What Captain Mode actually needs right now.

[[AG] Heir of Aenarion]

Literally only one dedicated skirmish cav player on APE. If you think Crusader/Jewkbox Cav is a good cav this really says something about your players ?

Only good cav from either of those teams I have ever fought is Woj and that was only because it was on EU. My point was cav has a low skill threshold to learn so if you're coming from a more technically sound point to begin with you won't have a hard time playing it. AG did not play APE so I'm assuming you're talking about captain players in general.

 

[[AG] Heir of Aenarion]

APE winging their match against a dedicated Captains team without using cavalry:



By the way, this was Captains in its earliest stage during EA:



Listen to the commentary. There might not have been Rambo (though it was still possible), but archers still seemed useless, and the most effective meta was simply to steamroll with two cavalry and four shock infantry. (I saw more varied and interesting plays by APE in CL2, with or without Rambo.) The winning team apparently played that composition for the whole tournament, and there seemed to be little the other teams could do about it, except possibly to run all shock infantry (as the commentator suggests), which is exactly what people complained sorely about after the big MP patch that introduced crushthrough later on.

Yes like I've already stated APE had success in some matches, especially this one against SkBR, where they overthought the comp and planned too much more counter-cav and not enough for an inf fight. There is merit in that for sure. I cannot speak to SkBR's failures in that game. You can hear you/Melon illustrating that they (SkBR) tried to big-brain it (referring to counter-cav build) and then you have the advantage, especially because they just took the melee rather than trying to rambo to skirm down AI or control more of the map, which would have been better given the builds.

The video posted has Grendel as a commentator who is notoriously terrible at analysis and yeah that tournament to my knowledge was held well before season 1 of CL where archer strats were viable up until the semis. The KoV-LoB combined team that season essentially went to the finals playing an archer-cav kite strat before losing to BTL since BTL adopted the shock meta first. It's probable the rambo cav meta could've existed then too since cav played more or less the same yet only a few players like Gainer, Horse Gang and Forbes were ramboing at that time.