have a read and tell me what you think.
By Ultimitsu Version 1.01 Revision history: v1.00 - 22/01/06, completed the guide and posted in heavengames forum v1.01 - 23/01/06, added more start analysis, Age2 native usage, and Age3 fort usage, added more instruction at end of Age1 and start of age2 with ATP building. Introduction: Portuguese is considered the weakest civilisation in Age of Empires III, there are many reasons to it. In my view the biggest problem is its weak Age2 and Age3 mainstream units, especially in Age3 it does not get any decent siege units. With most games only go as far as Age3, Portuguese players have no choice but to deal with this problem. Even if Portuguese saves up a powerful army, all it takes to stop it from marching is a well guarded fort, some may say you can use culverins as siege, well, in case you haven’t done the math, in the time falconet can do 300 siege damage, culverin will only do 80, and because they are only good at killing artillery, there really is no point in making anymore than two to three, it will take forever to take down a fort. Portuguese eventually gets quite good in Age4. It has one of the best dragoons, with dragoons themselves being a pretty powerful unit, and one of the best artillery - heavy cannon. I believe once one reaches Age4, AKA the Industrial Age, Portuguese will have a very good chance of winning. This guide will attempt show you how to maximise your chance of survive to Age4. However, don’t take this as a 100% winning strategy, there are plenty of risks. Execution and luck will matter a great deal. Now, let’s begin. Required Card age1: Advanced trading post (ATP), age2: 700 wood, 700 gold, 700 food, Unique Church Upgrade, 8 Crossbow Man, native treaty age3: 1000 wood, 1000 gold, 6 Dragoons, 9 Cassadors, Fort age4: factory 1, factory 2, Highly Recommended Card age2: 600 wood, 600 food, 600 gold, age3: 1000 food, Recommended Card age2: 6 musketeers, engineering school, advanced arsenal. age4: 1600 wood, 1600 gold, two extra explorer, fortify all walls/outposts, The Walk Through Age1 Game starts. Put all but one on huntables ASAP; leave just one to unpack food crates, get him to hunt once all food is unpacked, and no need to unpack wood and gold. Make no settlers. Explorer run around base, get a good idea of where everything is, hunt treasures, look for wood/food/xp, leave gold and pets alone for now, don’t waste your time. You will have relatively little micro to keep you busy, now is a good time to plan your building placements. don’t worry about the TC idle time, it is way more crucial for us to reach age2 first than worry about productivity at this point. As soon as your first shipment arrive, click ATP, as soon as you hit 800 food click age up with 500 wood. Keep all settlers on food. Unpack wood and gold now. You should always have at the least 100 wood, luckily for your being Portuguese you don’t need to build your first house because you will have a new Town Centre(TC) when you get to Age2, that means as soon as ATP arrives you only need 25 wood to build your first trading post, which is why you should look very hard for wood treasure. Alternatively, if you can find yourself some food treasure, so you aged up a bit faster, get some settlers to chop some wood; it will take 2 settlers 25 seconds, 4 settlers 13 seconds to get 25 wood. Don’t chop anymore wood then 25, go back to food ASAP. Queue up a few settlers in Town Centre. When your see ATP is close to arriving, place your explorer nicely on the trading post closest to enemy’s base, as soon as ATP arrives, build an ATP. Now you should be very close to age2. Have one settler walk to back to town centre. Age2 As soon as you reach Age2, unpack 500 wood with the settler that was standing next to TC, and get your explorer to build as many trading posts as you can. This is extremely important, we sacrificed all that Age1 TC idle time for this, so go hard. Also get two settlers walk towards to two nearby trading posts, by the time you get there, you should have unpacked enough wood for them to build ATP. Begin building. Your settlers are very slow in building ATP, that’s OK, the point is to start building so opponent can’t build on them. You get your explorer to help them once he finished all rest outposts. Ship 700 wood next, if you built 5 ATP that would have used all your 625 wood, leave either nothing or 75, if you can build 6 ATP you will definitely need extra wood. Try to include two different types of natives. Each ATP will give you 50xp, 6 means 300xp, be sure to enjoy the extra shipments. If you explorer is taking his time building trading posts, build a market with your wood, research for hunting dog. If he is fast, then reserve this wood for him, trading post must come first. Placing new TC near huntables is what we want, but we also want it to be close enough to our first TC so if under attack we can use both TC to fire at enemy. Here is where luck comes in, because sometimes the second group of huntables is quite close, and sometimes they are a bit far, so you can’t build TC that close to them. 10 settlers having to walk extra 10 seconds before hunting means 100 food less, kind makes a difference. What we are trying to do in Age2 is gather nothing but food, we don’t want to chop any wood, because it is slow and cost a fortune to improve its gather rate, we want to mine minimum gold, again it is slower than hunting but not by much, and improve mining means using wood so we are not going to do that