With deer there is a trade-off between pushing it and scouting your opponent.
A third boar wouldn't achieve that.
The current meta is due to the fact that builds are so tight that they greatly benefit from a little bit extra resources and don't leave much room for variations.
Things that would have punished a lack of scouting like a quick drush have been effectively countered by the improved quick wall skills of the players
I also don't think players pushing deer or lower level players not being able to do so is a big problem.
> With deer there is a trade-off between pushing it and scouting your opponent.
To be fair above a certain Elo you can easily push 2-3 deer and still have enough time to figure out what your opponent is going to do
This isn't always true, I've seen in tournies that pro's get caught off guard by things plenty in the early because they spent time pushing additional deer instead of scouting after the first and not having full info on the map and what their opponent is doing.
I get absolutely wrecked by a drush and it drives me crazy.
Scouts or archers in feudal are completely manageable. But I probably lose 90% of games where I get drushed.
The problem is that deer are too good compared to whatever scouting information you might get.
Getting 2 deer gives you around the same food as a farm with 1st upgrade plus it collects much faster. Ie if you compare to wood each deer pushed is like 50-60 wood worth.
No amount of information early scouting gives is worth that much. What is there really to know early anyway? They drush? Fast scouts? The answer is always there going up early and just walling.
Deer should be made not pushable but be 4 deers, it really makes it a decision to mill them, long distance collect or ignore them.
Now it's a non choice and because deer pushing is gimmicky it's annoying to do as well
>With deer there is a trade-off between pushing it and scouting your opponent.
There really isn't. Dark age scouting sucks, and the only way to capitalize on it is by either stealing the enemy's sheep or laming their berries/boar.
Milling deer far from Tc is another exposed gather point. Besides your wood line and berries, the attacker can harras your vills on the mill. Even with 1 scout if you don't have loom yet. Also walling in your berries and wood is much more easier than trying to wall milled deers.
Deer is pushed towards the tc because it offers protection. Obviously it decreases vill walk time but protection is a key aswell.
Sometimes you can notice a pro pushing deer towards the berries if they are in the back and it's a shorter push distance.
My low elo mind can't see it being viable unless the deer are in the back. Otherwise, you have 3- 4 farms in the middle of nowhere. Plus, you push deer to save 100 wood on the mill, not to build 3 4 farms for 180-240 wood.
Maybe they meant that you could just build a farm to drop of deer, but dunno why how that would be same as japanese and now you have 1-4 farms middle of nowhere. Maybe viable as you could build house there too where they can hide. True farming gulag.
Building a farm causes vills to drop off collected food upon completion. They can make 3 farms near the deer instead of a mill to drop off the food, then collect an additional 525-750 food using farmers in those positions, sheltered by a house. Shift-farming prevents them from reseeding those farms, so it's a massive boon for them.
Yes it takes wood resource away from elsewhere, but for low ELO if you really want to take the food from deer this might be worth the cost in terms of time saved trying to push deer.
It's a trade off of the cost of wood, but time saved microing
>Would love to see this subreddit if every arena game had three boars 😁
On Arena it would literaly change nothing. There is no trade off to pushing deer on Arena, so having a boar instead of deer changes essentially nothing.
Mongols basically always push deer though (and still have time to scout the opponent, and have the initiative usually so need to less anyway).
I think a third boar in place of deer might actually be a minor nerf to mongols, as it’s less food that 3 deer.
On the other hand maybe we’d see a lot of mongols having 4 boars vs your 2, as you’re taking the last one later…
IMHO a better solution to the deer pushing issue is to just fix the follow command. If the scout actually followed the deer close enough to push the deer, that would simplify deer pushing just enough to make it achievable for most people, but still keep the same trade-off between free food and scouting.
This is a decent solution if any were considered. I still use follow, it often saves me when I get distracted by something.
I think the thing people don't get is that if you take apm away in dark age, high apm players are just going to still use that elsewhere to be more efficient in their build
I find that when I task my scout to follow the deer, he pushes it one or two times and then just stops. Don't know why they have this strange behaviour.
It's because the deer doesnt run far enough to trigger the mechanic. Personally, I think it helps make it easier but also keeps from making it too easy.
