I am currently in the 1700s and am usually no lower than the 1600s.
Most of the strategies I see are either giant spam, spear + archer, spear + albows, or giants + albows depending on the map.
Most of these players, however, either start out by pressuring with spears and continue to do so until your economy is completely wrecked. I usually try to counter with albows and shadows, but after reading the thread on counters the shadowalbow I realized I was using the worst possible strategy. Also I know about pressuring back with spears but they usually raise their defenses before me. Getting castle archers does help for a while but their army is then way ahead of mine and if they've been using only spears then I'm rather vulnerable to a spear rush.
So the final question is, is there a certain strategy that can protect me from early on pressuring by spears?

3 swords beats out an early spear and is much cheaper. If someone starts with a spearton and you started with sword + archer, you can get another sword. Try to retreat an almost dead sword and kite with your archer as much as you can if you have to.

If you started out with dual swords, try to go for triple swords, by cycling out the weakened ones, you should be able to kill it.

Also, this game has shifted greatly towards Sparcher, all of my wins in the 1800s have been with Spear + Archer since the auto-shield bash patch. Speartons in Shield Wall can stop quite a few Speartons while your Archers do major damage. Fire Arrows has also been buffed greatly. Fire Arrows on archers are now like Blazing Bolts on Albowtrosses.

If they do that, then I start getting swordwrath to kill the spearton, then get rage, and then tech up to albows+giants.

SWORDS WITH RAGE

Yea, swords too. 3 swords beats a Spearton without rage, so with rage, swords would tear through spears.

What's with all these newer players calling it shadalbow? Everyone used to call it ninjalbow >.>

Also...wtf are you talking about, ninjalbow is generally countered by a standard spear/albow tech into giant. You should have a larger army of you have spear/albow than ninjalbow due to cost. I don't know why you're talking about archidon (No one calls archidons archidonis...) mass, it's horrible to mass archers against ninjalbow because they will just rush in and wreck havoc.

uh.... was this directed to me? XD
the point of this thread was discuss how to fend off early spears
If the other player pressured me well enough then I would not be able to get as many high-tier units, which is why I though that using NINJALBOW would be stupid.
I didn't really talk much about archidons but yea.....

Quote from DragonArcherZ

What's with all these newer players calling it shadalbow? Everyone used to call it ninjalbow >.>

Also...wtf are you talking about, ninjalbow is generally countered by a standard spear/albow tech into giant. You should have a larger army of you have spear/albow than ninjalbow due to cost. I don't know why you're talking about archidon (No one calls archidons archidonis...) mass, it's horrible to mass archers against ninjalbow because they will just rush in and wreck havoc.

I called it Shadalbow, it sounded cooler in my opinion. And I don't even see it anymore, it's all about Spearcher, or as I call it, Sparcher.