OMG, I played against a player that did exactly the same thing (I'm around 1150 ELO), I think he was Argentinian too btw, not only he TC dropped me, annoyed the hell out of me with vil fighting, he also kept taunting "wood please" "wood please" when he saw I was struggling for wood to repair my TC

I took classes from him. He's such a nice and funny guy, very supportive of the community and the casters. He taught me regular build orders and strats, not this kind of stuff, but he loves to play anti-meta style. He's thrilled that you posted this, and since he doesn't speak English he's asking around what's it that you are saying.

In Argentina, to call someone "son" means that you are better and can teach the other how to play. Cause a dad teaches his son how to do stuff. So, by calling you daddy, Biry is acknowledging you are better than him. He is like making fun of the fact you are better. In Argentina is very common to tease and make fun of each other, even ourselves.

I love that there are people like this out there keeping the ladder honest.

Biry is well known in the spanish speaker community, and there's a word for his strategy, 'ranciar' which would be something like "ranciding" (like from rancid, you know)... He's super funny on his streams, you can tell he is actually having fun, and he actually plays like this 90% of his games. 100% cool guy, we love him.

I first meet Biry in early 2004. On our first game, he did an early feudal 8 vill fwd when meta for that was sending 4 😁. He was named Biry-Biry after the monk's converting sound expressed in sort of argentinian slang, when monks were not very popular on the old days. It's a lifetime dedicated to be annoying. It's funny how he get's excited every time he sees a wacky strat, even if it's performed by a low ELO player.

After placing those two towers on your woodline, if he had TC dropped you a second time instead of building his TC back home you were done. Your TC had already lost a quarter of its hp, he could have denied your mill again with it and you had no wood at that point. It's a weird thing to say but I honestly feel like that's why he lost, he didn't fully commit to going all in. At 14:45 it's 24 villagers vs 17 and you had almost no resources left and no lumber camp, he should have crushed you but he gave you a breather to try and rebuild his base.

AOE2, like anything, is a sport at the end of the day. This guy uses troll-like tactics in order to disrupt the opposition but none of it is actually illegal. A refined master of the dark arts. I like it.

I want this man in exploding kings imagine the memes he would pull on everyone lol

I used to think I understood the phrase "early aggression." Clearly I was mistaken. Thanks for sharing, T90. I thought that was hilariously fun. Amazing that you stood against it and won. I agree he's playing within what the game allows, and in LEL you always say players should play in the way that's fun to them. ;-) He's not trolling. He's just fully gone to the non-meta dark side of the force. Lol.

OK, i used to only like low elo legend videos but now i also love "T90 gets picked on by unorthodox players" videos.

Biry's problem is that he doesn't know when to stop with those crazy strategies and start playing like a normal, more meta oriented person. At the time 14:04 of the video he was ten villagers ahead. At that time he must have realized that he had already done enough damage and returned all those villagers to work on their economy. He would have reached the Castle Age much sooner and I'm sure he would have ended up winning the game. Greetings.

This play style requires a lot of creativity to pull off, and also a lot of creativity to defend. Even if you don’t adopt this strategy, I think playing these games out is good to keep you on your toes. That said, there were numerous times where I’d have resigned. Well played T90.

I think is necesary for the game that this kind of players exist, it helps only-metaplayers improve in new ways to handle stress during the game and creating new defensive strategies. Also, this kind of players creating new strategies help the game not beein repetitive, if there are only meta strategies it would be always the same and the same, kind of boring. It's creative and funny. He just do it for fun and for finding new strategies with the game resources. You always handle him very well that makes you his father, he recognize that you are better and he isn't toxic. It's just his style, and thats what takes him there, at your level.

I loved this game, I was rooting for him all of the time.

I love how in a game where the object is to annihilate your opponent, and where scout rushes and M@A rushes are "normal" strategies, people consider this kind of harassment to be rude or dickish. 3 to 5 scouts in my base at feudal age is just as rude and devastating when you don't know what to do. Same same. 🤣

This is the finest cheese that have been cultivated so far. You gotta apreciate the dignity of the exotic arts that is presented here.

I think the opportunity for going unorthodox strategies keeps the game interesting. Occasionally I go full feudal and make the game messy (1150 elo). It can turn out to be a really fun game adapting to uncommon situations.

