Sometimes knowing what your goals are is more important than having the strategies memorized

Most of you probably know all this already, so please feel free to just skip over it I don't care. But if you didn't know this and have questions or comments or anything please feel free to respond, I'd appreciate it, thanks.

The strategies in AoC are as we all know rather stagnant, they are stuck in a rut with very few options being available to players especially on the arabia map, which of course is the most popular map and will continue to be so until the game is not played anymore. So now it comes down to having your priorities in order, and having goals within the game that you must try to reach. But what exactly are these goals and how should you set them is the big question.

Different maps different goals.

I'll start with arabia since that is by far the most commonly played map in the game.

Basic strat Fast Offensive anywhere before 10 min feudal time.

Your goals in a quick offensive such as this are pretty simple. You basically want to take over as much land as you can, and hopefully kill some villagers while your at it. Take the important land over first, this would include where they are chopping wood, where they will likely want their next wood to go, good farming areas, and of course their own stone piles. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to pallisade up any stone mines that are too out of the way to be worth using a tower on. I'm not an expert on using towers for offense, but if you go for a fast offensive I think it is essential that you build offensive towers or you will be doomed. So your basic goal is to limit their options as to where they can collect resources, and what resources they can collect efficiently.

Basic strat skirm/scout combo in feudal.

I personally hate this strategy, but I can tell you what you should be trying to achieve with a strategy like this. Your goals are to keep your opponents villagers working less efficiently than your villagers are. Simple in theory, complicated in execution. You have got to be able to ballance your offensive efforts with those of your defense, all the while keeping things running smoothly in your economy. So what you've got to be able to do is send your army out, knowing that at the same time your enemy is going to be sending his army to your economy. So what you have to be able to do is scout out where your army is going to be the most effective at slowing down his econ, and setting up your own econ to the point where his army can't possibly do as much damage as you can in your spot. To add to that you must also know when your offensive army is being overwhelmed too badly, and when withdrawing will be worth it, very often it's not worth it to withdraw as by the time your troops manage to escape you lose half of them. But then again sometimes it is very useful to run away because the enemy will undoubtedly give chase, and waste their armies ability and/or their villagers working time. It gets a fair amount more complicated than this I'm sure, but I really am not the right person to tell you everything about a strategy which I have so rarely used.

Basic strat defensive boom to castle age.

Your goals here are very simplistic in nature, but a lot more difficult to execute than most others. Your basic goal here is to keep the enemies army running in circles as it were. Using walls to divert their path towards your economy is always a good idea, yes they can be destroyed but at lease you know where the enemy is planning it's attack from. Speed isn't always essential in something like this, but if you don't go for speed make sure you are getting more economic upgrades than your enemy is, your whole goals here is to have a superior economy due to the fact they are hopefully wasting resources on troops that can not dammage your economy. If you do it properly you should come out with a faster castle time, and a better overall economy, it is however very very difficult to keep the enemy completely out of your base.

Basic strat fast castle offensive

Your whole goals here is to get to castle age as fast as possible, hopefully not long after the enemy makes it's first attack on your base. Depending on the troops you use you may have different goals, but if you plan on using knights your goal must be to disrupt his economy by raiding as much as possible. You shouldn't be able to take out his army because massed up skirms with a few spears is tough to out micromanage with just knights. So instead disrupting his economy and hopefully delaying his own castle time while still expanding your econ from multiple tc's is the key here. Very tough to get away with using knights, Eagle Warriors on the other hand have a fighting chance of fending off any enemy attacks. With EW you should have the option of either disrupting their economy or destroying their army after a short while. In either case you must hit their economy before they manage to castle, keeping the enemy off of their gold is a sure way to win when you have EW on your side. Another option along this routue would be to use siege to fend off the enemy, so your goal with an army like this would be to keep his army away from your economy, going offensive takes some time because you really need to get a decent amount of scorpions out before they can be used offensively, so just work on expanding your own economy while hopefully not getting hurt.

Basic strat BOOM

You have one goal and one goal only, create a big economy faster than the enemy, getting to castle age fast isn't essential, but getting there before the enemy can is IMO very important. How you achieve this is diffferent every game, but a good defensive ability is essential to pulling something like this off effectively. Knowing where the attack is going to come from (because there will be a big attack against you 9 times out of 10) is something you must know. Putting up radar housing/outposts is a good way to achieve this.

Team games 2v2 I am not going to comment on because they are basically 2 1v1's most of the time.

