Hidden Cup 4 Decider | BacT vs Dark (Best of 7)

we got to do this special youtube intro yeah there you go for the viewers here's another best of seven decider winner here moves on to the main event of hidden cup four that will be march 18th through the 21st uh main event players will be playing on hero names so we will not know their identities and bact has played in hidden cup 2 and hidden cup 3 and he's looking to get well back to the hidden cup now dark is up against him here in the red dark is 16 years old he was not expected to make it this far real underdog story but yeah alice and i were talking about frank's first saracens here you like the sarasota's pick for game number one i do i like the new saracens because you have a sieve with great versatility right with uh amazing camels but you also have a sieve that can go for a composition like a bluster camel which completely annihilates frank in kind of the mid to like early imperial age yep so there are definitely timings there i don't know what you think do you think like maybe in futility frank or ahead but later then they're not i am yeah sorry to hop in here i'm getting excited about it just thinking about it because well i do prefer frank eco because they have the forage bonus and then the farm bonus and all that i do feel like the mid game there's potential here for saracens uh and before saracens became kind of an a go-to archer civilization which has been common in the recent uh i used to always believe that you could use the sanderson market bonus to just sell your your gold buy some food and just or sell your stone excuse me buy some food and go up to castle age a minute or two faster when playing against knight sivs so in this situation if you've been watching sarasota's over the last year we don't need to see some type of yolo archer play from dark i think that he could honestly scout open and then just try and get up to castle a bit faster and if you're expecting frank's to go into knights and you can scout it out just get some camels on the field and boom it out it's it's actually there's potential here as dark has really struggled with his dark age macro um there's potential here for dark to do something yeah he completely agrees it's one of those weird matchups like oh he killed the oh dude he must be nervous this is really bad yeah this bucket just been very sloppy oh my god like both deer were really bad he shot the first one with uh oh my god it's past he can't call a restart or anything either this is past four minutes he's screwed oh god well anyways this has been really poor and now the game plan changes he shot his board with his tc feels bad man he has lured two deers though so as larry says like if you get lames all you need to do is little one there so if we believe larry he should be fine fingers crossed yeah it's true i think he could still pull off a relatively solid uptime but i think everything i've seen here from the deer pushing to to that boar there tells me we're actually seeing some nerves here from dark because he plays a lot he probably practiced here it's not as if like he needs he's 16. it's not like he needs to warm up his his hands in the morning you know he's ready to game when he wakes up so um yeah that was just a bit iffy and bact is not going to have those problems back on the other side who we haven't talked about too much um everything's looking clean and he'll probably go for 20 population feudal which is pretty fast and standard for franks yeah definitely one interesting thing is that dark has already mined 10 gold um i'm not really sure why exactly because he's not built at barracks yet okay so he's not drushing yeah with maintain gold and not do anything with it yeah maybe he had his villager out there i think he built the houses and he just figured let's just get some resources on the way back just in case i feel the need to go for a strat but yeah weird opening for dark dark is going to be able to pull off a 21 population feudal it sucks that he lost 340 food like that but it's manageable at least though i'd say far from my deal yeah definitely and then you kind of if you are going to go it looks like he's going for scouts and if you are going to do scouts against franks you kind of do want to be up at 20 pop because obviously having the more hp like it's very easy to snowball frank scouts so he's being a little bit kind of um well you don't really want to be 21 pop against ranks honestly yeah it's also kind of possible maybe he maybe he was planning on going for a drush which is why i got the gold and then you can't really do that when you shoot your board down with dc uh what are your thoughts on that man are you weakening your bore with the tc nowadays are you not doing that um i think it's really good and i'm experimenting with it for sure but i think yeah when you're nervous like it's just another thing that can go wrong and it obviously has gone right here yeah but i think i think if if you're confident with it and you can do it then i think most of the time it's fine okay um i don't know what you think because it just kind of saves some villager hit points really and it's a bit faster as long as you get that rhythm down like i a year ago was complaining because i saw vivi as this villager could go down back has that scout what's that yeah i saw players losing the their boars because of that and my theory was if you do it correctly you know 100 times but then you fail one time in a tournament that could at one time could be the game you lose the set with so that said i practiced with it and here's the stable for dark and fact has been extremely annoying with this and dark hasn't even found backed um and i do like it actually it's just you know can you execute it's like anything else so yeah i know i i agree um it's crazy the doc hasn't actually scouted back to you i mean i presume he knows he's going for scouts but it's almost 10 minutes in that's pretty late have we got spearman coming forward from back and the honest truth is it's just the players are really close together and this is all snowballing on dark real hard right now he lost his board which is already going to set you back now we've got scouts and spears on him and the pressure's on eco is never going to be as clean as frank's anyways able to get the scout past be stable from back but maybe not really realizing what the situation and i think that scout's going to go down and this is not start that dark would have won this could be like he's got to keep his his head on straight here because losing this game isn't the end of the world it's just you know making sure that mentally you're still there after how this has gone so far if you lose yeah this is a he's only 16 as well right he's not going to have a huge amount of experience in these games and and not especially like playing you know losing your ball early is never going to help your your attitude right exactly but um yeah unfortunately for him his map is quite open which you kind of never really want to see against franks yep but he is he's only off now um defending with the spearman as well yeah i think what i would do in this position because nice quick wall's there um at this point you realize that you're probably not gonna get any counts for damage in with scout rush because back to so much time he'll probably have walls down plus it's backed so we'll probably have walls down um and so at this point you just play defensive as backed as running in and then eventually try and use that saracen market to catch up um and let's see what happens here here comes the scouts for blacks yeah i should get a villager kill there dark loses a second yeah it's just it's just sloppy he was baited his three spoons were baited well out of position by i think it was one spearman yep yep i mean these are these are like villager losses that you wouldn't normally see like you should never have these spearmint so far away from these villages they're just kind of useless at that point um actually three eco kills in this game for back and back has not really had to invest that much either and uh man sometimes with that attack the villager's gonna head towards the tc in that instance it pat the other way and so that's four villagers killed and backed it's just like take me to the main event please this is this is like this rated game right now oh man this is brutal honestly yeah um this is rough to watch right now i'm again i'm just hoping if this game ends uh relatively soon it does feel like back should be able to snowball this to a victory that that uh as the villager gets sniped they're on the farm fact is in great form but yeah i hope hopefully dark will well can't be worse in the next games right we know that much exactly it's only up from here presumably oh dude i can't even imagine like because i i didn't play anything competitively at 16. i can only imagine like the stress i'd be feeling right now but i mean what's funny is as we we're gonna see bax go for some additional doinks on the farmers here because there's still some weak ones what's funny is that he was playing leary in some ranked games just the other day and like he took a ranked game off of leery which i've never done before you know so like it wasn't even like leery was full on trolling or anything dark was actually playing really well so he certainly got the quality he's just started the series it's been all about fact it's not like back's base was super easy to wall that's a crap ton of walling right there he was just never pressured yeah he was just always on the back foot right i didn't think he even built a scout um and it's so hard to chase scouts around in your base if you only have a spear and they just have free reign essentially yep oh no and that's another villager yeah it should be again i'm loving how bactus grouping up these scouts because they are kind of weak and dark tries to quick wall doesn't happen no and dark's doing exactly what i said i would probably do here at the market it's somewhere out there yeah he has the market he sold the stone and honestly he's on his way up and he's only 10 or so seconds behind that that could be way worse for him sarasons are bailing him out a bit yes if he wasn't saracens he wouldn't be up to carthage at the same time but he is also down three villages and wheelbarrow i presume so yeah uh well actually no bax did not get wheel what in the world then wait okay well bags must just have idle time then that's ridiculous according to capture h practice had 40 seconds of tc idle time which equates to like a villager and a half i think oh okay so i guess it kind of makes sense but yeah i feel like back should have a bigger lead there he did not get wheel how many villages did he kill about five or six right yeah and it takes it's very odd it i feel like the math isn't adding up here based on what i yeah yeah i agree unless you've got town watch or something i i can't see how he's not up more villages that's true actually can we see let's see that looks like it might be town watch nothing is it is it town i don't live maybe it's not anyways halas uh dark has given himself a chance here what do you think his approach needs to be here do you think he's gonna go like super yolo or can he go like super boomy or something ah this is oh he sold his stone to get cast age which is why he's up so quick so i think that probably answers your question um yeah maybe he will be going yellow i think honestly i i think it it feels worse than it is he's only down three villagers he could just play us try and play a standard game right and if you do get to you know imp and you're not massively behind economically i think you can compete with sarsons yeah it's true yeah maybe just like stay alive you obviously get military on the field i think bax approach is going to be fairly standard here he's adding a second pc and the monastery this is perfect meta play in this position in my opinion go two stables for map control as back gets a villager on the farm nice little doink man that's six villagers down these scouts have got so much value but um but yeah two stables for knights add some monks behind it to convert any camels and then go for the boom that's all back needs to do he's making the right call here oh and okay so dark just let backed in and now back immediately scouts the two rangers so he'll know exactly what's coming up he knows that you know doc's probably not going to build tc's behind this if he scouts two ranges so like what do you do is dark now i mean uh i i i don't want to say call it just yet but it's like it's it's definitely getting that point where five minutes that's gonna have such a big lead it's gonna be unreal that is losing his night numbers uh but he's running home now and he should be able to get a quick conversion here yeah and that should be a it should be a conversion but it's d okay no conversion yeah yeah i'm i'm not really sure about the archery range platinum i feel like it's just a little bit too slow um i don't know what you think about that that is first off i commend you for for saying that like a caster would you know because i know deep down inside you're like what on earth why you know i know like there's definitely a more brutal opinion somewhere in your in your mind alice uh and i'm with you dude i don't like think about it he doesn't have any upgrades yet and then if he was going to go cav archers those ranges could have been up before he arrived to cass lake so he could at least could have some mass right now and the scouts again for back yeah this is yeah this is is he gonna get another one too that one is beating the woodland yeah i think he's going back right now jeff goes back for it and will get unbelievable man nine kills back just made this first game looks so easy yeah okay so cave arches with no upgrades um oh more conversions as well yeah this is not looking too hot is it no no you've got the 11 villager lead now for back combined with the eco upgrades combined with the fact he'll be on three pcs in a second i think honestly if i was dark's coach right now and you know not that anyone can like sit in the game and coach you it's not a thing but if that was a thing i'd just be like you know what play for a couple more minutes get get the jitters out of your system if you can before game number two you know cause like clearly he was he struggled at the start he didn't do himself any favors with that fail with the with the board um he probably realized this after those losses that this should be game over but just just played out a bit longer that way when you go into game two you might feel better about the situation yeah as well the thing is against frank's as well right it's not said that you can have a bad feeling or dark age really like that is one sieve that if you have a bad futile age that you are just dead um so you can kind of um probably understand a little bit especially with you know first game he's got a lot of nerves probably at least from from what we're seeing i mean honestly the the only thing that makes me feel like it was nerves was was not just the um it wasn't even just the bore issue it was the deer because i've seen him push deer many times and the fact that like one time he used one villager instead of two to shoot it and shot it away from the tc yeah and then the other one was really far away and then he found with the board that made me think maybe there's some nerves there so yeah the thing that made me think nerves was when those three spin got dragged away from his face like if you're doing that like you just you're not thinking straight like you're not paying attention to the right things and it it just it was so obvious that he's not really in his element like dark can play so much better than it's like we know that yep yep well consistency over a best of seven takes takes some talent and so i guess again on the on the bright side he's going to have some more opportunities here in fact it's just snowballing his lead coming forward to build a siege workshop and this is what that meta play is able to accomplish especially when you get nine villager kills but you know he's got three tcs running massive eco lead as the monks for any conversions and any healing it's exactly what you'd want to see from bax position and a few scorpions would be a very good addition here yeah definitely it's why it's kind of a shame that the dark couldn't at least get to car stage without without dying right because if this is an even position like you're kind of forced back to make a play because frank can't really just like let saracens build up to like you know heavy camel and our blessing you just lose the game yep so like at least if you'd have tried to keep the game open you forced back to play really well like here i mean i guess black backed has played really well to win the game but he's not really done too much like you may not really have to work super hard yeah yeah yeah like he's not really made any crazy decision make uh decisions right he's just kind of microsome scouts and won the game yeah and this is the ideal world for frank's is where you get ahead just doing the basics you don't have to do anything you don't have to do any crazy tech switches they're just so good economically and then it gets to a point where when you have the eco lead you just transfer to stone which i think should be happening soon for back at least i would and then you could eventually build some cheap castles all over the map and then you're an imp it's just there's a reason why all the low elo legends out there well not all but a lot of them play pranks and there's a reason why high-level players love to play franks for arabia yeah there's a reason why there's a reddit thread every week about about franks they are very simple very easy to play um i think i think they do have the weaknesses and they don't really have the perfect win rate and especially in tournament games right yep but um they are definitely a solid step right yeah i'd say the sieve that's probably weak against potentially meso and then chinese can give them some real problems if we're talking tournament draft scenarios yeah but uh right here back just but he probably feels like he's got this right now not hesitating to go in for any type of kill monks are always on the camels to get conversions which they like to see split up his knights on the cav archers which is perfect but also keeping us nice next to the siege and dark is going to call it here not this best start to the series but like we said it definitely is not going to be worse in any of these future games so um that's the only positive here for dark yeah it's only up from here right um shoot i had something oh i wanted to give since we have a lot of people here and whatnot or we mentioned the subreddit i wanted to give kosh dai a shout out i don't know if cash day is here right now but kosh dai is posting a hidden cup 4 meme every single day on the subreddit and i've been looking for them i've been frequenting the subreddit just to see the memes and every single day they've been amazing so i don't know if anyone out there has been seeing those but thank you kashtei for doing that i didn't get to send you a pm about that yet there's been some funny ones all right so um this is where like we know franks are strong on arabia halas but but now we've got these other maps and this is where we have to scheme a little bit and guess where players might end up using the sieves um we actually talked about hideout before the series started if hideout comes up as it was the first home map pick we feel as though back's in a good position with tunes right yeah okay so one weird thing is that dark has italians and portuguese so presumably he's going to pick one for islands and the thing about portuguese is they are kind of a clowns i think you could probably see them being picked on hide up maybe oh do do you know how they match up against tutans is that that's probably winnable for portuguese right i i don't know if there's many sieves that match up super well against tunes on video maps like like honestly is there is there a single save aztecs won't do it you can't go for that traditional pick buy-ins maybe by ins i mean at a certain point students just wreck everything with their options i feel yeah so it is rather tough i would honestly if i'm dark i would not go for a hideout from my next home map and i might go islands and i think you mentioned it you've got italians portuguese and japanese in your draft uh bact would have well vikings is is honestly pretty good but i still think you could go portuguese maybe to counter that on water um and then also it's completely different style from these standard land maps where backed is the most capable yeah definitely i i'm just kind of a bit confused because he's got it feels like he has too many too many subs for like water maps like italians portuguese japanese i guess we've got bay as well right yeah and bay islands cross but he's already got lithuanians for crossroad um i don't know if you expected maybe for portuguese to be sniped you know it's really hard to map out where i think these sieves are going to be used on both sides but if i had to guess i'd say dark would go portuguese on islands he would go um he did go uh italians on cross against overtaken i know that hero really likes um italians on cross i i know from watching a lot of his a lot of his streams and he also picked them against leary in a show match recently as well um so if hero plays them i mean you could probably argue that quite a solid pick against mongols though i'm not i'm not too sure if they're actually better than mongols um yeah it's it's hard to say i think like we could easily spend the next 10 minutes just talking around and around the circle gonna come up and uh i think we'll just have to see it's funny i'm looking for uh the game they haven't launched yet and dark elf is playing chat dark elf is it i don't know if you've heard of him palace he's a loyal legend he's like 700 elo like his base always has perfect farms and perfect house placement oh nice nice like the there's not a single tile gap between the farms and the houses it always lines up it's always a nice little square and he's played like 1200 ranked games it's insane but um we're not gonna be casting him sorry chat uh i think we'll just have to wait and see what map they go for yeah i mean it could be it could be any of them honestly i mean he's got lithuanians across he's probably quite confident on cross raid um do you think we've seen the cross meta that kind of evolve now um what do you think the best crosstips are now so it's not necessarily that the met has evolved but i think that the version of cross we have right now is so much more dependent upon switching ponds um the previous tournament versions had a lot more food in each pond and then even more so the ranked version which people come become familiar with for lakes has like 10 times the amount of food that we have in these ponds so you honestly you kind of need to get the other pawns which which is one factor and then the other factor is sometimes with the map gens and it is going to be islands next you can find situations where uh players can't they're so close together that they can get ahead with land as well instead of just winning water so it it's honestly it's just kind of a mix of everything which is crazy and i we were spot on with the civilization guests it will be portuguese or dark and vikings are backed in game two yeah that makes sense honestly i really like how cross and slopes have been changed because i watch these maps and like i don't you don't really know what sieve is going to be on on on which map like you kind of have an idea but especially with slopes like i know that jordan won with britain's against indians earlier right and you know i've seen bulgarians work on that map i mean there's so much diversity like before it used to be indians mirror right yep and it's the same with course really you could really pick hans like lithuanians like byzantines are picked a lot um yeah it's definitely difficult to tell which is the best at the moment um how do you feel about cab watches in this metagame by the way if you're faster to