either. Age up fast is the goal, the longer we stay in Age2, the more settlers we will have, and we don’t want to waste wood on houses either. Start to build settlers from second TC, keeping the production going and put all settlers on food. Ship native treaty, it is doesn’t take pop space and is generally better than your 8 crossbow and 6 musketeers, especially in Carolina where it gives your 4 Cherokee Rifleman and 4 Seminole Sharktooth Bowman. If you are not attacked you can use them to hunt treasures. As Portuguese, I do not recommend use this army to raid enemy, because if they die then you wont be able to afford back up for them, Portuguese is generally considered the worst at early rush. I have however succeeded in using this army to rush, turn it into an age2 rush game and won. But you need a whole different strategy and deck, at this point I do not know if that was my luck or does port actually have an advantage somewhere helping in age2 native rushing, I will surely investigate further and let you all know. ===defend against the first attack=== Age 2 is the hardest age for this strategy and Portuguese in general, because you will get attacked but you don’t have a good army to defend with. I can not give you an exact order of build or what to do, but I will give you some guidelines of what to do in different situations, Scouting is the key, Portuguese is somewhat disadvantaged in scouting because Spy Glass takes forever to recover, and no hunting dog means it is kind hard to beat guardians in Age1 and Age2 to rescue native scout. What you can do instead, is build little pieces of walls outside your TC or even randomly in the map, they will help you in seeing where enemy is heading and what does he have etc. however this is easier said than done, you cant afford to do this in Age1, but in Age2 there is a lot of economy micro management you may not have enough hand to do this. If you manage to find out that your opponent is doing, you can plan what to do. If he is going to with siege/hand infantry, you want to ship 8 cross bows and use a box wall to cover them. Make sure the box is quite large, it should be about the size of 4 TC, and you should have it so two sides are touching your two TC, so if under siege, you can shoot from inside or being close enough to it that you can retreat back into it if being chased. If he is going ranged infantry, then ship wood and build towers, maybe 8 cross bows as well if his force is too large, if he uses cavalry, build towers or ship musketeers, all cavalry rush don’t really happen, so you shouldn’t really need to use musketeers most of the time, besides, that 8 cross bow will transform into Besteiros later if they survive. Try not building more than 3 towers, because again we may run out of wood, when we need to build more houses. Worst comes to worst, you still have some natives you can recruit, if that does happen make sure you research wood chopping now and start chop wood, as native use a lot of wood. Here ATP again give you’re a big edge. 2 ATP with native cost 250 wood, give your 25~30 or so pop space + 100xp. In comparison going barrack will cost your 250 + 300 wood and only 85xp. Note that your ATP has 6000 hp and it attacks, that is good because your opponent has to choose to either live with them so he doesn’t get trading posts, or he has to kill them by building Pikeman, which is a waste of resource, because you don’t have any cavalry. Killing a 6000 monster will greatly district him to give you enough peace time to age up, if he uses all his army attack your trade post, make sure you shoot down cavalries first, repair them as soon as he gives up on attacking them. ===end of defend the first attack=== How to get enough resources is another thing that I can not give you exact shipment order, but generally you should be able to gather a lot of food, so at the most you should only need the 700 food shipment, depending on if you had a chance to mine gold, if you succeeded in mining 300 gold, then the 700 gold shipment is enough, you saved yourself a shipment; if you find yourself with a lot of food and a lot of settlers but not enough gold plus enemy is lurking around your gold mine, just go for 600 gold shipment. Having 6 resource cards in age2 is quite a disadvantage in later ages. But your are Portuguese so you have no choice, sometimes you could be under constant fire so the only way to age up is to send 700 food+600food+700gold+600gold… Once reached 1200 food + 1000 gold, age up choose 7 cassadors. The next resource we are going hard is wood. If you did choose to get 700 gold+ 600 gold earlier, you can now put that spare 300 gold in use, research for the first two wood gather rate improvements, the second one requires 250 gold. Otherwise, don’t bother with the second one. As soon as you have clicked age up, you move as many settlers on to wood as you can. Leave just enough settlers on food to keep constant settler production. During aging up, use a shipment to get Unique Church Upgrade. Age3 Congrats to yourself if you have survived this far. Build the third TC in between the first two if they were quite far apart. Otherwise build it in such way make a triangular shape between three TC, and make settlers ASAP. Make all new settlers chop wood. Keep your first Age3 shipment unsent, use it to ship 9 casadors if you get attacked. Hopefully before long you should have close to 800 wood in your hand, now ship the 1000 wood and build a church at the same time. Once you