Team games 3v3 and 4v4

Pocket player basic goals

There are two ways to play the pocket in my opinion. You can either go for a fast offensive against your opposing pocket player, or you can try to support your partners attacks on their opponents. If you go for the fast offensive your whole goal is to keep your opponent busy so that he has no opportunity to help his partners, keeping the fight in his territory is the key. If you can manage that then you should be able to actually help your partners to some extent while still keeping your guy worried about your offensive capabilities on his base. The other option to help your partners is pretty basic to start with, in my opinion you should help your partner who is most ahead as very often this can tip the scales so decidedly in your partners favour that he can be just as powerful as you in no time. Also most people will try to help their partner who is in trouble the most, so you will be helping to prevent your partner from losing his advantage at the same time. Small amounts of help should be given to your other partner as well, but make sure he knows that most of the help won't be coming his way at all.

Outside players

You should have the same goals as in 1v1 except know where your middle man is going to help out. If he is going to help your partner then know you will need some defenses at home to help fend off their pocket guy to some effect, if he is going straight to his guy then you don't have to worry so much, if he is going to be helping you then you should know that you can be more offensive than ussual, and can therefore take the fight to your enemies base as early as you can.

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Part two: Mediteranian goals

Medit is by far my favorite map in the game, easily the most diverse and IMO fair map there is, I think you'll see why that is throughout this post, if not I'll just post my reasons at the end.

There are many options as to what you can do on medit, but not only are there many options but most of these options are viable 100% of the time, not just dependant on your opponents strategy. This write-up is going to involve a lot more talk in the way of strategy because not everyone will know all about the strategies employable on this map. There are also a lot of ifs involved with this map and I'll try to go in to as much detail as possible about those specifiic ifs.

Again I'll start with 1v1 games, not a commonly played map 1v1 but every once in a while you'll get it on random map so here goes.

Basic strat all out galley rush.

There are two reasons why you will want control of the water in a given game, sometimes it's one sometimes it's both, other times it may be none.

Reason 1: Either your land or your opponents land is easily controlled by water, very often this isn't the case on medit because there is ussually a lot of land available, but sometimes all the gold or stone or something is along the shoreline, in a case like this your goal has to be to take control of the water, because if you can do that you can control the resources which will win you the game no matter what. Your goal in this case is to cover the shorelines with ships anywhere there are valuable resources, eventually you'll just run the enemy out of gold while you sit there with thousands in the bank, makes for an easy win. If however you are a civilization without the bracer technology, and your enemy is a civilization with the bracer technology, you must take the fight to your opponents shore as soon as you can. Without bracer you leave your opponent the option of going for a fast imperial time and simply taking the water back from you with superior ships. As well as that, if you need to take the water because it is your own shoreline that is so important, be sure to press the attack as soon as you can, your supperior economy (see Reason 2) should allow you to press a much more powerful attack than your enemy can stop. You can do this even if it is your enemies shoreline that is important, but it's a little riskier than just playing the boom game in my opinion (keep in mind that I love to boom, and absolutely love imp age fighting).

Reason 2: Fishing. Fishing can be a huge advantage, if you control the water you obviously control the fishing, so if you are taking the water purely for the reason of being able to fish remember it always. One of the biggest mistakes i see in water games played by all sorts of people (from rooks to "experts" I wouldn't classify most of these guys as experts but most people would because they know how to memorize and perfect strategies) is that they take over the water but still just sit there with their original 4-6 fishing boats and don't take true advantage of their water capabilities. If you start to take the water with ease then simply start using half your docks for fishing boats and the other half can continue with galleys, this will give you such a huge economic boost that you will surely have more resources available the rest of the game. Usually if you take over the water for reason #1 you may as well take advantage of reason #2 as well.

On top of both of these there is another main goal and that is to keep the enemy off of your own land. So make sure you wall up both sides of the map properly, make stone walls as soon as you think the enemy might not be going to water, and also mine stone. If the enemy managed to get a transport over to your base very often a few well placed towers will be all you need to keep him out of your wood and gold (you won't need to farm at all for a long time in this case). If you can secure these two spots then you should be able to castle faster (due to fishing) and put out an absolute ton of knights. As well his options become limited because he can't run his troops along the shoreline without losing a handfull. Another thing is to know when to call it quits you are not going to win the water every time, knowing when you have lost is very important, there is no need to waste more resources than you have to on something you won't win. However there are some things that you can do which will help you out by setting back your opponent at the same time, I'll discuss these in the next strategy.