castle age by by 40 seconds or more i love them the issue is that a lot of people are trying to go cav archers when they fall behind and so they'll have to like they'll have six nights at their base and then they're having three-range cav archers and they're in a tough spot so like doubts showed in red bull now granted there was different settings and i am in the game then if you're able to find it all right yep um but yeah i really do feel like in certain situations probably not on islands but cavaliers can work really well so by the way shout out to zero empires in chat what's up zach nice to see you man probably here to support you alice i think you guys have played uh you mentioned cs a lot of cs together over the years right we have yes yep we have uh probably still do if i had my yeah we do all right well uh here in the blue we have backed in fact had a very strong game number one that said everything that could have gone wrong went wrong for dark in game one he shot his board with his tc he failed some borders oh wow and he's he's now moonwalking all right that's a plus um just overall kind of a game that you're expected to lose when you you perform that weekly and dark age so we've got portuguese versus vikings it is team island there's been a lot of conversation about portuguese especially alice where do you think portuguese fit as far as the water meta is concerned um i'm not the best sports player i will admit that but i think they have a really really really nice lay game timing right so that if you can stay alive which most of the time you can lions if you get to those pretoria um you're usually in a pretty good spot to win as long as you don't take crippling damage yeah um but i think they're not immensely strong earlier so i feel like it does kind of bounce out at least a little bit i don't know what you think well um man i could have a full-on conversation about this i asked we're gonna have the time here uh so you know how when it comes to the units made on water it's often referred to as the water triangle yep i feel like we've got the when it comes to water civilizations there's four of them and so i guess that makes a cube we've got like the water cube and uh it's i don't know i could be explaining this way better i didn't practice this explanation but you look at this sith match-up in particular portuguese can give vikings some real problems because vikings do not get fires and portuguese strength with the caravels which is good against galleys or or longboats can excel so i think portuguese against vikings portuguese the better civ look at something like italians against portuguese italians not only do they have fast fire ship but it's cheaper for them to advance to each age plus their dock techs are discounted i feel like italians even though portuguese could uh stall it out are the better save in that matchup and i think the data has reflected that as well but then you got like vikings against italians vikings might be slightly better than italians if it's straight galleys i mean i honestly and then you have japanese and some other sieves but like i it's so interesting now to talk about sieves on islands whereas in hidden cup three it was just italians italians italians italians so i welcome the the portuguese to the conversation and i think that if dark is able to play this well i'd say late castle age early imp if it's early he's got to start thinking about stalling now a little bit and going for those uh it's victorious yeah i completely agree and one thing as well about portuguese is that um they do actually have heavy demo and that unit is insane yeah so against sims like japanese and italians like if you can get to like patoria heavy demo like i think you should be winning most games late game but like you said they obviously have them timings earlier on in the game too so i think it's only really against like um vikings where they have a really kind of solid matchup like all around really um but other sims should have timings to win the game it's just like you're always on a timer with the sieve right like if you let them get to faetorius you are just going to lose yeah just because of the nature of violence yeah it's it's tough like the data simply does not reflect that one sieve is stronger than the other on islands right now it's just how it goes uh we've seen portuguese get killed off before the victorias can pay off we've seen as dark as weakening the boar with the tc again okay so he seems to have this down now but um it stressed me out and now i've lost my train of thought but yeah i think that once we get to the main event we're going to be seeing a lot of the same civilizations it's just that there are many players in the main event who won't prefer to pick this map if they have other choices yeah yeah i think yeah i think i think it's just balanced in quite a nice way in that like you know but there's not one side that's massively like a head but also kind of have their timings and have like kind of phases in the game where they can when they can compete right yep um right so well i i like the back dock position on the left side um you probably do not want to go for forward dock if you have to open up with galleys in this case there's no question vikings do not get fires so yeah this will probably be a side back dot galley play do you think with that in mind the dark should try and and punish the fact that the enemy doesn't have fires and send fires out or do you think maybe he could consider opening with his own galleys out of fear that that could be strong for back i think honestly i i think unless you're you know your dogs are really close i i just think galleries are better um okay but i i'm not a water expert and if i was dark and and i didn't scout my opponent's dogs and i don't know that they're close then i would be really worried about going fire galleries because i've seen so many games where like it's so easy for the galley player to snowboard it right late all it takes is five or six with fletching and then you you but it's very hard to lose a galley when you have that many right yeah you've not taken that early damage um so i guess we'll see i mean doc probably has practiced this so he probably knows better than me and i guess we'll see his decision in uh in a little while yeah well we have backed making the galleys no surprise i i've had this conversation a lot over the last few weeks i think like a straight galley opening is fine like if you're really worried about fires maybe just side dock it and perhaps this is another weakness of the portuguese is that like they tend to play into that fire meta and galicias or even a galley strat could be strong against them um you know for backed he's no stranger to these settings islands is a classic water map and he's been around for years and years and after winning for his game i'm sure he's feeling good so he's going to send the galleys out an interesting note is if you wanted to i've seen some players grouping up just two galleys to snipe fishing ships because it's a lot faster to do so uh than fires would be yeah yeah yeah that's that's pretty common um bacter's being very aggressive here with his early early numbers i want is do you think that's is that common with galleys i feel like that's probably a little bit risky i think he it might be confidence we're maybe just scouting here okay there he goes sees the fires we don't actually see fire from the fires all the time sorry viewers but yeah that that it looks a little bit sketched now right he's being yeah the problem yeah the problem as well is he's he's got to lead dark to his dogs surely um i know he's actually done a great job to duke but uh usually you'd have to run back to where your dogs are and doc doesn't actually know where we're back just dogged these things are so fast now the galleys feel so much faster than fires man this is insane and look at that fletchings on the way he hit a fishing ship and now he's just going to zoom on out of here it's like it almost feels like he's burpers right now but no this is just viking galleys and i'm if he can get the mass up at home as now uh dark has found him i really would like bach's position but there's three fires on the way right now and he's got to have to have a demo land and not not a bad demo i guess considering that the other one was also pretty weak yep and this is what happens it starts to snowball right like as soon as the more galaxy gets the worse it gets for dark i mean and you can't really switch out at this point because you've already lost that that mass rate like you don't have time really to catch up yeah um yeah back to just it's just we're we talked about it before the series fact is has been there done that and there's a reason he's a part of all these events uh year in and year out and he's just making it look really easy here that said darks micro pretty good there uh i like the the one dodge but i'm gonna have to overwhelm here quickly either taking out fishing ships or taking out the mass from backs because back to not taking many losses here yeah definitely uh i think yeah back he's also quite scared about a landing as well which i find quite interesting he's already warmed up the back of his base oh and a really big demo here that oh he had me distracted with the back of the base there but yep demo lands and back to defense and i think he had four fishing shifts maybe he lost one it could have been three either yeah he lost one to those players yeah okay yeah it's ten military versus five um yeah if you look at it oh sorry it's so interesting if you look at the kd it's already seven to two and one of those is a fishing boat so like yeah it's just so hard to get the massive fires out right you know what's interesting though look at the macro for dark and he did added uh five fishing ships in dark age and he's got about to have 700 food i mean he could up so much faster to the next day oh wow that is crazy quick that is really impressive and i can't help but feel like that wasn't even with market shenanigans alice it's not like five fishing ships brought him that much food and he's on the way up so if he doesn't completely lose water over the next two minutes i think he could easily clear up back and cast out yeah yeah that yeah there's one thing that flyers really have going for them is that if you get that fast castle age timing it's so much better than than if it's just galley v galley yeah like you can just run away but but with fire galleries you can you can catch up um and even if you don't you can land at the same time and if you have this combination of like fire ships and landing it's so much harder to micro like the galleys than it is to microwave the fire galleys although this fight is really bad for dark yeah i think you should just be dodging here i don't think he should be diving he should just be like running away acting like he's gonna attack you know tight a little bit the kd 12 to three right now yeah but the castle could be sick and if he keeps the fish and chips alive i might even like to see his fishing ships go to a back dock just to keep him safe for the next couple minutes but it fires ships against bac's current comp composition could mean that bags could lose docks uh bax could in theory micro against cass league units but it's going to be so much more difficult yeah and the one really weird thing is baxter's built an archery range in the barracks and it's his main place um i think he's not really respecting dark enough here i think he's not even clicked car slash yet i mean like these fight ships can do some real damage if you if you manage to keep them alive oh big demo maybe okay i mean it's it hits you know it's better than nothing but it wasn't really what you'd want acts now we'll see the darks and cast legs yeah i don't think that he ever expected dark would be up at this time 18-minute uptime is sick and i know when um dark is probably training with winchester and when winchester played islands he also was picking portuguese and he had a very similar uptime so there's got to be some build that they're working on which is just insane because the consistency's been there for those two i think it has to be the the five fishing ships right and then he loaded all his deer and it's just like it's incredibly clean let's get to get a cottage that quickly um here we go i mean for dark yeah you're 16 years old you you lost the first game horribly but you're now in a position where you could threaten and the demos are landing but look at this there's more fires coming in there's a caravan coming in oh this is gonna be sick dude facts could just die here what a play this is this is amazing and also he's buying himself so much time to switch to caravals right like this is kind of perfect for him like um cairo's are kind of a difficult unit to get in that mass because you can't build them in future right that can just build his galleys and then he has 20 20 war galleys but like you know dark can't do that um but now he's able to thin out that mass and he'll should have about eight carabaos by the time um backed his is costly so this is great for dog do you see this transport for fact it's just like it's it's it's hiding in plain sight it's just sitting there that's really weird and he's trying he's doing a decent job i guess to keep his mask alive but the point that you just brought up is what are you going to be massing you're going to be massing a unit that gets countered by caravals so it's not an ideal situation at all when you're vikings and you fall this far behind well played dark yeah and again like you don't you just don't want this to happen as vikings because you don't win this late game either like your timing is probably well in feudal age i guess um with the faster working farms and and the the galleys right so this is looking really really tricky for banks well back to the transport loaded up with five archers he somehow was able to get the transport over there i mean i can understand dark is focused in various areas on water mark did make outposts all over his island and let's see what his reaction time looks like here in a second oh he sees it straight away or he should yeah he should if he notices it right he could see he could see it but yeah he's noticed yep yes yeah he's already walling on the left and he's built that tc with more villagers it worked so yeah perfect reaction from dark though right and also his golds are on the other side so it's not like a gold's getting denied by that could easily just make a siege workshop um i'm still curious though backed his he's got a big mass in his docks and it's a deceiving amount so as he comes out with a demo there i could definitely see him hopping out of these docks here in a second and trying to take on the caravels both of those demos connected with two caravels so i'm waiting for it it'll probably happen soon for back he is kind of trapped in in the back corner though and how many of these war galleries are going to go down as they flee it's kind of an awkward fight as well when for caravals when they all release right because you kind of want to get that that nice like scorpion bolt damage on on lots of units but like if they're all spread out it's kind of harder to get that splash damage yeah it's true not exactly right and so the caravels have to to get out of here it's somewhat manageable for fact right now economic well i say it's somewhat manageable but economically he's he's actually really far behind and now he's going to get wrecked it's not manageable at all i lied i take it all back yeah i mean what but even then what is the play i mean how do you even come back i mean you you have the worst unit you have the worst late game yeah i mean like what do you even do so this is okay did you not feel like this game was over after the 12-3 kd before seeing the resources that dark had uh no just because of the way islands is like yeah yeah it's true true but i see what you mean yeah if it definitely felt like the the back was fine and he was looking great to kind of you know snowball the advantage right yep yep um crossbows were transported over and were able to get a veil kill that's that's good annoying work from back because dark felt like he had this dealt with um that said the crossbows can't really go anywhere so i would just continue to camp the gold caravals and crossbows i don't see frequently well they're missing a lot of their shots sadly but uh but yeah i'm just i'm thinking back to the macro approach from dark and just how impressive that was because it looks like fires were not the play early on and then now everything's looking good for him and the nature of the matchup i feel as though portuguese are just a perfect counter to vikings vikings would have to be winning at this stage of the game and they're not right now so yeah i completely agree and i guess if you know that your build is that good you probably have confidence in it right he like he he knows i can lose 12 five at least my build is so good i'll get cartilage first so um i think it's just really impressive uh mentality and just i mean i guess really impressive build yeah yeah preparation and it also probably just the mindset of well if i don't win with this because it was his first home map pick it's like then i'm screwed in this series because it clearly i mean i would have confidence in this build order so yeah i mean he is kind of losing this battle now though on the water a little bit yeah it's he's struggling perhaps to focus on everything he's got three tc's right now and so maybe being a little greedy with the boom but on the bright side if you have the better unit you probably always have that confidence to be able to just keep it even on water at least you're keeping it easy when you have that eco lead you should feel okay yeah i mean what's the worst case scenario is that he loses water um but even then he's up 20 bills right so he should be able to build a castle and re-dock and in which case he still wins because he's again he's got the better league himself so yeah um yeah it's looking really good for dark do you think in some ways we also should be questioning back the way that he's played this because the galleys looked good but he started to wall up expecting a transport which clearly wasn't the the thing and also he sold his stone to up to the next age it was still so much later so it's got to be some question marks over his his build order compared to yeah i think you absolutely have to because i think he underestimated doc to be honest because he built um a barracks an archery range it kind of felt like he he'd already thought he'd won warsaw yeah i don't know if he because we were saying you were saying sorry that you know if if you were we kind of felt like the game might have been over with the 12 to 3kd i think maybe bach thought the same thing and he's like well i only lose this if i get you know yeah forward like stable on me and he goes car slash but true yeah that wasn't really the case yeah i think he was i think a small part of him might have believed that when it said dark hit castle the dark had used the chat trick and typed it um anyways longbows i mean i love how we're seeing in 2021 here we've got longbows and caravals we've got unique ships out there uh years and years ago you had to make castles to unlock your unique ships it's so boring man but it still feels like one unique ship counters the other unique ship especially because longbows stack and as these these caravels fire they pass through and the long boat stacking actually makes them significantly worse than some other units you could see yeah i mean are war galleys much better i mean they're well i think longboats stack a lot easier but yes point is correct that uh war gallery is also stacked you really should be changing your formation it looks like back to thinking about it when you're using units against caravilles okay so how do you win this game if you're back t right what is that what is the strategy there's not a single i mean i would think get villagers to his side and go magnol crossbow but he's out macroed three tc's to one on water it's somewhat 50 50. like this isn't even portuguese vs vikings at this point this might as well be a vikings mirror dark is just a head in every single aspect yeah yeah i mean yeah this is so hard to deal with some of these fights whether or not i think this is good for bacteria yeah it does look kind of good are you confused that dark continues to mix in fires yeah i think it kind of doesn't really make any sense because my back is still building demo ships as well yeah and i mean like long boats just destroy fires right so yeah maybe not the best unit composition yeah i was weird it was weird to me how he continued to mix in fires uh there's no real need to do that here and caravals would be the way and maybe and you asked back's win condition it would be winning water and despite all we've said about how portuguese should match up nicely back's production has been a lot higher and uh he's pushing now and he sees blood in the water there's opportunities for him to weaken these units he's now going to bring it across more crossbowman i mean dark 16 years old is a little shaky in game one maybe starts to feel a bit shaky right now and maybe bax could show his his confidence in his class to maybe bring this game to an even point uh that's still gotta have he has a lot of work to do yeah loads of work to do i mean this preemptive castle from dark is quite nice um one thing i'm like maybe that could have been i don't know what you think but isn't that a bit preemptive i mean he might lose the water and he might need that stone to to cast those dogs and he's kind of doing that for five crosswords yeah i mean i he had no real way of expecting that transport so imagine if you will place it on the shoreline you know that castle would never go up so yeah sure yeah yeah so i think he just wants to go imperial here i don't think it's the end of the world for dark i think what he should be doing is making a scorpion for home and then he should be back docking or side docking and just continuing to mascara bills yeah yeah um yeah caravals is the play here right i think as long as he survives and he doesn't you know as long as he can't as long as he doesn't get to the point where he can't re-dock then i think he's fine yeah and backed is so worse off it looks like we might have a pause that is a series with backed after all um that is not on three town centers backed has 64 villagers 105 villagers so dark was able to use that faster cast lag to not only like get a bit of a lead on water or come back on water but also extend that to an insane land eco and when this game resumes here i expect to see docks and caravals and then another uphill climb back because it'll be even worse this time he won't be in the imperial age and then he probably will get shredded yeah exactly i think honestly dark has played this really well um i think he's shown a lot of like calm um his macro has been pretty perfect like yep it's easy to like to not build tc's on islands because like yuriko is so like kind of it's so wood oriented and you don't have much food early castle like he didn't even have a farm until he hit car stage right but he still managed to macro perfectly he's got like 40 villager lead and now he's just he's calm he's not you know taking too many risks he's just i'm not sure if i like this castle though on the right side of his base um it you know these castles would be really good to protect victoria's later or something yeah actually that's a good question does he open up like right now is 45 free pop space and he's 90 pop away from being 200 so he could possibly justify opening up with a fetoria or two do you think you would do that in this position i not sure i think you you could justify it but i think i'd rather have a castle on my on my on which is why i'm a bit confused but if you look at what's happening um his cultures are just so conservative that he's taking kind of unnecessary damage yeah like the cc on the left he's just you're losing a tc right now yeah yeah yeah i mean dark is getting into the position where he could throw this game if he doesn't