This video will inspire future annoying players to try strategies it sure did inspired me

With estimates of "Roughly 1 food per 17 seconds" if we start from the point where you have all 8 sheep inside the mill 1:55 (in game), and count up to when you asked how much food was brought by the bonus, 30:17 (in game), then you have brought around 836 food. Just a bit more if we consider you put initial sheeps earlier than that. If we count up to the end of the game 37:00, then you have brought 990 food. (Round up to 1k food counting the food brought when you didnt have all 8 sheep in the mill yet)

Such an awesome game. Thanks for pausing and explaining things because I would've been lost without it! Also, his style is quite creative. It's nice to see a more "chess-like" game structure with traditional strategies, but thinking outside the box and doing crazy things is good for both players every once in a while (IMO).

I'm 900 ELO, and I ran into the same strategy online a couple weeks ago, much less refined than this guy here, sure, but I'm still quite proud of myself for keeping calm and dealing with it. For me, finding another wood line further away was key.

This game is one of the best I've ever seen as far as execution is concerned for the both of you. You dug down deep and just stayed in the game.. so much respect for that. React, react, react.. the APM must have been insane for both of y'all.

"Just resign and play an actual player" - I love the salt even while casting the recording. Players like Biry are a nightmare to play against but very entertaining to watch.

if you know the straggler tree laming is coming, you could build 1-3 palisades beside the tree to block the farm placement. not great but it would be a 3-9 wood investment to save upto 100 wood. I guess you could partly build them to refund them later.

Im in love with this man This is what I think of when I think AoE2, it isn't toxic, it's just a different way of seeing the game.

You defend it by placing palisades on each side of the stragglers and build them at least 1%

Who saw the title and thought “oh no I hope it’s not me” Who saw the title and thought “finally I’m in a T90 vid”

He really likes you and always denotes that you are cool about all his strategies (you may guess some pople aren't 11) and that you win most of the times. That's why he calls you daddy, because in spanish "being the son" of someone implies that that someone is better, more experienced or has something to teach. I also want to add that he sees hoang like a master but he isn't like him. Biry has very good micro (his vill micro is remarkable) and a nice toolbelt of strategies, and one of them is playing meta (though most people only know him for the weird plays). That makes him even more dangerous because he can adapt depending on the player, matchup and decide when to go a specific strat on a specific game, on a specific moment of the game or even when to switch from one strat to another in the middle of the game; and that is what i think he did when he douched you. He realized that his vill rush wasn't and wouldn't work the same after you built a lumbercamp and walled in your villagers and had to do something fast to prevent reacting time for you and so a snowball. He had to wait for to wait for the 100% uptime while you were in feudal already and could build towers and archers. What can stop that or give him time? A douche! A douche could cause lots of problems to your already fragile wood marker. Also, after all the time and resources he wasted on his aggression he NEEDED the fight to be on your base. Besides that, I wanted to mention that he knows how to play meta, he just prefers to play weirdly and to enjoy the game. On a recent tournament he played against Capoch (3-2 for Capoch) and Capoch himself told on his stream after someone in chat said something negative about his playstyle "He was the player that made me struggle the most". Sometimes when that topic comes on his stream he says that he just likes to play on a way he has fun and where matches don't get too repetitive. And if he played meta all the time and not just some games he would lose the thrill of playing the game, and that is what made me love both your and his channel. It's all about laughing and having a good time :) There are lots of ways of playing the game and we all can apply them as Biry does. He learns when playing against people and from replays and that is something I admire about him. He always gives credit when he sees someone doing something weird and tries adjusting it to his playing like he did with Fulgor, Survivalist, Sitaux, Semur, Rubenstock and people from the Microsoft Zone. The most inspiring thing about this topic is that some of the strategies (maybe most?) weren't discovered to this day and some of them were used in the old days when meta was different and disappeared as players left the game. We can scavenge old videos or posts on old forums and find something really valuable! By the way, sorry for the long comment and all the parentheses (I deleted some of them [not these 11]), I really like this topic and I am truly grateful to Biry and T90 for their content

It is 2 AM here. Perfect time to sleep watching T90 videos. 👀

I was rooting for you but the game was amazing! I didn't know half the stuff we see here was possible! Thank you T90, for bringing all these stuff.

