Hi all,

I like to play open map types with huns and random civs and was rated up to 1900 a few years ago. So I decided to go and play aoc again, first because of the african kingdoms expansion- and now back in voobly obviously.
However the new meta seems to be the drush. Now I happen to dislike this meta alot - my favorite meta is feudal age wars. The drush + FC is turning out to be problamatic for me to counter at 1650+ level.
The eco disruption by 3 militia+ scout/eagle is just enough to hinder me to put enough pressure on the enemy in feudal.
If they have backward gold its hopeless, if they put up an early tower on their gold likewise.
I would like to know if you guys have any advice/ recorded games on how to approach the game with all these drushers .. or is feudal battles a thing of the past?

thanks!

Hey,

Feudal wars are absolutely not a thing of the past. If you favour scout openings, make sure you are opening 21pop as often as possible rather than 22 - the extra 25 seconds can dramatically affect the amount of damage his drush can do, and you also get over to his base faster and figure out what's going on (this is going to start becoming more important as you start facing more drush forwards around that rating, and the response to a drush forward is obviously going to be much different to the response to a drush fc).

Don't be afraid to pull vills at the right time to deal with the drush. Position your initial units correctly (E.g. let's say you open with a spear and 2 additional scouts to your starting one, his drush is harassing your berries - move your scouts and spear to behind the drush so you can pull 3 vills and then stop him from going back with the milita.)

You can prepare for the drush if you scout it (stop luring deer if you are doing, focus on finding all your resources and finding him before 6:30 every game). Rax goes up around 6:40 for your standard drushes and 10 gold is taken around that time too. Once you scout the militia being built, tight wall your lumber camps (i.e. from trees to lumber camp on both sides, make sure you leave enough room for the vills to work uninterrupted - at least 2 trees on each side of the lumber camp which are not blocked by palisade.)

Once the drush is dead after doing minimal damage, you have to decide whether you are going to prepare for the fc timing and go up as fast as you can yourself, or if you are going to pressure him. Maybe 5-10% of the time your map is easy to stone wall, in those cases do that. A decent player will be fc'ing around 16:40-17:30 ish - faster if they didn't wall and just towered their gold and understand the build correctly.

Otherwise, going for a mix between the two rarely works well. Either go for the 19:30-20:00 castle time with just enough skirms to defend build (making a few walls where it's efficient, using scouts as outposts at probable lanes of attack, checking minimap and positioning skirms correctly.) Then just play a standard macro game once you get up. Scouting the CA before they get to your base and correctly positioning your skirms is vital here - if you miss the scout you're probably dead as the CA lead snowballs very quickly and you can only afford to take minor damage.

Or you can apply pressure. One build which works much better than most people would expect is to keep making scouts. Especially if he doesn't wall, but even if he does - you can keep making scouts, get on stone quite soon after you built 10-11 farms and send 3-4 vills forward around minute 12 to start towering his wood and break through the walls. Get bloodlines and +1 for your scouts. Build archery ranges at home. Go full scout/skirm, stay light on gold. Drush fc timings are quite fragile economically and if you can pressure him with the scouts he will probably be unable to afford +2 without making large eco sacrifices - in large numbers (you should have 12 or so scouts by the time he ups) scouts do fine against CA. If you can get him off gold for even just a couple of minutes you're probably ahead.

If you want to understand how to play against drush fc, do it yourself for a few games. You'll understand which timings are important and what the weaknesses are. At the very very highest level perhaps drush fc with huns is the strongest strategy and is ahead in more situations than other builds, but you don't have to worry about that.

Thank you Fallstar your advice sounds like it will help my game alot.

watch the latest masters 5g tourny on voobly youtube and observe and mimic their use of palisades to defend off drushing. hyper effective. meta turns trush/trash after this.

also stop being ****s and boar laming, save ur scouts hp and drush with it, asserts more map control. forward 7 villagers into mill & double enemy boar lure nu meta i swear

Use your fingers. You should have no trouble counting militia drush then.

once time i heard viper say on stream that it's impossible to die to a drush
but im nob so idk

paladins . or just wall

Don't forget that villagers can fight back!!!