hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to be looking into the rarely used
defensive stance and how it works on a mechanical level so you'll know how to recognize situations
where it's giving your units a desirable Behavior we're then going to look at the guard and follow
commands how they're related but different and how one may be the secret to consistently winning
every Dark Age Scout battle now aggressive stance is of course the default for the vast majority of
units when they're created and you could no doubt have a very decent level of success keeping all
of your units on that stance at all times the second most popular stance is actually stand
ground which is my preference with archers for a couple of reasons they're less likely to follow
units into town center fire and also just seem to path around each other better when given an
attack order heading into this I realized I really don't use defensive stance all that
often and didn't even know the exact rules for how it works so that's what we'll be looking at first
to start off simply I was curious if defensive stance units would be more selective in who they
fight or even if they'd fight villagers at all here I have the game paused and and you can see
I have villagers at various distances and all the samurai here are on defensive stance if I unpause
notice one of the Samurai doesn't attack which right away implies to me they're not searching
as far as they normally would skipping ahead at a certain point you can see they then move back
toward where they started but not quite all the way there which is sort of odd if I put the final
Samurai on aggressive stance to confirm suddenly he can see the Villager at the limit of his sight
and engages with it though obviously at the end he doesn't do the same behavior of returning to
a starting place this tells us a few interesting things about defensive stance but let's go deeper
the samurai here has a line of sight radius of six and you can see I've outlined his sight with
dirt so we can keep track of it and if unit crosses into the grass he should be able to
see it with a scout unit notice I can enter the first grass tile without a problem but if I get
any closer he'll Chase my unit interestingly though he won't leave that inner circle and
while I can dance right up to the edge of it as soon as my unit steps on the last grass tile he
turns back heading towards starting location it's definitely not that the unit just loses interest
over time as I can run them around that Circle for as long as I want and it's only when I'm six tiles
away from his starting location that he gives up the obvious next test to me was to then increase
his line of sight by two and see if that maximum range is based on his line of sight or if it's
just a five-tile defensive radius regardless of how far you can see it turns out his extra line
of sight changes nothing and he still chases me for the exact same distance and loses interest as
soon as I'm on the final grass tile this suggests to me that all units will behave in a similar way
but just to confirm I used a Mongol Hazard with 12 line of sight on defensive stance and saw the
exact same five tile defensive radius before he loses interest in chasing me likewise just for fun
I did it again with a Spearman Whose line of sight I reduced it to he can't see my Scout until it's
almost on top of him but once he sees it he can be led the exact same distance away before giving
up now one odd behavior I noticed from units on defensive stance is here if the pikemen is
being shot by longbowmen standing outside of its five-tile defensive area it'll actually run away
it stays within its established five tile area and you can see it returns to the center once it
gets too far but it's still interesting Behavior contrast that with how a pikemen on aggressive
stance reacts charging the attacking unit even though it's well outside of the pikemen's usual
line of sight there are definitely moments with infantry that the defensive Behavior might be
advantageous say if you're trying to avoid being baited by archers in a castle fire and of course
there are other times you might want the limited range to protect one specific area of your town an
example when defensive stance makes a lot of sense would be feudal age spearmint where the five-tile
defensive radius means that Scout Cavalry can't lead them away to attack your exposed villagers
likewise with Cavalry and trade routes defensive stance units will naturally confine themselves to
a small radius instead of chasing trade cards back and forth across the map outside of a few
select situations though defensive stance is not really used that often but at least you know how
it works now there's one odd case though I want to address where the game actually pushes you
into defensive stance unless you opt out for nearly all units they're created on aggressive
stance but strangely the ram mangonel line and bombard Cannon always start on defensive that
got me wondering if I should leave them on that stance ever switch them to aggressive instead
or even if there's a difference playing around with it I really don't think defensive stance
is necessarily better Rams for instance have a very short line of sight and search radius so
they already struggle to find new buildings at times but you can see on defensive stance that
gets even harder as they stop after five tiles and go back to the start contrast that with the RAM on
aggressive stance which will keep looking for new buildings switching to looking at onagers in this
case we get some clarification on the rules it turns out any ranged units will be happy
to attack units outside of the defensive area but they themselves can't be lured outside the
bounds in some situations I'd actually prefer the behavior of aggressive stance more than defensive
especially when raising enemy towns I think many players have intuitively figured out playing the
game that Rams and bombard cannons should be on aggressive stance when raising as they seem
to spread out better and that's exactly how it seems to be working upon closer inspection demo
ships also begin on defensive stance by default similarly this prevents them from traveling more
than five tiles away and pursuing an enemy unit same as we saw before though of course if you
prefer they'd be more assertive you can switch them to aggressive stance to remove the five tile
distance limit so that's defensive stance and how it can be used to generally keep your units
from wandering off but then how is that different than guarding this is a function not used all that
often and is an advanced command like Patrol or attack move and not a stance in fact you
can guard a unit or building in a aggressive or defensive stance so how does that work here we
have a halberdier on aggressive stance who has also been ordered to guard another unit notice
that if we get too close he tries to intercept our unit and will chase us for any distance across the
map if he eventually catches up and my unit dies or it goes out of his vision then the unit returns
to guarding in this case the trigger distance is six tiles from the guarded Target instead of five
for defensive stance and actually has nothing to do with how close I am to the halberdier itself
notice he reacts as soon as I reach the grass tile whether he's on the closer or far side of the king
from my Scout but now let's have him guard again but this time switch him to defensive stance with
that combination he works a bit differently but not in the way I expected this time he lets me get
much closer to the king down to two tiles though if I trigger his guarding behavior he then chases
me and continues to chase across the map it seems all defensive stance did hear was give me more
