How to win big fights?

[Squamiger]

I’ve played a couple games lately where I had an amazing start, the right counter build, and the right unit composition as the game progressed but then I just throw everything because I’m damn dogshit at winning those big pivotal fortress age fights. Early age 2 when theres 15 units each I’m pretty ok, but when the armies get big I just suck so much. I feel like it’s holding me back because I should have won these games easily if I just traded evenly.

I feel like I need a time to micro but scaled up to fortress age army numbers.

Usually playing India/France/Haud here

[callentournies]

i should stop trying to give advice

[Hazza54321]

get gud kid

[Guigs]

i should stop trying to give advice

Your previous comment was better imo
More seriously @Squamiger positioning is key :

https://clips.twitch.tv/TawdryObedientA ... xqeul630Uu
In this clip you can see how good positioning help you snipe a lot of units, kevin is also pulling back his kanye and some musket riders. Trees also help a lot here.

https://clips.twitch.tv/CloudyWittyJack ... kOjulCMW4J

In this one it's the opposite, it's not a terrible positioning but it's not great either imo. The forest prowlers are in a good spot but the musket riders aren't shooting at the anti cav and are dying to iron troops/arqs which is the main reason kévin lost this fight imo.

The kanye micro wasn't great either but it would have been fine to just z move them if the musket riders were in a better position shooting at the chinese anti cav.

[Squamiger]

i should stop trying to give advice

wait why that comment was good, now its gone

[Mitoe]

Are there specific unit compositions you find difficult to win with?

[Squamiger]

@Mitoe

well these days it's been mahout+zam+gurkha or mahout sepoy gurka, or alternatively skirm goon huss falc.

[Mitoe]

Hmm, that's pretty broad and the micro changes a lot depending on if you want to engage or retreat and depending on their unit composition.

Some tricks that come to mind:

1) Learning to use the "remove from group" hotkey, if you don't already. It's bound to CTRL + 0 by default (but you should really change it, although I use the default and want to kill myself every time I make a mistake moving my hand all the way to the other side of the keyboard) and makes it much easier to unsnare a skirmisher or small group of skirmishers by dropping 1-3 units out of your group quickly.

This can also be useful for microing huss away from anti-cav. You can use this to pull back 1-4 huss when they're being focused by melee infantry/muskets without ruining your control group & pathing for the rest of your cav. You will have to use the mouse to move these cav units until they can re-enter the group, but I personally use this hotkey all the time to split up my army in fights.

2) If you're kiting you actually want to control your goons more than your skirmishers if they have cavalry. In a lot of situations you can just keep the skirms walking and focus on sniping 1-3 cav units with your goons while you occasionally use the above hotkey to unsnare your skirms or turn to focus fire 1 unit with your skirms before running. It took me a long time to learn that the DPS of your skirms is actually the lowest priority when kiting away from fast-moving cav.

3) It's pretty hard to kite when every 3 seconds you're turning to shoot and wanting to split your units into 2-3 groups to snipe a lot of units all at once. An easier way to do this is to split your Skirms reload times in two. You can use 1 control group for this. Here's the steps to do this:

a. Run with all of your skirms.
b. Select half of your skirms and snipe a unit.
c. Use your control group to select all of your skirms and begin moving again.
d. Select the other half of your skirms (it's fine if you overlap with ones from the first snipe) and snipe another unit.
e. Use your control group to select all skirms and begin moving again.

Now you've split their reload time, so you can just select the entire group and click one unit and half your skirms will shoot while the other half can't cause they're still reloading. Then you walk and shoot again, this time the other half will shoot. This way is much easier to control than split-firing with drag boxes while you're kiting, you just have to remember that for most units you will be clicking to snipe units every 1.5 seconds instead of every 3 seconds.

[callentournies]

damn that's pro

[Squamiger]

Hmm, that's pretty broad and the micro changes a lot depending on if you want to engage or retreat and depending on their unit composition.

Some tricks that come to mind:

1) Learning to use the "remove from group" hotkey, if you don't already. It's bound to CTRL + 0 by default (but you should really change it, although I use the default and want to kill myself every time I make a mistake moving my hand all the way to the other side of the keyboard) and makes it much easier to unsnare a skirmisher or small group of skirmishers by dropping 1-3 units out of your group quickly.

This can also be useful for microing huss away from anti-cav. You can use this to pull back 1-4 huss when they're being focused by melee infantry/muskets without ruining your control group & pathing for the rest of your cav. You will have to use the mouse to move these cav units until they can re-enter the group, but I personally use this hotkey all the time to split up my army in fights.

2) If you're kiting you actually want to control your goons more than your skirmishers if they have cavalry. In a lot of situations you can just keep the skirms walking and focus on sniping 1-3 cav units with your goons while you occasionally use the above hotkey to unsnare your skirms or turn to focus fire 1 unit with your skirms before running. It took me a long time to learn that the DPS of your skirms is actually the lowest priority when kiting away from fast-moving cav.