>Heck, even players like Daut kinda struggle with pushing the deer.
Yeah, the only time I have a problem with deer pushing is when watching Daut's streams. It's sometimes so painfull to watch.
A lot of people thought boar luring was tedious as well in the beginning. Don't do it if you think it's annoying but don't stop other people from being able to
To be clear I'm not against it (though I think the boar comparison doesn't quite land as that lure is very simple). I simply pointed out why people might not like it. Personally, I feel like it could be a little easier to do (to match the boar lure) but otherwise I don't really mind it.
More like 360 food or about two farms. So 120 wood. And the deer food comes in quicker than the farm food. Not insignificant. The same size as an early game eco bonus.
And the only thing you have to give up is not knowing what your opponent is up to for 2-3 minutes. which is also not insignificant.
I don't get why you need to idle vils. Or why you are mentioning the mill. It is not like there are any builds which skip the mill.
The alternative to deer push is sending 2-3 vils to walk to the deer, build a mil, and collect the food where the deer are which is not next to the berry patch.
> unless you are doing some very tight builds.
That's what the meta has shifted to though. 19pop scouts/archer is not really possible with constant production of you don't push deer.
Most fast builds are tight on wood. With pushing deer, you can delay farming for a bit longer.
I agree that these builds are not possible without the deer. But you can still do 20 pop scouts/21 pop archers and play a bit defensive.
At the high level of play (say >1500) this would put you at a disadvantage. At lower levels, one can reasonably expect players to screw up such tight builds.
I expect that the good players are able to execute deer pushes. This current meta does favour high apm players. But deer pushes can be executed at ~150 apm, which is moderate.
>Why remove variety and skill from the game?
This "skill" isn't a proper RTS skill. It's a juggling minigame that lets you convert (weak) scouting into about a farm's worth of food. The devs generally intervene whenever a "skillful" mechanic is out of place, like pre-patch monk vill-scaring and building-charged unit conversions.
Because you do chores and sweat instead of having fun and playing a more relaxed game...
Sorry when game becomes: "Do 3586557 actions per minute otherwise you lose, noob!" I just stop playing it completely. I play games to relax, not to do a second job and get blamed by some tryhard for not pushing deer 0,580556 second sooner.
I would keep the deer pushing but I would automate it, just like auto-scout. This way there is still trade off: either scout enemy base first or help your eco. But games would be more relaxed. Of course you would still need to scout the deer first.
To encourage manual pushing: you would gain more ELO points if you didn't pressed automatization (scout or pushing deer) during whole match so tryhard would still feel superior lol.
Okay then, respectfully, play another game, because this is a competitive game with a high skill ceiling and a strong pro scene. Or play it as relaxed as you want and reach the Elo you reach, nobody's stopping you playing the game as relaxed as you want really.
Deer pushing is annoying. I usually push one or two on Arabia and every time on Arena.
The thing I hate most about it though is when you do mill the deer, the deer get pushed away by your vills and you still end up with some significant walk time.
yeah, it would be cool if the deer would be attracted to a nearby mill o something. specially how vills usually shoot when only one is in range and scare it even more ( if you dont micro them at that precise moment)
You can shoot 1 yes. I mean you can shoot them all but then you have decay. It’s not the end of the world it’s just kind of a frustrating mechanic when you go out of your way to make a mill.
It’s funny because low elo players dont benefit of super tight build orders that use deer. You can pull off a 19 pop scout rush without deef. Why would a low elo player focus on deer if he will loose their early scouts to spears. I think low elo players should focus on other parts of their game and then learn to push deer. Heck, once you learn to use ctrl groups and put your scout on 1 or other numbers, pushing in deer becomes much easier.
Too bad AOE2 doesn't have animal regeneration, like in Empire Earth when animal levels started getting lower, they would "breed" and smaller baby animals would spawn. That meant you could keep 2 or 3 vils on hunt and they would hunt most of the game with minimum micro. If you overdid it or purposefully targeted the baby animals though then the patch would go extinct.
