Well it depends on what you call a "rush". What I usually do is the standard 3 sw 700w start, with TP + market + hunt dogs + placer mines (you get those in early age 1 or in transition) and 125w banked. From 400w age up + 125w you get first a rax then 3 houses, and just put SW on coin and vils on food, and you should be able to get a 5 dops batch out slightly before 6 min. That's not hard rush but it's early pressure. I honestly don't really see another why to make dops anyway, because if you ship 3 dops first then I'm pretty sure you will get only a batch of 4 dops out (because even with 3 sw, getting 5 dops out is pretty hard), so you rush with 7 dops instead of 5, and delay all good shipments (3 sw, 700w, 700g) by a shipment. Not very good if you ask me.
duckzilla wrote:Doppels are more of a fun unit than a real one for rush purposes imo. They cost 200 resources compared to 80 of a pikeman. At the same time, the pikeman has both more than half dmg to buildings(32?vs60)/cavalry(40?vs60?) and more than half HP (120vs230) compared to doppels. On top, pikes are faster by 0.5.
Further, doppels and pikes benefit from the same unit combat cards and arsenal upgrades. So for me the real question, besides the fact that there is no pike shipment, is: What can doppels do that pikemen cannot?
(In lategame there are reasons for the doppel to be a nice unit. Having a 30-40 high siege dmg units with 5,75 speed to cut through your enemies' walls and kill factories is just awesome
)
There are a lot of situation where dops are better than pikemen. The only 2 situations where pikemen are actually better is when you only want to siege buildings (pikemen indeed have slightly better siege) or when you bow/pike rush (if you tower rush you don't have the eco to get dops early so you need to make pikes, or if you use wood crates to spam from double rax then pikes become really cheap and can be spammed).
Other than that : dops are actually a useful unit in fights against anything they can reach. If dops get in melee against musketeers, crossbows, or w/e infantry, they will do (very) good damage, mainly because of the area effect. Pikes on the other hand are essentially useless against any unit but cav. Well, they can still tank in cover mode, but dops can more or less do that as well. Colonial dop/cav is an option for germany, because it's a good unit combo. Cav/pike would just be terrible. If you play against russia for example, a bow/dop/cav timing is much scarier than bow/pike cav timing because dops can actually kill strel+ruskets, while pikes can basically only siege and scare cav away.
By the way, pikemen cost wood (slowest resource to gather), so you can't really say they cost 80 resources compared to 200 for doppels. I think it's closer to half cost for the pike (too lazy to do the maths though).
Oh and last thing, dops are just a much better anti cav than pikes. Pikes are not a very good anti cav, they do their job but don't shit that much on cav. For example you can catch 5 pikes sieging a TP with 7 uhlans np. However if you instead have, say, 2 dops, trying to fight with 7 uhlans isn't even worth. You're just going to lose like 4 uhlans or something and get a bad trade.
People just underrate dops too much. You guys would need to tower rush a bit more. When you do, you know how strong dops are once in melee, vs more or less anything. Just pop 3 dops from your tower when it's getting sieged, and laugh. Try to do the same with 8 pikes on infantry and tell me how it went