play correctly in the next few minutes seriously um like it would be a pretty massive throw i think as well like like caramels thirty build your lead and faster imperial age that should equal a victory here and dark is now going to front dock after the castle but this castle is the first one of the three we like and you prediction at t90 that's i think you might might be right that's why he was placing the castles there because he's building a tory in between both of them yeah man you got to keep them safe and what's nice is sometimes at least every time i've made a victoria and it has not been too frequently um sometimes you forget to have houses for them so you make victoria and then you're instantly pop capped and that can hurt your production but he's got a ton of castles now for pop space plus he's adding houses and now he's front docking but i have some real concerns over his economy yeah like look at it he has on food he's got 11 food in the bank backed has been on one tc and backed his 18. it's not a lot for either but he does not have a mass and backed his he has 40 long boats this is a ridiculous mass to deal with if that gets upgrades yeah and islands is one of those maps where you can make it work if you have either the tech advantage or the numbers right yeah like it doesn't necessarily matter if you have you know if you're down 40 villagers especially when i mean dark sea coast is hot far from perfect right but if you have that mass i mean you can do so much with it you can stable the game it doesn't matter if your opponent has double the villagers if they have no army um the question is can bacteria now now capitalize can he like get forward transports on on docks island and take out those victories and you know kind of secure the game yeah because again it doesn't really matter for back if he's ahead he has to kind of win the game soon-ish yeah otherwise those victories will just generate too many resources i think because dark was so far ahead he should in theory just be able to get back on water here use the fitorius to bring in a trickle of resources and then eventually win that's that's my feeling about this but i also felt 10 minutes ago that this game was not even close to winnable for backed and backed and dark showed us that a throw is always a little bit possible so um curious now elite longboat's on the way these caravals are not elite yet chemistry is on the way but not in yet so there's some upgrades missing for dark hand backed takes some good fights against the caravels or maybe he still needs to hesitate a bit about that yeah i'm not sure i don't know if you saw this by the way but um back tried to build a forward archery range in the middle of dark space he is still trying with one villager and looks like that'll either get converted or shut down but yeah i think even though they're elite longboats caravels should be doing quite well here but backed is that just doing all right man you know he's giving himself a real chance yeah he's doing a great job and that pop space is so deceiving too yes victoria's bringing a trickle of resources but you're losing 20 pop space for for victoria population is not as high as it seems for dark if you look at the stats uh military is 55 to 18. i think that need either needs to start transporting trebs over or go for cannon galleon right now like you've gotta you've got to start pushing the main base as quickly as possible exactly yeah and if if batch can hit this timing i think i feel like dark is really kind of he doesn't he doesn't have the oh he's getting elite caravan now which is perfect if he can hold and get 30 or 40 caravel i think he can still win this game yeah but he's given back so much potential to you know like you said like land trebuchet is like start putting some real pressure on him um yeah it's probably another victoria as well so let's say you're in bags position alice and you end up losing this game but you lose this game recognizing that you were way behind and you almost you almost came back does that does that give you a lot of confidence going into the next series or does that not really play a role in your mind honestly from the way back just played this game i think bec is extremely confident anyway yeah so i don't think black cares but yeah if this is me and i and i know i've got the worst sieve and you know i was you know that far behind i would be very happy with being really annoying for my opponent and like making the game difficult um poor victorious for dark i think that's too much man that might be too much that that's 80 pop space that he cannot fight with and then he's got 80 villagers so he literally only has like i'm trying to do quick math here 40 pop space for military and back to 60 military out in the field i think vittorious while they can be strong with some unique situations are not necessarily the way to win on islands you still need to have control dark could lose this game he could and it just it it feels uh it feels kind of bad for dark because he was so far ahead all he had to do was was keep a massive carabaos and not completely sacrifice both his economy and the water but he managed to do just that right and then we were saying how does back to win this game but i guess he's he's kind of showing us right you just keep taking the map yeah just build units and you kill your opponents oh and if you look on the left that fatori is actually being arranged by those those long long bits victoria is that the victoria of the house though um no no sorry if you go if you go further up oh oh oh that victoria oh gotcha yeah there's sorry there's too many to look at yeah that's nice are you blind like come on man jeez you can't have two blind people in the casting booth well anyways um the gold's also being ranged by backed i think back to showing that in this matchup you can't just switch to victoria's like this man you've gotta you've gotta actually have mass it really is frustrating to see this now it was particularly frustrating when classic pro and zoopy played there was a point where classic pro had four victorias just like dark and zupi had like 80 military on water and he refused to go for cannon galleons and finish off the game um in this case i don't even think cannon gallons are necessary i think back to transport the trebs and then just start trebbing down everything i i don't see dark being able to bring this back right now like it's 250 stone and 250 gold for vittoria he loses one he's adding another one that you're still costly to make and it's time i'm consuming to build them and here we see the the transport ship like you were saying those traps are coming forward like what is what does dark do now i mean the game has switched so quickly right like if you're dark like are you just playing for the ultra late game we're just hoping yeah pretty much i think it's just wasn't a smooth transition helles he had it in the bag if you would have if you would have used if you would have played the game honestly yeah i know yeah so and this is what i was talking about with those cars was like he'd essentially lost the water at that point so like what i would have done and again i am no like islands you know pro or anything like that but i would have just built them by my docks and then if you if you can guarantee the production if you can guarantee elite caraval maybe in a better position but then he lost a lot of economy from the from the longboats anyway right so it's already a difficult position um and even prior to that i think he just kind of switched off on water you know you you've got to stay in water and castle age if you stay on water and castle age you can easily transition to amp get your castles where you want them what is the little awkward though is while we're we're talking about all this look at the carriables in the back back will lose that and there's always that possibility that slight possibility that if backs can't finish dark that then you know dark could come back but i'm looking at yeah castles on the left that's going to go down the vittorios are going to go down he needs to get up to 70 military before i'm feeling really comfortable for him yeah honestly if you look at the mainland as well black tea's got oblasts and rams already so he's this is this is honestly perfect like um capitalization of the lead it's something that we didn't see zippy do right and it's something that um you really when you're playing against portuguese and you get this like timing you just have to win the game right now and back to playing in a way that that should secure the game from which is really impressive yeah um but like we're saying what does how does dog even win this he's got nothing on land his water is kind of he's still kind of losing on water i mean duties it's like you know how people are learning the game they go for three town centers a lot because they're like eco is important and then they get overwhelmed by military like what did i do wrong i feel like this is the obviously this is high level i'm trying to dumb it down a little bit but like this is just a classic case of not taking map control you have a lead and you don't take map control with it and then you just think that you could just sit back with a couple castles and victoria's good players especially someone like back who has so much experience he's not gonna allow this to ever happen and one two three four five victoria's now for dark it's like he's making victorious before he loses eighth victoria but it just his taps as pop space even more he doesn't have pops we can't do anything yeah i mean the problem is he he's lost most of his villagers now so he's he's committed t90 yeah he's he's building factories or he's losing the game i mean yeah wow he the only way i'd really have faith in him is if he had the same amount of military but even then that's got buildings on his island now and can make siege and there's not a whole lot out there i guess there's a few bomber cannons but there's not a whole lot out there to stop the siege and traps and the arboles from from handicapping and cutting off the part of that island yeah and the trouble is as well is that the dark is soon gonna have half an island yeah and it doesn't matter like it's going to take a while for the victoria's to outlast back to you but he's got literally an island and a half and or i'm just looking i'm sorry i can't take this seriously i'm just looking at this this northern corner of his island it looks ridiculous if this could win him the game it should be a thing but i don't think it is man we're gonna see 38 caravels against 52 longboats feel like if bact is able to spread his units out a little bit the longboat should actually win here but air bells are still carrier bells still very strong unit to work with there are just so many long boats man and this is the master that we were talking about it doesn't matter how many or how much economy you have if you have half the military it's just going to snowball right um yeah i think i think this could be the end of the game yeah it's such a shame dude dark had this dude dark we had this yeah he did but if you look at his resources he's actually got still a lot of resources considering yeah yeah um the other weird thing about the uh like this situation is you get all that food from faetorius you get more food than anything else like what what is food gonna do for you on islands it's the trickle of of everything else that becomes important he's adding more dude i i feel for dark because he will know that he should have closed this out and we're assuming that bact is probably just going to win this from here and he he should he's going to be kicking himself like how did i lose this game best of seven against someone as good as backed i should have won this to give myself a chance you know all those thoughts start to come into your mind so even though i i heavily disagree with how it was played in lake castle age he put himself in such a good position and really just tossed it all away yeah i mean you have to praise dark for his early build his feudal age was perfect even though he lost most of his units like he got caught stage and he retook the map control and he boomed really well it's just like his follow-up from that just wasn't crisp enough that that was able to take the map control back yeah and uh the problem was that backed managed to kill so much of the of dark's economy with those with those long boats right when he took on that control that it kind of snowballed into a huge military lead yeah the relic heist almost happened they're back to try to steal those railings this is very silly now at this point we've got debbie firing against bombard cannons bomber cannon there on trebuchet ram on faetoria what's wild you look at your pop and you think that you're not dead if you're in darks position so i mean let's see how much these victorias can carry dark if he can actually survive for any longer yeah um i don't know man it's it's like yeah he should play on at this position because he does have victoria's which if the game goes on for a long time we'll give him resources and back to run out but back to soaked up all the resources all the gold all the stone in the middle he's he's got the relic advantage now and now he's he has sea dram with the treb so castles are going to start to fall victoria's going to start to fall and it just does not feel like it's it's going to be enough here yeah this this is definitely feeling looking pretty rough and even though you see drums as well we're really good against the carabaos if you put them on the shore right because they absorb so much damage yep um yeah i just can't see where the comeback is gonna come from right now i don't think it's it's possible like a lot of people it's funny actually i was looking at the feedback thread on the aoe zone last night and people were talking some people were discussing the sibs and giving us good feedback there but someone was like saying portuguese is op blah blah blah and i looked at the stats i'm like wait a second what makes you think that i understand how in some situations you might think that being able to make this building's op but but portuguese actually have a pretty poor win rate though i do think it will climb in the main event and you can't just make victorias and win palace you've got to make navy yeah you've got to control the game exactly yeah it's you can't you can't substitute victorious and just assume you're going to win i think like you said you have to take the map you have to you know have an army you have to use like at least your caravals or or try and take some kind of map presence i mean we still hear how how much you can be punished for being a little bit too passive right i mean dark wasn't even not building units he just kind of didn't focus enough on keeping his mass alive yeah yeah and it just snowballed so quickly like and it also is just like i i felt like even though he had lost his mass it was still very winnable for him because he was that far ahead so yeah the fact dude who had some real a weird opening i guess after the early lead you know he didn't have a good castle time but what a monstrous play from back to to somehow give himself a shot here make all the right moves and poor dark is like at this point his villagers don't have anything to do but take that shore fish look at this this is his eco that infaetorius this reminds me of that hero against viper game and gigi is called yeah gg called here and wow this kid is 16 years old talented player had a massive lead and tried to go for victoria's too early back said you have a lot to learn it's not going to be good enough and backed wins the game what a game that was from back and maybe a lesson for anyone out there who's playing islands on how they use portuguese and how not to i guess yeah i mean if you're back right now how confident are you feeling i mean you must have i mean if i was back i would have thought that game was over a couple of times at least yeah um but yes the mental fortitude like all of these 2k4 players do is they just never die they never give up they always know exactly how to come back and like the way to do it and i think we saw it here right i mean there was no point where like i i felt like so many times that the dark should have just been able to close that game out but but back backed made it look so easy with like just messing units and taking good fights right like it's really impressive actually people look at that timeline one hour game victoria's do not show up on the timeline so this shows you how little control dark had the game when he tried to go for the victorious so in the mid game back was way behind economically if i recall it was 30 phil's like we were saying and yet bact was able to control the water and he was able to to have a later imperial age and still end up winning that game i am borderline speechless right now because the positions that dark was in the first 30 minutes should not have been loseable and uh it just happened and it's the class of acts to to understand how to play and i think dark may be lacking the experience there it's like he maybe practiced his openings a lot to get to the the leading position but then hadn't picked up against someone who could actually come back out there so if you are dark there what adjustments do you make so that you do win that game comfortably you don't have to rush imp there you honestly what good did imp give him in that game yeah you're right and nothing else so only go imp if you're also massing the caravals at the same time so even in that situation if you would have gone for a second town center just go two town centers and then invest into caravels because i think maybe him going to three tcs and then needing farms that's a lot of wood that he doesn't have for docks and for production of caravals so i yeah again you're on two tc's you're still gonna have an eco lead you're gonna then have the caravel mass all you need to do is just keep the caravel mass in that matchup and you should win yeah i agree i think you're right maybe that's that's i think the problem with portuguese is that on islands like you always want to get that tech advantage of imperial age yeah but the problem is like what you have to think when you're not going for fast fires because obviously they're not good against uh long boats what is that imp going to give you and really you because because you're not going to go for fast fires like the imp isn't that important like it's more important like you said to get that massive army out right you just want to have equal numbers and then if you can get like as long as the game is even with portuguese you should win yep like as long as you're not losing like you should win um so i think you're probably right maybe like you could still go through tc but maybe something like five or six stocks like kind of playing quite passively in front of his docks with his carabao so that bact can never take a fight and then you can close the game out i think like you said but dark just kind of he just he kind of just gave up too much map and was a little bit too greedy was with his economy also the long boats didn't fare too terribly but then again it was a three to one ratio so uh it's like it's like trying to think of counter units here it's like it's like three to one ratio with crossbows against skirms the crossbow is also wrecked so um that's just kind of how the game goes um yeah yeah wow well let's let's move along here for dark uh he's he's lost on arabia he's lost on islands and islands looked like a really good strategy we kind of discussed hideout it might also be crossed for him we'll find out soon um yeah uh well if you if you're dark right now what what map would you be playing what map would you be picking i i don't know when you went to rip the hideout band-aid off because yes that's what i was thinking like do you i feel like i go cross here because i based on the sieves there and would be a little worried about going to hideout when you're already down two games and backed as twons for that um sometimes you don't have an understanding of what the enemy's going to do on a map and i know bact has picked berbers on hideout in the past but like toons is such a clear pick for hideout and such a strong pick for hideout against most of the sieves that dark has that get a win on cross and and then move on from there you know what i mean it just will give you a confidence boost if nothing else yeah i completely agree i would just if i was if i was dark i would be pretty worried about picking height out just because students seem to just annihilate every sib that he has in the in his roster at the moment i mean i honestly the only thing that i could see may be working is some kind of weird clownery with malay maybe win the game quite early yeah otherwise it's just all those things that he has just feel like they're kind of well they just they don't really match up too well against students i i agree with you on that and it's it's tough man you're up against a much better player now i forget how the series went but i know robo's in chat everyone say hi robo uh robo could you possibly look back and tell me what the score line and well i know the final score between dark and fish in round one was 3-2 but i'm curious what order those wins happened because if i i think callus that dark was behind in that set and then came back no he was behind he lost arabia he won islands in bay and went up 2-1 and fish won gold rush and he closed out on cross okay never mind we don't need you robo rubber you're fired alice you're hired congratulations i mean it's it's on liquidpedia yeah yeah i know i just you know gotta robo's gotta earn his four dollars an hour that's true you can't just sit there come on man chad sing by robo now that's great um to the viewers out there today thanks for showing up again this is what the schedule is today so alice is with me right now and uh we're casting backed versus dark after this will be heart versus barrels man what a set i think that's a 50 51 and casting that with me will be will be leery and then the final set of the day will be accm verse daniel and then uh hera will be casting that with me so four or sorry three i can't count best of sevens today halas uh what do you think about that hard versus barrel set though that is a really really interesting set because obviously heart has only just come back right well not only just but he's been back for a while but you know he's not really played that many tournaments right um i don't know man who are you favoring who do you think's gonna win that one i think i favor heart but like the thing is bart's heart's friends with like heart was on team am so it's with all the big names you've got like hair leary mbl nikov so i feel like if you're borrows you don't have any of these like high level teammates or buddies or whatever and so you're not getting pumped up as much right it's like all the gl guys and rightly so or like jordan jordan jordan jordan jordan they're always going to do that and i think barley's and heart are very very similar in how they play the game so i it wouldn't surprise me either way if if like borrows their heart were to win that next set um it should be really tight yeah it should be really tight um i think i think you're right when you're in a team like am i feel like there's probably a lot more pressure to um you're in a team of people like here at mbl leary right like guys who are all like winning tournaments or like you know getting in the finals so there must be you must think you know i really want to compete with these guys and then you obviously work a lot harder to try and get in the events right yeah whereas bose obviously doesn't have that but at the same time i'm not really sure how much prep the am guys are doing right so it's kind of hard to tell it looks like it will be hideout next and we were just not correct at all with our predictions oh my god dude we're wrong in so many different ways i'm going to send you the game idea in case you can't find it when you see these sims you're not going to believe what they've gone for here we're so wrong oh my god um let's see if it lets me load