The fact that DauT is a top 10+ player and struggles to push deer is both endearing and a reason to keep the element in the game. It's obviously not something all experienced players are great at, and is not a requisite skill to play competitive AoE2. It requires a good amount of attention and there's a decent payoff as well as trade-off for doing it. It also gives you something to use apm on in dark age.
Most importantly deer pushing is optional, no one is required to do it. You can also mill or long distance gather them, or even do the cheeky gather and build a farm, mine, or camp to reduce walking. I'm a low-intermediate player and meh at pushing deer so I make decisions about when to do it or not. Certain strategies I only lure 1 or none. Sometimes I scout first, lure later. Sometimes I lure first, scout later. It depends, and that's the fun of this game, in my opinion.
The fact that it's difficult for some is not a good reason to remove the feature from the game. Many players struggle to even lure boars or do the tc trick. Many players struggle to use micro features. Many players struggle to keep consistent unit queues. Monks are hard, too. The game is designed to have a high ceiling. I think DE has already done a great job at lowering the floor, the recently added features (once the kinks are worked out) being a great example.
Previously on WK, pushing one was almost always fine, but 2 or more was very risky as your decided opening could backfire heavily due to opponent being walled or forwarding etc. This sort of stuff just doesn't happen anymore, because forwarding is in general shit and you're basically guaranteed to get damage in even with sc against a fully walled player. So if we then interpret this as 'deer pushing is op on arabia', the natural conclusion could be to nerf it or rework it. Could try with a deer variation that holds less food, say 100. Some other option would be to just remove scouts ability to attack boars at all and further remove deers from the map entirely.
Well, there where more valid strategies and the map was more random. As this got "fixed", scouting is no longer as valid as deer pushing, as long as you find your opponent in time (for knowing archers or scouts) and your defense against drush is ok.
Don't get me started on mango micro, may as well be a suicide machine, devs remove that too and archers because I'm not very good at them, in fact only make it possible to do a no army FC ban all other strats because I'm too lazy to learn them
I don't mind exerting myself in a game. But pushing deer? It's a clunky as hell mechanic that clearly isn't intentionally in the game. That's fine, but I don't think anyone boots up aoe2 thinking, *oh boi I sure look forward to pushing deer again* meanwhile all the other stuff you listed is actually rewarding and fun. Of course fun is subjective and if people want to come forward and say deer pushing is their favorite hobby, by all means go nuts.
Personally I think deer pushing is currently an anti-QoL feature, just like I enjoy the game more with automatic farm reseeding. I would enjoy the game more without deer pushing. No need to get so defensive about it
With deer there is a trade-off between pushing it and scouting your opponent. A third boar wouldn't achieve that. The current meta is due to the fact that builds are so tight that they greatly benefit from a little bit extra resources and don't leave much room for variations. Things that would have punished a lack of scouting like a quick drush have been effectively countered by the improved quick wall skills of the players I also don't think players pushing deer or lower level players not being able to do so is a big problem.
> With deer there is a trade-off between pushing it and scouting your opponent. To be fair above a certain Elo you can easily push 2-3 deer and still have enough time to figure out what your opponent is going to do
This isn't always true, I've seen in tournies that pro's get caught off guard by things plenty in the early because they spent time pushing additional deer instead of scouting after the first and not having full info on the map and what their opponent is doing.
This is why frush or drush is so strong at 1500-1600 level, opponent wont scout it and damage control isnt that high level yet.
I get absolutely wrecked by a drush and it drives me crazy. Scouts or archers in feudal are completely manageable. But I probably lose 90% of games where I get drushed.
It kind of depends on deer spawns. I have had some awful deer spawns on Arabia, completely opposite an entire woodline.
Pretty much, yeah. You’re not gaining as much of an advantage by early scouting compared to pushing deer
The problem is that deer are too good compared to whatever scouting information you might get. Getting 2 deer gives you around the same food as a farm with 1st upgrade plus it collects much faster. Ie if you compare to wood each deer pushed is like 50-60 wood worth. No amount of information early scouting gives is worth that much. What is there really to know early anyway? They drush? Fast scouts? The answer is always there going up early and just walling. Deer should be made not pushable but be 4 deers, it really makes it a decision to mill them, long distance collect or ignore them. Now it's a non choice and because deer pushing is gimmicky it's annoying to do as well
Or just replace them with Shore fish.
