Romans vs Barbarians as Western Rome

hey guys spirit of the law here in the last video I showed a playthrough of my custom scenario Romans versus barbarians where I played as the Jutes one of the barbarian invaders I thought it was a good game that showed some nice teamwork and some sneaky strategies this time I'm gonna be playing as the western Romans and show you how I approach them as the scenario is really all about the fall of the Western Empire and trying to desperately hold on to your capitals be aware it is designed to feel a bit overwhelming partway through the scenario a good chunk of your empire is going to be on fire and you really have to plan accordingly good roman players anticipate things falling apart quickly and plan ahead subjectively I'd say I have about a 50% win rate as the Romans and a 75% win rate as barbarians so Romans are definitely the tougher side to play but that's also by design if you decide you want to play the map yourself it is on the mod list for a definitive edition and there's a few versions on HD including a single player a slash co-op version designed to be played against the AI you can see these settings here note it's medium resources so barbarians can afford to build starting town centers 200 population a limit to castle age and everyone's teamed up against players 1 and 2 which are the Romans civilizations are automatically given to you when you pick a color though if everyone agrees I don't mind the idea of people using other factions in this case we had a Magyar and Briton player for example I'll quickly go over the rules in game while things are getting rolling let's check it out welcome to Romans versus barbarians and this is my capital of Rome now my goal is to keep my five capitals alive or at least just one of my five capitals and if I can make it to an hour and 15 minutes then I win and red wins as well since we're allied this is his capital at Constantinople we'll talk about that in a minute so I've got Rome I need to keep that alive or he's keep Carthago alive or I need to keep Cordoba alive or I need to keep lug Dunham's alive or I need to keep Londinium alive if I keep any one of those alive till an hour and 15 I win it's that easy problem is that I'm up against six different players and they all have to start by building their town center so as you can see the Romans start off way ahead 33 villagers and my allies got 50 and everybody else has got like 12 or 15 so how can we lose this right or maybe you're thinking how can we win this so everything's gonna be a little bit choppy in the recording and that was happening in game as well I don't think it was a server issue because the actual ping at the start of the game was quite good but it was choppy when we played it and unfortunately that's in the recording as well anyway so a couple things to begin with everybody starts in the feudal age so the way I play it is you queue up a lot of villagers so you notice a villagers queued up and see it up there so I do have four town centers and all of them I keep working I just want to get my economy going you can see we have a little bit of trade and a lot of my economy is actually set up for me the villagers auto task to begin work you can see I have quite a few one food and the idea is to get a lot of food quickly so that I can advance I can make villagers and all of that the other thing is I'm gonna focus a lot on stone early on so have a little bit of stone kind of off to the side in random places and here's the grand Roman army and just some small amounts of stone bits and pieces around so I'm even telling my allies look maybe we got a grab stone right away so he's got stone there he's got a little bit down here and intentionally don't get a lot so you can't build stone walls but you can build castles and you can build towers at some point I might add a limit on how many castles you can build so we're getting raided the they are just in feudal age where they start with a few units and you can see the Huns they're starting off with cavalry archers and so I'm gonna wall this up or really want to take this stone actually that's I didn't care about this gold it's a stone I care about and as well up in the in Britain I try to wall off this side because the orange player who is representing the Jutes and Angles and Saxons they typically attack here and try to go for that town center that's kind of their main goal and he's cavalry are just gonna push in here pretty quick we can see I'm already Castle aged and actually my ally is also castle a tech Romans have a huge advantage early on and there's a few ways you can play that you can either try to go out and attack as quickly as possible or kind of more my strategy you'll notice I don't really do that I focus on defenses so I already have a castle coming up here I'd like to put Doc's here to try to block this off just so they can't sneak through with the Navy this wall is just so they can't drop off units and sneak attack from behind my immediate goal at this point is to get enough stone to build a castle and a wall around each of the five capitals because remember it doesn't matter if we're winning or not we could just have one Town Center left at the end and we still win so you're gonna notice that I'm gonna wall all these in and put castles down and just play it as defensively as possible and I was saying surprisingly little leg get stirred off actually not that bad and it got pretty smooth at a few points but by the end is it's pretty laggy and it's certainly not like that every time I think this is probably the worst performance I've had on definitive edition in