Basic strat Lose the water with low costs.
This is more of a strategy than teaching the goals of the strategy because I don't think that most people would normally consider doing something like this.
Your goal here is to make your opponent spend more on the water than it could possibly be worth to him in the short term (as in the next 15-20 minutes of the game). This is something that a lot of the lower level players won't recognize as a valid strategy. The only way you can make your opponent spend too much is by actually fighting somewhat on the water, so you will want probably 3 docks up producing ships, also you'll want to be able to castle much faster than your opponent can so you need to be collecting food right through the feudal transition, as well as having a regular amount of fishing ships working. Fight like normal on water for the first while of galley wars, fight like you mean to take the water build as many ships as you can. You must make sure your opponent is commited completely to taking over the water, if he isn't going for water very much at all then by all means take it yourself and fish away, your enemy is pracitcally giving you the game by doing something like this. If however he is fighting for the water then you should be able to stay even with him in ship production for the first few minutes. Go offensive a little bit, show him that you mean to fight for the water, let the fight come back to your docks at which point you have two options. He will back off from you from time to time to regroup and that's your chance to exercise these options.

Option 1: let him fight you at your docks, he will start to have more ships by now, that's ok you plan on losing. With this option you want to pull your ships away from your docks, circle around his ships and go to his docks, get his fishing that's all your after, don't worry about picking off stray ships. On top of that build 1 additional galley in each dock you think will survive long enough to put a flag up. This way he'll think you still mean to take the water, and therefore will continue to make his own galleys to counter your new ones. Your ships that kill his fishing ships should only hit and run, never get caught by his main fleets. Your goals is to keep these ships alive as long as you can, kill any new fishing that he tries to make and just keep running around.

Option 2: This ones a little bit more tricky. After he goes to regroup his ships take about 1/5 of your ships and place them well out of the way of your main fleet, somewhere he isn't going to find them for some time. He will come to attack you again, at this point you let your remaining galleys die a horrible horrible death, oh those poor poor sailors. So now you've got a group of around 4-8 galleys still alive and in hiding. Watch your docks, when they all start to get fairly injured, or when there are only 2 left and one is getting close to dead, take your ships in to his docks, if he built more fishing ships you should be able to pick them off fairly easily, sometimes a good distraction can be to attack one of his pallisades with a couple villagers or something, make him panic a little bit, if he sees that maybe the attack bell for his fishing won't get noticed in time to save him much. If it works ok congrats you just wasted a whole lot of his resources. If your opponent is japanese don't try this option as it would take too long for your galleys to kill off his fishing ships, option 1 is your only choice in this situation.

While all this is going on you want to be making it to castle age yourself fairly fast, or you want to be setting up for a late power flush, in that case how you get in to his base is up to you there are many options and you should be able to figure out which one is the best for you. In the case of a flush taking over as much land as possible with towers isn't going to win you the game. Your goal at this point (either the castle age or flush) is to strike with a large force that he hopefully didn't see coming at all. If your force is large enough when you strike you should be able to completely topple him in one fell swoop. If he sees you coming all I can say is your screwed . Ok ok not completely screwed but things will get a lot harder at that point. What you are going for at this point is his wood opperations, he'll have lots of food coming in by now from fishing so he won't actually be farming a lot yet (if he's smart that is). But if you can hold back his wood capabilities well enough then you should be able to stop him from producing the buildings and counter units he needs to stop you. By this time he'll have lots of gold sitting around more than likely, so stopping his gold production although nice isn't going to win you anything yet.

I think I've gone on long enough on this particular strategy but yet it still feels like there is so much to cover, hopefully I'll cover all of it in the rest of the strategy overviews.

Basic strat fast flushing offensive.

Flushing is probably your best bet in this case, but also by far the most predictable, having the odd ship out there to harrass and keep him distracted isn't a bad idea. Your goal is of course to catch him off gaurd with units he wouldn't expect to see coming at his base. Surprise is your only ally in an attempt like this because his econ will ALWAYS be bigger than yours. I personally don't think a strategy like this is viable 99% of the time, mostly because I alway seem to be able to fight off an all out flush even if it does catch me off gaurd. Your goals are to stop him from getting up defensive buildings, and to take over important land. Important land comes in two forms, the first is obvious in the land that has valuable resources that he will at one point or another want to obtain. The other valuable land is land which is easily walled off. If he can wall you off from 1/4 of the land, and keep you out absoultely, you are will be absolutely screwed. So always keep in mind that you must get to the easily walled areas before he manages to do so.

