Flanders Front AMA

  • If you only build cavalries the enemy could have defended easily by producing flame throwers (same build time as cavs), which hard counter cavalries stats wise. Even defending armored cars or Infantry would have traded equally with cavalry.

    It is true that cavalry rush is a strong opener in the early game, especially due to the mobility, but you can still counter it. Every tactic has a counter tactic in this game, but it seems your enemies did not explore the rock-paper-scissor system to the fullest.


    There will be more rebalancing going on though and stronger units will become more xpensive in comparison.

    Hey, sorry, there is a little flaw with this approach.


    My mate and I did this rush:

    I did mass cavalry, my mate did assault Infantry. Ressources work out perfectly. (I give my mate supplies and tools, my mate gives me fabrics and food). This means massive amounts of troops.

    2-3 Barracks/Factories and produce cavalry/assault infantry lv1 non stop.

    Only very few ressources lost in buildings or research, everything used in troops.


    This means an aboslute massive amount of attacking troops.



    What does the enemy see? He sees two enemies, each with 2-3 barracks/factories. What is he supposed to think? Based on 2-3 very basic buildings, will he expect a full out rush? If you see 2-3 barracks/factories, do you expect 60 units running into your country any second? No.


    By the time the opponent notices the massive all out early rush, its too late.


    My mate and I send everything in, cavalry without recruits, extremely fast. The opponent doesn't have enough time to react to it, no time to start production of enough counter units. (Remember, since game start we started rushing these units)


    Within hours the frontline is breached, we are all over the home country and with the fast cavalry, we are also in the empty provinces far away from the frontline. First and or second opponent are immediately eliminated/crippled. They cant do anything anymore. The overall situation favours us, 10vs8.


    We made a big hole in the frontline. Especially with the roads where we are extremely fast. Capturing a "knot", a province which connects roads. Build railroads there. From there on you can use roads to further rampage through the enemy empty provinces.

    pasted-from-clipboard.png

    (day2)

    Blue is the route of the cavalry. I took that city there using the very fast road. I reach that knot faster than any enemy reinforced could. From there on I had multiple options, see black arrows. All provinces on its way are likely empty because they are far away from the frontline.

    If the neighbouring countries wanted to answer, they would need to build a ton of counter units (dont forget, our rush is using assault infantries and cavs, two different types). They would also need to build a considerably big amount of counter troops since we have been building cavs and assault infantries non stop since game start. And 0 casualties so far thanks to the combat system. Furthermore only minor combat strength losses (fewer efficiency), because even at lower HP, the efficiency remains high.

    Thanks to roads and railways on knots, the newly produced units arrive very fast at the frontline, maintaining our numbers advantage.


    Furthermore, the frontline has been stretched incredibly due to me taking that knot. So many provinces (and roads) are threatened, can be directly attacked. Many provinces strechted through a long (new) frontline is tough to defend.


    pasted-from-clipboard.png

    (day4)

    My infantry was very quick conquer all the empty provinces in the south, occasional resistance couldnt put up a fight because of the sheer number of cavalry, furthermore he had to deal with his respective opponent who was fighting him.




    Point is, you cant see a rush coming. When you see it, its too late. You cant stop a country that built units for a rush for the past 24-48 hours by building enough counter units (+research +buildings) within very few hours. Because the rusher only needs few hours to breach the frontline and travel down the road to take knots deep inside your territory.



    With 1 player down, it snowballs it easily out of control. A 10v9 quickly becomes a 10v8, etc.


    You can only defend by "counter rushing counter units". But just because you see 2 barracks on the enemy, will you hurry to produce 30 flame throwers? Just because you see the enemy has 2 barracks? And if the enemy doesn't rush you are stuck with 30 flame throwers with extrmely limited usage possibility, as well as all the lost resources.



    Edit:

    Even if you manage to build enough flame throwers and amass enough units to deter the rush, perhaps by falling back 1 or 2 province lines to buy more time. Advantage gained by the attacker. The defender needed to cancel his plans and do something else, perhaps even giving up some provinces. Abruptly changing its plan is always bad (cancelling research/construction/production to enable the production of flame throwers, resources distortion: you wanted to build airplanes? Unlucky you just used all the oil for flame throwers, nothing left for aircrafts)


    Upon learning the counter measures, the rusher can easily pull back, use his mobility and abuse that the enemy has very limited options to gain intelligence, and move his cavalry using roads quickly to other parts of the map and start a new rush. Whats the original defender going to do? Counter attack using flame throwers? The slow flame throwers are stuck there, any rotation with them takes a long time.



    Btw, ressources continue to accumulate after end of game.

    pasted-from-clipboard.png

  • Thanks for the detailed report.

    Keep in mind that you used your strategy while heavily cooperating with another player, while the enemy team may have consisted of uncoordinated newbies or barely active players. Therefore I would not jump to conclusions that this strategy is the ultimate strategy. Plus the event content was very new and even experienced players did not know entirely what to build and may have gone with a suboptimal build and may also not have expected such a fast rush due to fast build times. It would be interesting to see how this strategy would fare against a team that consists of experienced active players that also know the different meta strategies available.


    I am still quite certain that it can be countered, by also cooperating heavily, reacting quickly (being active) and by building the right counter troops. Although Cavalry is fast, you still have time to produce many defending units when you see it coming, since speed on enemy terrain is still only 30% and Lvl.1 build times are low. The standard Inf only needed 5min to be built (a quarter of the time the cavalry needed to be built) and also costs slightly less ressources than the cavalry. Even though it's a 1:1 trade it probably is enough to block the rush until more reinforcements arrive. I for example used alot of fast offensive units (cav/assault inf) in my event game as well, though my enemy used fast produced defensive troops very well to play for time until reinforcements arrived.


    Also keep in mind that this balancing was basically only the first draft and will be refined. If we see that rushing is too strong we will certainly change the balancing in that regard. We already made some adjustments on our end that would make this type of strategy harder, for example. Please give us your opinion when you play the map in the future, how your perception of this strategy changed.

    So all in all nothing is set in stone balancing wise yet and we thank you all for shaping our balancing with us :)