So… I just played an orc vs human. The human fast expanded and used Tinker as his first hero. Obviusly couldnt stop it, and even when I was agressive the whole game, I lost to economic advantage and like twelve rifles and casters. Didn’t even needed the Hero to take me down.
What is the course of action when you see human Fast Expand? What do you amass? What do you center on?
Your question is too broad to get a reply with one message unfortunately. A human should not be able to fast expo with tinker first without you being able to stop him in general, there might be micro or timing/scouting issues in your game which lead to him being able to expand too easily.
However, I will give you some general guidelines.
When a human expands, this leads to 2 things for him:
To strengthen the defence human invests heavily in towers. That makes his tech even more late and he loses total map presence.
This means you can creep the whole map and gain significant hero and item advantage. Also, creeps give you money, so this lets you have almost the same amount of gold the human has even though he has expo , as he will have too much food in peasants and thus will breach upkeep early. Thus his 2 bases will give him only +4 gold advantage.
If the human is not investing hard in defences, make big army at tier 2 and kill him. If the is investing too much into defence, creep everything get heroes level 4/4 and make an expo yourself.
Hope this helps. Of course there are many many small details I cannot go into in this post.
Thanks, although Now I changed strategies. For Grubby and other guides, I always opened wit BM. Now, I open with Far Seer and keep pressuring until I have Shamans. Lately, this is paying of real nice.
Shamans BL seem like a good option. I could barely kill any rifles in the mid game. I think early game zep drop might work too.
Yes, currently the meta is fs goes after am all the time and you kill peasants as much as possible thus hurting the human’s lumber. This makes the human have 2 big issues
his tech is late if he makes an arcane tower, that means you will have shamans, tc level 2 and can start an early expo when human is just hitting tier 2 and does not have anything but footies and AM. From there it is pretty much game won.
the human techs early with no tower but inevitably loses at least 1 possibly 2-3 peasants from lumber. This means he cannot make blacksmith, 2nd hero and 2 arcane sanctums with the wood. This will force him to skip something which is not ideal for him and you will gain advantage (not that big one but still).
Currently we see people like Lyn and Spiral winning a lot vs humans as they understand that well and execute it on a very high level.
The human counter to this strategy also deserves to be noted (created by Infi). He creeps with militia the first spot and goes directly to the orc base to cancel 2nd/3rd burrow. The FS is forced to defend or will remain on 20 food forever. While he is busy defending he is not killing peasants or harassing economy in the human base (thus the human does not need arcane tower and is able to tech faster). Also, once he teches he gets militia and creeps the other green spot near his base (reaching level 2 for the AM).
If you visualize the whole game as a tree, every branch requires specific adjustment from the opponent. This leads to different scenarios but in orc/human I am inclined to say it is quite balanced and mostly the better playing person wins (with some consideration of the map of course).
Last but not least, the third strategy is the one Romantic (the Chinese human player) does. He power creeps to level 3 with AM and comes to the orc base killing 2 burrows. (No amount of repair is able to stop 4 footies, 2 elementals and AM attacking). He closes his base completely, so that no grunts or fs can enter it. Here arcane tower can be done and the late tech taken as canceled burrows and spirit lodges will make up for the late tech timing.
I think this covers the early game. One thing to note is that in human vs orc the early to mid game mostly sets up the win. If you are in a good spot once you hit tier 2 you should be able to win it after.