this game overall though I'd have to say definitive edition definitely runs smoother than HD ever did so can't complain too much you can see on the left there we're just chatting with each other about strategy so my allies elected to go with a very aggressive strategy I forgot to mention Constantinople if they destroy that then instead of us having to go until an hour and 15 if they destroy it we have to go until an hour and 30 so basically if they don't think they can get all my Town Center time plus my wonder then they can try to sneak attack this and take that out for a bit of bonus time which can be quite useful I mean sometimes you don't need it but often you do and you can see my allies sneaking out right now with a few Scout cavalry to just do a bunch of raiding and poke them as just looking at the population for example let's go for even 41 military and they've all got like 10 military units and he's an H ahead a few of them and I'm not gonna be doing raiding at this point so I'm trying to block this up because I know that could be a little bit dangerous if boats go through there because by blocking this this goes to the end there and there's no other way to get around except to go through here so if you put stalks there and I put docks at the top and we can control the water that's a big advantage you know it's every single one of them I am building a castle and trying to wall it up and we're talking about trade and everything right now trying to get that going one of the things I love about definitive edition is that the trade units now won't just use these shortest routes they won't always use the longest it's kind of complicated but it is definitely more efficient and I noticed that Romans do have a couple of docks and markets so they can do a bit of trading and I think it's always a good idea min-soo my Allah is going out he's being very aggressive attacking a few different places and even almost threatening a town center here and what's nice here is that you're forcing the barbarians to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to make units to actually fight this off and I'm almost think is barbarians it's not a bad idea to wall up a bit just right at the beginning and that's not totally historically inaccurate I haven't really decided what time period this is at the beginning but the Romans had campaigns into Germany and Asia gameplay-wise it makes sense as well considering how far ahead we still are this is a very fast rate actually from the orange player it's coming through and you can see a wife built this up cuz I'm gonna build a second wall here because he doesn't really have to destroy my castle he just sees this drill my town centre and I have disabled stone walls for the Romans so I can't be using those I have to use other things to wall like houses and palisade gates and stuff like that and so again I'm trying to just wall up as much as I can notice I'm not attacking them even though I do have an army I'm going for my third castle up front here this one's always so hard to defend which again I think is reflective of actual history and is invaded by at least Huns franks and vandals off the top of my head and probably other groups as well let's take a look here our military as you can see is still pushing forward a lot of units and still running around raiding with these like calves it's gonna be someone no Inc the other players especially kill doesn't seem to know this is going on oh yeah traditionally the way it's played best in the barbarians have the best chance is that you have green and purple are just booming as much as possible not even really making military units yet well made by 25 minutes but really focusing on economy early so that they can just ban units in the late game and even actually as I play the barbarians all the time I'll over boom a bit to like 150 villagers and then delete a bunch of villagers like most of them and go with a giant army of 200 and you just charge the Romans and lasts kind of 20 minutes and try to over they see I'm getting rated here I'm getting landed and so my reaction is to have my fleet and I try to engage his fleet but I keep some Teutonic Knights which are gonna be really strong against the Rams obviously and just stall all you do is stall and while your units are firing at them I'm not charging out to fight them I'll slow it down here for a second yeah so we're taking a little bit of a naval engagement here and so far I'm okay but I don't really want to trade in the open water like this too much just because you're fighting too many people they have too many resources so you really want to be fighting in like choke points like this where you also have the castle firing though building the second castle if this is gonna get cleaned up now Hank said do you have an army up here so I've got my crossbows but I'm just gonna be defensive with it cuz I want to fight in my territory in choke points I don't want to go out there though I don't let's doing a great job doing that he's even out here like look at where that is on the map his Reds territory and he's out here no way they're gonna expect that at the beginning of the game so make sense they're not very prepared for it yeah so this can happen sometimes it's sort of one of the downsides of the map is if red is a very strong player like a much higher rating than the other players then it can sort of run away with it because he doesn't really have to worry as much about getting invaded as I do because at the end of day would be sort of a waste of the barbarians time when the objective is to kill my town centers to focus on red so I think