I'm not experienced, so hopefully this question has a good answer: Why not just send a group of 6-8 vils to a corner to a hidden woodline? Especially on arabia, there are plenty of wood lines, and when you're being vil rushed, it's unlikely your opponent is focused on scouting the map.

This got me stressed out only by watching it. I can't imagine actually playing this game. Duh.

Here in Argentina (and all Latin America, I guess) to be someone's "daddy" ("papá" in spanish) is a sports slang that means to be super ahead of him in the wins/loses record. Biry uses it joking about you almost always winning the matches you play against each other.

I would say that players like Biri raise the skill ceiling. I huge part of AoEII is recognising and adapting to, or coming up with and deploying, an enormously wide array of different strategies. Nuking strategies like this one into the ground would be artificially limiting the variety of play and skill ceiling; and let's not forget, as annoying as it is to play against, _watching_ a crazy bizarre play like a TC drop being executed to its maximum potential is just absolutely beautiful and hilarious. It's likely part of the popularity of the strategy is because it's weird and silly _but it can work really well,_ which would also explain why it's not that common among the top 100 best players' games as opposed to the 2100 ELO. There's ways around it. That said, these kinds of things do still need to be balanced - if it's by a ways the _most_ useful strategy to be used, it'll naturally limit the variety of play as well. At the top level, people don't tend to choose a worse strategy just because it's different from what everybody else is using (just look at the Masters of Arabia tournament last year, where nearly every single game involved some kind of Men-at-Arms rush, with an Archer follow-up). The fact that it's all over the place, even among 2k1 players, means that while it's hard to pull off effectively, it's _maybe_ just a _little bit_ too powerful at the moment. In a situation like this, it's likely that tweaking a single variable by ±10% will fix the issue.

This felt hilariously personal. I'm not sure how strategic it was vs. adlibbed based on the current situation though

If I saw the 10 villagers approaching I would just call GG. I don't play the game like this, I refuse to.

Your best solution would have probably been to walk some villagers away to get wood further away. By the time he realizes and scouts you his forward vills will have wasted so much time.

"i killed that vill, I figured I need to get stone" : the slippery slope...

When he first started running around your base I would have waited until his annoying units were of the left side of the base and I would have snuck a couple of villagers to the right corner and tried getting wood and gold over in the corner while he's too busy being an a'hole inside your base. That way you'd have some resources that aren't being disturbed. As long as he didn't notice of course. Would have took really good timing.

I love watching your instinctive panic clicking during rewatch. It's like a passenger in a car trying to pump the non existent brakes

As a lowish elo player I would have placed my lumber camp very far from my base after the enemy denies my first lumber camp so that he can't find it. Even if I have to walk across the map it's so much better than to get tower dropped in the woodline continuously. (The obvious downside, though, is that I would have fewer villagers protetcting my base in villager wars.) Also, T90, as you say all the time: If you get attacked the best thing you can do is to counter attack. You eventually did, but maybe could have been a bit earlier. But anyway, great game! I really enjoy watching these chaotic matches in which Biry and Rubenstock flip the standard flow of the game upside down and sideways. I know playing these matches are a different thing but they sure are entertaining.

I think biry got to 2k+ playing mostly normal with one account too, he just love this things

Best of the year. Thank you T90. Pls show more games like this.

thats weird cuz sometimes when i make a farm on a straggler tree the tree stays on the farm until they finish but if they move it disappears some weird shit

"I'm having some bad wood problems" - it happens more and more the older you get, sadly.

"Delete enemy's straggler trees" is something I will be doing from now on :D

The question at the end of the video: I would rather see more options to diversify clowning tricks rather than banning behaviors as exploits. I really only get to see high-level clowning rarely, like Reubenstock in Rage Forest Madness or whatever as flank. TaToH was his perfect foil, and it made me appreciate both of their play so much more. Similarly, I knew T90skill was high, but now I appreciate your skill a bit more because you adapted and overcame that so well. Laming, walling things in, even that farm trick--I wish tournaments would get more clownish. I need more clown tournament victories. Lately tournaments are all just, 'here's TaToH and Lierreyy and over here we have a bunch of players a little bit slower than those two guys. I need a major Reubenstock tournament victory and someone said a clown cup might be on the way and that's the most exciting thing in forever.

t90 civ picking most op civ this match. SMH my head

tbh if you think is annoying, *remember theres lamers, drop tc, clown closed map bois and more* and no, the tower rush t90 for me is like "another day in the office"

- Rushed that hard, start maybe sneaking vils off to a distant woodline where they won't be harassed?