in and we should be in in a second here wait what on earth yeah that's do you think this is mind games from both of them i just i i don't know [Music] maybe maybe back to this point it's like i don't like playing with tootins i'm up to zero let's just win this thing fast and then i never have to pick tootins but it does feel like as far as pre-planning goes which is really important if sets go long then maybe these civilizations were suited elsewhere i'm going to show the viewers here in a second as we get into the game um but we had said that italians would be probably be utilized for some type of water map and now you have dark in the red and dark has gone for the italians and then we thought that tootins was the clear spot for hideout because hideout's a very campy map and thought that mongols might be utilized well we didn't even discuss it because we felt mongols would suit more of a land map while this is a land map back to said you know what let's go mongols so mongols italians on hideout don't think i've ever seen this one before yeah i i can't say i have either i mean i i mean i'm a bit a bit shocked honestly because mongols are like the best basic right or one of the best the esther at least yep um and it just feels like you're limiting your options a little bit by picking them on hideout i just i don't know this is something that um and this is typical for a hideout game for us to just find something else to talk about for the next 10 minutes but uh this is something that is very backed like where he'll get who play well in a series and then the draft doesn't necessarily add up over the length of a series um he has shown that to be one of his weaknesses in close sets fortunately for him you know he's he's so good that he's up 2-0 right now and i actually do prefer to have mongols over italians here anyways so i don't think i'll be worried too much uh with the way this would pan out and what are your thoughts on italians here i mean italians have some bonuses to work with but to pick that sieve over some of the others is a little surprising for me i yeah i i completely i the thing is what what sieve do you pick um if you are dark right because it might have been a mind game for back tea because he might have thought he's gonna pick celts and hang rush me so i'm gonna pick that's true mongols that's true um and i don't know but i can't i can't i don't understand the decision-making process from dark to pick italians like what you know what bonuses are you getting with the serbia well we thought maybe malay right because we didn't like any of his tips for hideout except for possibly malay am i mistaken yeah yeah we said possibly malay yeah pinch so if you think about the late game strengths italians are stronger right they have they've fully upgraded hussar they've got the genoese crossbowmen which is great against cav even though they lack like halberdier um they actually have similar if not the same siege options as malay i mean just just having hussar would be pretty good if this goes late i suppose but i think the concern here is that italians don't shape up that nicely against mongols if we're talking post him strength so mongols i mean they destroy everything in post-temp to be honest elite mangudai and siege this could actually get to a point where let's say dark wants to go for archers and specifically genoese crossbowmen which are fairly good against uh asar and mangudai facts could honestly go for like 20 seed ramps with drill and nothing could kill it you know just randomly yeah well it's not just that though it's it's it's drill on ages as well i mean george manganite again like what do you really do is italians i guess you can build bomber cannons but like yeah they're very speedy so it's kind of easy to dodge them um yeah there is something to be said that italians will have an early imp timing which you can use i think that's probably what we'll see we'll probably see something like uh fast ish imp with ford castle bumbacan and trev i think maybe that's what makes sense here i don't know what you think because i i can't really see i if i was dark i wouldn't play for the lake and i wouldn't let that just like kind of boom to win because you will probably just lose to the uh to the siege no you called it you said exactly what i was thinking it's the fact that you recognize mongols are stronger in late game and you have a sieve which can go for a very fast imperial i think that there's potential there um this is not the type of game where you want to drag it out and look for relics and look for extra gold you know it's it's more so get a castle up maybe in this front position uh on one of these hills next to the deer in the golds and then try and force a trevor against mongols early as for how he's going to do that i'm not sure hallis but that's kind of what i'm thinking yeah i mean there needs to be some kind of intermediary step right he needs to do something to take map control because he can't just you know teleport his villages across the map um so be interesting to see how he does approach this do you think we'll see something like crossbowman you know wait a second i'm looking at his build here is he gonna click up dark there's this time do you remember back when winchester was always going for the tower builds on arena yes i do yep okay i i'm ashamed to admit this because at the time i didn't realize that he was probably like 14 years old but i died so many times to dark throughout that time period with manadaram tower forward and he would always follow it up with like one range and he was quite good at it right it was a different time was back in the bubbly days and and i i just know that he's capable of going for these really sick builds with with towers in a forward range so it almost looks like he's got seven on wood he's got the barracks almost looks like this is going to be tower archer forward against backed but i'm not saying this is necessarily going to be all that good because look at the distance he has to travel to get over there yeah and the problem with mongols is that they're a sieve that doesn't really take that much time to collect to fuel edge right so like usually you want to be at your opponent's walls and breaking in before they reach feudal age because then they can't build a counter tower and they can't you know build an archery range or adapt um as quickly but with mongols obviously that doesn't really matter because you're you're such a good economy that you can you know fast castle with 23 bills which is what uh bacteria is doing yeah um all right well dark is just petting the dog walking the dog you know getting some exercise in and here he comes and i i have to agree with you that while there's that history for dark i don't think that this is necessarily a great strat against mongols because as the right when he gets here bact is already making his buildings and backed is going to be in a decent position anyways go to castle tonight i'm curious now what back does because his stones are relatively forward um he does have one and see if he's scouted it yeah if he goes outside as well as he's got the other one out there but if you deny the stone from mongols it could honestly be a solid position and so okay he's going to place the tower there immediately i i don't think this is 100 necessary but i think this is a good play just to get a preemptive tower up to control the stone i'm not sure if i like the tower a whole lot because you can just move on the right hand side and tell the stone anyway yeah um i feel like it probably could have been at least a little bit in front of his stone a bit more to the right um but it's still like you said it makes it very tricky to uh for doc to figure out like where does he go next right like um if dark so so this build order is to place towers and position them so you have your tower in range of the enemy tower but their tower is not in range of yours and then you have fletching archers inside of them and you shoot their towers down that's what the build order is so dark just lost his scout here comes back he's thinking i'm going to rush this down but he wasn't expecting the archers oh i'm back to just let dark in what the this is a big mistake oh my god oh my god wait a second now that stone can be towered and now there's a fletching archer there and now he's like a minute away from the next age he doesn't have a stone to tower to uh tower and he doesn't really have good eco and now packed with the gate we're not back with the gate sorry dark with the gate blocking the quick wall off and here come the boys and girls were back this could be honestly just fight with villagers if you're dark maybe and just use your archers against the one yeah the problem is right he's only got yeah the probably he only had two archers right if he had three or four there he could win the game there but now he's going to die and run away back's going to try and trap him in here yeah yeah this is worst case scenario this is yup huh so i feel like you could just pull your fills close to the walls though and the archer's going to be helpful it's not like back scout is all that useful just a lot of clicking and a lot of things to focus on right now and back seems to be better in that area than what i'm seeing yeah um what is the pull up now from dog can you look at his economy oh his economy at home the united is it's not it's not pretty oh we won't look over there stable he's going to try and go for a scout i mean in theory right if dark is is just going to be up against scorpion magnetals and a scout would actually be pretty helpful here but like i think he's taking you know what though look at the ville count he keeps producing villagers and keeps delaying back and then eventually ups and he has to macro for that maybe there's a slight chance for dark that could lose i mean yeah back to eco is not pretty either i mean complete mess he's got two on food he can't afford to produce villages i feel like i needed this game in my life you know i didn't know i needed this game in my life but i needed this game in my life okay yeah you gotta that dark is gonna have to add some farms here shortly but he's so focused and there's the magnel for and so that should be the end of the villagers could be uh yeah yeah i kind of have a feeling i guess there was so much to focus on it's probably a little bit harsh yeah but if he's got 600 word t90 i mean yeah it's just not it's not good enough if you want to start winning these games right i agree yeah it's got to be a finer balance there like he didn't even have now he's seeding farms but you've got to have a balance there where you're attacking and then you're also having some type of macro even if it's 80 micro 20 macro it can't be 100 either side of the spectrum you know yeah yeah yeah i completely agree what i really wish he would have done here it's almost like back letting him in worked out for back right because now back doesn't have the threat anymore and the villagers didn't make any more towers whatever i really would have liked to have seen uh is exactly what i said where he placed the tower kind of to the left of that house it would be in position of the stone and it would have for a couple minutes they've been able to shoot down the backs tower while denying the stone and then his villagers would still be alive they can repair like that's the build order that i was mentioning that's very common his back kills one of his own villagers yeah that's okay um yeah i can i agree i think maybe that's a safer way to play i think he could have still made it work if he'd have been a little bit more patient and he'd ward in that tower yeah if he has three archers there if he buys time for three arches and the four villagers like bax can't really take that without suffering huge losses um yeah it just all happened a little bit too quickly for a minute and actually did well to pounce on that timing with the four villagers right yep okay now that now that dark has been pushed back like what is the full up now like what does he what does he do here do you think i mean if he if he didn't make the forward stable i would say it wouldn't be too crazy to add some scouts at home if he would have been honestly if he would have just made the staple at home and made two scouts before the spearman came out which are now coming out and it's a wise move from from back to do so he could just clear up the magnels and scorpions and villagers and then he could just boom his way up to the next stage so i mean he's got 600 stone right now clearly he was counting on building more towers he does actually have his scout oh wait a second it's not his scout he's making scouts yeah he's scouting back to his base yeah oh man he's found a way to make this work i guess so yeah i would just say micro your scouts and be annoying and then just try and get to castle age then yeah i don't i mean this it looks pretty bad for for dark right now but i don't think this game is over you know if you look at his backs economy it's still honestly his economy is a tragedy like he is not getting any economy up anytime soon and dark is actually on stone so i think dark is either preparing for like a defensive castle or maybe he was thinking it like a forward castle if that you were to start booming um but like this aggression from bax i think if if dark just goes defensive towers i think you should be okay oh dark was so close there um okay so what's weird about defensive towers though is they they die to a few manganals i think what bact wants to do is go for another workshop and turn this into some type of a yolo play um but yeah now he's clicked up you're right and i'm with you as as the scout is on the hunt for the weak villager and can't find her where is she actually she's on the farm now even though bact will probably have a castle as well i feel like this game is winnable for dark it's just a little bit of a shame to be down two games and then have that not paying out as you would have liked you know yeah i'm not okay i guess bacteria is doing forward siege um he's gonna go castle drop too look at the villagers oh my god dude he's going to castle drop this what you tell her me i castle you how do you like it wow all right well you know what that is one way to to react when someone goes all in and that you know that they're they're going to be a ways away from castle age this is one way to react and when you're mongols and you want to fast-track your way to mangudai well typically you'd want to have more than like three on food i think that's that there is something to be said for getting the castle up sooner rather than later so here he comes yeah i mean maybe backed he's been taking some lessons from his fellow countrymen huang yup i mean you don't need farms guys all you need is 20 villages on on gold and about 10 onward and what are you doing dude oh no this is not even if you take out the siege here there's no way well you know what if he takes out the siege and then pulls every single villager that he has and places his own castle in five seconds maybe there's a chance all right well every villain make a castle come on it's gonna be a tower instead yeah honestly the cast is at 60 he has fletching if he can complete that no no he needs to he needs to bail on this otherwise he's gonna lose about 10 villages but i feel like the game's probably over if he doesn't you know like if he doesn't stop this castle that's such a good spot and he's already committed so many bills he runs now yeah and the castle will go up good job from back to send enough and unfortunately for dark if you had another game where he's just not looking up to being able to beat someone of that's quality yeah oh man okay dark should uh he should he should run around and he should now castle drop back just for the memes yeah did he have to did he have to commit this heavily to the castle drop defense though no i mean if any if any sieve is you know able to deal with a mongol costume surely like italians can at least have a chance right like build your own defensive castle like try and rush em like it's already cheaper right yep and you can build your enemies crosstalk into the fence and then maybe you don't insulate but like again that move was he's already he's lost his building now it's it's kind of even and as you said like uh that is in a great position to pressure him and and now i think in fact i say this as he still has three farms at home but now i think you start to shift your eco around and try and get some farms out and have better eco behind this as you pressure with mangudai um but yeah what i'm seeing here i mean game two especially was a sign that dark is um you know having played against him and i know we both have he's playing a bit uh a bit blah or like a bit sloppy and and some days at least for me i feel very together like i'm i'm sticking to the meta i'm getting all my upgrades i'm i'm accurate micro microwave everything's clean there's a nice balance here but we've seen two straight games now where it's either all in one thing and nothing or the next or there's just no balance right the previous game full eco no water and then he went five victoria this game here all in yeah and then had the opportunity to say okay let's sit back and casually defensive castle and macro and then ended up in you know no man's land with a bunch of bills so just doesn't seem like it he has the confidence or maybe the mentality today i i'm just not sure that he's even i guess this manga makes things so tricky for him but if you look at vax economy it's really bad i mean i guess the batch can build another um ford castle which oh okay that's what those villagers are looking to do i think oh man overtaken style as those genoese crossbowmen go down and that was that was dark just not patrolling initially and not paying attention probably because he was macroing and uh also i'm now getting bod canary after losing them really hurts where do you build this castle if you're back uh that's probably on that gold on the left i think if you build it on the gold on the left i can't see how dark can do anything really he's got no resources he's only got wooden stone yeah um yeah i see i see what you mean about the way dark is playing i think this is also down to he probably feels like he's he's worse than bhakti yeah um which is pretty reasonable and when you get like i i've played against back teen and tournament series right and like you do stuff like i remember i did stuff that i wouldn't normally do just because i felt like i wasn't going to win a normal game yeah and then you just play worse you just make really dumb decisions sometimes i mean i'm not saying that dark has made any really dumb decisions you just kind of play in a way that you're not really that familiar with yeah because you feel like playing meta you'll just lose so you have yeah exactly yeah yeah especially especially after the way game one went right like that was not that was a brutal game right there was no chance for the dark really yeah um but yeah it is a bit of a shame because i think even in this game like if he just fixed his economy a little bit and if he even just got to carthage a minute earlier like he could just drop his defensive castle immediately and he's fine like he has the villain right now if he can somehow go imp with two castles and start trapping his back i mean there's potential and backed has really been patient where he wants to place this next castle i really think yeah i know it's tough against mangudai but maybe your own workshop could have been a good move for dark i'm oh this okay this is this is where the game will be decided this castle here i think you need your own castle i think you sell food yeah and buy your own castle delete some farms right in front of that tc and drop your own personally but doc is building knights now i just does he want to actually i mean is there a chance for him to snipe the magnet on the monkey and then deny this oh okay this is perfect as you were saying he's now building his own defensive castle this is exactly the reaction that we were hoping for um yeah i think honestly if if this castle goes up 290 promise he has no gold like what do you do with no gold how do you really get em without losing yeah half of you already like weakened economy right like you have to sell 70 resources well wait here it is he's going to be able to deny this so isn't he he should be able to deny that castle in fact i mean backed his now cleaner eco because a lot of villagers were pulled to build that but i say clean and i mean right now he doesn't have the second wood upgrade he doesn't even have horse color for his farm so it's not really all that clean then again though uh dark seems a little bit further away from imp after everything has gone down uh and we'll lose a few villagers here so what it what a weird game halas but it's also so entertaining because you just never see games play out like this and we never see these guys in hideout so it's it's refreshing this reminds me of vodka against slam actually um a little bit yeah just in the way of crazy aggression everywhere that was an interesting series slam up against winchester uh tomorrow at winchester and dark i'm sure have been playing a lot to train for their sets um i want to answer a quick question from someone in the chat someone had seen the five additional maps that are playing in the uh that are going to be played in the main event and no big moment here oh that's gotta be bad why is he moving out yeah that hurts big time man the monks are there to get some conversions on what's left ouch yeah yeah again this is one of those decisions we were talking about right like uh it's just it just doesn't really make sense to move out there like you're not gonna win the fight he's got manganese out and a monk just defend your eco and go in you may and then yeah if you get troubles out and drop the castles you're fine the problem is i don't think he has eco any a while ago he had a lot on food look at all the farms he's had to abandon because of the kids and i think i think you hit the nail on the head he's probably moving out there because he sees the score he knows he's behind by two games and he feels like well i need to do something so i need to send my units out and then it just continues to get worse and worse for him it's really just the pressure of the moment yeah no gold right now either that's a big thing yeah he's got all of his golds controlled by backed back is even going to follow this up with towers and magnel mangady monk power i mean this is really threatening and back to even repairing the magnel dark he does not have enough genoise cross moment yeah and this this game is looking really rough now i i with no gold it's and even back to you is transitioning a little bit out of it now he's got two town centers with a nine village leader just i mean what can dog even do at this point i mean yeah just tough oh nice shot there these enemies cross bombers so weak i also feel as though genoese crossbowmen even though they counter they should counter something it's like a cav archer in some ways they still don't trade all that well against mangudai because mangadai firing speed is is insane they get three shots out before january's crossbow is getting the second one it feels like um and yeah just a confident game from back again even though it was messy he just feels like he is the better player here and well he's showing it right he's these games have been yeah gg scored yeah these games have been fairly fairly dominant except that ireland's game which dark to be fair played very well but um yeah i mean what went wrong here t90 for darkrai i think he got baited into backspace initially like it honestly looked so tempting for him to run into backspace there but after everything went down i think it would have been better for him to just deny that stone with a tower and stick to his game plan of sending the archers inside the tower and shooting shooting it down like if he does that he probably then doesn't have to vilfy either uh halas so he probably has better macro and you know then back maybe goes into a magnel later but then the enemies and his base wow i just realized