elitetroops
Deity
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2012
- Messages
- 5,725
Sure fast starts make early rushes much more effective. But I think the land and resources in your BFC is only a minor factor in making a start fast. In my games early worker steals are a much bigger factor. If I by accident bump into a 5 gems start, but find there are no possibilities to steal early workers, I happily throw it away and instead play a start with quite basic lands and 3 workers stolen in the first 20 turns. In an immortal HoF game I would virtually always open something like warrior-warrior-barracks, with no intention of building my own workers, which only works as I can throw away the game and start another one when it fails. This is why I'm saying that in HoF type play, the general approach to the game makes a bigger difference than the start itself. For S&T games which usually revolve around a single attempt at one specified map, I would never suggest such an opening. To those reading this who are struggling to move up the levels, ignore these remarks and just build worker first, okay?Now of course it does depend on the type of game you're playing, but IMO it's "HoF starts" that make early rushes stronger than they usually are -- attacking earlier and having more production available both reduce the absolute/relative cost of "early rushing". Basically playing with a very fast start makes you stronger compared to the AI, which is like reducing the difficulty level, thus increasing the efficiency of early rushes. I hope my thoughts aren't too confusing![]()

OP plays marathon, because he felt his armies were going obsolete before he could use them on noble/epic speed. Learning how to take out noble AI is learning how to walk. If you can't win wars at tech parity on noble but try to learn it on emperor or higher, then you're definitely trying to run before you can walk.Certainly early warfare can be important and learning how to deal with it, but you have to learn how to walk before you can run..with a pointy stick.