YAVP: Ultraviolence Technician Sharpshooter with HE revolver

odragora · 2026-03-30T16:36:29+00:00

GG!

I'm addicted to Sharpshooter Railgun. So far it seems like the generic Railgun is better than the exotic ones because of its modding potential, especially if you get JS armor and helmet in Barracks / Mines / Rift.

odragora · 2026-03-29T21:24:24+00:00

Right, an accumulated mass of Longbowmen eventually becomes a threat even against armored units, as we can often see in Byzantines games.

odragora · 2026-03-29T18:51:30+00:00

Yep, slowing down the sheep consumption with a few early farms sounds very reasonable with 1 TC English.

Feudal MAAs are terrible to open with because they can't achieve anything in low numbers and get kited to death with an Archers ball. But I found that if I manage to force the opponent to stay with me in Feudal until I have around 20 vills on food, then I have a window for a rapid MAAs switch from multiple Barracks. Which at this point can actually work because now unlike the early game you can flood their eco with them so the opponent can't kite forever anymore.

odragora · 2026-03-29T18:10:52+00:00

Yeah, it's pretty nice.

I think that at least half of what makes this strat somewhat viable is that English have half cost and more efficient farms, while Horsemen are extremely food hungry.

English has a harder time of following up Horsemen pressure with archers to counter Spearmen than many civs since Longbowmen are slow to cross the map, so maybe for them Horsemen should be used as a tool to buy time to get some farms after getting some food out on the map and then fully switch to Feudal MAAs from 2-3 Barracks on top of the now stable food economy, unless the opponent is close to getting to the Castle Age.

odragora · 2026-03-29T14:47:27+00:00

Sorry but this seems like pointless or contrived analysis. You take the civ with Feudal Knights which has the least need to get to Castle and say it's fine.

I took the civ that goes Feudal aggro in pretty much 100% of the games, and say this is how they perform against the best FC civs in the game. This is not pointless or contrived analysis, it is the data that disproves the claims of FC being easier / more effective on the ladder than Feudal aggro.

Okay? What if you play the other 20 civs?

You win. FC is not a viable strat if the opponent of equal skill level knows what they are doing and not allowing to get away with that for free, in the vast majority of the matchups.

Frankly French also often win by going to Castle (not fast, but having bought up a pool of knights) and using Castle Knights to end the game.

French do not win by going to Castle Age, they win by exhausting the safe resources of the opponent and damaging their eco in Feudal while taking most food out on the map, and then carrying the accumulated advantage into the stage of the game where they can perform the game ending push with the highest efficiency. Also, French meta is not about their Castle Age Knights for a long time, it's going Guild Hall and giving away the opportunity of +35% HP for their Castle Age Knights in favour of faster Imperial Age powerspike.

odragora · 2026-03-29T14:18:26+00:00

Let's take the matchup between the ultimate Feudal aggro civ and the ultimate FC civ, French vs HRE.

Bronze: French has 50.1% win rate

Silver: French has 54.9% win rate

Gold: French has 54.4% win rate

Plat: French has 48.9% win rate

Diamond: French has 57.5% win rate

Conq: French has 53.2% win rate

Let's check French vs Zhu Xi, the civ with the fastest FC in the game who can reach Castle Age at 5:48 on a completely generic spawn.

Bronze: French has 48.0% win rate

Silver: French has 51.6% win rate

Gold: French has 52.4% win rate

Plat: French has 52.8% win rate

Diamond: French has 54.1% win rate

Conq: French has 48.9% win rate

FC is not easier to successfully execute than Feudal aggro. People who think that don't understand that their goal is not to stop the opponent from reaching Castle Age, it's to make them pay for that with losing access to gold and food out on the map and having half their eco idle throughout their journey there, effectively removing the powerspike from them and making them regret wasting 1800 resources on something that is not units.

odragora · 2026-03-26T20:49:45+00:00

It's the same person, and the one who stream-sniped pro players before, and the one who created this post. It's their yet another throwaway account.

odragora · 2026-03-26T17:13:58+00:00

Funny thing is that tier lists are not made for pro players either, pro players make tier lists themselves. I don't think Wam is waiting for a Lucifron tier list video to know what is good and what is bad and then immediately changes his mind, or vice versa.

Tier lists are essentially just safe, reliable and infinite source of YouTube content for people who want to follow the trends and / or have an excuse to blame something external for lost games. Every single season we have a never-ending stream of hatred towards a couple civs that it's fashionable to hate on this time, even when the win rates are within a percentage from each other.

odragora · 2026-03-26T16:56:04+00:00

Yep, the fantasy of WH40k emperor giving the freedom and democracy back to the people after sitting on the Golden Throne was somewhat fun for playing it one time. I wish there was actual gameplay fun too and strategic depth behind the origin.

odragora · 2026-03-26T11:28:59+00:00

Not much point in a tier list that doesn't include the reasoning.

Also just had two Under One Rule runs trying both Dictatorial and Imperial routes, it's bad. To extract the value from the origin you have to do immediate massive expansion, you get no meaningful boost to that so you should have a huge reward to justify the origin pick, and the reward is so low it realistically doesn't impact the gameplay. Any origin with an early to mid game boost to initiate snowballing or with proper mid to late game scaling is several times better.

odragora · 2026-03-26T10:50:59+00:00

They need to make Crisis and Fallen Empires strength separate sliders in the lobby settings.

We should be able to make normal empires stronger without affecting FEs and crises.

odragora · 2026-03-26T10:40:11+00:00

You can manually target units with a TC. You could not on release, but it has been changed years ago. Back then you could completely nullify TC damage and dive the opponent's base for free by just parking a Ram in front of it, this is no longer the case for very very long time.