the dark had a villager around here that's kind of funny um so yeah i think the the strategy was was it was correct logic that mongols in late game and probably back in late game would be superior so he wanted to pressure early i don't hate it that much he was fortunate to see the stone there he just unfortunately lost his push and then went back to castle dropped should have just like you said just let it happen and then plan to protect the next gold and just go up to imperial age to maybe trap down these castles didn't have that yeah i agree completely i also think some of the problems this game also stem down to the draft because um it felt like i mean if you're picking italians on on your home map on hideout i mean like i don't know it just feels like you've drafted wrong like i i can't really challenges are not really an amazing kind of close match but it's really not an amazing seven on a map like yeah um especially against the options that the bax um had in his arsenal so it kind of feels like maybe he should have had one more spare save just in case or said maybe that's more of an all-rounder like tunes um and yeah it didn't even feel like the the um dark should have been this far behind either it's just his macro at home was so sloppy that his car stage time was really far behind like if you get castle dropped by mongols and you have your own castle and as long as you don't lose your gold and you don't get like this kind of snowball push this is actually all right because if you trip down those small castles like what is the follow-up from mongol right like yeah it takes so long for mongol to stick into anything they wanted to go for so much economy but actually you could be ahead um it's like it's almost like back to us inviting him to trip down his castles like come on yeah you know yeah this is why mongols are not a broadcaster it's so risky if you lose those castles i mean you can't build anything sure um backed has not lost a game yet in the qualifier as far as i'm as far as i'm aware and remember dark went in as the underdog in the first round and was able to win 3-2 he then moved on to win another set 3-1 uh and to make it here to back so dark is worthy of this spot it's just that back to showing that he is back to his back is that is that a thing i don't know but there's the resources there's the kd i think dark also coming in here with lack of confidence to uh i mean who could be confident facing up against someone as good as backed um the next game will be on crosshales so we don't need to speculate and on cross there's maybe once one or two sieves that stand out for back but i think that you could argue that dark is going to go into this with better civilizations yeah definitely so we're probably looking at persians beers i mean maybe berbers but probably persians or beers for back tea right and i think we're almost definitely gonna see lithuanians for dark um if we do get into that matchup which sieve do you which said do you favor though um i'm sorry you said backed would go for what uh either biz persians or maybe burgers okay yeah well backed back to an accm are there two who picked berbers back in hidden cup three qualifiers they would lose every single time i just remember they like had this infatuation with berbers back then and they loved the camel archers and that was a real easy tell for me uh when back in accm were playing in the main event but anyways i would personally say going byzantines feels pretty natural here because persians and their flexibility might work out on something like uh bay uh and then berbers might work out for all-ins on gold rush but i mean yeah i mean my guess would be byzantines that's probably what i would do off the draft and if it is byzantines for lithuanians byzantines can really counter any civ it's just lithuanians have a sick build order to get a head start um you also this is what's tough if you're in dark's position do you want to play for your reputation at this point or do you want to play for the series because if you play for your reputation you might pick lithuanians here thinking that's the best civ but if you're playing for your reputation maybe lithuanians are actually better if you make it to game five and game six you know so i guess on the bright side though lithuanians and japanese both strong on bay both strong on cross so i figured if he gets a win with either civ he's still going to be in a fine position yeah i think i you should have to play to win uh there's like those two of those three games were pretty pretty dominant from back to you yep um i think you just have to pick your best of um ignore the series on like the later games because if you lose this you're out right you just have to try and you know ignore everything play your best game like maybe you'll win probably not but you know you've just got to play your best right yep that's true well um we'll see so i want to get back to the question i wanted to answer uh someone was asking about the new maps for the main event so the qualifier all the maps are on the screen and we've seen them all qualifier long uh the main event we've added five new maps i uploaded the video to youtube which introduces them uh well i guess technically one is new one is is new but a tweak off of a map from last year and then three additional so um someone asked me if the top eight the main event players were able to test the maps and play with the maps ahead of time and the answer is no which is really important because i didn't want the top eight to have weeks and weeks of weeks of prep for those maps ahead of the players who were going to qualify that'd be extremely unfair i mean backed here has been playing a qualifier for three weeks it would not be fair for him to then like find out that everyone else had seen the maps so we've been doing playthroughs in fact alice was on the team uh of people who are testing and i was been doing 1v1s on these maps and testing concepts myself on top of everything for the last couple weeks so um yeah the maps were just announced yesterday and players are now able to look and scheme and think about the main event but i really do think they're so the maps are so different and they introduce so many potential strategies that the main event's just going to be very very unpredictable it's exciting and i can't wait to see some of the uh some of the more adventurous players make some strategies on some of the maps honestly it's gonna be really exciting yeah yeah and and you uh one of the players who had maybe seen and tested some of those maps as anyone in particular that that stands out from the new ones oh any any map yeah yeah as far as the oh yeah the new maps i can't remember the name the the bookland one the ah yes mudflow mudflow that map is gonna be super interesting i can't wait for some tattoo demo ships or just i think the way that it kind of like forces you to play feudal but there's also that kind of element of water and the word being in the middle i think we're going to see some really interesting games um lots outside that map i think yeah lots of scouts which is always nice because scouts aren't really matter at the moment they're kind of yeah um yeah bypass could be really interesting like we'll see i think it'll be interesting with bypass to see how much that like kind of middle channel differs from normal hideout because obviously they're quite similar maps but they probably play out very differently just because you do have like straight access right very differently yeah and i think that what's cool about that as they are starting the next game and you were correct in calling lithuanians and i was correct and calling uh byzantines uh if you go into a map like bypass in the main event expecting it to play like hideout having not practiced uh you're gonna be in for rude awakening uh now granted we were just playing with round one players from the qualifier but you're still talking about top 50 top 60 players in the world and um anyways the games and the sieves everything really gets shaken up there so um i'm pumped and it'll make it more difficult for us to guess who is doing what too because it's not like we've seen players play those maps yet yeah one thing about playing in the qualifiers though is you do get a hell of a lot of forced practice just by playing the series and you know obviously having to try and qualify it true it reminds me of kind of a red bull a little bit where we saw like a lot of qualified players actually do really well um and that might have been because i mean they just could practice all the maps right and they had to just to qualify um i guess it really depends on what expert so how much time they're putting in sure sure yeah we'll we'll see uh but it looks like they launched the game i don't know if you found it but they might have had to restart it find it yeah okay i think they might have uh restarted for some reason because it wouldn't let me join so i still will see the next game shortly everyone i'm just gonna pan over and show you guys the heroes that will be used for the main event of hidden cup four those are all the heroes right there so 16 hero names and the way this pans out is after sunday night we will have all 16 main event players after the qualifiers have finished so immediately after that concludes admin is going to send the players their identity we also have accounts that were created for them uh with the game and all that so a similar story there they say hey this is your identity this is your account this is your password um i will contact you there for scheduling and so uh the players they say i can play on this day this day this day and then the admin just says okay show up at this time and be ready to play and then the players will show up it might be cobra car and then cobra car is going to show up to play philip the good having no clue who that is and uh you know it makes it fun for us of course when we start to watch later on too so lots of craziness behind the scenes with all that i'm not actually involved in any of that but on monday we are going to do the bracket live so i have a randomizer program that overlay guy's working on and we basically randomized the hero bracket uh and so this year it'll actually be interactive with audience so looking forward to that man it'll be kind of fun to see if there's any funny hero matchups in round one yeah my favorite one there is little john because little john shouldn't even be a hero little john is a three hp or not three hp a uh a normal spearman but is listed as a hero in the game because it's in accounting okay so okay i i'm liking cobra card to be honest um that's it's gonna be interesting though do you think we're gonna see many upsets from like maybe from what we expect like would you think any of the kind of like outer echelon players like bhakti like jordan are gonna be able to take any wins from some of the more established players or do you think we'll just see a kind of a return to the status quo um i would argue in some ways the only player who's actually been consistent in hidden cups has been viper like yeah i think hidden cup one two and three viper viper viper one right yeah i think hera hera uh trying to remember he didn't he wasn't high enough rating for hidden cup one hidden cup two he lost in round one to vivi hidden cup three he made it to the finals and lost to viper you think of leary leary hidden cup one he lost to miguel in his first round hidden cup two he did make it to the semi-finals but couldn't play which was really sad uh and then hidden cup three he lost in the quarter finals to tattoo like i could continue down the name of whoever like you might think is in the top five right now and the only player except for viper who has made it to two semi-finals or more was mbl and that was that was hidden cup one hidden cup two and times have changed too so it's like i i have no clue what to expect all i remember is that the quarterfinals from hidden cup three there were four best of fives we did in one day and it was 13 hours because every single best of five was just insanity so i think that uh the beauty of hidden cup is you don't know what when the big matchups are going to happen and that can lead to the first rounds having better games than the second potentially so i think you are right though have you found the game by the way um you know what i was too busy talking if it's if it's live i can hop in yeah yeah it's live cool yeah i was just going to say that you are completely right i think i think people kind of talk a lot about viper's it's not even a fall from grace he's just not winning everything anymore but if you look at the tournaments he's actually not won um a lot of them have not really been the classic viper tournaments right where you have this like mixed settings it's more like empire wars which he's it seems like he's not as comfortable with and it was also the masters of arabia or desert yeah um and we haven't really seen a tournament like hidden cup that recently the viper is actually lost right he's lost a couple of empire wars once and like i'm saying everything in the desert i still think viper should be the favorite like he's still so good on these settings the problem with playing against piper is that he is um ridiculously versatile like he's he wins like these arena tournaments like he's one of the best players on on like water maps like he's one of the best players on hybrid maps yep it's just really difficult to see like in a series like where viper is really gonna gonna lose enough games to lose a series right it's it's fascinating but the big takeaway from from that as we're catching up to live speed here is just the fact that not not the fact that viper is dominated and of course the viper has dominated and there's there's plenty to talk on there it's just the fact that there's no clear number two in hidden cup like players have shown to it's not as if they were even losing to other players in the top five in some cases so players just don't need to be having the best time sometimes what under hold on a second i'm okay so back first thing he's up 3-0 he goes forward to try and lame and find the enemy he finds the enemy he's actually sending a villager forward and is he going to wall in the main gold i i think he is let's have mercy on him he's just 16 years old man i'm so confused by this because what's funny is he could actually steal the sheep with that villager he just doesn't know that now he's not even walling in the gold is he maybe going for the boar back there or something that's not going to happen has he scouted the ball he has a scout of the board maybe he's going for that the enemy would never expect you to wall in the gold in the back of the base so now he's just going to wall in this goal this is i think this is backed having fun at this point i am not sure what this is i mean the thing is like he's going to war these girls in right but he didn't wall in the main goal yeah what does why send the villager they're not willing the main goal and then more than the second god i mean he can still just build a mining camp on his main goal like it's not really oh man well let's let's talk about backed the other aspect of back strategy here he still hasn't docked yet and i'll cross normally it's about fighting for control of the puns he has not gone for a dock and this would be if he doesn't dock a first i've never seen someone play this map and not dock yet in the qualifiers and that's through all the rounds i mean i think he's sending this religion oh no that's looking for i think or is he sending that to doc yeah no he's i think he's sitting in this village on the right side no this oh no he's like bringing in a boar i don't know what is happening maybe his first stock is going to be on dark's lake maybe that's the strategy what yeah look there it goes that's a villager dark is never dark is gonna be so confused if he sees blue fishing ships in here like typically you fish your own pond or you know a pond that's safer that way you can have the fishing ships out so i really don't agree with this strat because dark should have a faster feudal age time now because of the food but dark is probably never going to even scout the left side of his pond if he's expecting some type of a landing he'd probably go to the right with a fishing ship to check so i won the one yeah i agree but but the one thing i really dislike about what bacht has done is that i love this strategy kind of well i get i i don't know if i love it but i think it's definitely like workable yeah why wall in the gold and the both goals right because if if dark scouts that he knows oh there's a villager close and what's the village you're gonna do on on on four lakes right he's gonna dock your lake yeah so i think if he scouts his gold he should immediately like check and then if he checks like i mean baxter hasn't built four fishing boats he's just behind economically right exactly um it's kind of kind of an odd one what's also kind of odd to me though is how dark somehow doesn't have a bigger vill lead because i mean he is on his way to future bit faster okay he scouted it they're fishing the same dorado over here he's probably so freaking confused but it's like typically you dock the enemy pawn to take the fight to them in this case it's almost like the castle dropped in the previous game act is like hey i'm here kill me now thank you yeah it's an invitation i do see what you mean though i don't it's kind of odd how dark isn't up more villagers yeah oh my god what are you doing man what quick walling oh the sheep need to be saved what on earth is this dark clearly sees how awkward this bull is going to be now i'd feel a little flexed on if i was dark right now to be honest we'll see if in fact he loses this game then i think we'll be saying something else about it true um that's very true well it will be two docs in the north for dark who is in feudal has not made a fire galley yet uh now is doing so byzantines do have faster firing fires plus higher hp docks which is nice but in theory if dark can get the rest you should have two fire galleys in the north and be fine back to villager also could go down here in a second no it won't he's too good at that and now the villagers saved again so uh back to round three for dark in this boxing fight what a weird moment but you know what's awkward about this is dark is so preoccupied by the villager in the pond it he's left the front of his base wide open and back is going to go for spearman this might be a full-on trash play with byzantines this could be really difficult when when you start having some micro in like multiple locations you've got to deal with the the the forward dog right and then you have to deal with like a forward biz play yep i mean he doesn't even have a barracks yet right i mean yeah he does difficult to see yeah like what does dark pull up now i think he's probably gonna win the puns back right but like what does his land play well if you're up against trash units and you have food income from fish it's not the end of the world to switch into your own trash units with lithuanians you should have food he's got plenty of sheep you've got plenty of wood so he's going to tower his gold now after losing the scout there and i think catching an eye yep he sees he knows now okay this is gonna be byzantine trash flood though i'd say honestly just try and match the trash as much as you can wall up where you can and then make sure you just don't lose your fish because that could be really bad yeah i'd say that's about right i think lithuanian scoms are really really nice in um trash mirror right um just because they move faster so you can micro them so much easier yep so as long as he he keeps these fish alive as he said um and he builds a scam number and the sky mass without taking too much economic damage he definitely has a solid chance to um to hold on in this game i don't know how these villagers keep getting here now there's two villagers next to the dock for back because he's repairing that's the word for it and you don't know where to prioritize your focus and if you guys know back he's so quick and his mouse control is so insanely good it just is a gifted player and that he should be able to have the edge in all these little moments here he's even fighting with his villagers how awkward is this yeah i would just be so frustrated like dark is is doing he's winning the game right now but past a certain point if acts can continue to annoy him i could easily see this getting out of control yeah i mean if you're if you're if you're dark right now this feels so uncomfortable like you you have no real map presence your opponent's just going like full trash into your base and they've got a dock on your leak this is the most uncomfortable i think you can be in a game yeah [Laughter] yeah and your berries are exposed too you can't even take that uh he is gonna make some of his own skirmishers though and backed is actually mixed in archer with that group a great microphone dark look at that saving the ville he's using his own fills against the archer for now that's not easy to do and maybe should pull some of these weak ones back again here but again we can clearly see that there's weak villagers here but he's got 20 different things to do right now it sucks to play man i i honestly i feel so bad for dark because this is one of the worst types of games you can play in it's not at all yeah this is this is awful but that being said he's not he is doing okay i mean back hasn't docked anywhere else so like baxter's only dodged one pond which was his opponents um so yeah but the thing is back to now are doing reasonably well on water um still being really annoying with these villages as well right i don't know what you think about this but and it's almost impossible to have the presence of mind to do this but what about sending a villager through your walls opening up your walls on the left side and just stocking another pond dock another pond because the focus is here and then you can maybe freely fish there as opposed to like your pond currently which you're constantly focusing on yeah i think that would be definitely that would be a really really like you said you have to have a lot of clarity of mind to do a play like that um and i think maybe he will i think to be honest there's just too much going on right now like i think that maybe a little bit unreasonable yeah like once he clears the stock up i think then you should definitely be focusing on on getting another another panda yeah but if you if you look at his wood as well he's going to refresh that lumber cam very soon otherwise he's going to have wood issues um yep it's kind of difficult to see where the wood would come from for the dock but he has skirms out and the skirm should easily take out these skirms and archers from back and they're fast lithuanian skirmishers with fletching back just now getting fletching too um that and and maybe even taking the hunt on the left side i don't know how much he's scouted let's see yeah again having the clarity of mind to be able to figure that out but taking that with a mill would be very helpful and overall it's a big eco lead for the russian yeah he's only up seven villagers yeah he's done a good job but he could lose six of them if you lose his water that's the big problem here yeah so we were talking about docks and it looks like dark is preparing to build a dock on the right hand side um i'm not sure if i'm too keen of that one i would prefer like you said just dock out of the way build more eco lead um but that dock on the right hand side is also really good in case bacteria does um dock later on and you're getting like really nice pond control from that um the question is now though what is what do both players do like what is what does this back to you just keep being annoying you passed a certain point i think the play is to bash your head against the wall this is this is this is crazy man this reminds me of those old games uh for like you know the i think the first very first age of empires tournament had a prize pool of like a hundred thousand dollars is the best of one in the metabolism yeah i think it was just trash right