The straggler tree lame with the farm was inspiring. I wanna try it now

I would have uninstalled, throw the computer out the window and then legally change my name to Wagabaga Wagaboo and never show my face in public again

my go to when people play like this is to not be afraid to evac the base and to build a tower with cav or archers out of view. then when they deny the tower you gambit the vills to kill their vills. then youre just up and they lost their momentum.

Honestly love watching and playing these types of games from time to time. You could place a palisade wall behind the stragglers to block the farms too.

I think everything he did was fair game. Apart from the straggler tree delete I have done most of this stuff on socotra. So much more difficult on other maps though

Completely fine to play this way, players should be prepared for the unpredictable instead of only tunnel visioning preparation for meta moves. Very entertaining, thanks for uploading it.

Biry is a super cool dude, always hyped, great admirer of all AOE2 players, casters, etc. Always saying that he plays that way because he gets bored with meta. When he loses he never tilts and always says gg! Really fun and wonderful player. Spanish community loves him. Oh and he knows some english so he has a repertoire of spanglish expressions such as "daddy" etc. showing respect/fun comments to whom he plays aganist with

I don't know how viable that is build-order-wise, but you could place houses left and right next to the straggler trees to protect them

11:51 i LMAO ahhaha ''we vill fight" XDDD i'm cryin 17:04 you're so hilarious. omg The tower he was building omg that was a freakin wise move lmao

saving that mill was crucial so that you had constant access to food. btw i think biry's gameplay is great and actually enjoyable, at least for me as a viewer 11, because after all, all he did was executing the strat that the game provided or hinted in its mechanics and design, so it is valid and legal, therefore should not be punished or banned. when everyone is used to these "orthodox style" gameplay where both players develop a regular city, make regular army, and take regular fights, biry's unexpected and "unorthodox" gameplay actually brings a new way of understanding to this game, and a new fresh air of entertainment to us viewers.

Biry trully admires you, he calls you "daddy" because, for a long time, you allways won against him, as a father does with his son.

t90 - I'm a fan and I've been following you for ages. One thing I can suggest - It would TILT pro players when you keep claiming YOU'RE JUST A CASTER. When you cast a game yes, BUT when you actually PLAY the game - you're a player just like all others. Good for you remaining calm and ending with the W at the end. GG WP

You know it's been a wild, unorthodox game when at 19:00, both players are still feudal, the eco K/D is 18 to 5, and the player with more vil losses actually has 4 MORE vils total. To the question at the end, I'd liken it to demos in Rocket League (which I remember T90 saying he used to play). A player on a team intentionally going for a lot of demos can be very tilting, and people often complain about it, but it's a part of the game and it's not impossible to stop. I think it's fair game and you just have to keep your head and focus on your win condition.

25:47 what you're describing sounds like the killer in the Wolf Creek movie... The way he's talking, It's detached from the reality of what he's doing "to you".

Biry doesnt speak english, he loves antimeta stuff, he plays for fun and thats the way he enjoys the game. When he said daddy its for an argentinian expression, not bad intended.

So apparently sheep/pigs are at 3.5 food/min per each garrisoned accordng to a reddit post. So if you keep them alive in the mill for ~20-25 minutes you'll probably be around even with where you would have been by gathering them earlier, since 90 food (assuming some rot)/3.5 fpm is 25.7 minutes, but there would also be villager gather time to factor in which makes this a difficult comparison. You could also think of 8 herdables in a mill as a ~1.5 farm's worth of gather rate all game. A farmtoria, if you will.

Idea to defend the trees: Place some Pallisades or other things around it, the main thing is that the space for farms isn't enough. Where no farms can be built, no trees are stolen.