blue naturally plays more conservatively but purple doing a good job actually and done nicely into some cavalry archers and parkings not a bad unit I mean you want to take down buildings quite a bit so of course everyone's limited to castle eight so you can't just take this down with Trevor chase so castles become a quite strong let me see a few of them sort of this push into the city area here it's more rating out frontal is show you sort of what I've done I like to put a bunch of these docks so that if they do come in I can just throw out a bunch of fire ships quickly I've got a castle I've got some palisade walls there's some stone down here that I took anymore rates up here I don't think that one's super serious so again palisade wall I don't have stone wall but I do want a castle there and trust me you need all of this you feel like hey it's 35 minutes where you know coming up on halfway done this and they haven't even had a successful attack yet and I've got five these what's the problem every time I've never like I say never but the number of times that I've won with all five capitals left I can't even think of one I know it seems passive but you have to think like this if you want to make it to the late game purple even making a pretty strong push here into red and forcing to build another castle here but the raftsmen is going both ways here at red still pushing into their territory as well but I mean it makes sense and as long as they're fighting out here so the thinking would go as long as they're fighting out here they're not fighting in our territory so we're winning by stalling but really the other side of that is it's hard to win these engagements it's hard to reinforce these units quickly whereas if they push in here this is where my military buildings are so I can reinforce very quickly and take really good fights and if you can trap their units I mean that's ideal you don't want to get caught out and so he has taken out these docs and it's doing a good job I'm stopping me from really getting in here and doing anything like that so I'm gonna put up a watchtower again gonna reinforce whenever something's destroyed if they leave below you go and repair it every time and so he's still pushing out although purple is now focusing very heavily on this but again Purple's distracted that means I don't have purple in my base right now so I've no problem with what red stirring right now and I do it assert and defending against this I see the rams and that could be a problem they could take out these buildings and you say what three castles here and it's gonna get my population Abiquiu of everything I possibly can and crossbows are great you seem using all the trees and buildings my advantage to describe a chokepoint that's what it's all about is taking very efficient fights and trying to get my dogs back up walk that again and house Carl's though are scary so just talk about civilizations a little bit you always want at least one goth player mostly for this reason as the barbarians and you also want to have a couple of hunts mostly because you run out of space for houses you can see I'm getting over bombs for a little bit with a few different things I think the other day I don't mind if he's just gonna focus on this because I don't really have to hold all of them I just really wanted to lay in here and I'm liking the teutonic night house carl matchup that's pretty good for me and where's Reds arming these days so he's been pushed back here so now Purple's reestablish and he's building a couple of castles you can see there's some excellent stone here for the barbarians stone only is very difficult for the Romans to get mostly for balance reasons of course let's speed it back up but you can see I'm just kidding up as much as I possibly can to try to get some units out I really want a really strong Navy here some realizing they're having a hard time pushing this they should be coming in with Rams and Megan else and everything like that but they're having a hard time pushing this and landing here so I just want a big Navy here because if this ends up being the last place the Roman Empire I can hold it you still win Angi tonic nights are just amazing in situations like this and crossbows obviously now you gotta be careful gotta conserve your resources because we're only about halfway in terms of time loans are pushing here you can see that all this rating that read did it did slow them down but really it's very hard to eliminate any one of the barbarians and they can't always just go and rebuild in the back but so far safe but you can see I'm not counting on this to hold I'm totally okay with this falling at some point so I'm still putting more towers I put more docks here basically as a backup in case they do break through in Britain and get water control and red is getting push the unfortunate thing here is if they take this down then we have to go till an hour and a half instead of an hour 15 and this is where it's hurt to get a little bit overwhelming as the Romans you can't really fight everything you just queue everything up and you're just kind of counting on your defenses holding at this point and it's sort of that for another up to 40 minutes and this is perfect this is what one should be doing is going for a massive Navion focusing completely on this one and of course castle age units often do that great Undertown Center but I just show you so again I have put some defenses back here just in case they sneak through but over the next 10 minutes or so I really should be expanding that as the back-up plan but they're definitely pushing and they're