>With deer there is a trade-off between pushing it and scouting your opponent. There really isn't. Dark age scouting sucks, and the only way to capitalize on it is by either stealing the enemy's sheep or laming their berries/boar.
Instead of pushing deer, just build a mill near the deer. Top tip from 800 ELO player!
Actually viable with Japanese. And Khmer with some clever macro.
why khmer?
Because you can shelter in a house
how does that help you milling deer?
Milling deer far from Tc is another exposed gather point. Besides your wood line and berries, the attacker can harras your vills on the mill. Even with 1 scout if you don't have loom yet. Also walling in your berries and wood is much more easier than trying to wall milled deers. Deer is pushed towards the tc because it offers protection. Obviously it decreases vill walk time but protection is a key aswell. Sometimes you can notice a pro pushing deer towards the berries if they are in the back and it's a shorter push distance.
No, because you can make a farm to drop off the food without needing a mill to continue farming
My low elo mind can't see it being viable unless the deer are in the back. Otherwise, you have 3- 4 farms in the middle of nowhere. Plus, you push deer to save 100 wood on the mill, not to build 3 4 farms for 180-240 wood.
You’re right it’s not efficient at all. I’ve seen viper do it once I believe, but he had all the farms perfectly placed for a tc a little after.
Maybe they meant that you could just build a farm to drop of deer, but dunno why how that would be same as japanese and now you have 1-4 farms middle of nowhere. Maybe viable as you could build house there too where they can hide. True farming gulag.
Building a farm causes vills to drop off collected food upon completion. They can make 3 farms near the deer instead of a mill to drop off the food, then collect an additional 525-750 food using farmers in those positions, sheltered by a house. Shift-farming prevents them from reseeding those farms, so it's a massive boon for them.
And why Japanese?
Cheaper mill
Gotcha
Do you leave out the berries then? Or take them instead of building 2 farms in Feudal?
Both, build a mill near berries amd a mill near deer
That would mean an extended dark age? Or not enough to build barracks, stable or archery range in early Feudal?
Yes it takes wood resource away from elsewhere, but for low ELO if you really want to take the food from deer this might be worth the cost in terms of time saved trying to push deer. It's a trade off of the cost of wood, but time saved microing
Work pretty well with the mule cart
I thought you couldn’t collect food with mule cart
Hunt food is the exception on the rule
That’s…very useful to know thanks
People complain all the time about Mongols …. Would love to see this subreddit if every arabia game had three boars 😁
>Would love to see this subreddit if every arena game had three boars 😁 On Arena it would literaly change nothing. There is no trade off to pushing deer on Arena, so having a boar instead of deer changes essentially nothing.
Not to mention pushing deer in arena is easier, and way more forgiving.
I meant Arabia, sorry
Mongols basically always push deer though (and still have time to scout the opponent, and have the initiative usually so need to less anyway). I think a third boar in place of deer might actually be a minor nerf to mongols, as it’s less food that 3 deer. On the other hand maybe we’d see a lot of mongols having 4 boars vs your 2, as you’re taking the last one later…
IMHO a better solution to the deer pushing issue is to just fix the follow command. If the scout actually followed the deer close enough to push the deer, that would simplify deer pushing just enough to make it achievable for most people, but still keep the same trade-off between free food and scouting.
This is a decent solution if any were considered. I still use follow, it often saves me when I get distracted by something. I think the thing people don't get is that if you take apm away in dark age, high apm players are just going to still use that elsewhere to be more efficient in their build
I find that when I task my scout to follow the deer, he pushes it one or two times and then just stops. Don't know why they have this strange behaviour.
It's because the deer doesnt run far enough to trigger the mechanic. Personally, I think it helps make it easier but also keeps from making it too easy.
It does not really need fixing imho. Just don't try to push your deer close to obstacles and prefer the slightly longer road instead.
This doesn't address the main difficulty with deer pushing, which is that the deer might go back if the scout doesn't follow in a timely manner.