leeway to approach whatever he's guarding but once I trigger it defensive stance does not restrict
his movement where it gets really weird though is if you're at asking him to guard but also
be on stand ground and his behavior is actually identical to aggressive stance for some reason
and you can see as soon as I step on the grass he'll chase me across the entire map guarding
definitely adds a few odd behaviors and here you can see even just a few tiles from the halberdier
guarding the King on aggressive stance normally he would attack any of my units immediately and
it's only going to get too close to the king that he reacts that got me curious if units could in
fact guard themselves and the answer is yes here I have a hell of a deer on stand ground and switch
him to defensive stance none of the red units are within five tiles so he'll happily hang out there
and I can then have him guard himself on defensive stance and again he's going to stay in place if I
then set him to stand ground though he switches to the more aggressive guarding behavior and
will start attacking nearby units despite being on stand ground considering though units with
the guard command will pursue approaching enemies across the map it makes it pretty clear to me that
Spearman defending woodlines for example should be on defensive stance but not guarding the lumber
camp or villagers which to me actually undermines the whole idea of the Guard command to begin with
the only situation I can really understand is if you want a group of units to follow a specific
hero in a campaign though even that use case is questionable as it seems like they just lag behind
and leave your hero exposed anyway in fact the guard command seems so pointless I was looking
around for any use case idea someone had and came across a claim by Marauder Dave that some people
claim it made units attack faster this is actually kinda true though not in the literal sense that
it increases their attack rate to show how it works here we have five hand cannoneers two of
which are guarding themselves on aggressive and defensive stance and the other three are just
using the basic stances in order of popularity with aggressive stand ground and then defensive
last the game is then paused and if I switch diplomacy and unpause you can see something
really interesting happens slowing things down you can see that the units guarding themselves
do tend to attack first I did this five times and it was pretty consistent that units guarding and
on attack stance attacked earlier than especially the defensive stance unit so it seems there might
be something to this I then flipped which units were getting each stance so this time the units
on guard stance are at the bottom just to make sure there wasn't something else above those
specific units going on and again saw guarding units fire off their initial shot generally faster
with defensive stance being the slowest it's not quite as clean and consistent as I'd like but it
seems something about guard stance puts them on high alert to pick up targets and something about
defensive stance makes them a bit slower to start fighting the same thing in case you're wondering
also happens for melee units with Scouts in this example at the same time I'm somewhat skeptical of
its practical utility though as there's a whole bunch of other behaviors you get thrown in with
guarding like not engaging anything that's too far away from whatever they're protecting and I
feel like you need quite a bit of experience with this to figure out exactly when it's helping more
than it hurts over just an attack move or Patrol to keep going with the potential of guard I then
tried a large number of Scouts where I was the blue player and an AI was red having all
the units Target each other blue actually went just about every time it's been known
for a while that there's a very slight Edge in perfectly equal fights to Player 1 over player 2
Etc check it out though if instead I pause switch to being player 2 and have one of the rows of red
Scout's self guard just before the fight Begins the results flip and they consistently win their
fights one-on-one whereas the other row I didn't have red self guard lost 80 percent of the time
I don't want to overstate this and take from it what you will but it seemed consistent to me that
having your unit guard itself just before a fight while it doesn't outwardly change anything and
they don't appear to get a first hit or attack any faster over time with everything perfectly
matched between the two units at the end the tie seems to go to the self-guarded unit instead of
player one for unclear reasons all I'm saying is if you're playing as red against Blue and are
jumping into a Dark Age Scout fight it might be worth a shot self guarding your unit at the last
moment no guarantees of course but so far it looks very promising to me if you time it just right a
second or two before they engage at the very least I think it's fair to say something funny here is
going on at the same time I'm less sold on this with groups of though as well in this case green
is self-guarding which actually didn't seem to hurt and they won the first two fights I tried on
the third test I started to notice an issue if the unit your group is guarding is killed mid-battle
then all of your units stop fighting for a moment and even after they re-engage they're just
fighting without even an attack move or Patrol order so even if it did lead to better fighting
while the guarded unit was alive after the guarded unit goes down I expect the rest of your army is
actually fighting worse remember this also only works if two units are exactly balanced and get
their first hit at the exact moment which really isn't all that common this all led me even farther
down the rabbit hole though now I'm starting to wonder how guarding behavior is different
than follow which I have to admit is something I have never used in any situation follow says
it orders your unit to of course follow but also avoid detection in fact unlike guard it seems like
this is actually meant to be used on your enemies trying it out here with the blue halberdier
following his own King you can see he completely ignores my Scout even when it comes right up to
them this halberdier is on aggressive stance so so the follow order seems to be completely
overwriting his regular Behavior likewise if I set him from following the king to following the enemy
Scout again he's completely passive I wouldn't describe this as avoiding detection walking right
up to me like this but as the game suggests if you ever want to follow a unit and see where it goes
without killing it then now you know how to do it in practice the main use case for this would be
as a way to push deer the idea is to line up your scout so that your following will scare the deer
toward the town's Center and at least sometimes it does work out pretty nicely other times though
the deer stops at just the right distance so it's not far enough to trigger the Scout to move closer
but also isn't close enough to scare the deer so it's not completely foolproof but it could
be useful if you're also keeping an eye on it to prevent that but there you have it generally you
probably won't make too much use of these tools especially guard and follow which both maybe have
one Niche use in the early game defensive stance though definitely has a few good uses and also
just being aware of when you might want to turn it off in favor of aggressive stance can be something
worth keeping in mind as well especially now that you know what to expect from it
that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys and I'll see you next time