As far as I know this strategy was invented by Challe. I’m just writing it down.
The aim of this strategy is to surprise the opponent. Brits are mainly known as strong boomers, susceptible to rushes and not strong rushers themselves. This build order gives you 21 muskets at 6:15-6:20. Generally I advise not to musket rush, as it gets easily beaten by a RI defense, however, as no one expects brits to muster such a force so early, I find this strat to be very strong on some occasions.
If he goes HI you are in great shape, same with cavalry.
If your opponent goes heavy on RI you might have a problem.
However, let’s compare xbows and muskets:
Musketeer: 75 food 25 gold (131 VS), 150 HP, 23 ranged attack
Crossbowman: 40 food 40 wood (128 VS), 100 HP, 20 ranged attack vs HI, 20% RR
So, we see that these two units cost about the same in VS.
How efficient are they in killing each other?
A musketeer takes 100/(23 x 80%) = 5,55 = 6 shots to kill a crossbowman
A crossbowman takes 150/20 = 7,5 = 8 shots to kill a musketeer.
So you see, musketeers beat crossbowmen nicely, IF the opponent cannot micro properly and cannot use their higher range to his advantage. This is exactly what we are trying to achieve with hitting his base at 6:20 flat. Hit and run works nicely on an open field, but not if he is in the middle of his town, and his eco is being threatened.
Pretty standard.
• villager distribution: 4 food, rest wood.
• build houses so you have 40 pop and make sure you have at least 200 wood when hitting colonial
• Send 2 vills forward (you should have scouted a nice place for your fb. Covering, hunts/goldmine is nice. As you want to be agressive, you can go as close as possbile)
This has to happen all very quickly, speed is key.
• send your tower to your forward vills (I tend to putt he waypoint if my TC there while aging up, so I don’t have to do this extra. Just remember to switch it back to food!)
• send
• build 2 barracks after another with your forward vills.
• gather the age up gold
• start queing 1 musket in each barracks, as soon as they are built. Make sure you always get full batches out of your rax.
• when the tower is built set the HC shipment point to it (make sure the travois doesn’t get killed on the way by warchiefs/pet army or the chinese monk/disciples. It’s best to guard it with your explorer)
• Ship
• important: build another house as soon as you have 135 wood. If you start doing this too late, you won’t get all the musketeers out in time.
• when you have both barracks and 50 pop change your vills to: rest food, 6 wood, 3 gold
• when the 6 shipped muskets arrive you should have 15 muskets + 6 shipped muskets = 21 muskets at 6:15-6:20. Attack!
My next cards in succession are:
My villager distribution is a bit sloppy, but depending on starting crates and treasures you might have to tweak it a little. I’m confident you’ll get the hang of it fairly soon. Generally I have 6 on wood at all times, 3-5 on gold and the rest on food, all new vills going to food aswell. This way I should maintain constant musketeer production from both barracks (after the 8-9 minute mark), and in case I want to age up I can just send 700 gold and age up very soon.
• split your initial 21 musket force into 3 groups of 7 musketeerss. This way you can shoot 3 crossbows every round (as long as your groups have at least 6 muskets in each). As soon as you are under 18 muskets, it’s better to split them into 2 groups. This little use of hotkeys can win battles. Do it!
• of course fighting crossbows with muskets isn’t exactly smart in the long run. It may only work at the start. If you cannot hurt him properly, fall back, get up a stable and start making hussars. With just putting a few more vills on gold, your eco is already setup for 1 barracks + 1 stable spam. With decent micro musket+hussar beats pike+xbow.
• this strat needs tons of food. Make sure you use your aggressive start to gain some map control. Spam manors over the map to „secure“ hunts (meaning their line of sight makes it fairly safe to gather food there, as you can run away in time)
for my mac friends:
for ESO players:
for Vanilla players:
This strat is made for the AS patch, and FP 1.0. However, I think the increased manor cost is not that great a nerf, that it shouldn't work fine in FP 1.1 also.
Hope you like it,
cheerio
EDIT: I really don't know why the little pictures aren't working anymore. They worked when I previewed it. But still, the information is there.
[This message has been edited by mathemagician198 (edited 05-11-2009 @ 07:26 AM).]