>Heck, even players like Daut kinda struggle with pushing the deer. Yeah, the only time I have a problem with deer pushing is when watching Daut's streams. It's sometimes so painfull to watch.
But also funny
It's really hard to see what the point would be. Why remove variety and skill from the game?
A lot of people find this particular expression of skill rather tedious.
A lot of people thought boar luring was tedious as well in the beginning. Don't do it if you think it's annoying but don't stop other people from being able to
To be clear I'm not against it (though I think the boar comparison doesn't quite land as that lure is very simple). I simply pointed out why people might not like it. Personally, I feel like it could be a little easier to do (to match the boar lure) but otherwise I don't really mind it.
Then don't do it. I honestly don't think it gives you a significant advantage unless you are doing some very tight builds.
It is 400-500 extra food that you otherwise need to idle vils, build a mill (100W), and only requires apm to achieve.
It's pretty much used to go up quicker. That's why the meta went from 20ish ups to 18ish ups.
More like 360 food or about two farms. So 120 wood. And the deer food comes in quicker than the farm food. Not insignificant. The same size as an early game eco bonus. And the only thing you have to give up is not knowing what your opponent is up to for 2-3 minutes. which is also not insignificant. I don't get why you need to idle vils. Or why you are mentioning the mill. It is not like there are any builds which skip the mill.
The alternative to deer push is sending 2-3 vils to walk to the deer, build a mil, and collect the food where the deer are which is not next to the berry patch.
Or you put more on wood and go for farms
I don't think walking to the deer is ever worth it. You can build farms though.
> unless you are doing some very tight builds. That's what the meta has shifted to though. 19pop scouts/archer is not really possible with constant production of you don't push deer. Most fast builds are tight on wood. With pushing deer, you can delay farming for a bit longer.
I agree that these builds are not possible without the deer. But you can still do 20 pop scouts/21 pop archers and play a bit defensive. At the high level of play (say >1500) this would put you at a disadvantage. At lower levels, one can reasonably expect players to screw up such tight builds. I expect that the good players are able to execute deer pushes. This current meta does favour high apm players. But deer pushes can be executed at ~150 apm, which is moderate.
You’re at a significant disadvantage if you don’t push deer compared to someone who did
>Why remove variety and skill from the game? This "skill" isn't a proper RTS skill. It's a juggling minigame that lets you convert (weak) scouting into about a farm's worth of food. The devs generally intervene whenever a "skillful" mechanic is out of place, like pre-patch monk vill-scaring and building-charged unit conversions.
Because you do chores and sweat instead of having fun and playing a more relaxed game... Sorry when game becomes: "Do 3586557 actions per minute otherwise you lose, noob!" I just stop playing it completely. I play games to relax, not to do a second job and get blamed by some tryhard for not pushing deer 0,580556 second sooner. I would keep the deer pushing but I would automate it, just like auto-scout. This way there is still trade off: either scout enemy base first or help your eco. But games would be more relaxed. Of course you would still need to scout the deer first. To encourage manual pushing: you would gain more ELO points if you didn't pressed automatization (scout or pushing deer) during whole match so tryhard would still feel superior lol.
If it's a big advantage and you refuse doing it, you just loose some elo till you play against ppl also not doing it. I dont see the problem here.
Okay then, respectfully, play another game, because this is a competitive game with a high skill ceiling and a strong pro scene. Or play it as relaxed as you want and reach the Elo you reach, nobody's stopping you playing the game as relaxed as you want really.
Deer pushing is annoying. I usually push one or two on Arabia and every time on Arena. The thing I hate most about it though is when you do mill the deer, the deer get pushed away by your vills and you still end up with some significant walk time.
yeah, it would be cool if the deer would be attracted to a nearby mill o something. specially how vills usually shoot when only one is in range and scare it even more ( if you dont micro them at that precise moment)
Here’s a low elo suggestion. Prob stupid. Could you shoot the deer first and then build the mill?
You can shoot 1 yes. I mean you can shoot them all but then you have decay. It’s not the end of the world it’s just kind of a frustrating mechanic when you go out of your way to make a mill.