3) It's pretty hard to kite when every 3 seconds you're turning to shoot and wanting to split your units into 2-3 groups to snipe a lot of units all at once. An easier way to do this is to split your Skirms reload times in two. You can use 1 control group for this. Here's the steps to do this:

a. Run with all of your skirms.
b. Select half of your skirms and snipe a unit.
c. Use your control group to select all of your skirms and begin moving again.
d. Select the other half of your skirms (it's fine if you overlap with ones from the first snipe) and snipe another unit.
e. Use your control group to select all skirms and begin moving again.

Now you've split their reload time, so you can just select the entire group and click one unit and half your skirms will shoot while the other half can't cause they're still reloading. Then you walk and shoot again, this time the other half will shoot. This way is much easier to control than split-firing with drag boxes while you're kiting, you just have to remember that for most units you will be clicking to snipe units every 1.5 seconds instead of every 3 seconds.

this is some top tier advice, thanks. i use the remove unit from group key to split off cav for raiding but this is a use for it that I hadn't considered

[aligator92]

Real pros like me put units they want to split off in control group 6. Or 5. Or 7. Doesnt really matter. 3 is the maximum I am actively using anyways

[Hazza54321]

Hmm, that's pretty broad and the micro changes a lot depending on if you want to engage or retreat and depending on their unit composition.

Some tricks that come to mind:

1) Learning to use the "remove from group" hotkey, if you don't already. It's bound to CTRL + 0 by default (but you should really change it, although I use the default and want to kill myself every time I make a mistake moving my hand all the way to the other side of the keyboard) and makes it much easier to unsnare a skirmisher or small group of skirmishers by dropping 1-3 units out of your group quickly.

This can also be useful for microing huss away from anti-cav. You can use this to pull back 1-4 huss when they're being focused by melee infantry/muskets without ruining your control group & pathing for the rest of your cav. You will have to use the mouse to move these cav units until they can re-enter the group, but I personally use this hotkey all the time to split up my army in fights.

2) If you're kiting you actually want to control your goons more than your skirmishers if they have cavalry. In a lot of situations you can just keep the skirms walking and focus on sniping 1-3 cav units with your goons while you occasionally use the above hotkey to unsnare your skirms or turn to focus fire 1 unit with your skirms before running. It took me a long time to learn that the DPS of your skirms is actually the lowest priority when kiting away from fast-moving cav.

3) It's pretty hard to kite when every 3 seconds you're turning to shoot and wanting to split your units into 2-3 groups to snipe a lot of units all at once. An easier way to do this is to split your Skirms reload times in two. You can use 1 control group for this. Here's the steps to do this:

a. Run with all of your skirms.
b. Select half of your skirms and snipe a unit.
c. Use your control group to select all of your skirms and begin moving again.
d. Select the other half of your skirms (it's fine if you overlap with ones from the first snipe) and snipe another unit.
e. Use your control group to select all skirms and begin moving again.

Now you've split their reload time, so you can just select the entire group and click one unit and half your skirms will shoot while the other half can't cause they're still reloading. Then you walk and shoot again, this time the other half will shoot. This way is much easier to control than split-firing with drag boxes while you're kiting, you just have to remember that for most units you will be clicking to snipe units every 1.5 seconds instead of every 3 seconds.

or option f. get good kid

[Challenger_Marco]

Hard to explain everything on text i think. We need comprehensive guide for micro /rules of engagement /positioning .
The last one i watched regarding this was on Veni's channel but it was only a bit and from team game point of view. His way of going is to kill the unit which threatens your composition the most first.
Time to micro helps a bit but i don't think it replicates real in game scenario along with managing vills /macro'ing sending shipments ,making units from buildings etc .
How often do you focus on 1 thing ,sometimes we focus on full fight and forget to queue vills and vills being idle which means less reinforcements. And if we do go back fixing macro we tend to not watching fight and the fights happen as it is with not much micro. And also we over micro and it's bad.
I think i suck at macro'ing everything perfectly and keeping things flowing and this will be a common issue at low elo gameplay.
Need more info regarding this to help mid & low elo players tbh.

Maybe @Mitoe you can share hotkey file for us please . We laptop gamers need to work around with similar hotkeys or atleast i wanna try different setup.

I am using ` for finding explorer, keys 1-4 for control grouping units and z x c v b as control groups from 5 -9 for grouping buildings. ctr+` is to remove from group.
T is my default hotkey for finding TC . S for making vills and G for eject . Q for finding Market. F is my attack move.
I think i only use these hotkeys very common and rest i have just forgot at this point but i feel by z x c v b keys to be uncomfortable when there is high apm required like fighting +making units.

A -muskets Q -pikes S -skrims D -dragoon , W -heavy goons (war wagons) , E -heavy cav (cuirs ) from buildings.