even getting this castle Evan I'm sort of pop limit right now and down to 73 villagers because I want to have a lot of military and as sort of that balance of deleting your villagers too early so that you actually will run out of resources and I feel like I've got lots I actually stopped I deleted I had a bunch of docks here I deleted all them because they were all queued up with a ton of ships and I realized I really didn't need that many ships since already had 50 or whatever it's not a bad trade for me there yeah so I'd want more in terms of a land army but having a hard time with gold she'd be queuing up more Teutonic Knights but I mean this is all happening so fast when you're playing and green going around for a sneak attack and try to quickly wall up but you gets around it and so at 56 minutes my first town centre is gonna go down but it's pretty close if you sent even maybe five fewer Knights you know I'm gonna have my villagers repair this of course and just barely any ends up with like three of them in one manga no shot they're going that was pretty close I think a few more walls and maybe not a castle and I could've kept that for another five minutes and I always of course being overwhelmed at this point and they're going for this which makes sense so he's gonna be defensive and throw as many buildings as possible really we only need to go 16 more minutes which you know it feels longer than 16 minutes when you're in the game but yeah so now all of this is useless all of these castles they're not gonna go here anymore so I've still got back here again I've got my docks if needed and I usually dock this up as well in case they sneak through but I've done a pretty good job so far holding them off there but there's no way he can pull onto this so at one hour all the barbarians get a thousand gold just to help them out this in case the games not really competitive at that point we below easier throwing down another defensive Castle here you can see he's trying hard to hold on to this and still taking up a lot of their attention so it's helping me out too now this wasn't very good unit control on my part and my boats way too far forward here and weren't really properly protected by the castle did eventually bring them back here but this overall a little bit sloppy at least here the castle was getting a few shots and still this was not a very good trade for me and this lag on these recordings is a little annoying but it was actually pretty bad in game as well I think it was probably it's weird sometimes you just have these really great performance games and just sometimes the population really gets to somebody's computer or something so I'm asking a badge ient infantry army right here I get the sense as long as I can hold this which is getting a little dicey at this point now as long as I can hold daddy his ships can't get in so then he's gonna have to come through here it looks like stop-motion animation like you can see what's happening this recording let's speed up it it's not so bad and speed up a bit so I'm trying make Teutonic Knights here but he's finally gotten through with these girls and it's just a matter of just running massive as many units as possible and he is eventually gonna get in here I mean part of me says I only need to go another 11 minutes but of course Constantinople is gonna fall here and just see how chalky this is this is as choppy for me as it is for you guys and they just noped right out of there as soon as I saw the Teutonic Knights oh he's gonna be going around this way and I saw him trying to do this little sneak so of course I've maybe haven't yet at some point did see this and I start queuing up a couple of demo ships which can be really nice in this choke point here yeah I took down this castle but is able to survive but of course Constantinople just got taken down finally destroyed it so now we have to go not till 1:15 but until 1:30 and really tacked on all sides here still just want to install again the more time they're focusing on one particular town center the better so I'm going to try to wall this back up they've sort of given up for a second so it might as well and meanwhile he was trying to come in through here and I've cued up the demo ships and completely given up on this area it's fine we're just gonna make some more Teutonic Knights as many as we can and I'm trying to get some demos ships out and sort of playing cat-and-mouse here with them and he tries to go through with this full arm and a glove that's a pretty good shot but those all of those units are nav damaged it's gonna have a hard time though the second castle down here always multiple castle on each one so I've got two castles here on this one and this way still going after I did up two castles and it did try to ball this up I think he killed the villager and don't have another one cue but Purple's being kind of sneaky I don't know how he got around there it found some way to do that and as I'm gonna try to break through here since one of my capitals and things are pretty choppy at this point I think just so many populations a lot of people around 150 and higher so it's definitely gonna take this down but managed to stall out a lot of his armies for a long time just on one of these and if I could do this differently I might hit on one castle air one castle there instead of one in the back I do find when the back like they seem to be going around my castles a lot and even here like we went around that side I did manage to wall up a few times and we've got our Teutonic Knights there and I walled this up as soon as I saw his units go by so now I've got