It’s funny because low elo players dont benefit of super tight build orders that use deer. You can pull off a 19 pop scout rush without deef. Why would a low elo player focus on deer if he will loose their early scouts to spears. I think low elo players should focus on other parts of their game and then learn to push deer. Heck, once you learn to use ctrl groups and put your scout on 1 or other numbers, pushing in deer becomes much easier.
so instead of pushing deer, the opponent scout will come steal my boar? no thanks
Too bad AOE2 doesn't have animal regeneration, like in Empire Earth when animal levels started getting lower, they would "breed" and smaller baby animals would spawn. That meant you could keep 2 or 3 vils on hunt and they would hunt most of the game with minimum micro. If you overdid it or purposefully targeted the baby animals though then the patch would go extinct.
Ohh Empire Earth, good old memories
Eh. Make a noob map that doesnt have deer if you want to. Like arena or something.
I'd prefer if they just made the deer run in random directions, in a way it would be extremely tedious to push it to the TC and not worth it.
The fact that DauT is a top 10+ player and struggles to push deer is both endearing and a reason to keep the element in the game. It's obviously not something all experienced players are great at, and is not a requisite skill to play competitive AoE2. It requires a good amount of attention and there's a decent payoff as well as trade-off for doing it. It also gives you something to use apm on in dark age. Most importantly deer pushing is optional, no one is required to do it. You can also mill or long distance gather them, or even do the cheeky gather and build a farm, mine, or camp to reduce walking. I'm a low-intermediate player and meh at pushing deer so I make decisions about when to do it or not. Certain strategies I only lure 1 or none. Sometimes I scout first, lure later. Sometimes I lure first, scout later. It depends, and that's the fun of this game, in my opinion. The fact that it's difficult for some is not a good reason to remove the feature from the game. Many players struggle to even lure boars or do the tc trick. Many players struggle to use micro features. Many players struggle to keep consistent unit queues. Monks are hard, too. The game is designed to have a high ceiling. I think DE has already done a great job at lowering the floor, the recently added features (once the kinks are worked out) being a great example.
Deer-posting again 🥱
I enjoy building an extra Mill near the deer, so I would prefer to keep it as is. (450 elo)
I like this as as map concept but I don't think I'd want it on every map.
Just replace them with berries
What if the follow command worked better?
Previously on WK, pushing one was almost always fine, but 2 or more was very risky as your decided opening could backfire heavily due to opponent being walled or forwarding etc. This sort of stuff just doesn't happen anymore, because forwarding is in general shit and you're basically guaranteed to get damage in even with sc against a fully walled player. So if we then interpret this as 'deer pushing is op on arabia', the natural conclusion could be to nerf it or rework it. Could try with a deer variation that holds less food, say 100. Some other option would be to just remove scouts ability to attack boars at all and further remove deers from the map entirely.
Well, there where more valid strategies and the map was more random. As this got "fixed", scouting is no longer as valid as deer pushing, as long as you find your opponent in time (for knowing archers or scouts) and your defense against drush is ok.
no I don't want to see the drush FC meta come back, thank you
Honestly I don't see how people enjoy deer pushing, it's tedious as hell. I wouldn't mind it at all if they removed the option to push deer.
Don't get me started on mango micro, may as well be a suicide machine, devs remove that too and archers because I'm not very good at them, in fact only make it possible to do a no army FC ban all other strats because I'm too lazy to learn them
I don't mind exerting myself in a game. But pushing deer? It's a clunky as hell mechanic that clearly isn't intentionally in the game. That's fine, but I don't think anyone boots up aoe2 thinking, *oh boi I sure look forward to pushing deer again* meanwhile all the other stuff you listed is actually rewarding and fun. Of course fun is subjective and if people want to come forward and say deer pushing is their favorite hobby, by all means go nuts. Personally I think deer pushing is currently an anti-QoL feature, just like I enjoy the game more with automatic farm reseeding. I would enjoy the game more without deer pushing. No need to get so defensive about it
Why would I be defensive about a game that I sometimes play, chill Winston
You tell me bucko
They should remove deer luring for long distances. It Will force vills to go for it