Basic strat fast castle fireship rush.

Your goals are pretty simple, make it to castle asap with at least 3 docks up and in good shape (not about to be destroyed). You must obtain a castle time of low 16 minutes or less, it's not as hard as you might think. again you have a couple of options as to how you get to castle age fast enough. In either case you must use your market IMO, the first option is to mine 11 gold in the feudal age transition (15 to be safe but you shouldn't need it all). When you reach feudal you'll have 61 gold, you can then sell 200 wood for 70 and 69 gold bringing you up to exactly 200 gold, if you don't end up with 200 gold you gotta know your opponent is likewise using the market, act however you see fit . The other option is to sell either 200 stone or 100 stone and 100 wood(recomended), you shouldn't sell your food as that's a resource which will be in short supply very soon. Don't worry about being without stone you don't need another tc for some time anyways and when you do you can always buy back 100 stone (yes it's a decent amount of lost res but it works ok). Hit castle, get fireships, he's not likely to let you kill off his galleys, so go for his fishing and docks, take as many as you can before he castles, from then on so many different things can happen that you'll have to figure it out for yourself. You should be able to get a second tc up before he hits castle age( if you do the suggested 100 and 100 selling), and start booming, your econ will be bigger than his most times.

Basic strat fast castle to knight/EW rush.

Yet again your goal is to make a fairly fast castle, around 16 minutes. Again you have two options. First off you can attempt to transport some vils over to his land, risky but the benifits if it works are big. The other option is to build up on your side of the land with a siege shop producing magonels and at least 1 stables pushing out knights, when you get a mang out start taking down the wall. Your goals after the buildup are pretty simple, disable his econ the best you can, you should be castle loooong before any galley rusher is, and therefore you should be able to put the big hurt on him if you make it into his town with knights in a decent time.

For all of the above strategies it's assumed basically that your enemy is galley rushing, of course this won't always be the case, but if I went into detail on every possibility it would take me days. If I really get enough requests I suppose I could go into detail on some of them, but I doubt that will happen, so post specific questions please and I'll try my best to answer them.

Well that's all for now 1v1 seemed to take up a lot of space and a lot of my time so I'm going to leave the team part for another day yet again.

In case you haven't figured out why I love this map so much, it's because there are so many options, so many if's, and so many things that can change the way you should fight the game. This IMO is a real thinking mans map 1 strategy will never rule supreme on a map like this IMO.

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In response to the question "I have a question for u Rahl

1st of all, i wanna say great post, i really enjoy reading these^^
So here's the situation... I have one of those maps that really sucks, where my ress are near the water shore, and my tc is like 7 tiles away from water too..in other words, in the range of a war galley... I do normal grush start with viks let say, and i because of the poopie map, my #1 goal is to get sea. The fight goes on and my oponent starts to get the upper hand, and i am now losing the water... So my question here is what do i do?
Should i continu pumping galleys, relocating my docks and do whatever it takes to win water, even if this means im wasting ressources thus neglecting ur advice to stop completly and opt for another strat...? Maybe when he see he's winning he'll slow his galley production, and there would be my chance to bounce back..
Or should i just do what u said and let him have water and try to get him land? I wouldnt be wasting ressources on galleys but i wouldnt have much of an eco either because of ressource placement...
So what would u do in this situation? " by djinn ssx

Well your in a world of hurt at this point so you only have a couple options that I can think of.....

First off stop fighting on the water as soon as your absolutely sure you are going to lose the water. Try to keep a few gallies around to slow his fishing abilities for as long as possible. What this does is pretty simple your opponent is likely to do 1 of 2 things.

The first would be he might stop producing galleys completely, some people will even neglect to upgrade them properly later on, but I wouldn't count on that happening very often. If he stops producing galleys you shouldn't have too hard of a time getting to castle at about the same time as him (hopefully), his fishing will put him a bit ahead unfortunately, but if you can use your galleys properly you can disrupt it a bit and make him waste some extra resources rebuilding his fishing ships. So now you have two options that are at your disposal.