that one I've got this one and we've got this one but I mean they're pushing him from all sides now so we've got our archers player we got our infantry player pushing in at this point like where do you reinforce so generally there's one that I really focus on and like that's my one that I'm gonna save and for now it's did this one so that's my main focus not really building anything on this one though I do want to keep my villagers around so they can repair the town center and arches here really strong I know why I let him pick Britain's you want to play Britons it's fine just so many units everywhere man but we only got to go to 130 it's 117 but this is getting dicey so we've got how many we've got green purple and orange was around here somewhere on our orange is going this way so many Teutonic Knights trying to block every gap I possibly can and sort of sneaking around them I'm even cute a penny here so I go for the repair I'm sure come on it was to prepare Hill was just repair yet you talk nights are so good how they can clean up things like nights like that look like those nights we're going to take it but no and this is definitely gonna go down like they got all the their researches and everything a long time ago so it's fine if I lose the University but meanwhile getting pushed again by the Tarkan's here and again gonna count on my Teutonic Knights but again sorry but all the chopping is here guys that was a really good game they pushed really hard and I feel like I'm in a lot of good choices with defending as well and I fortunately get through here I wasn't able to quick wall any of that so I delete the farm so that I can actually put gates down but we got past the gates and targets are so good at taking down buildings like that had no chance once the Tarkan's get in also this is of course gonna fall which means this is now my last one but really only have to make it till an hour and a half like we're so close but yeah I'm even thinking like what would I've done differently so that this wouldn't be under this much pressure right now like I tried to block it up with dogs tried to make a bunch of Units and completely out of all my own images of course all of my town centers are gone and so I basically no income at the moment and sometimes the red glare will swing you at this point and send you resources but it still seems to be making some military but you sent me some stuff I'm cueing up you can see as many pikes as possible by villagers in here I've walled up everything I possibly can I need us to hold until 1:30 I'm just completely relying on my teach my ignites here holding this for another five minutes I'm sure the leg is helping me out a little bit to five minutes the Romans win I've got just about every I don't have yellow here I think that's the only player that's not here right now attacking me in some form so just trying to repair this as much as possible he's got three and a half minutes all the Knights of course don't attack walls very well and it's trying to throw down gates anywhere maybe literally anywhere and gotta be careful like I wanted to delete some these farms and stuff but what's so afraid I'd accidentally delete the town center two and a half minutes just look at the mini-map sell the boat streaming in all the units treating them all over the map everything keeps streaming towards here this is what it's all about everything's on fire just distracting with as many units as I possibly can pumping out every villager here is repairing I just need this for one more minute they start surrounding it all the units are in there it's just crazy it's so close just 30 seconds it's right there no but you know what's funny we won the destruction animation didn't finish until one second after an hour and a half meaning at an hour and a half we technically had a town center standing up so we won with nothing this is the remnants of the Roman Empire they died at 130 in one second but no Roman Empire survived Constantinople not so much normally it's a close finish but that's probably the closest finish I've ever had so I had to show you guys that one it did have a lot of leg but I knew I had to show you guys that one so good job for red he was actually doing a little bit of pushing out there and some aggression but yeah oh man you need to take a break after that one it was so desperate at the last second to like I had to build a market they destroyed my market so that I could buy the stone needed to start the repair and it was just repairing and spamming and he was sending me stuff is is crazy man you can see the economies here obviously mine got completely destroyed about halfway through but doesn't matter he just got to survive I'm not trying to beat them I'm just trying to hold the Roman Empire together and great job I read but you can see that they once they start expanding you're just in survival mode from that point on so probably one of the closest games have ever had and Romans versus barbarians it almost feels like a technicality that I won at all but it's those destruction animations they save me if you guys want to play your own it is up online and I do recommend playing a very defensive strategy for the red player they can't attack like that or they can also just build castles and stuff and help you defend it's really totally up to you but that's all for this one thanks for watching guys I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Spirit Of The Law

Views: 200,842

Rating: 4.9592233 out of 5

Keywords: aoe2, age of empires 2, definitive edition, aoe2de

Id: rRnyhzauIb8

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019