The "Combinations I struggle with and have no answer (yet ^^)" topic

Hi!

I'm a 800 ELO player, that should be rated lower (~700) for most matches I "won" where against people who were not in front of there PC (did literatlely nothing) or had to end the match earlier due to private circumstances.

BUT: With that said, I know where my errors are, where my borders are (I fail at quick multitasking, not only in AoE II, but in general), I rewatch my games and I can almost every time tell "Yes, here you should have something different!" or "You need to do x here and there."

But there are some situations that I encountered that I haven't an answer too, even after rewatching the replay many, many times. I just wanted to share these, and I am interested if you have such situations yourself and if you figured out a solution.

So this is less a "help me!" post, but a place to lament... ^^

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Here I go, the top things I just cannot get my head around:

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[1] Countering Brits with Longbow + Onagers + Helbardiers in Deathmatch

I played against this particular combination as Vietnamese. And while at first I was lucky to have the "Anti-Archer-Archer-Civ", I had to learn quick that this wasn't meant to be. My opnonent used his armies very well, in that he had the halbs to secure the Onagers against my light cav and the longbows in last line. Whenever I tried to attack the helbardiers with skirmishers, they were in onager range and fell like dry grass. When trying to attack with siege, I ended up in longbow range. In the end I could hold out for 2 hours before running out of wood (!) and gave up.

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[2] Franks in 1v1 Deathmatch without camels

I normally open Deathmatch with helbardiers, because I know that 80% come with knights of some sort. Mostly this works, but the combination of "Build the most advanced paladin 20%" quicker plus add the axethrower for good measure... No idea when camels are no option. With Inca I failed absolutely, second encounter was with Khmer and third with spaniards. Longest I lasted were 15 minutes.

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[3] Mongol scout rush

This got me frustrating so much recently, that I was about to just give up when facing mongols 1:1. Even at the ELO I am most mongol players make no mistakes in there build orders. When I wall up, I fall behind in economy. When I try to scout-rush myself, I'm slower even if everything went 100% fine.

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[4] Massed Janissaries

To be fair, most units are terrible when massed, but if I had to choose, those guys would take the cake. I don't mean this problem in an open battle, but 30 of those guys walking around, sniping what they want and running out of reach when you try to get them... I really don't come close to this formation.

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What are your "Oh s**t!" moments?