The first option is to go for imperial with a decent econ as fast as you can, this can't always be done, but ussually on medit you will have enough room to boom somewhat, you must have at the very least 1 stone mine that is accessable, if you don't well, chances are it's game over for you sorry. If you do have that one stone mine, and no gold mine, use that to sell the stone so you can make imperial, as soon as you start to go imperial get a castle up on your shoreline somewhere important ASAP (gold mine). You should also start putting docks up in out of the way places (scout around see if he is not covering your shoreline completely). Once the castle is up of course start mining gold like a madman, get the gold upgrades and sell as much food as you can afford too (you will need about 1600 food in total to get all the upgrades nescessary, of course you won't need it all at once). If you have managed to imperial before him your fully upgraded ships should be able to win back the water for you pretty easily, especially since he probably doesn't have a huge fleet to start with. This doesn't of course deal with the fact he might land on your land which will be a big problem, you can't afford to fight back with gold units so use a pike flood more than likely (unless he goes all archers of course), viking pikes are pretty good, just make sure to limit where he can come at you from as much as possible (the shoreline basically is where you want to keep him), if you can do that, then win back the water you should be able to push him off of your shoreline with ease. As well with him landing you, you should be able to imperial faster than him, and more than likely he won't get the galley upgrades until too late (most landers would rather save the res for more knights etc.).

Your second option would be to give up water, and make a go at his land. This isn't always an option though, first you must know what his land looks like, and know that you can take over enough gold mines unreachable by his ships that it will be worth your effort. Getting to castle and putting up an offensive gold mine covering castle somewhat early into your attack would probably be a pretty good idea most of the time, but only of course if you can get several vils over to his land undetected. Beyond that I'm sure you know how to handle an offensive landing as you seem like a pretty good player, so I won't go into detail unless I get requests.

The other thing your enemy might do is to continue galley production to take complete control of the waters, on top of that he will likely get up extra fishing, and with the amount of ships he gets out you probably won't be able to harrass his fishing for very long before he stops you. Chances are very good he won't land you until at least mid castle age, so you should be ok to boom at home as best you can, again you can take the first option from the top there by going imperial getting a castle up and building ships, however this will be more difficult as he will have lots of upgraded ships of his own, so it will probably take 2 castles covering a decent amount of shoreline to secure your ability to make ships, make sure you get conscription as you will be working with a very limited amount of docks in this case. Taking back the water will be tough but you should at least have a chance at it. Your castle placement is a bit tricky, make sure that the first one covers gold at the very least, it won't be able to cover too much of the shoreline unfortunately but it should be able to cover your next castle fairly well. Try to get your second one on a penninsula (I think that's the right word), a piece of land kind of like italy or florida, that way you can cover a decent amount of dockable land, putting up your castle on an inside corner is not going to be nearly as worthwhile because there is less space to put up your own docks. Chances are you aren't going to be able to land him on this map if he goes with more galleys, in fact I think that it's a waste of 5 vils or whatever to try it if he looks to be continuing production. Trying to break through his walls probably isn't a very good option at this point, he will see you coming and be pretty well prepared for any attack you can make, you lose your big ally of surprise, so it's not really worth it, as 98/100 you will lose horribly and the 99th time you will be sent home crying to your mommy.

Did I miss anything? probably but feel free to point it out if I did.

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Part 3, mediteranian team games 2v2

Oh boy this is going to be a very big one I have the feeling. If you thought the first two were a little wordy, well I'm sorry but it's only going to get worse with this one, just a prediction because I honestly don't know where I will begin or end, but here goes.

A warning a few things might not make complete sense in this post, i'm sorry in advance if they don't, I have had to write this over several days as I just don't have the spare time to do this all in 1 day ussually.

To start with I guess I should say that for a lot of this to make sense you'll probably want to refer to part 2 of this series, the one on mediteranian 1v1, I will likely refer back to certain strategies instead of rewriting some parts which I have already gone over.

2v2
There are so many options even with a basic 2v2 setup, basically anything that could work in the 1v1 can work here, but you can also add some more onto that I think.