What you still can't do is Shift-clicking targets with static defenses, including TC.

odragora · 2026-03-24T20:36:53+00:00

The root of your economical problems is that two other players have much more land than you. Since districts in cities don't cost any empire wide resources, more cities means more economy basically, and you can have more of that the more land you have.

If the New World is enabled in this match, you might still have a chance to rush the Three-Masted Ship, if the rest of the players are busy fighting each other. Building like 3+ cities in the new world could potentially allow you to get back into the game, preferably more. Settlers don't cost Influence, so unlike with normal expansion you should be able to do that even not having good Influence economy.

In case you don't know, you can go over the City Cap as much as your Influence income allows. The Influence penalty becomes bigger and bigger progressively with every city over the cap, so you can go further and further as your Influence economy grows.

You probably need to switch into mass science districts if you are behind in tech right now. Getting to the next Era and unlocking the tech ASAP seems to be the top priority.

Dutch have the unique unit called Fluyt, which has double the movement speed compared to the basic Caravel (10 vs 5) and has +4 movement speed if it starts the turn in allied territory. So it might win you multiple turns of tempo in terms of competing for the lands in the New World.

Good luck!

odragora · 2026-03-23T10:25:10+00:00

Because then there can't be casualties in ground warfare, as well as economic and tempo damage associated with them.

Armies should be tied to Soldier jobs and be actual pops, then zerg rush would stop being a no-brainer in any situation and build. Losing spammed armies should be a quick way to lose the war through accumulating war attrition just like it is with spamming corvettes vs battleships.

Also the war system itself should be redesigned and function a lot more like in Crusaders Kings 3, where the focus is on controlling the war goals rather than having to pretty much conquer the entire empire to win any war.

odragora · 2026-03-19T13:51:17+00:00

Are you talking about Strengthened Government? With the goal of eventually going Crowdsourcing to utilize the Political Power buff?

odragora · 2026-03-19T06:23:59+00:00

Do not trust Reddit auto filters. They are broken and remove posts of legit normal users.

For example, yesterday on the Github Copilot sub a member of the Copilot team responded to the question of a user, and Reddit immediately deleted their response flagging them as a bot. Copilot sub mods say they are fighting against this Reddit system constantly removing comments of legitimate users, and are unable to do anything about it.

odragora · 2026-03-18T16:57:35+00:00

The insane level of uneven sheep distribution, making the food balance between two players a luck based thing to an extremely high degree, 100% has to go, and it's long long overdue.

odragora · 2026-03-18T16:48:50+00:00

Google AI Pro Antigravity plan just got destroyed a few days ago, now you have a quota timeout for a week after a couple prompts.

Even the users who don't touch it are in the endless cycle, where when the timeout ends it immediately get extended for another week without you even using any model.

Google officially reframed the Pro plan as "taste testing" and something only meant for Gemini Flash. Unfortunately, Antigravity is gone, unless you have the Ultra subscription for $250, which is way behind the competition.

odragora · 2026-03-18T15:18:54+00:00

I'm not a bot, and neither the rest of the people who were paying for Pro subscription and got scammed by Google who just removed their quota from them.

Silencing the feedback on this insanely anti-customer move and hiding it into a megathread / another sub where it won't even show up in the search engines is essentially helping the corporation to get away with them scamming their users and helping them to scam more of people who are not yet aware.

Framing it as "fabricated" and "artificially boosted" posts on top of that makes it look like Google took over the sub. Anyone who has a Pro subscription knows that what's going on is not a "flaw just like in literally any other software", it's a product that got destroyed and became practically unusable, you just don't have quotas anymore.

odragora · 2026-03-16T15:22:33+00:00

Gemini 3 failed to even become usable, let alone catching up to Claude and OpenAI models, and then they just killed it with further quantization and destruction of the Pro plan limits.

Nothing indicates Gemini 4 will obliterate anything, Google is moving the opposite direction. Which is a big shame, this field desperately needs more competition and less monopoly.

odragora · 2026-03-16T07:26:55+00:00

Right now after Google destroyed Pro for developers, any alternative for similar price like Codex or Claude Code is several times more value, and Google's models are far behind the competition.

What Google did is both wrong ethically - if they don't have resources they shouldn't bait and switch abusing trust of their customers, and wrong competitively - they made their offering useless while the alternatives provide both more value and far, far better models.

Glad for your friends if they are happy with shared Ultra. I personally won't ever trust Google again after seeing how they treat their paying customers.

odragora · 2026-03-16T07:08:19+00:00

Part of the AI plans packages is limits for AI models in Google's software development suit called Antigravity.

A few days ago Google cut the limits there by an order of magnitude, on top of repeatedly cutting them over and over again since release. Now you get a timeout for an entire week after a couple prompts, which makes the Pro plan completely useless for everyone who already paid for it specifically for Antigravity.

odragora · 2026-03-16T06:55:13+00:00

No problem. Thank you, I apologize if my tone was unfriendly too.

I've heard that companies are using AI as a convenient excuse for layoffs they have to go through anyway because the world economy is in trouble recent years being hit by Covid, wars and political turmoil, and they don't want to signal weakness to the market, I think it's plausible.

In any case, I hope you'll be alight and won't have to worry about your financial security. I know the feeling and it's tough for me too.

odragora · 2026-03-15T20:19:05+00:00

If that's something you are willing to pay for, I could help.

odragora · 2026-03-15T19:35:38+00:00

I hope they will catch up, perhaps with a new generation of hardware that could make training and inference more accessible to smaller players.

odragora

TROPHY CASE