it's just a lot of skirms and spears and towers that's what this kind of reminds me of yeah it reminds me of the days where there was like three second delay on all movements from the players they just making it messy would behoove you so but yeah i think you just you try and write your eco and if it starts to feel right to go not imperial but castle age then go for that but back to just staying here being a constant threat and being so annoying and that that tower on the berries is really annoying as well because it prevents a really nice and stable source of economy like even though like you can get the puns out and you can get pawn control um you still the berry is always nice in case you do get docked right yeah in case like he starts snapping some of these fishing boats with his forward dog um that being said though i mean dark still has a 10 village lead and backed the economy again at home is not amazing no it's not what is interesting about it is we can really see the difference between economy numbers and efficiency i don't even think the idle eco and idle tc and all these stats of capture are just showing me is completely accurate to the situation because yes dark has has been tasking villagers to work but like the stone for example 13 villagers on stone do you really want 13 villagers on stone right now like backed honestly his eco is also garbage yeah it is two farms but at least maybe they're not being retasked i like the fact that dark wants to go for the stable and maybe mix in some scouts what i don't like is how the staples been denied and that he didn't even try and hide that move that could have been a bit better i'm not sure if i like the stable play to be honest with the way his economy is that's true too yeah i think just force gum and then get caught stage like you said is fine i think foursquare if he gets cast age before the actual has you know a miserable economy then that should be a pretty easy cleanup but like you see back to already building spin right like those scouts are not going to do a whole lot yeah that's true you just mix in some spearmint if you're worried about the scalps yeah i mean maybe just maintain scrub numbers and macro your way he's starting to add some farms now no double bit acts and no horse colors so when that pressure came in that was the time where he'd want to get those eco upgrades and ended up either not having the resources or forgetting about it but at the end of the day dark has wood dark has food even non-horse colored farms i think is better than the four farms that back has at home and they also found the ship's on the right side so yeah yeah that's what i was gonna say the vision ships have gone down now so well he's still up eight villages [Laughter] it's not actually that bad yeah but micro there too with this scout he tempted the spearman to go after it and picked it off and he was going to try that again let's see if he can micro it down microing the spearman down well they'll trade it no new scout on the way but i think honestly just start making defensive towers everywhere if you're dark and really start to focus on more on that eco and what the fact is building a range in the back of dark space oh my goodness um one thing i do want to point out 1890 is max economy is dreadful i know i keep saying he's got 900 wood and 400 gold i mean he's got 30 on wood right now i don't know how but he's got 30 onwards and if you just got here i'm sure there's a lot of people out here who are just thinking how is back to head three games playing like this a few of these games have been messy but i think backed is realizing that let's just make this crazy for the next game let's give some entertainment for the viewers uh he did not play the other games quite like this but the thing is this dark notice the rangers are there he really needs to drop a tower there walled in or something he's got so many areas to focus on that could actually hurt him man archers are being created out of that range you also have a barracks back there what on earth is this also back here is also docking on the right hand side on um doc's remaining safe pond so that will soon be um under pressure and dark just walks through bags base with a villager and bax didn't even react to it because he's so focused on the front and i guess this is dark trying to dock and threaten the pond for back but back just has one fishing ship so i have no clue what to even focus on right now this is crazy alice yeah this is insane it's absolutely insane and vact is clearly not focusing here because he's now losing a skirmish or something too much to look at man and he's smoking the archers that's what he was doing he was micro in the archers and killing villagers and now dark with the tower which is a good reaction and dark's on the way to castle i think dark's gonna get his victory yeah this this is pretty looking pretty good despite everything that's happened yeah um those feminine arches will be cleaned up by those scams and his transition he's already got the stable should be able to build a couple nights i mean baxi's economy is uh it's hardly it's hardly very well protected yeah the archers are not protected back actually has demos in that dock this guy's done everything to be as annoying as possible but the skirms don't need to get close to the shoreline the archers are just stuck there i also notice i think you mentioned this i even got distracted with everything that was going on but backed is going to try and threaten the right side uh which i feel is a good play but i still would like the food count and resources for dark and the ability to make nights soon is huge yeah i think this reminds me of dark in in the hideout game right except back to you this time like yeah we're focusing so much on that oh the skirms how did they die from there they must have been some weak skirmishers oh and then the scurvy archer goes down well that's fair fact you're such a troll man but yeah you're right it's very it's the other side of the spectrum here your back has gone too yolo it hasn't had enough eco to really get reward from this yeah i think if he had snuck that villager and had just played normally with his own dock i think maybe he would be in a much better position but like like dark had that trickle of food for so long right like it's it's kind of kind of hard when you've got like two fishing ships that get killed immediately and no dock that to really sustain villager production when you don't build farms yeah it's it's going to be complicated from here and so i'm i hope that darking closes out because for people who missed it the second game dark should have won that game he was way ahead he he had good good civilizations uh good position everything just looked perfect for him and unfortunately he couldn't close that game out if he would have closed that game out and they would get win here he'd still very much be alive in the series reverse sweep is still possible right uh but let's see if he can close this out and then maybe plan for the future as he does have enough stone for castle he's getting chain barting or was just completed chain barding for the knights i mean he can do so much with this position yeah he could uh he's got he's in the driving seat right now um he's also done a great job to um dock the bottom bomb pond and he's now killed all back to his fishing ships yep um which is really really impressive considering everything that's going on yeah um and he's gonna try and drop the castle here in the front i mean this castle is needed man if that can go up he can take his berries again he'd clear out the ranges in some of the houses here and maybe even mix in a latest or two i'd kind of like to see that um with the knights considering the upgrades and they'll also protect the golds i i think there's a few small things that dart could be doing better like maybe just noticing that he hasn't gotten a few eco upgrades but overall man he's survived he's weathered the storm he's sending knights over to hit backspace in fact this feels like forever futile at this point um yeah whoa bhakti is committing to scouts and spirit it looks like he's getting forging and plus one defense for the scouts ah so i i guess he's just gonna try and defend with the full feudal like you said um that's that's gonna be rough considering his buildings are so random he's got archer range and barracks in the north and he's got an archery range near that castle that's about to go up now he's making a stable at home he doesn't actually have a barracks at home he's oh he's got it in the middle sorry i can't even keep track of where his buildings are the market in blacksmith and houses are random this is like it's like a normal base exploded and went to a different couple different areas of the map yes yeah this is this is a crazy i mean maybe he's been taking some advice from song song or something that's so true yep yep that's very true song would play this way and what is this from back on the left he's got the scouts coming in two villagers it feels like he might tower that woodline and then if you were to swoop in with the scouts you could actually kill a few villagers there i can't help but feeling that the dark he's not done anything in with his car stage yeah i don't see any units really like what is he like he should be going forward with like five nights raiding everywhere like that actually should not be able to be building a forward tower on his wood right now or already him with scouts or having five swimming under his tower like like where is the map presence from dart i think so he he's just prioritized eco a bit more he didn't want to have a fragile castle so he got both of his wood upgrades he didn't have any of them got his farm upgrade he's now gonna add a tc so he's basically instead of trying to go for the kill here i think he's shifting into getting an eco lead and there's pros and cons to that right if you don't go for the kill and then you keep the enemy uh in the game they could sometimes overwhelm you with less economy in this position so i guess he feels like i'm gonna take a 10 15 villager lead be happy with that but honestly i'd be a little terrified if i was the weaker player and i didn't kill off back there baxter could have pikeman he could have skirms he's got randomness everywhere it's messy yeah giving himself a chance maybe i completely i don't think he's i think back to you is fine honestly if you look at the bill count um it's pretty even i mean that is almost cast stage right yeah like the thing the thing is with bags is that yes that cost is good it defends his gold but like the left side and the right side is it's pretty hard to defend against the siege push right like if that actually gets pikemen like and and manganese and maybe some knights and camels like what does he really have against that although that being said doc is finally doing what we were saying right on the right side he does have units raiding um yeah i think it's it's just very this game nothing's going to be pretty about it and it's very hard in the moment to understand what should be prioritized back in the south back on water how i think i've almost understated how good bacter's been staying alive in all the different areas with the rain oh yeah yeah like he's never it's not even just the fact that that dark isn't gone for raids this is the second or third time he showed up with knights the act is always defending look at that stone gates and houses and now has spear running camels out he i thought he was going to lose the south he didn't lose that he actually has his left side he also has the right side right now um i think that we're going to see keep this game competitive but i want to point out again that dark is on three tc's right now and so three town center's pretty solid when you have that head start and does now have a 10 villager lead yeah you're completely right and the back has played this like incredibly well considering yeah considering that he he sent the villager forward straight away which is just obviously one less villager on onward and he he didn't have any fishing boats essentially he had two that died immediately so he had no economy and the fact that he's even in this game is pretty impressive um i i can't help but feeling that maybe dark could have been a little bit more aggressive in early casting stage i agree with you on that yeah maybe a bit more and i think he's booming too much i think that's the problem like he's going for a fourth town center and this is very weird if he actually gets it up it's right next to his castle it does protect the stone and he did just bring in relic number one with lithuanians that's pretty cool uh but maybe this is too boom focused he actually doesn't have a single pond controlled right now though in the south he's trying to remain competitive there i can't tell i feel like facts he opened this up with a way that he would never ever do in the main event because the level plays so high and because his level play is so high he's actually made it work and poor dark has just been he might just be frightened or lacks the confidence to ever really take a fight to back and he's just hoping that he can boom it out you know yeah i complete i think again it's one of those things i've been in a situation before like you kind of just make some of the wrong decisions like i feel like players that are at that higher level of decision making like bank tea like when they see a window of being incarcerated for like two minutes before your opponent you will die there yeah that game is over if this is back to playing in in the opposite but like because dark like you're saying isn't as confident like he doesn't really feel like he can do that right so yeah he said he boom he gets the eco lead and you know that's completely reasonable of a play but i just i feel like some players like especially at the very top they have this killer instinct right like they see a chance to win a game they're not going to give back to you the chance to even you know get to like um the mid game right um look at the latest go here so yeah probably the better oh i didn't commit to the fight i think you could win that fight but feel like latest are the go-to if you have a castle and the enemy's making camels and pikemen that's the way it should work anyways and uh he's got one relic so a little bit of extra attack on there but the reaction from back he's making camels he's got pikemen he gets a conversion uh also garrison and his tc on the front is going to send in camels at the same time to take out the magnel i mean look at all the blinking on the minimap how on earth is back able to focus everywhere he needs to be every single time it's incredible but also on the wood line he tried to quick wall at the same time and uh dark was able to get through okay really important cast on the right hand side there if if dark gets this castle up i think he is secure like firmly in the driving seat like he can just pressure back to his economy so easily whilst also denying a wooden gold yeah and two town centres right that's a big spot yeah that castle i mean you take out two town centers and you secure the resources and you already have the eco lead it's pretty nuts i see back's on the left of the siege workshop but not sure if there's anything really to back that up yet unless he's gonna drop his own castle he actually has the stone honestly though i think dark has done an amazing job with his economy i think we maybe i was too critical because if you look at how many farms he has like his economy is really really good right now yeah he's got good upgrades like bhakti only has the fishing and if you took away the fishing like bacteri's economy is is really not very strong um and those fish will run out right is gonna go imp alice it's cheaper for byzantines to do that i think his plan with this forward castle hassle the enemy go imperial and start trapping down everything if it wasn't you know how earlier when dark had a poor game one we said if he wasn't saracens that he wouldn't have been able to keep it competitive yeah you could argue that if backed wasn't byzantines he wouldn't be able to keep it competitive right here because a normal imperial age cost would be it'd be a rough position because the enemy would probably be in him faster and then he'd be behind an eco you can make cheap units an imp faster here and give dark some real problems if your business needs and look at backed with the conversions you're kidding oh wow dang yeah you're i think you're right this is why again this is why i wouldn't want to give back to you any chances in my games yeah yeah just for that reason exactly how does how does doctor react to this now though do you think he knows that bacteria is going in pirillation i think he does but he's had he has to get gold he can't take that gold that was walled up in the dark age now he's trying to drop a castle to secure this gold but that's being denied by camels he does have gold elsewhere but it's really tough to know what to do against fast imperial and especially when everything's so clunky like imagine patrolling a military unit from anywhere in dark space towards backspace you're going to run into a house or a barracks or an outpost like you're gonna run into something before you encounter a unit so it's so awkward to be able to move out and and you just feel like claustrophobic almost because there's nowhere to go nowhere to go sorry yeah and the thing is as well is you you have this trouble with with with lithuanians it's like what unit do you actually build here because um i mean sure you can go for latest but back to you will just build the hubs right and the house of trebs you don't really have an answer until you get like bumble kevin and either like an overwhelming massive latest right like it's not easy um yeah it's it's not easy and it's it's probably one of the real weaknesses for lithuanians is that they're a little bit one-sided i think still you could go for your own skerms and maybe skerm latest in this situation it skirms against the halves and the latest for everything else would be the hope but the downside with that is you're using castles to produce the latest you could lose castle soon um you you can't really kill with skirmisher if latest ends up not being an option so i don't know man it's just backed honestly back to just such a beast it's made this game yeah he's so funny he's playing so well yeah yeah um i think yeah i think one thing that if you do go later i mean the full heavy camel could still be really strong against that right like it's not like heavy camel like full help i still think that's pretty pretty difficult to trade cost effectively with the with the latest oh my god look at the resources for dark 2 i mean he's on his way to imperial age and he has those resources feels like that's a dream scenario for lithuanians plus having three relics that's also sick but is this actually winnable for him i think it's winnable but it's awkward and fact has shown how much of a an annoying player he can be yeah so my goodness man i think dark has done a really good job to stabilize though and he's yeah he definitely has strong chances in this right like like baxter he can't really afford howard here right now which is um yeah he just doesn't have the gold we've got a pause here backed back has made the game so stressful he needs to take a smoke break this is incredibly uh common for backed guys um and so if if he makes it into the main event just remember that he likes to pause the game and uh now funny fact about that halas i don't know if you remember all the details it was the uh i think second or third set anyways it was one of the early sets for hidden cup three player picks i think i think it was aztecs went forward to try and lame early and then about two minutes in paused for like temporarily and i was like this has all the signs of fact game one i'm like okay someone's telling me it might have been dark that paused okay it doesn't matter story the story needs to be told anyways we don't know who paused because of cap straight but as we come back it was lame attempt and then uh quick pause and i'm like that's got to be backed and after all was said and done it actually was him he does not try and hide it at all so yeah i guess dark had just paused the game there for whatever reason maybe his cat was on the keyboard and we're back in business yep um the question with dark now is as you were saying like he's gonna lose his castles right um at least most of them like what is his follow up here like skirm i think you need a lot of skirms he's adding the ranges now it's a little concerning to me he's just clicking the lead skirm but i think skerm latest is what you do uh but maybe you could argue switching out of latest because you're about to lose castle number two on the left yeah i mean one thing that dark is doing really well is he's constantly raiding back to his economy like um back he still has 110 villagers but i mean dark has you know a 40 villager lead which is obviously pretty nice especially at this point in the game um yeah i do worry i i do worry like losing those castles he's just going to lose his power you know right like i think if you're just on skirm hustle i feel like i feel like byzantines can actually perform quite well if they just got a camel right the byzantines could just kill like honestly the one thing byzantines would really struggle with if they're going full trash units would be uh civilizations that can go for champion but then byzantines with castles can make cataphracts byzantines are the classic counter everything sieve so yeah it's just baptism kept us competitive i mean look at dark he's got these latest and skirms and they're taking out houses barracks in a siege workshop fact is just constantly showing up with something and dark is unable to really push out i this game continues to go on there's a sneaky castle with one villager i guess others were there and he called it in for dark but yeah dark needs to get some real way to deal with the front and i just don't know if there's an option for him right now yeah i feel the same again it's just this is why again like back tea just hitting these like really really really nice timings he knows that lithuanians again they need a little bit of time right yeah you need some time if you let them get to like four latest with like relics like that you're gonna be in trouble but he knows he goes past him four traps he gets rid of the castles and now like it's really difficult to see like where dark really goes to this game you know i'm i'm i'm sitting here just relatively confused i look at the population they have 180 population but it feels like each player has 30 or 40 population that they don't know where to where to place on the map uh actually that might end up being the water population confusing me but seriously man like back does have this area on the right and dark's been trying to raid that uh back is kept the villas alive and uh sending habs over that way now you've got some latest running through the middle you've got a castle on the left for dark and he's gonna raid with latest on the left he's actually getting some really big kills here alice yep he's doing a great job i love how he took the map um on the sides yeah just like when he was being pushed in the middle because he knew he needed that space and that he could also deny back to the space um and also raid his economy um yeah yeah go ahead finish your thoughts yes you can say that castle is now being tripped down as well so he is gonna lose that knife control um wow but i mean he did just kill a lot of villagers it is still uh 200 pop versus 160 but this might also be the case of an overbeam boom for dark he's got 155 villagers i think when and alice you know this as i guess this is another pause it must be it um when it's late game scenario and you're constantly being raided i mean both players have lost so many villagers you're cycling through your tcs and sometimes you go into autopilot and you create a bit too much and so that's that's where darkseid but he's still killing a lot i see like have here in the very south killing villagers and back to