Very well played!

ggs mr daut, gl qualifying!

DauT, I don't think you read KZfaq comments, but think about the last game. For the last 7 minutes of the game, you were making archers into Byzantine skirmishers. That is not the way to increase your El Reinado ladder win rate, which at 61% is the lowest of any player in the top 20. In Nili's interview with MbL and Liereyy, they thought you might have a 10% chance of qualifying. Every civ is supposed to be able to counter any other single unit by another civ. Byzantines have Cataphracts to counter strong infantry options: this is because many of their other counters to strong infantry are weak. This is just like how all the American civs have a unit with bonus against infantry (even though with Mayans it's just Plumed Archers with +2 against infantry), because they don't have cavalry or Hand Cannoneers which are the normal counter to strong infantry. You shouldn't continue making archers into Byzantine skirmishers because "if I switch into any other unit, my opponent is able to make a counter to that unit." That logic applies to every unit, and every switch. You had 50 villager in Imperial age, with one TC making villagers, and were making archers against Byzantine skirmishers. If you were going to make more TCs, making them on a deer patch would have been great. Spending 375 resources on a TC on deer is better than spending it on a mill + 4 farms. You had enough floating resources to do something like that. You were probably just in the mindset of "when in Imperial age, it's fine to float resources". That's not how to win. Even if you're at the pop cap, if you're floating resources, you can use those to build forward production (especially on the sides) and apply pressure. Mayan skirmishers with unique tech have at least some chance against Byzantine skirmishers. Byzantine are cheaper, but only do 4 damage, while Mayans do 5 damage against other skirmishers, and 1 more damage against anything else. Eagles can run away from Cataphracts, and can be used as runners on stand ground stance during skirmisher battles if Cataphracts are protecting the skirmishers. Often, you don't even try to split against mangonel shots; instead, you just try to move in a single direction. Liereyy always does it. A few years ago (probably like 5 or 6 at this point) there was an epic clip of Viper microing down like 6 mangonels using Chu Ko Nus. He did it by just continuing to split each group. You go from one group of 20, to two groups of 10, four groups of 5, and then groups of 2 and 3. Even if you get hit, it's just two or three units taking damage, not 5~7. And you are not confident enough in moving towards a mangonel. The reason you should do this is simple: it means you have more freedom in which direction to move. If you are always trying to move to the side at maximum range, that makes your movement easy to guess. If you might move to the side, or forward, or backward, that makes it much harder to hit you. And if some groups of crossbowmen manage to get inside minimum range of the mangonel, that means their fire is easy to guess: they will shoot at a group that's further away. All of this came into play when you were running away from the two mangonels on the right side, from 1:47:48. If the players were reversed, would you be at all surprised if Liereyy used 9 crossbowmen to kill two mangonels? If you had tried and succeeded, how much damage could the surviving crossbowmen have done? Instead you were just running around the wilderness. You could also make eagles to snipe mangonels in this kind of situation, or at least force them to wait for reinforcements while you do damage. Still, about castle age: Mayans can still make skirmishers. Archers are cheaper, but elite skirmisher with full upgrades takes just 20% of the damage of a crossbowman (1 damage vs 5 damage). Mayan skirmishers still do better against enemy crossbowmen than Mayan archers. You thought that cheaper archers would be enough to win fights, but you should take every advantage you can get. Don't be stupid and avoid making skirmishers in an archer vs archer fight just because your opponent is being stupid and not making skirmishers. If you make skirmishers, and your opponent makes skirmishers in response, then that just gives you an opportunity to respond. More generally: if you think you're worse at micro than your opponent, use a strategy that doesn't rely on micro. "How can I win even if I lose every straight-up micro fight?" With archer vs archer, this basically means pushing somewhere else. Like making a siege workshop on the side, to make a ram, then bringing archers to kill villagers once the ram breaks through some palisade walls. Maybe bringing an eagle warrior in case your opponent tries to defend with just a mangonel. Maybe you should read Sun Tzu's Art of War. All the stuff about attacking at weak points, so your enemy doesn't know where to defend. In this last game, you just kept hoping that cheaper archers would win you the game. You did this in castle against archers, and kept doing it even when fighting skirmishers in Imperial age as you were running out of gold. In the end, you died to skirmishers (best unit in the game) and two trebuchets. One final note: to defend against an all-in push of crossbowmen and mangonels, you can still make a tower and fill it with archers. It won't take long to die if you don't repair, but a mangonel won't take long to die either if it isn't repaired, and the tower is cheaper than a mangonel. Mangonels that are shooting a tower are easier for you to hit with your own mangonel. It helps to build it on a hill for the defensive bonus, and a hill might not be in a great spot, so you might have to plan and build it before you lose a major fight. Second point: if there's a forward siege workshop next to the hill, like in this final game, you can build on certain sides of the siege workshop to force any mangonels it makes to eject from other sides. So you could start gates on the near sides so they couldn't eject close when you're building a tower; or, in another situation, you could build on three sides to force a mangonel to eject close to your melee units that are attacking the siege workshop, so that the units you have there are inside its minimum range. You can also do this with monasteries, to stop monks from ejecting far from your melee units. Ok, one final tip because no one ever does this: you can use stone gates to deny castle spots! Stone gates have building armor, unlike palisade gates, so they don't take +5 damage from TC arrows and are hard to shoot down. Suppose something like a Phosphoru fast castle strategy: a villager 6.1 tiles from a TC can build a diagonal gate that extends 4 tiles towards the TC, leaving just 2 tiles of space, not enough to build a castle if you put gates everywhere.

Go for the title again, Daut! You are playing really good and I think you will beat Hera in the final!

DauT had mutual random selected and did not get his backup civ.

How does he know he went random in game 1?