umeu wrote:i don't agree with that. age 1 can make or break some civs or mu's. Play otto vs spain, and a good spain player will hunt down your hero asap, on many maps while ur building ur tp, youre gonna lose your hero just after the tp goes up. That means otto can't get more tp's effectively until a few mins into age2. If spain gets one or 2 nat tres, that also means no forward base is possible any more. In some cases you can deny russia or even iro forward bases in the same way. When playing sioux vs iro for example, age1 makes or breaks that mu, or atleast it did on nilla. Where sioux just wanted to get those op tres, preferably renegado or otherwise pistoleros or pirates, and hunt down that age2 travois asap. denying fb or potentially even killing the travois. A good iro player would know this, and try to build their own age1 tres and deny sioux from doing this.
You can severely delay an agra if you do it properly, and in some cases even deny it from going up mid map depending on size/layout of the map. Playing vs japan as well, as TWC civs, getting those renegadoes and hunting the jap heros, that's an artform, and it can be so huge if not countered properly by the jap player.
Not to mention when playing vs atp civs, getting nats just means vils can't safely build tps, and if you hunt down the explorer as well, you just deny atp entirely. On a further note, even MM in age1 is way underused from a strategic perspective, as well as strategic backherding, because it's considered lame. But in fact it's actually very smart play. And ofc its lame lol. But who cares. And tres help there as well. Getting that 150 coin for mm in tres, that's really big. And then just use it to deny blockhouses, travois or even atp.
Thats true but anyone above pr 25 can do that. Its really not hard to pull it off. All you need for it to make it happen is the awareness that this can be done in age 1.