I know its mighty late, but for the straggler tree laming if you place a palisade foudation build it a little next to them they cant build farms to delete them.

He ran out of wood when he TC dropped you, so he couldnt repair it after destroying your tower... thats when he lost it. He knew that your mill was key also, but still couldnt save his tc

I'd watch a couple of game series on this matchup

damn we need more messy players like this, nowadays i miss them in t90 castings

T90 talking about noobs: "Look how cute! Chopping straggler trees, they don't know what they're doing!" T90 playing: "This absolute grandmaster is denying me precious resources by deleting my straggler trees!"

Just like the 2nd amendment has those tiny little words; "shall not be infringed", I believe all tactics in AOE2 should be legal. Laming, lying in chat to falsely boost confidence, troll strats, that cute little farm to delete straggler trees.. This game is an undeniable masterpiece, bugs and all, don't colorblind yourself for the sake of *competition". I'm proud of you for sticking in and pulling out a V here, T90. Great work.

good to see that he's just a very good spirited (and ruthless) pro player and not some ahole who gets sick satisfaction from ruining the game for other people. he's basically a troll with a ton of technical and mechanical skill.

If this game were a restaurant, the health department would have shut this place down for being so messy and untidy.

When he dropped towers on your woodline and you said "you didn't know what else to do". There was like one layer of trees left - would it be feasible to delete them with same trick he did to your stragglers? Start chopping, build a palisade and your vills are safe and ready to relocate.

Too bad cheese is not allowed during tournaments, because this is very entertaining to watch. I understand why but the straight up action and obvious stress this adds to the game would be worth it if we could reach an arrangement of a set amount of cheese in a tournament.

T90 that resilience was amazing👏👏

“…resign and play an actual player” the post-game salt 🧂 😂

The thing about eliminating straggler trees being chopped down with farm foundations should be corrected.

@t90 you build a single palisade right beside the tree (you don't have to finish it, obv), so enemy buildings can't be placed on top of it

I know a guy who plays similarly, although it's more that he really experiments with unorthodox strategies in order to destroy the meta and then outplay in the chaos. His AOE handle is Sik

All's fair in love and war. Nothing seperates his strategy from the meta aside from popularity. Love your content T90.

I'm glad this guy is breaking the game in different ways. Good dev feedback.

He basically plays like how i'd assume every high level player would do, as it denies so much and allows him to build up in peace

This is why I'd rather play against the AI or against friends... don't need the aggravation that this guy will exhume out of me.

It's actually a strategy played by Sitaux quite often, Biry started playing it after him but played it a bit more all in ofc.

I closely observed the food generation speed from the 8 sheep garrisoned in the mill. It is 1 unit of food in each 3 seconds, which equals 20 units of food in one minute. Let's say you get your mill up and find all the 8 sheep by the 5th minute (usually it is within 3 minutes) and start benefiting from there. By the time you asked the question (30th minute), you had already gained at least 500 units of food for free and that equaled 10 vills which was exactly the villager difference at that moment. By the time game ended, the mill generated over 640 units of food. Combined with the insane camels, shawarma riders, and cheap castle units, Gurjara is an extremely overpowered civilization with no dead ends. A nerf is urgently needed.

I think if the point is winning, then it isn't productive to describe certain tactics as rude or annoying, if they're effective. If the point of the game is to compete and have good sportsmanship, then obvs denigrate laming and early rush. I personally think this looks super annoying but also charming :)

This is the best strategy I've ever seen and I love seeing players do stuff like this.

"There's no wrong threats, only wrong answers." -Dave Price

I like any kind of unorthodox rush, but smurfing is a big no no. It’s dickish to the opponent who expect a fair match.

Yes. Let the tilt flow through you. None can resist the power of tilt.

I think the farms as "ranged" straggler denial is galaxy brain, it's great lmao

@T90 You can build palisades around your trees to stop the farm trick.

Put a palisade wall next to the tree on two sides? To keep him from farming over it...

if you remembered your foes tricks you could have gotten out of that woodline chop the upper three trees and delete them with a farm... tada exit might also be a neat trick in forest nothing maps :>>

Great attitude towards a difficult opponent. Tons of respect.

7:00 You can place a palisade wall next to the tree so he can't place the farm