posted 10-30-05 11:59 PM EDT (US)
There is alot of micro that has to be done in the Discovery Age to make this more effective in the Colonial Age, especially if your opponent is any good and repels the rush before you get the TC down or do significant damage. Do not attempt this against the Ottomans unless you know what you are doing (they can hit you hard at home with a Jan rush before you get a chance to disrupt their econ with Uhlans) and be wary of doing it on the French (their vills higher HP makes it hard to take enough of them down with your Uhlans...and if they rush you it's probably over). I'm not going to go through all of the micro I do, but once you get it down, you will be able to flawlessly execute this strategy on any map besides Amazonia or Caribbean time and time again.
GeneralVasa's U.(hlan)R.(aid)/I.(nfantry)R.(ush)
1. First vills and settler wagon onto unpacking food crates. If your herdables are near enough to the TC, send one vill to a spot just a little behind them and shoot one to force the rest to run near the TC. As soon as you have 100 food, hit T and then V to queue up a vill in your TC.
As soon as you have 100 wood, send one vill to build a house, hold shift and then click on the house and then click on the deer you killed with the other vill. This will automatically send your vill to the deer. Once the crates are unpacked, send the rest of the vills to the deer that was killed, and kill another one next to the TC.
Put your TC gather point on the second dead deer. At some point in the middle of all of this, you should hit the / key and set waypoints in a circle around your immediate vicinity for your explorer. Finding either an experience treasure or a killing a few weak guardians is very helpful. All of this should be done before the first vill comes out of the TC.
(Note: If your herdables were not near the TC, and you had to send one vill to push them towards it, you will want to send your other vills and settler wagon and also set your TC rally point on berries. The quicker you can get them off of berries and on to a deer that has been pushed to the TC the better. Noobs might want to not use this strategy on maps where there are no really close huntables until they are proficient with hunting deer.)
2. Everytime you get 100 food, hit T and V to queue another vill. As soon as you've killed 2 or so enemies (getting your explorer killed will ruin the entire strategy) send him with waypoints in a line on the very end of the map from you, starting with the spot you think the enemy's TC is in.
3. By the time you can queue up to 13 or 14 pop limit, you should have a home shipment ready. Timing is crucial, so AS SOON as you hear the little bell hit the H key to go to your shipment page, and then select the 300 food crate.
4. Select the 4 closest vills to the TC and set them to a control group. Set the rest of the vills to a different control group. It works best if your micro game is good and you can keep your deer close to the TC. If your micro game sucks, every once in a while take a vil out past the deer herd and shoot them. This will cause them to run closer to the TC. Wait about 10 seconds and shoot them agin.
5. If you've done everything right so far, you should have 500 food just immediately before the food crate ships in. Hit the second control group button and send all of those vills to the nearest wood source.
6. I keep a look out for my explorer at all times, and when I find the TC I set waypoints in a circle around it so I can see where the enemy has their vills. Try to find an unprotected gold pit or some hunters far from the TC...and remember where they are.
7. When the crate arrives, hit the 1st control group and have them unpack the food. If you've done everything right, this will occur right before or right as the last vill is produced. Set the TC gather point to the nearest wood. As soon as you have the 800 food, hit the advance button (select the free 500 food). Task the 4 villagers to gathering food, and take one of the woodies and send them towards the enemy TC, which you should have found by now. About one screen outside of your town have them build a house, and set them to a control group. As soon as the house is built, recall them and send them towards the TC again...this time building a house right on the edge of where you can build one because of the enemy TC restriction.
8. As you advance, you should watch your food. As soon as you can queue up two villagers, send your 4 food vills to wood. You will need the extra boost to build the barracks.
9. You should get a home shipment sometime before you advance. AS SOON as you advance, hit the H key and select the 5 uhlans. Also, take the 4 food vills from earlier and have them unpack the 500 food crate. Queue up vills to wood for all of your food but 200 or so. Make sure to shift click on the crate and then shift click on a herdable to they dont go idle. Also, recall your house building vill and have them build a barracks as soon as you go colonial.
Now, depending on the situation you will either continue pumping out wood vills and adding a food vill here and there to make crossbows, or adding more food vills to make pikemen. You won't need any gold unless the game advances past mid-colonial, which is unlikely if you are playing a game in the Home City 1-8 level.
10. When the uhlans pop out, set them to contol group one and send them to whatever unprotected vills you found earlier. If you've done everything right, you should have advanced way before most civs except maybe the Ottomans. Your Uhlans will slaughter the unprotected vills, and if you can micro well and kill enough of them, it might win you the game right there.
You want to hit FOOD and GOLD especially. Without food, their economy will falter because they can't produce vills or units. Without gold, they can't effectively counter attack massed crossbows, except to turtle with outposts which wastes vill time and lots of wood.
11. By the time the Uhlans pop out, your barracks will be up. Queue up 5 pikemen and send them towards an enemy house that is far from the TC or some other vills that are far from the TC. If you can hit them hard before they hit Colonial, start queuing up pikemen and attack their TC once you have about 15 or 20, all the while constantly raiding with you Uhlans.
12. After this it's mostly up to you. I try to shift some wood vills to gold at about 8:00 if I don't win outright with the first rush, so I can pump out some Uhlans to seriously raid the economy. It depends on your situation though, and what the enemy is using. You also might want to add a market during a lull in the fighting to get the wood and hunting upgrades. Done correctly this can give you a 4:00 minute Colonial time, with enough incoming resources to field a 30 unit army by 5:30.
I won a 2v2 game where my teammate had dropped before the game started in 7 minutes using this. Both hit colonial about 5:30, but by this time I had almost taken down the first one's TC with pikes and quickly mopped up the second one's army with crossbows and destroyed his TC.
Optional Cards
I haven't tested it, but I am reasonably certain you can get 1 settler wagon instead of the 300 food and still pull off this strat with the same Colonial time. It all depends on how early you can get your first shipment. In Carolinas you could probably do it with 11 vills instead of the normal 12. (Which gives you a 15 vill pop on Carolina and 16 vill pop elsewhere, strengthening your economy during the upgrade to Colonial).
Also, a furrier card will work if you can get it really early (I've only done it on a map where an experience treasure guarded by 3 wolves was right next to my initial TC), and would allow you to rush with a 13 pop instead of 14. This would give you a weaker rush, but you could get Uhlans earlier and do some serious raiding damage to any economy.
Leader- OOYA (Odhinn Owns Ye All)
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[This message has been edited by lordvasa (edited 10-31-2005 @ 00:39 AM).]
