Overview
Think outside the box and put your enemy’s army inside one!
Concept
Walls are commonly known as a defensive structure to keep your enemy away from your economy. But you can also use them lock your enemy’s army up inside your economy! It’s hard to pull off, and risky in a way, but if it works, it works wonders. This little trick also stresses on the importance of hotkeys. Having walls and houses under easy to reach hotkeys will only make playing easier for you.
Practical Example I
The first example is something anyone can use, I have taken the example from the Jaguar Jinx recorded game between Daut and Chris.
Daut manages to sneak 8 skirmishers in Chris’ wood, but Chris knows he has more skirmishers coming, so he starts building a house at the end of his lumbering activities.
As Daut walks deeper into his woodgathering, he adds more houses and palisade walls.
Soon Daut is surrounded by houses and palisade walls and with Chris’ skirmishers outnumbering his, he’s 8 skirmishers down. And he couldn’t kill a villager in the meanwhile, so that’s quite a loss.
This is an example anyone can do. You wall off small parts of your economy for defense and if a small army of skirmishers or any other unit sneaks in, you can wall them off. The best part with skirmishers however is, that villagers can withstand a lot of their javelins before eventually dying. Practice will learn you more about this little trick than this article will, so go out on the battlefield!
Practical Example II
The second example is more extreme and hard to pull off, but it saved Chris’ ass. And made him eventually win the game.
In late castle, Grunt breaks Chris’ gate with a few petards and sends 30 eagles into Chris’ town. The breaking was close to Chris’ main goldpile so he started walling off his villagers.
While Grunt’s eagles run deeper into unknown territory, Chris walls off more chunks of his economy.
Grunt’s eagles now face a wall of houses and don’t know where to run. They stand still for a few seconds and Chris quickly decides to delete one of his houses and trap the eagles.
Trapped!
Chris can now kill 30 eagles with an onager and crossbows. So that’s 1500 gold down the drain for Grunt!
Recorded Game
The game where Chris walled in 30 Eagles:
Practical Example III
Last but not least, if the randomizer screws you with a bad civ, just put your enemy in a box and forget about it. That’s what RiuT did to JorDan_23 anyways.
Jordan is terrorizing RiuT’s economy and slowly building up a larger army.
But now his army is immobile and split. Jordan has to start from zero again and Ruit uses this advantage to totally surrender Jordan’s economy. Game over!