have 2000 wood, scream “oh yeah!” and ship 22 Besteiros. Congrats to yourself again, you are one more step closer to survive to age 4. Now place all Besteiros in the box wall (that’s why I asked you to make it so big). And build a barrack, keep making Besteiros like there is no tomorrow. Once you on that track, you don’t need so many settlers on wood, put some back to food, after all, you have 2000 food to gather. Ship Fort. I cant believe how late this has came to me, I normally always use fort, but recently with Portuguese I have been forgetting to use it, and now I have realised it is the best thing against early falconet, and you can train hussars/dragoons from it if you needed. ===defend against the second attack=== Why did we go for Besteiros? Besteiros is the best ranged infantry in Age3. At 27 damage and 150 HP, it is 50% more powerful than skirmisher, fires 50% more than cassodors, has the highest HP and is the cheapest of them all! That 2000 wood literally gives you a guard upgrade, which alone worth 1600 resources, but since this is fortress age its actually priceless. 2000 for 22 guard level unit itself is a huge bargain. Somewhere during 3rd age, your opponent will do a quite powerful attack; with Besteiros walled, you can just shoot everything to death. 2 Besteiros will beat 1 abus gun with ease. having 30 (22 + 8 from Age2 if they live) of them to start with and more coming all the time, it should not be too hard to work out that you should be able to defend against 90% age3 attacks. The only attack will give you problem is an army of hussars + falconet. He can just let falconet firing at your TC or walls, forcing you to come out and shoot him, and then use hussars to kill your Besteiros. That is why I suggested the 6 dragoon card. You may end up having to us your gold to train some hussars from fort, to kill falconets. That will be unfortunate because more gold will need to be mined. In worst case you will need to build an artillery foundry and make culverins, which is going to delay you from getting into Age4 due to its heavy gold cost. That is by far the worst thing could happen, try to avoid that as much as you can. I don’t think a normal merc rush will be much of a trouble, if your opponent did an FF then you would have been able to get there as fast as he could, because you had more shipment and we were able to boom a bit. Your Besteiros should give them a good fight, and you should have a lot more of them than the mercs. ===end of defend the second attack=== Ship 1000 gold when it is safe, and once you think you are close to 2000 food, place about some settlers on gold. All we need is 200, 17 settlers will take less than 30 seconds to get them. If you have done everything with utter most efficiency up to this point, we should not be behind our opponent in terms of advancement. Once we have enough food + gold to age up, choose 1000 gold or 10 musketeers and age up on the inmost Town Centre. Note over this time you may have some spare shipments, don’t send them, it is vital that we have 2 factories when we reach age4 ASAP. If you have more than enough shipments for that, and you want to use heavy cannon later, ship Engineering School. (This will no longer work after the next patch, ES is going to take away factory artillery bonus from Engineering School, it is sad for Ports) once we are aging up, there is no need to keep chopping wood, because we cant win with just mass Besteiros defending in a box. We will need an army that can attack in Age4. Send wood choppers to mine gold, your gold mines should be mostly untouched at this point, with so many settlers you don’t really need to research the second gold mining tech. Build Artillery Foundry, Stable, and Arsenal. Build some dragoons and research for infantry armour and cavalry Armour. Build 2 culverins if you can see opponent is coming with more falconets. ===defend against the Third attack=== From the moment you click aging up button to the point where you are fully ready to attack, you will face the third attack from your late age3 enemy. This army will be more than less the same as the last one but bigger, possibly more artillery orientated, they could easily take down your TC, it could be a nasty fight. What’s strong about your enemy is that they may have researched quite a few arsenal upgrade this time. Again you will have to rely on Besteiros as your main force and use some dragoons on cavalry and culverins on artilleries, shipment of 3 organ gun is also helpful in Age3. If this battle happened in Age4 after you have fortified outpost and fortified wall, you will have a much better chance of winning ===end of defend the Third attack === Age4 Congrats to yourself one more time if you made it this far, but we cant attack just yet. Get both factories. Making heavy cannons with engineering school card should give you two every minute. This is great, except there will be a few combos that your opponent can use that will beat massed heavy cannons. You need at least 4 to 6 of them, after that you will need to work out if you should make more or go to organ guns. Ship the card that fortifies everything, this is very helpful for Age4 defence. You can’t just make upgrade all units; you should selectively up grade whichever is the most effective against enemy’s army. Besteiros will eventually show its weakness in late game, there is no upgrade left for them, and you would have cleared all nearby woods. ===Below is some common late game combinations and how