Basic strat double grush.
Your goals are going to be the same as with 1v1, with a couple of exceptions. 2v2 medit there is a lot of land to play around with, the chances that your enemies are going to have all their good resources on the shoreline are slim to none, so taking the water should be IMO for the sole purpose of winnning the ability to fish. Being able to cover the shoreline with ships and limit your enemies options at the same time is just an added bonus I think. Now of course this isn't always true as it is entirely possible that the side land portions will be narrow enough that ships can reach from one end to where the trees begin but it's not nearly as likely as in a 1v1, and the bigger the map gets the less likely it becomes. Ok so you've managed to take over the waters, now what? Well I think you have to strike out towards their land as soon as you possibly can, make a landing and even if you only build a few troops to harrass their econ, at least you are causing them to either garrison, or spend more than it's worth to stop your force (archers are a good choice for this I think, throw in a magonel if he chooses to ignore your army and things should start to get interesting). You can of course also go for the all out castle age attack and take it to them as hard as you can, chances are if you manage your econ (with extra fishing etc.) properly, that they won't have much chance of repellling your attack. Now of course communication is very important and you should make sure your partner is on the same page as you, if he decides just to boom away chances are very good that you will be doubled and wiped out. Taking the fight to the enemies land by yourself is fine as it leaves your parter to just boom away, but it can also put you at a disadvantage as you waste a lot of res on a rush that should be crushed in no time flat. What I'd prefer to do is a double landing on one of the enemies, you should be able to cripple him enough that your other enemy has no real chance to fight back. Your options for combinations are far too many for me to go into detail on, please refer to my previous post on 1v1 mediteranian. Anything I suggested there CAN work here, but you must keep in mind that there is more room, which means less chance to cover all the resources. As well your enemy has the ability to trade so just taking away gold mines isn't going to be enough, eventually they can get enough trade giong to make up for anything you could possibly have taken away, this means you must take the fight to them eventually or you will lose your whole advantage which is fishing.

I'm not going to bother going into the other basic strategies where both players would do the same thing, I think I covered all the real changes from 1v1 to 2v2 playing in the above paragraph, so just use the same basic thing as in 1v1 except have two people do it, most everything should work the same.

However the fact you are now playing 2v2 means that 1 player can employ 1 strat while the other does something else entirely and this is what the majority of what i plan on covering in what I still expect to be a long post . I will only be covering select combinations as of course the amount of variants are just too much to cover without taking weeks to write it all up, so if you want me to cover something that I miss then feel free to ask, and I'll give any input I might be able to. As well I think I will add a few strategies that just aren't viable in a 1v1 game.

Basic strategy: player 1 does an all out grush, player 2 does a half grush-landing attack

Responsibilities and goals for player 1:
Your main goal of course is going to be keeping the enemies busy on water as much as possible, to do this it's likely you'll want to avoid too much direct fighting with the enemies navies unless you KNOW for sure that you will win a given skirmish. What is nescessary in a role like this is to hit both enemies docks from time to time with the help of your parter. I would suggest both partners picking very similar colours (red and orange for example), as this will give a nice little advantage at times. This is beneficial because you should be able to fool most enemies into thinking that both players are doing big grush's when in reality it is only 1 player doing a big grush while player 2 is slowly making his way to castle with small amounts of support ships. So what player 1 wants to do is hit his opponents docks as often as possible from different angles if possible. Killing fishing would be nice but it's not a priority IMO. Hit and runs are the name of the game here, hit make your opponent draw back, then run before any major killing happens. After that send your ships around to player 2's enemy docks, add in his ships to your own and advance on the opponent's docks, make sure that his ships are very close to yours but preferably in front, I think that most players will click on the front boats to look at them rather than the back ones, so the enemy may mistake them for being all the same. At this point you may want to fight player 2's ships but it's not nessesarry, he will likely ask for support so be sure to run if it does arive. At the same time have a small cluster of new ships waiting, if player 1's enemy does come to help, those ships have a perfect opportunity to destroy enemy fishing. Repeat the above and just keep doing hit and runs, don't combine your navy with your partners every time, and more than likely you should never combine it when attacking your own enemy. Keep the enemy busy for as long as possible, your partner shouldn't need more than 22 minutes or so (just a rough guess) before he can start doing his part in the war. Whatever you do don't lose your ships, losing your dock is ok, but if you can keep them running after your ships you can keep them distracted enough that their econ will falter somewhat as well as their homeland scouting capacities.