us now below 100 villagers that really hurts yeah i think bhakti is on that threshold of this game snowballing like miles out of his control like they'll get to a point where he can't even afford to build habits to defend his economy anymore like that's how much um he's losing uh in terms of eco also like all of those fishing boats so not all of them most of them are either on fish traps or like idol yeah so that source of food has kind of like dwindled for him um yeah the issue now is is stabilizing right he's actually got half the village of the darkness and dark has done a great job i don't know how he has 60 plus on food because of all these pushes like he's lost town centers i think he's lost castles but he's continued to do it i would honestly suggest that he make a few rams and clear up some of these houses he's got like 30 skerms in his eco right now if he could just clear up some of this and even the sneaky barracks which continues to spam in units it would be so much easier for him to think about hitting some skirms with his cav in back's eco because back actually does not have a counter to skirmisher right now yeah that's very true and back doesn't have the eco to switch into anything else right yep yep he's done a great job of making sure that the back is just he streamlined into this how play right um the only difficulty is is that bhakti is still able to push in one location um pretty strongly because um dog doesn't have access to the latest right yeah it's like actually can just go and take out all of like darks town centers all those castles um is it going to be enough 1890 i'm really not sure i i i feel like again if the rolls were reversed fact would win from dark's position but i'm looking on the right side as we see newcastle actually going up for dark he's going to lose one and then on the left side he's just lost a town center and he's going to lose two monasteries which means minus two relics which means minus attacking his units i mean it's 150 bills for dark he's he's completely outmatched with military back doesn't need eco it's byzantines man 82 military oh my god dude yeah this is one of the things that i've actually learned late game is that sometimes you don't want to rage your opponent because less like especially sims like beers like maya's aztecs like the more you kill their villagers the more they have just really annoying units everywhere um and obviously with us if like lithuanians you want to be building hustle so you need those like 130 villagers like this i mean you don't necessarily need i mean you don't want 75 villagers that's for sure but you don't necessarily need 130. i think um like honestly i think that baxter's close is going to close this out here look at this he's got trebs everywhere there's just so much spam for him man and dark is actually sacrificing villagers right now so maybe he'll have more skirms on the field in a second which would be huge but still it feels like he's losing so much grounds yeah and he just has no unit that can really deal with both the hams and the trebs right like he's got i guess he's got bomber cannons which he's using now yeah but he's only got one but like again you with skirms you can't really take out the the trebs in time right they've got so much pierce armor well it's you know what the bombard cannon changing things a little bit here and the amount of skirmishers it's almost like after he lost the ville suddenly he goes up with military yeah now he has 80 military so wait a second he just shot up by 40 military maybe he does have a chance and he can swing this back and get a win here the trebuchet goes down the bomber cannon stays alive and you could even use the bomber cannons to push the castle in the middle if you're dark yeah i mean it will take a while but it definitely will get that castle down eventually yeah um yeah is this game going to stabilize they're both on 100 villages roughly i feel like this game might there might be a while well left on this game i'm not sure there's 60 skirms on the field right now and how many what can backed really do against that if the skirms are in one big balls halves of no chance i guess you could make light cap but he's kind of missing a lot of upgrades there well apparently he can convert darks like kevin using against them yeah that's true also being very attentive on the left man there's so much to focus on so both players playing out of their minds right now and that castle will eventually go up but there's another area that dark was able to expand to which is nice we'll take the middle uh he does not have any relics right now but then again he's not really making any latest or cavaliers so as far as the attack goes it's not really benefiting from the relics anyways yeah um he is getting hostile which is really nice okay um he is building himself upgrade for that really strong late game just the hosa scone should be enough um especially the fact that the bank team doesn't really have any economy to build hustles look at the villagers killed and lost in this game the eco kd is insane there have been so many raids in this game and the raids have been so very different too it's it's really it's really crazy but house the reason i was laughing is because back is being such a best man he's got these barracks up against the edge of the map and he continues to spam halps in towards well now there's just farms there but there's been that gold pile there and back just refuses to quit man i mean if you look in the north as well he's somehow got like five pounds in dark wood i don't know how they even got there oh my god it's probably that barracks in the middle of the freaking map dude he's producing out of it yeah he just he just continues to spam units left and right to various areas but for the first time in a long time dark actually has a ball that he could slow push back eco with before it was just raids now bax could actually lose his main eco and his eco hasn't been that strong anyway so this is where bach really starts to feel like he needs something now or the game might even be over yeah i think dark has done an amazing job to stabilize this merchant i think you're even right that the the thing that made him stabilize was just losing 40 villagers yeah like because he just had more military right and the problem with bhakti and the way he was playing is that he just had a like a 40 villager lead right so there was just constant raids everywhere and because dark didn't have the economy he couldn't deal with it i didn't have the military story um but now the thing is if bhakti does get to hustle i think he still actually has a win condition um because if he the dog's economy is like so open right like there's no way he defends that against house outrage yeah um and the the economy is as backed as trying to detect switch into something else right now and get his farms up he is being threatened in enough areas where it's kind of he's running out of space here uh to maybe get a tech switch and he's going for capped ram right now but siege workshops are going down yeah honestly i think dark should close us out um yeah he's so far ahead right now yep yeah yeah but i mean the way back to you has played this game i mean nothing is certain right yeah i'm with you on that i think what you do if you're in dark's position is you just continue to fight with skirms and your own trash units wait until you have well he's getting there wait until you have a lot of gold banked up and then go either elite latest or cavalier you just use that gold to to finish off the game you just don't want to trickle it in when you end up investing into the gold units make sure it's the blow that counts and that yeah probably do it if he even needs it right yeah dude what a game and finally back taps out i mean he kind of handicapped himself a little bit playing like this what an entertaining game the 16 year old gets a win finally in this best of seven decider and probably the most entertaining game of the series man that was just type a one in twitch chat if you got second hand anxiety for dark throughout that game like oh my goodness dude the amount of pressure that was coming in the random buildings and spam forget your build orders man when you're playing against backed back makes it a different game halas but uh what was the key i suppose for dark it was a long game but what was the key uh i think honestly it was resilience and confidence really i feel like he was able to just always constantly keep villages going keep his economy relatively safe and what he's so good at doing like the boom in improv where he has these 40 c's he always keeps him running like we saw he always had like like about around 50 farms even when like every castle was being tried like even when every tc was being trapped so i think he just he was constantly macroing and despite that he had putting on him under so much pressure like he was able to kind of uh snowball the village and uh that kind of led to the victory well good news for us is that means we get another game and maybe more if dark can uh show us what he's capable of on these upcoming maps there's the kd for you you cries thank you uh 500 kills are almost for dark economically i mean this is just a testament to fact economically dark had food wood stone and gold he was ahead in every single category and it was way ahead in every category and then the other thing is at one point there were like three or four relics collected for lithuanians if lithuanians have relics and that much eco it should not take them that long to finish off a game yeah um i mean if you even look at the kd as well the kd and the economy like how is this a close game that's true look at the timeline there yeah but it was just the military count for backed um it was it was consistently higher until dark sacrifice and villagers and i think maybe i don't actually know who paused but you know maybe they paused to fix keyboard or maybe a hotkey or maybe dark just needed to take a deep breath you know yeah yeah feel like maybe it was a slight tactical pause where he's like okay what do i need to do he looked at his pop and said okay i have a 160 vills let's uh let's toss let's toss a few away here and that changed the game so yeah i mean how tired are you if you're dark right now oh my god that game must have been completely exhausting like well dark is normally i i think i would be pretty exhausted after that one but uh from what i know about dark he's playing like eight to ten hour days every day so he plays okay he's probably used to this yeah so i think that he's like uh he's like a young mbl in hera you know they used to do the same way back in the day so um yeah yeah that makes sense all right i don't mind if i need a quick one minute um break yeah do that take your time no rush there man um and good time to for him to take a break because i've missed so many subs today chad thank you christ thank you for the 20 gifted i am blown away by the viewership considering this is just a decider but i am also blown away by the support so guys you're been incredible um the main event prize pool is updating live um and that is based on the amount of subs the channel has too so obviously the channel does not have 67 000 subs but the prize pool started at 60k with microsoft so appreciate you all whether it's a prime sub here or there uh a gifted sub or resub whatever of course there's also many people i saw some comments saying they were new from youtube today i forget your names but welcoming new people from youtube glad you could make it and uh we have two more best of sevens after this one when this eventually ends the next best of seven is between heart and borrows and i will have leery crazy player he's going to be joining to co-cast and then the final set of the day will be accm verse daniel and i will have hera here to co-cast so we got some big names joining not as big as alice of course but that's that's on the cards for today um the next home maps for backed are bay slopes gold rush ginger mountain thank you 50 people at least 50 people even if you didn't receive it just say thanks just sit definitely evil thank you it's the qualifier anyways i don't know if i can say much more than that yeah it's been it's been wild man it actually feels like main event these these deciders so um shoot what was it gonna do i would damn son apparently when alice goes to the bathroom this stream receives a lot of gifted subs so i think hell is to drink more water uh damn son thank you for 50 gifted subs what is happening right now what is happening also you're not forgotten tech t and berget 90 for the twitch prime subs um this is what i expect backed i don't think he's going to be too stressed out as far as the maps are concerned here i think honestly it would be wise for him to go for something other than bay because dark has some good civilizations for bay so maybe we see gold rush maybe gold rush maybe tatars um i could see if it is bay maybe going for persians on slopes i i could see tatars working out well and maybe gold rush berbers two ends uh not a sieve that i would expect to see sorry to tootin lovers out there but i don't think we'll see tootins in the remaining games it just doesn't fit quite as well uh i'm loving all the the dark fanboys right now rooting on the underdog who shouldn't have even been here in the best of seven but he made it cobra says uh i was there for hidden cup one this one feels like uh the world cup wow well it's been crazy so far halas i think i heard you come back yeah sorry tim what's with drops you need to drink more water man the stream gets a lot of support when when you step away i guess when i can pay attention to viewers i i see always i will get back to music yeah yeah just kick you out now i'm kidding um i was just speculating a little bit here on the maps uh the tutans one the only spot that we felt like that would fit was going to be on hideout so i kind of doubt we'll see tunes in the next couple games yeah it leaves him with berbers tatters and persians um well this is actually kind of tricky for back bacteria actually because um if you pick slopes you would assume he's going to pick tatters i think against and i would prefer indians yeah i'd much prefer indians there and then bay i guess you're gonna pick persians on bay against japanese which i think japanese are also great yeah japanese also great and then what's the last one um gold rush and i'm not too sold on berber's on gold rush to be honest with you um i think they have really good potential of taking map control in the mid game but i feel like whenever i play gold rush i think the thing i'm worried about is you know like arbs and trips yeah um and anything that is really good at pushing one location and i don't think berbers really have that to be honest i don't know what you think well kels can be pretty good against berber's there just going yeah yeah yeah so imagine if if dark would have gotten that that island victory we'd be looking at a 2-2 and i would honestly like dark civilizations more long term so yeah i completely agree i think all of like dark civilizations are really good against back teeth ones um if they get played in in the way we're thinking they're going to get played sure sure yeah so it seems unlikely because it's the 3-1 score line but based on the civilizations and of course you know alice and i top-tier strategists right we think that dark might have the slight edge with each civilization going into the next game that said i'm completely surprised we actually see malay for dark on slopes it will be malay against tatars not indians what in the world was dark i mean it's not it's not very close in the alphabetical order so i think that he's probably gone malay intentionally do you think that this is a prepared strategy um i have no idea do you have the uh lobby code by the way um i don't but overlay guy can maybe send it to you or you can rob robo's got you i'm sure someone's got you they uh they're actually in the game so i'm gonna speed up on my end here and yeah you'll have to catch up to speed but backed playing as the tatars and it is live and we were a little bit behind with no spec delay so we're just speeding up here that dark has picked malay as if that advances 66 faster to the next age uh and he's got to be careful here back just run forward to lame they're both actually going forward with their scouts to try and maybe steal some sheep or steal some boars act as a big lamer and on this map it's it's really hard to say what the best strategy is we've seen britons be picked and people will play very passive and play for archers and walls in the middle you've seen indians and mongols and magyars be picked to take resources on the sides and go for a lot of scouts and aggression there's a thousand food i think the exact number is 960 or 940 on each side and there's huge reward there but it's high risk with threat reward halas uh were you able to find the game oh yeah yeah i'm in the game yeah all right cool stuff so yeah i i just never would have seen malay picked here mainly because indians has been a common pick uh in a lot of these games and indians was available for dark so yeah is this a mind game i i'm not i'm not too sure because as i was saying like again like tatters they their halves are like really bad yeah and they don't get our blaster right so like all they can really do is like have archers and camels and like indians that is what indians want to be doing they want to be building camels against cabarches with the extra psalm um so it's a really difficult i'm he must have some kind of a strategy prepared you can play too yeah like i i just can't see why you picked melee otherwise i mean it's not a bad archers maybe he just felt more comfortable going into archers here um the one thing that's that's tricky with malay is if you're able to delay as i say with them advancing faster to the next age is huge so you could go for an early drush and then have a sick fast fuel time behind it with a lot of villagers so um as dark weakens the board with the tc finishing off with the villagers which he failed to do correctly in game number one i think we're going to see a pre-milled rush into we'll see from dark yeah um oh oh oh boy okay moment here back delays the barracks and also could get the villager kill possibly now he's not going to but that means that dark has to send villagers out to finish that in fact now knows what the strategy will be yeah and bacteria has already built the barracks as well so i think they were both going for the same strategy okay um yeah i guess it's kind of an even match-up and i guess if they both i think do you think we'll see fast castle is just going to be direction to interfete ledge the act feels like a player who would go drush fast castle he he loves his walls he's not i mean with the exception of the previous game he's not really the type to go forward too much nowadays so i i do feel like backed is probably the type to just send the militia forward he's already gonna have the lead in the numbers there and just feel comfortable that way um but yeah i think our opinion is is pretty similar when it comes to malay i would love to see him have a planned strategy and love to see it work but if it doesn't work then there's going to be big questions over picking malay when indians have been proven to be pretty dominant or at least one of the top five eight civilizations something like that on this map yeah yeah well the reason that i but i would think indians are good is literally just because the match up against tatters um yep otherwise like maybe i could see if it was like for example if back teak had celts and he thought he was going to pick celts on slopes and obviously you don't want to sit like indians or like if you had mines then yeah sure i understand but because bhakti only really had tatters for this map and burb isn't maybe persians i mean those indians still deal fine with right um so you have to think this is something prepared something that the dark has thought about um so be really interesting to see like how he kind of plays this and we are saying back to you all by the way so i think you are right that he will go for a fast castle yeah and no risk yeah i mean do you want to take massive risk either when you're ahead maybe he also doesn't want to show well i guess i can't say he doesn't want to show his strategies because we won't know who he is in the main event like maybe in the maid event he's going to send villagers to all corners i don't know but then we wouldn't know it's backed so that's hidden cub um but i would really like to see dark right now as back actually made for militia what the that's crazy so he doesn't have loom right now but um i would really like to see dark since he knows that the rush is to the north to send villagers over to mill the left side i wish more players would do that because it's not like the enemy is going to head over there they're clearly going for your woodline right now yeah this is about to get really messy um oh never mind um dark left that villager alone oh no that's huge that that villager not only could have been killed by the scout because the villager doesn't have loom but the militia could have got in yeah yeah and this is the risk when you move out with the drush man is you get punished like this if you don't get him yeah um and now the four militia will pay off and that should be a villager down the dark doesn't really have the food to ever go futile here nice work there from back to block and doink that that villager down and yeah this is yeah this is brutal so it's so rough like his eco is going to be so delayed from this especially with malay who already have like a fragile um time of it anyway because it advanced so quickly yep um this is the spot where it the correct play looks very weird don't make that far oh does he want the straggler tree still is that the thing is that what is that you can still build it one thou down [Music] all right a bit of a t90 farm though i would argue that i i would never place one that poorly nowadays um but yeah he's quick walling and he's just forced to bring the militia back but i think this is honestly a spot with malay where you have to go with like i want to say like 13 or 14 dark age farms and click up what feels very late if you want to have a good fc time it's really awkward to get your builds down with this civilization because they advance so quickly yeah luckily i mean malay is a civ where if you do have a sloppy dark age like you can be bailed out by yourself yes true um i think honestly i think baxter could have done more with this josh i can't have a feeling like he didn't achieve as much as maybe he could have done it just because yeah that's what i mean it's kind of weird like against most players that i play they would be they would have killed i think two villagers of me at least just because like he should be on on woodlines on the gold right um he still hasn't he has the scout as well so like he can always take a fight against um dark's militia um but i guess he's content to just uh bash a house i guess yeah it's weird to me how he ran away like at the very least forced the repairs to be close to the resources that darkness taking and i actually yeah dark is doing this well here as far as this build is concerned he's staying in dark age because he knows if he would have clicked earlier that the time wouldn't make a lot of sense so let's see what he can pull off here i mean the farms i don't think it's ideal to make 13 dark age farms but that's going to give him a ton of food and if you look at bach's position he's going to arrive in feudal with just about the resources to click up i think the fc times could maybe be somewhat similar yeah definitely and if you can like sort your economy out i mean you do just gain like what four villages i mean he lost the village right so he should be up just three villages yep um so melee are a good save in that regard um the problem is again is the malay that's kind of their only bonus right like yeah yeah especially on non-maps and water maps it feels it feels like at least the way you know where players are playing competitively is they're prioritized