to counter them using Portuguese=== Halberdier + falconet or heavy cannon: upgraded Halberdier is deadly is swarmed, first 10 will die but as soon as they march into your army they will kill everything. No light infantry is good for killing them, you only chance as Portuguese is to use massed royal guard musketeers + heavy cannon yourself, it is good to throw in a few organ guns too, you use heavy cannon mainly to kill his artillery. Cuirassier + falconet or heavy cannon: massed musketeers + dragoons + hussars, but use more culverin and don’t use organ gun, they die fast and do little damage against horses. Heavy cannon is also not very effective. Ruyter + falconet + skirmisher: this is very powerful when he has 50 of horse + 50 skirmishers and 4 to 6 falconets, use Royal guard dragoon + cassador + royal guard musketeers + heavy cannon, have musketeers rush into them. End of walk through Analysis of this strategy and its winning secret With Portuguese we don’t get any settler shipments, it is a disadvantage in general, but it actually made the choice between ATP and settlers for first shipment easy - we can only choose ATP. We will take advantage of this by age up straight away. With the benefit of not having to build first house and 500 wood from aging up, it allows us to build as many trading posts as fast as our explorer can. More trading posts means more shipments, this allows us to rely all our aging up gold on shipments. Why can’t your opponent just copy what you do by make no settlers and build ATP straightaway as well? Because that is real suicide for them, at the most they will break even with you in terms of trading post, because you still that 100 more wood than him, it is more likely you will acquire more ATP than him. Once in Age2 you will have 2 TC pumping out settlers, he will quickly be out boomed and die of an Age2 death, Naturally multiple TC provides faster cover for settlers, shoots multiple fires in defence against rush, quite straight forward. Besteiros is really the most important part to this strategy, it is a vastly superior age3 unit compared to any infantry, yet Portuguese has the ability to get them so cheaply, that allows you to solely rely on them for age3 defence. In comparison, using cassadors means you will never age up to age4 due to their gold usage and low surviving rate. Comparing to musketeers, Besteiros rely on mostly wood and very little food, that means they don’t conflict with your settler production. Another winning aspect of this strategy is focusing on one particular resource at a time, and relying on shipments for other resources. This can significantly cut down research cost. Also use as little gold as you can means you can delay building plantation for a long time. (General Rule: building plantation is bad) Limitations of This Strategy As you can see, this strategy heavily relies on food, and wood and trading posts to some extent. The best map to pull it off is New England and Carolina, the worst is Rockie and those maps without trade route. Also because your are defending most of the time, it is best if enemy can only attack from a direction, New England also gives you a bit of help here - your enemy can only attack from two directions and one of them is quite a long walk for them too. Although your walled Besteiros should stand against most attacks, there is one strategy you will have next to zero chance in surviving, that is German Wallenstein Merc rush, because he will do the exact the same as you - age up fast, getting trade posts, have no army in age2 and first half of age3.. once he completes Wallenstein, he will come at you with 14 Jaegers and 10 black riders to keep your Besteiros busy, 15 Landsknecht that will destroy all your TC, outpost, walls, 10 Hackapells that will kill your Besteiros in a bit more than 1 hack. ---I will write a guide to teach you how to increase your chance of pull off a Wallenstein General tips when using this strategy When you are under attack in Age3, while defending with Besteiros, you should make a few native warriors from your remote trading posts and having them raid enemy’s settlers. It’s great because they also use wood and food, which is something you are not short on, and that will force your enemy to defend himself, therefore weakens his attack upon your base. If you don’t have enough huntables near you to get 2000 food in age3, and you are near the beach, you can build a dock and make some boats; again, they don’t use gold. At some point in age3, you may find yourself with excess food and waiting for gold shipments. Make a stock pen and start fatten all the sheep you found, make a few more to have total of 10 sheep, it will give you about 2900 food once they fully fatten. Don’t use Mercantilism. I normally like this tech, it gives you a good boost in age3, but the thing is it doesn’t really give you any extra shipments, it simply gives you due shipments faster, this will make future shipments all taking longer to come. This strategy heavily rely on gold shipment, so you don’t really have that spare 1000 gold, and with trading posts you should already be getting shipments fast. Thanks To Ceres629 for sharing his "Guide to Playing as Portuguese", which helped most of us with Portuguese To Ender_ward for for the interesting discussions Heavengames forum, which initiated my interest in using Besteiros To Heavengames forum where I learnt all most AOE3 knowledge [This message has been edited by ultimitsu (edited 02-03-2006 @ 03:48 AM).]