Responsibilities and goals for player 2:
Player two has 2 options to go for. Option 1. Player two has an easier job initially but he also bears the greatest responsibility of the two players. His objective is to build a minimal amount of ships and use them as effectively in support of his partner as possible. 2 docks pumping non stop plus a third one doing his transport plus any extra ships that can be afforded should cover what is needed for support. This is just enough to keep the team somewhat viable on water while still allowing a fairly decent castle time for player 2. What your aiming for is about a 20 -22 minute castle age with a landing of 2+ villagers on the enemies land. Beyond that it's fairly simple, your goals are to take out your opponents gold first off, this will hopefully stop him from producing much on the water as well as hinder his abilities to go castle quickly, wood is next as that will stop him from building too many pikes/farms/fishing ships. If all goes well here your partner may be in a possition where he can take water if only he had a little bit of help, well you have two options here. You can either help by likewise hitting your parters opponent with some knights on important res spots, or you can build up a decent sized navy of castle age ships, chances are you won't have the econ for upgrades so demo ships and fires will have to do. In any event weather you can help player 1 to take water or not it's still your job to hinder both your opponent and your partners opponent all the while expanding at home.

Option 2 is giving the same type of water support only a little bit more (3 docks non stop garunteed as well as more later), plus a landing flush. With the landing flush it doesn't have to be done quickly, in fact the same time frame is open as with option 1, you want to start your attack by the latest at 21 minutes, but if it's going to be that late it has to be with something rather large and of course unexpected. Man at arms is a good bet as they are very effective in the early stages of a surprise flush, but of course be ready to back them up with scouts and archers, I don't think skirms are really worth it because they are too ineffective at some things. The problems you'll encounter is that your army is inherently slower than a castle age knight rush, so it's unlikely that you will be able to do very much damage to player 1's enemy (unless he's closer than usual). It's likely that the flush will start to come to a standstill at which point you can easily switch your goal to taking over the water, very often your opponent will just completely forget about the water and you can bust out with a huge navy to help your partner (who hopefully is still kicking on water somewhat). There's nothing wrong with aiming to lose the water only to take it back again (if that makes any sense).

Basic strat player 1 does basic grush player 2 does chinese demo rush.
For the most part I'd suggest having player 2 be chinese because their demo ships are much better than other civs demo ships, the only problem is that chinese have a seriously hard starting on water sometimes. Anyways your goal as player 1 is basically the same as any other grush, just make sure not to lose many ships before your partners help arrives, when it does arrive you should have a distinct advantage I think. Player 2 wants to make an approximately 16 minunte castle age time or so, then procede to make a navy of mostly demo ships which are to be used in support of your partners navy. With chinese it should be fairly easy to get in and do some damage with those demo ships, when they hit they should take away most of the life of nearby ships, which means a couple shots and they are down and out. This really isn't viable 1v1 because chinese just aren't a good 1v1 water civ unless you get a good start which is no garuntee. Not much to say here that I haven't covered before, take water, fish like mad and expand. The chinese player should have a good advantage in castle age and therefore be able to boom out of 2 tc's fairly early, but food could end up being a problem.

Basic strat player 1 does basic grush player 2 does fire rush.
Pretty simple, player 1's goals have been spelt out before in detail, go back and read the first couple paragraphs if you can't remember. The only difference here is that player 2 is likely going to be fighting on his own for the most part, the fireships don't really need support as the demo ships do for some obvious reasons like the fact they die when they attack .

Basic strat. Slingshot to power attack.

Your goal is to sneak 2 vils into enemy territory pretty early on probably, player 1 will tribute food/farms/whatever it takes to get player 2 to castle by 15-16 minutes. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to do a fake grush for player 1, go fast and attack your enemies docks early with a couple of ships, then back off, you won't likely be able to afford more than that. Player 2 has to make it into enemy territory whereupon their very large amount of resources (still getting tributed) should allow him to quickly run over his opponent. Doing 2 stables and a very quick siege shop is a good idea IMO, it's up to you wheather you fish off the start or not, I don't think it could hurt as you gain the resources back before your ships could possibly be sunk, plus at least your enemy sees that you are fishing and might think you are going for water. Anyways your goal is to kill off your opponent as soon as possible then continue on to harrass player 1's enemy, you probably won't ever even bother trying to take water over but that's no big deal IMO if you do a good job with your power rush. Having player 2 be goths and doing a longsword attack could prove to be very useful due to their extremely cheap price (too cheap I think), plus the fact that they are extremely hard to counter in feudal age, and they take down buildings so very fast. Either that or have player 2 be mayans/aztecs as it's cheap to pump out EW and they are impossible to counter in early feudal.

You can do other types of tributes too, but I think that this is probably your best bet in a tribute attempt.

I think that's about it for 2v2. If you have anything you want added or any questions let me know, 3v3 and 4v4 medit will be next but don't hold your breath as they will take a fair amount of thinking on my part to flush out as much as I can.