more on water maps i can utilize that bonus and then there are little vanilla when it comes to land options i do see that backed on the way to castle also using his three hp scalp to scout the map right now which i'd love to see and did dark lose his scout yeah he lost it to the town center oh yeah when he got in yeah yeah okay well uh again looking at the up times you see the archery range you now see the blacksmith for dark dark will actually be able to click up and arguably have a it might even be faster if he can get up right now than the enemy but i do still feel like the two ranges for back looking very clean um everything looks perfect he didn't take losses he could place his lumber camps where he wanted it's just what you'd want to be at if you're in back's position yeah i mean dark also only has one range right so it's like he's going to be outmasted and he's not going to have thumb ring sorry true true yeah it's going to be pretty difficult to hold this antatars will do more damage on top of the hill uh small thing here and i don't know if darks even scouted that side he has scouted i would almost like to see him send his militia to kill the deer on the right side of backspace just in case bhakt wants to go out there later on which you sometimes see i mean it gets more value from the militia than you'd otherwise get put it that way yeah it makes sense i'm kind of surprised that no one took the um out to resources but i can kind of understand it is very risky yeah um but yeah in back's case i understand it in dark's case when he had when he was bringing his defensive rush home i would have liked to have seen him you know send four villagers out there and then maybe he wouldn't have had to seed so many farms but he's going to be in cass lake at almost the same time here so both in caslade and that is the power of the malay he saved himself with his sieve i he did save himself but again i'm still really worried from like these crossbows they're gonna always be able to micro back to that hill um it's gonna be how how would you hold this if you're if you're if you're dark well is this the situation where maybe you you hope that back makes a bit of a mistake because you don't have a scout it's not like you can see what's going to happen uh here comes back ed backed as the king at sneaking armies he actually doesn't have bodkin yet he doesn't have the eco for that but he kills one ville and dark has to react and dark will lose another villager that's three villagers down in this game and but with malay actually ahead in bills which is pretty cool yeah is that just an experience from dog i mean moving out there is extremely risky i mean especially when you have exposed resources especially on this map um he has no vision really and especially on status when they're gonna have probably more numbers than you just because of the way the delay kind of works with you yep uh i think yeah i think it it's tough because this other woodline's garbage right now this is what happens when you you keep yourself in the middle like for back that's not an issue because back has had the control um but i think there as back to now getting loom it's a good time i guess um i would say just make an outpost it's not like you're going to need the stone for three tcs right away making an outpost in that woodline is huge yeah to be able to see that army a bit faster and for now he's just going to wait at home which i can't disagree with he's going to try and get his mask together and maybe back who's trying to split armies will get caught out with one of them and it can give dark an opportunity to counter attack yeah i mean what is really interesting is building skirmishes right now so i think bacteria is prepared preparing for a elite scam switch um which is not very meta yeah i think at least in the situation economically it feels a little weird because it does it's pretty expensive to make the skirms which cost food and wood like here have an outpost dark i have an outpost or okay he got town watched he noticed it though i've been proven wrong but yeah skerm's coming in here is uh this was uh hera or leary my next two co-casters i think they would just stick with crossbows right yeah i mean okay another point as well is that okay dark has every upgrade in the blacksmith and that actually has plus one and he's still not chasing this army or engaging it is so so that he should be able to click on these units and see what if i just run an attacker might win the fight right um maybe he's worried about the hill but this this game to me i don't know if you feel the same it screams like either like lack of experience in games like this or or lack of confidence really because it feels like he doesn't really have a clear idea of how he wanted to address like the early car stage period of the game probably probably lack of confidence and lack of experience and it makes sense when he's so such a young player and alice you know this having played in a few events and whatnot even if it's just a qualifier there's no substitute for actual tournament experience right no amount of ranked games or training games is going to give you the feel that natural tournament gives you so i think that this is a big moment for dark's career winner lose in this best of seven having made it this far but i mean look it look it back he brings in the skirms now and now he should be able to get these kills and for dark unfortunately actually he could in theory take out some of these skirms yeah yeah i mean they don't have defense and they don't have vodka either and dark has ballistics and his micro has been in pekkabala yeah seriously look at this oh my god dark take it easy man oh my goodness look at this yeah and he's done a good job and he also has not lost too many villagers concern for me is backed is on two town centers but this is the importance of having the blacksmith upgrades and the university upgrades and dark what a nerd man he's actually could win this fight this is this is crazy yeah i mean the problem as you said is economic right i mean uh bhakti is in a great position economically like he's got solid wood control and he's building a tc on on the left-hand side um if if you are dark here like when you get this army lead from this incred incredible micro like what do you do with it how do you like capitalize yeah i think i mean this is again incredible play um he's gotta clear up the army and the other side which he's also doing and you need to just counter you counter and then you tc hell this he's actually done a really actually i take it back i thought he had other eco upgrades but i think you've you've got to make sure that when you're on one tc it's a healthy one tc with your eco upgrades behind it so get those eco upgrades and then after taking that control add your town centers back just now and he's kind of done this already with the skirmisher choice act is going to play very defensive from here and just try and boom it out and he does have a villager lead now so it's definitely on dark to push and on the right side he's got skirms to micro against now and he's still trying that so this will be a more difficult fight because ballistics is in for backed and then on the left side he's adding the tc i like the tc yeah and dark's also building his own tc as well um i think this is definitely back he's now going for cabo just again i'm really not sure about the cabochon it feels weird because he doesn't have control to mix in ca right now is a little you know yeah i mean like he doesn't even have bodkin for example like going for cabbages now is a little bit odd is this um do you think that he forgot that about bodkin because this is at a point where he either can't afford it because he's producing villagers out of three town centers or he genuinely does not know that he has not clicked that um i think he might not know that he didn't get bodkin but the thing is like he should be getting plus two defense on the skirmishes anyway because it's such an important upgrade that like there's not really any excuse for not having it because like again you want that plus your defense as soon as you can because then the archers only do one damage right yeah and you're seeing right here i mean crossbowmen again taking a pretty decent fight against them and here we've got a magnel but the magnel is just kind of there um and actually gets good value before it goes down can you get another shot off here dark that's actually really good considering because he took out a few cav archers and he took out a few skirmishers and he's taking out villager and he's defending at home so dark is still in this game i think it's more honestly this game is very okay back tea is now finally getting vodka okay there you go um yeah i think if dark just went a bit more aggressive there like again he had no bodkin and no plus two defense so he can still fight these guns and if he gets on this on this wood on the right hand side and maybe harasses the farm on the left like you get some serious damage um the question is now though like is this is a pretty even game right here yeah um so what is the game plan with with malay just hold for imperialism i think if you go a mix of skirmish it could do really well against guitars so yeah maybe hold to the imperialist he's mixing in his own elite skirm now which i like and he has armor which back does not and he's also maybe tempted to come forward with more siege as i see a magnel running forward so dark he's not going away quietly and remember even if you're a little behind to the imp you can always just go whoop and just zoom up with malay i hear back to fighting on top of the hill which he'll like his tutors but i think fact is shown a few times today in this best of seven the strategy is not always there yeah i agree completely i mean the thing with with malay is that they will have the timing and early end when they get rbluster um but then tatars should be better in post-imp with the upgraded hussars um but it feels like uh i just don't really like how bad he's really playing this like it felt like he could have played this much smoother if he just got plus two defensive bodkin and yeah you know he just the order of things like having skirms cav archers three tc's is eventually a nice goal but the order he did it really hurt himself here my concern with dark is can he kill enough as here he comes as there's three ranges here for backed and a siege workshop at home so it's kind of a tough area to be in and then also can he get his eco right because he still doesn't have horse collar he still doesn't have the wood upgrade and he's still on two tcs and there's also a really annoying counter attack coming in from back so feels like i'm with you bax could have definitely been more convincing and if he makes it to the main event we'll have to be but at the same time dark's aggression is really it's nice to see aggression paying off you know and and the military and the kd all shows that um yeah doc has definitely played really impressively because i was a bit skeptical like early car stage it kind of felt like um he wasn't really that sure what he wanted to do but then he had that amazing bit of micro and i think he just grew with confidence from that oh my god the magnel dude the magnolia just hit back twice there yeah a lot of confidence indeed i would love to see another siege workshop forward he's got three yeah on the hill if he had another siege workshop for reinforcements would be sick micro battle and what how did that happen there and oh no it's all gone wrong yeah that's a disaster and if you look in his economy as well there's three um cavalry archers from backseat oh god dude oh it was going so right and then back just held on so typical you know for someone who's considered to be top 10 top 16 like so typical to just hold on barely and get away with it i act i'm so annoyed for dark right now because oh my god and then in fact kills two magnets like we doubt him and then he gets away with the greed with these town centers typical man fact is like how how dare you doubt me man come on i'm i'm blind get out of here with this with this dark hype gang it just yeah these games can turn so quickly like one one bad decision one bit of sloppy micro and that's it you're you're you're you're dead well maybe not dead but yeah you're in a very difficult position right yeah that's about the beauty and frustrating thing about age of empires i think it's why a lot of people prefer to watch because when they get to a certain level of understanding they just realize like there's so many small things i have to do and it's hard to do everything right um but it's also like what makes age of empires is such a beautiful game because you could also be the biggest noob with no hotkeys and it's just so relaxing and peaceful and there's just so much to find out too and even at the high level like we've seen malay on this map not saying it's necessarily going to work here but at high level we're seeing varying strategies and things all the time so very happy with it yeah yeah this is really tricky for dark now because he's just lost his um well his entire army right he's um yep yeah tc will go up that's an awkward tc and to be honest the starting gold pile is kind of sucks for him but lucy secures it there um here comes back on the left just to see if dark is over here and he's just gonna camp that farm and that's just a small thing that's perfect because a unit actually has to go over there to deal with that now because it's not close enough to the town center that's got to be careful oh oh and another one oh good oh my god yeah two big shots there and also if you're looking at the resources it kind of looks like dark is flirting with the idea of going imperial well he's got yeah he's got like 15 villagers cute so when he cancels those um the question is what does he do with it like he doesn't have enough stone for a castle and it looks like back tea looks like bacteria's got some ideas t90 you look at the left-hand side well the difference here is that the dark as he sees the villagers and we'll probably know what this means dark is clicked up to the imperial age but he doesn't have stone right now so he cannot take a castle defensively or offensively at all and back it seems comfortable to just stay in castle age a bit longer and take more of the control before he clicks up and i actually think that's a great play against malay if you try and sit back then they can punish you with the faster imp here he's piling on the pressure and even if dark makes it he has no answer to a castle on his face yeah i mean one thing i really that is actually frustrating a little bit is that bacteria still doesn't have plastic defense units it's only like the fourth time you brought that up here yeah i mean it doesn't really make sense at the moment but i mean maybe he's focusing on other things right now yeah um yeah the issue here for for dark though is that he obviously lost that army right so he's not really like he doesn't have that that massive 30 hour blasters that make something pretty scary wow that was such sick biker from back there too using cav archers and a few keshiks to take out the siege or drop the castle he takes out the scorpions at one point it was 40 kills 10 deaths for dark and now if you look at that kd it's pretty much even and back has been able to have the stronger economy behind this with some castles for map control um i see dark now adding barracks and ranges so i think he's maybe thinking halberdier as he's worried about keshik switch or lightcap switch i can't say that's bad i think halp and arbalest is good but he just made it to imp with next to no military which is the big no i actually disagree i think it's bad because um yeah because again at this point his only chance was this like early m without a snowball yeah without and the only thing that he should be focusing on now is getting 30 hour blasters and then you add the house but like because he he's kind of doing this kind of like tech switch that takes a long time no way he's gonna be able to take the control back of the game and by the time he gets harder especially against castles right yeah yeah yeah so i think you want to get chemistry first right i think another thing that he could have maybe done a better job at as he's trying to tc the other side is expanding to that side he backed his he said castles on both sides now if you look at the mini map i guess that tc goes up but he's really put himself in this this position where he's stuck back here but to be honest i think it all has resulted from that big loss after bach's defense with the magnels because everything was looking fine with his numbers everything was looking fine with his position up until that point yeah can you imagine if he had like those 20 hour blasters at home instead of yeah it's different game isn't it he's got uh 20 of his military currently or militia and they're patrolling by the gold uh that's not a great sign for him yeah i'm very teasing defense there you go oh wow there we go finally 40 minutes into the game perfect um yeah this is looking rough t90 i think i i i don't know if you can see away but i i'm struggling to see where uh dark can uh yeah that's back to shown his class today i think he also might have shown that he's a little iffy on strats here there he looks pretty weak on islands and we think dark could have taken that game um yep uh the mongols pick on hideout it's a little weird but it's also hard like i asked you before we we cast it together uh what you thought of the series and you said that you know dark is training hard and he's talented young player but that will show his class is i think your words and you've seen that today it's just back to just a great player now if he wins this game he moves on to the main event of hidden cup where he has been two previous times hidden cup two and hidden cup three he lost in round one so the the lack of strategy and maybe the the weakness is tough against the top 16 but against everyone else it's just like it's just crazy what he's able to accomplish well i think he's showing right mechanically he's incredibly gifted like yeah it's very hard to to reach his level but if he can reach his level again he's had some kind of uh questionable set of picks right yeah and like we were saying if dark had managed to win ireland which i think you know maybe with someone with a little bit more experience like you know some of the the real quality players like they would probably be able to win the islands game like his draft could have really um gone bad with him if if um dark had picked the right sieves yeah i can agree with that but for back it looks like he's about to return to another hidden cup and that means at worst based on the prize pool we're looking at right now back to just earned himself two thousand dollars with this series so um i think that backed he's also maybe learned a lot of lessons too like he was just able to get by with some of his wins and so he'll realize that against the big names that he's going to have to step it up but either way back who's been a big big name in our community for many years is back to the hidden cup and dark will have to try again next year uh but my my respect goes out to dark because he really did play good today against a player who's just superior mechanically um and i think i mean just considering the amount of time he's playing and the fact that he's 16 years old if he keeps at it it wouldn't be too crazy to you know to see him maybe someday uh be amongst the top 20 top 25 if he can make some big improvements right yeah definitely i think today um back to you definitely i know we were a bit critical of some of his sieve choices but if you look at how he played in the games he played really well today like um the only times where like it kind of felt like back to you was like playing maybe a little bit question it was maybe islands and that was mainly due to service right but i think today um actually really showed his quality i think i think you're right about dark as well and again this is like his he's kind of one of his first major tournaments right like he's done incredibly well just to get here yeah and he's only 16 right so i think if he keeps playing if he keeps grinding i think we'll definitely see more of him in the future he he won again so when i did my predictions i had the 20th or so seed player named fish who's also from vietnam kind of an older player who just climbed up the rankings real quick before hidden cup i had him beating dark then beating uh madre or overtaken and then making it here i thought this was going to be backed which is almost a sure thing in my eyes because he didn't lose a game before this set and then uh fish but dark was able to beat fish 3-2 and then he was able to be overtaken 3-1 to make it here so yeah i didn't even have him in this set so he deserves a lot of respect for that and i'm excited to see back to move on the main event he he's got a little bit of redemption to go for i feel and uh if i recall i think hidden cup 2 we of course didn't know during the event and it was revealed after he lost to tim 3-1 and then lost to mbl in hidden cup three 3-0 but i think we also all know mbl is a beast so i wouldn't be too disappointed losing to him in a set all right yeah well um thank you so much for joining today man it was great having you back we have to do this again and uh yeah it was great fun thank you hope you'll be able to tune in for some of the future sets maybe you gave your thoughts on them do you have thoughts on the last set of the day uh yes uh last set i mean not any striking out to me it's hard against um bows right um last okay so yeah i really should slow down a little bit here oh you talk about daniel again say my name yeah daniel and accm actually is the final set of the day and uh hartford sparrows is coming up next oh yeah yeah um i don't have that much to say about um that matchup i think it hopefully will be close i think acm is obviously the clear favorite but um you know danny boy is he's really good he's a quality player i mean i hope for some close games i'm personally rooting for danny because he's a friend of mine so i won't i won't um pass on any more bias commentary but yeah it should be a great series all right sweet stuff man well everyone's gonna salute you and chat man uh guys check him out with the co-caster command alice uh good luck on your grind as well maybe we'll see you in dark's position or something maybe next hidden cuff qualifier we'll see yeah we'll see all right bro have a good one yeah youtube end all right see ya see you all right chat uh please salute him and say thanks it was a great co-cast today um i so i i don't know what the situation is as far as interviews go um i know that that bacte has certainly done interviews in the past i'm gonna just hear from robo hear what robo has to say and robo says it doesn't look like there's going to be an interview gotcha okay so interview will not work out for backed and backed has not i guess responded to robo gotcha yeah fair enough well uh backed is part of the main event and guys we do actually have a scene for this today check it out this spoils what happened yesterday sorry but not sorry because we do a 24-hour spoiler rule here so we move on pretty quick i know that you guys probably don't have the time to watch all the content but we've got the invited players from hidden cup three on the right side they have been in for some time since this event has been announced the viper hera tattoo dogal leary doubts mr yo and mbl yesterday jordan was able to qualify velez was able to qualify that set was insane it was almost four hours um and then just now we head back to qualify and we will have many more qualify over the next 48 hours

Channel: T90Official - Age Of Empires 2

Views: 67,746

Keywords: twitch, games, Hidden, Cup, Hiddencup, Four, Age, of, Empires, Two, Definitive, Edition, DE, AoE2, Decider, match, Deciding, Deciders, HC4, Hidden Cup 4, T90, T90Official, Hidden Cup 3, Back, Bactee, BacT, Dark, Salzz, Vietnam, Russia

Id: zV-oCnNjz2w

Length: 186min 14sec (11174 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021