I also think queuing only 1 unit instead of trying to queue everything is more efficient as you might miss food for making vills constantly & hence only make it full batch when you nearing to produce them.

[Challenger_Marco]

I miss _H2O inside the mind series good knowledge showcase in those episodes...

[Kaiserklein]

3) It's pretty hard to kite when every 3 seconds you're turning to shoot and wanting to split your units into 2-3 groups to snipe a lot of units all at once. An easier way to do this is to split your Skirms reload times in two. You can use 1 control group for this. Here's the steps to do this:

a. Run with all of your skirms.
b. Select half of your skirms and snipe a unit.
c. Use your control group to select all of your skirms and begin moving again.
d. Select the other half of your skirms (it's fine if you overlap with ones from the first snipe) and snipe another unit.
e. Use your control group to select all skirms and begin moving again.

Now you've split their reload time, so you can just select the entire group and click one unit and half your skirms will shoot while the other half can't cause they're still reloading. Then you walk and shoot again, this time the other half will shoot. This way is much easier to control than split-firing with drag boxes while you're kiting, you just have to remember that for most units you will be clicking to snipe units every 1.5 seconds instead of every 3 seconds.

Yeah that's a really good trick for sure, I do it a lot. Kiting is a situation where stopping your units to split nicely isn't as valuable as having them walk away consistently, meaning splitting manually is usually not worth it. So this trick is the perfect compromise because they barely stop walking to shoot.
However I'd add a few remarks:

1) you can actually skip steps d and e. After you've shot with half your skirms once, you can just walk again for 1.5 sec, and then when you z move your other half will shoot. It's easier that way, you only have to select skirms manually once.

2) in fact there's even a way to do this without even selecting units manually at all. All you have to do is shoot the first volley, but while your skirms are shooting you directly move them away (in other words, cancel the end of the volley a fraction of a second after you z moved). About half your skirms only will have their animation complete and actually shoot at their target, while the rest will cancel right before the shot. After that you can just z move every 1.5 sec like before.
This essentially does the same thing as manually selecting only one half to shoot, but it's easier. I think that's due to z move being slightly buggy so not all skirms shoot at once, also maybe not all of them having to turn to the exact same radius before shooting or something.

3) of course it doesn't have to be a half, that also works with a third, you just have to shoot every second then (not that hard actually). Then you get even more value out of it. You just need to cancel your shot a bit faster so instead of about a half of your skirms shooting it's less, then do that a second time 1 sec later, then you can z move every 1 sec.
I wouldn't try to use this method to split into more than 3 groups though.

[Garja]

by selecting only half and then the other half you have the advantage that the army kinda pull tricks itself kiting better

[Squamiger]

2) in fact there's even a way to do this without even selecting units manually at all. All you have to do is shoot the first volley, but while your skirms are shooting you directly move them away (in other words, cancel the end of the volley a fraction of a second after you z moved). About half your skirms only will have their animation complete and actually shoot at their target, while the rest will cancel right before the shot. After that you can just z move every 1.5 sec like before.
This essentially does the same thing as manually selecting only one half to shoot, but it's easier. I think that's due to z move being slightly buggy so not all skirms shoot at once, also maybe not all of them having to turn to the exact same radius before shooting or something.

doesn't this mean that your whole group of skirms will still get snared, though? whereas if you select half the group manually to shoot, the other half will pull the shooting group forward because they have been walking the whole time

[tabben]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/43729190?f ... sort=views

[Kaiserklein]

2) in fact there's even a way to do this without even selecting units manually at all. All you have to do is shoot the first volley, but while your skirms are shooting you directly move them away (in other words, cancel the end of the volley a fraction of a second after you z moved). About half your skirms only will have their animation complete and actually shoot at their target, while the rest will cancel right before the shot. After that you can just z move every 1.5 sec like before.
This essentially does the same thing as manually selecting only one half to shoot, but it's easier. I think that's due to z move being slightly buggy so not all skirms shoot at once, also maybe not all of them having to turn to the exact same radius before shooting or something.

doesn't this mean that your whole group of skirms will still get snared, though? whereas if you select half the group manually to shoot, the other half will pull the shooting group forward because they have been walking the whole time

What "whole time" though? It only takes a split second for that half to shoot, after which your whole group is walking

[Challenger_Marco]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/43729190?f ... sort=views

Flank from behind catch reinforcements...noted.

[Squamiger]

@Kaiserklein ok yea I probably just gotta see it in action or try it out

[Kaiserklein]

Yeah I might post a clip of this if I don't forget, cause it's a bit hard to explain

[harcha]

i should stop trying to give advice

wait why that comment was good, now its gone

just pest callen, all his posts are limited time nfts


on topic - unit positioning is huge. you wanna think ahead of where you're probably going to fight and how you wanna position your units for that, and ideally how to bait your opponent in that position. obviously you can't always control where you're gonna fight, but preparation helps