The Silk Road Rush
By Ultimitsu, 9/10/06, AoE3 v1.08, Author’s Rating: Unknown
Introduction
This is a simple build order for an Ottoman Rush. Here I will be presenting my build order and some of the things I do in hopes that it may help you improve your game. This was inspired by Ender_Ward’s IOR.
The Required Cards
- Three Villagers
- Advance Trade Post
- Six crates
- Five Janissaries
- Three Hussars
- AA
- Silk road
The Build Order
– Explorer builds one trade post, Three villagers as the first card, and age up ASAP.
– During the transition, send all your villagers to wood. If you started with 500 wood, you only need 100 for second trade post, if 400, then you need 200. Build second trade post as soon as you get 250 wood.
– Now, you can move most of your villagers back to food and you can move a few others to gold.
– Once you hit the colonial age, which should be 4:00~ish, send the five janissaries card, then send the silk road card, collect 400 wood, build a forward barrack, and finally research stage coach.
– Queue one janissary as soon as you barrack is up. Your pop should hit 19~20 now. Build a second house with the wood you have chopped and finally produce as many janissaries as you can.
– Your five shipped janissaries should arrive before first batch of janissaries are made from the barracks. Use them for a bit of treasure hunting if you would like.
– By 5:30, you should have stagecoach researched, and you should have two trade posts up. These are giving you 5.2 resources per second, equivalent of ten villagers. It should ensure your constant janissary production. You should have ten janissaries made with five more on their way. You can now launch your attack.
– The next shipment will be ready shortly; it can be 910w if you want more trade posts, houses, and a foundry, or 910F for more janissaries, or three hussars to kill villagers and light infantry, depending on your need.
Some Notes
Against civilizations with strong light infantry, it could be beneficial to start with a foundry instead of a barrack, using your shipped janissaries and hussars for anti-cavalry in the beginning of the game.
Against French, you may want to get a stable and train more hussars. They are much better at killing the French villagers than janissaries are.
On water maps, you may want to swap three hussars for one of the 600 wood crates so that you can create galleys.
The advanced trade post card is used for defense; if he is not trying to take down your trade posts then you do not need to send it. I find sending advanced trade post card early is a waste of time, saving only 100 wood from the second TP(or not having a TP for first 3 minutes of the game), three villagers alone chop ninety wood per minute.
Two trade posts give you 5.2 resources per second, which turns into 0.52 XP for troops or 1.04 XP for buildings. This is almost as good as having 1 normal TP just on XP. Shipments should be flooding in to you since you have so much extra experience points.
(View further discussion about this strategy)