanks to these 5% the titan survives at least 3500 additional points worth of incoming attacks (even more for pierce attacks). This is also to be multiplied with the damage that the unit can deal during the additional time of survival. For a toxote, it matters little whether it lives an additional 5 seconds or something. Yes, I know, 5% more hp is not worth 5 seconds of additional survival for a tox, but it can easily be worth 20 seconds of additional survival for a titan. And we all know what damage a titan can deal in 20 seconds...

I would also like to mention that armor increases multiply with hp increases. If you research a +10 hp increase and research another +10 hp increase, then these bonuses only add to +20. The second hp increase does not improve the first one; it just adds to it. However, if you research a +10 hp increase and then a +10% armor increase, then this armor increase will not only improve your base unit, but will also further improve the hp increase that you researched before. Therefore the benefit is the mathematical product.

Dionysus offers both: You increase the hp of all your stuff by 5%, and then greatly increase its armor by means of bronze. The effect is huge!

Quoted from Sam Ham:

But UW.

UW sure is not bad, but last time I checked it could not fight for you.

Quoted from Nirwanda:

If you send a couple of colossi accompanied with some tox/myrms you at your enemies homebase in a split second and he has no troops there (because his slow priests/phants hang out at his FB) you will be able to shread the major part of his economy down and win the game.

And if you march them there manually so he has time to move his army there as well, but then all your stuff has +5% hp and is bronzed, then you may well simply slay his army along with his base...

The difference may not be that great, but remember that lategame, killing the enemy home TC is not necessarily an automatic gg. You all-out assault his TC under fire of his housed towers, you kill his TC. Then his army arrives, destroys your stuff which is still under fire of his towers, then destroys your UW while he rebuilds his TC. Effectively, he has lost a TC for 100f/400g (Eggy price), you have lost your army. He may also have had some military losses, but yours may easily be greater. He quickly rebuilds his TC, and the attack is over.

However, when you attack with bronzed stuff, and that stuff is even 5% improved, then your army is stronger, and the stronger army has the lesser losses. You crush his army, and after that, destroying his base is an easy thing for Zeus hops or myrms.

Winning a major battle just because of Bronze is sadly not usually the case, it doesn't totally reverse things like FW can.

lol the thing is that u can replace ur units because u have ur 3 tcs still at work while he has 2, THEREFORE he is at his pop limit and will not b able to replenish his army while u can. That can easily win u the game right there if u have the res to replace ur army. Also, a major part of ur opponents eco will be shut down for that period of time (depending if its his home tc or 2nd tc) and if resources are tight, he wont be able to fight you off. Also dotn forget that vills repair UW very very quickly.

But you dont slay his army of ellies so easily, that he has to replace it within a few seconds. In fact, he has a better army than you, because you went mythic, and he had all the time+rec to max his army+ups.

No.

Even with 1/2 collosi and bella and not fully upgraded myrms he still has better army.

UW sure is not bad, but last time I checked it could not fight for you.

Yes well last time you checked Rain boosted MU stats so who knows what UW does.

Sam_Ham 1 : DaP 0

UW is generally much better than Bronze IMO. It requires you to actually have something to send through the passage but then Bronze is also useless if you only have 5 Hoplites. The repair rate is what makes it particularly powerful - it can be very difficult to destroy it without a GP such as Locust Swarm, Meteor etc.

Quoted from DragonQ:
The repair rate is what makes it particularly powerful

What repair rate? No GP is reparable. Oh wait. It's another awesome Titans-only bug. .

UW does wonders in team games, and in some maps like Alfheim and Watering hole. The rest I'd just go Dionysus.
-invent00r

I doubt that. Myrms can be countered with axemen nicely. The combo that you named does not include any tox, so you will not be able to deal with the axes. (And making tox on top of what you said would cost even additional time and resources.) The colossi are the tough stuff, but you cannot go FM and train lots of them before the Eggy opponent assaults you with a big heroic army.