【AoE2】Importance of focusing on archers
Channel: Rohkiani311006
Date: 09/03/2019

Letting skirmishers auto-attack whatever they want, vs focusing small groups of skirmishers on archers. Second is more effective.

Inspired by several recent expert games. In a game between TheViper and TaToH, TheViper used skirmishers to focus down TaToH's mangudai, and won. In another game, TaToH did not focus down TheViper's cavalry archers with skirmishers (enough), and lost. In another game, TaToH did not focus down BacT's arbalests with skirmishers, and lost in what was mostly a war between units that don't cost gold ("trash" units) when TaToH was Byzantines who can produce such units cheaply. These were all basically post-Imperial games, despite some missing upgrades, and unit control in combat played an important role instead of the games being decided by economic advantages accrued during earlier ages.

What I hoped to show in this video was that by micro-managing small groups of units to target valuable gold units, you can increase your effectiveness with fewer wasted shots, and that this effect is valuable enough to compete with other things you could be doing (like checking for idle villagers). It was not shown very effectively. I had thought about showing just 20 seconds of each scenario, to avoid the exaggerated outcome that comes from unequal military fights, but the game was much too laggy and the fights had too much statistical noise for this to be very useful (like not fighting for the first few seconds). If I had, though, it would have resulted in average larger numbers of attacking units, so more wasted shots. If a group of units can't kill an enemy unit in a single volley, waste is somewhat small (but retargeting plays a role here too).

Two other reasons this video isn't too convincing: monotonous army composition and lack of movement. A skilled player should use 'runners' in front of his or her army to distract ranged units, but this is extremely rare. A better army composition would have had units that could easily kill skirmishers but would die to the arbalests. Problem for this video is that you would send them in after killing the arbalests, so the timing is another variable and in the autoattack condition where the arbalests never die, when do you send these melee units in?

One further reason this test is problematic is that it's against fully-upgraded arbalests. An arbalest with the Thumb Ring technology attacks slightly less than twice as fast as a skirmisher, and does half as much damage against an elite skirmisher with +4 pierce armor, so it's pretty accurate to say that an arbalest and an elite skirmisher have equal damage output vs a skirmisher, but arbalest dies easier.

But if the arbalest is missing just one upgrade, then their damage is halved and you could arguably want to kill a skirmisher first if you only have skirmishers yourself. Similar with feudal-age battles when archers have equal or less upgrades so do only 1 damage to skirmishers while skirmishers do 3 to other skirmishers and 4~6 to archers (depending on upgrades).

In this video, the first two runs are supposed to be the most important, but the data is a little messy ('doing nothing' can result in both losses and victories) and a few different strategies were tested.

Blue starts with 16 arbalests, 9 skirmishers. Orange starts with 15 skirmishers.

0:00 Do nothing. Loss with 6 arbalests remaining.
2:04 Each skirmisher attacks a different archer. This is unrealistic, but also would be less effective than having several skirmishers attack the same archer (focus-fire without wasting shots). See archers die at 3:30 (really bad fps). Victory with 10 skirmishers remaining.
4:34 Focus-fire groups on skirmishers. (Maybe avoids retargetting delay.) Victory with 5 skirmishers remaining.
6:45 Do nothing. Victory with 6 skirmishers remaining. Looks like some arbalests aren't attacking; a trigger put them on stand ground so they don't run back after attacking. Maybe 'no AI' would reduce noise in data, but too hard for this.
8:53 Do nothing. Victory with 3 skirmishers left.
11:01 Try to patrol to see if they would move after killing a unit, then stop moving, causing arrows to miss them. They didn't move like this. Result was probably from bunching up, causing wasted shots/overkill, and possibly from interrupted attacks from patrol commands. Loss with 10 arbalests left.
13:46 Patrol, again. Skirmishers did move a few times, but it didn't help. Still, victory with 4 skirmishers left.
16:33 Focus groups of skirmishers on arbalests. Victory, 8 skirmishers left.

Before settling on how many skirmishers for orange, also tried 'running group of skirmishers into the middle of arbalests so they auto-fire on them instead of the skirmishers in front'. The results were bad. Took too many losses getting there. Situations where you would want to do this: you have expensive melee units or enemy has cavalry near your skirmishers. (No more room to explain.)

How to end war: http://pastebin.com/4ukwRxDG http://9gag.com/gag/5675396/