No
Villager Russia
Rush
by MrMilo
The basic concept of this strategy is to advance quickly the second age,
stop making villagers, and invest all of your resources into your military. You’ll
get a really strong early mass that you can use to beat your opponent’s army,
hopefully creating a snow-ball effect in which you army continues to be larger
than his so you keep on beating his army easily and then can start pressuring his
economy.
This guide is available in video form, which you can check out on FileFront.
I’ve also attached a pack of recorded games of myself performing this strategy
against some top players, including games against Japan,
India, and Germany.
Train Your First
Batch of Villagers as Quickly as You Can
Because Russia requires 270 food to train a batch of villagers, you must wait
longer than usual to train your first batch of villagers as your starting
villagers gather food crates. If you leave your starting villagers on their own
at the beginning of the game, you often won’t have enough food to get that
first batch until 20 to 25 seconds into the game. The key to cutting this time
down – I can usually start my batch in 11 to 13 seconds – is putting each
villager on their own food crate. This way, by the time the villagers are
finished with their first food crate, and ready to start bumping into each
other as they clumsily path to the next crate, you’ll already have enough food
to train your first batch of vils. For tips on how to accomplish this, such as
garrisoning through your town center, check out my Early Game Guide.
Get Treasures, Scout,
Scout, and Scout Some More
As with any rush strategy, scouting is incredibly important. Because you’ll be
sacrificing your economy early to get that great military edge, you’ll need to know
where your enemy is and how his resources are laid out to exercise your
advantage. Your first scouting task, just like in every game, is to find your
second herd of hunting. In this strategy, you won’t start herding that hunt
back towards your town center until you have begun advancing to the second age,
but it’s still very important to know where it is. Next, you want to start
moving towards your opponent’s base, picking up treasures you see upon the way.
The best treasures to get early on, in order of helpfulness, are food, wood,
xp, and gold. As you reach his side of
the map, scout around his base, identifying all of his resource spots.
Get Ready to Age-Up
Your
first card will be Distributivism. That’s a wood
trickle card that gives you 1.25 wood/second, which is equivalent to two and a
half un-upgraded villagers chopping wood. Once you’ve gotten your third batch
of villagers, stop training more. Your three batches of three, plus five
starting villagers, will give you a total of 14 villagers to age-up with. Oftentimes,
you won’t have 800 food ready the very second that your third batch of
villagers come out. You might have up to 15 seconds of idle town center time before
you click-up, but it shouldn’t be too much more than that. As politicians go,
always pick the one that gives you 400 wood.
Reorganize Your
Economy
As soon as you click-up to the second age, you’ll need to quickly gather 250
wood so that you can have your forward blockhouse built by the time you reach
the second age. Just how many villagers you’ll be on wood for this varies based
on your starting crates and treasures. You’ll generally already have about 50
wood gathered from your trickle card at this point as well. Whatever the
set-up, make sure you have that 250 wood gathered about 40 seconds after you
click-up. Once that wood is gathered, put all of your villagers back on to food
and start herding your second hunt towards your town center. About 20 seconds
after you click-up, and this varies based on the size of the map, take three villagers
and start walking them towards your opponent’s town. Once you’ve got enough
wood, start building a blockhouse as close to your opponent’s town as possible.
Scout Some More!
As you near the second age, and after you reach
it, you need to have your explorer in your enemy’s town (but not too close to
his TC, should vils be garrisoned in it). Look at what resources he’s gathering
and try to infer what units he might be build. What age-up politician did he
use? What military building is he building and where is it? What is the first
shipment of the colonial age does he send? The more information you have, the
more effectively you can use your own army.
Get Ready to Attack!
There are a bunch of things you have to do
right as you hit the second age. First, don’t train any villagers! Next, task vils
around your town center to the wood crates from your politician. As soon as you
have 100 wood, train a batch of strelets. Then, send your first shipment of the
second age, either 5 cossacks or 13 strelets, depending on what units you
anticipate your opponent will make. If you send your shipment before you train
the strelets, you won’t have enough population space to train the strelets, and
you’ll have to wait until you can build more houses. As soon as you do these
things, you’ll need to do a few more: change your Home City
shipment point to your blockhouse, build two houses, and train more infantry.
Sometimes, if you anticipate your opponent to be making cavalry at the very
start of the second age, you’ll want to train musketeers instead of strelets.
To do this, you’ll need to have gathered some gold, either through starting
crates, treasures, or through villager labor while you aged-up to colonial.
Be Aggressive, B-E AGGRESSIVE!
The only way this strategy will work is if you
play aggressively. Because you are not making villagers, you must use your military quickly and
efficiently. There are two basic things you can do once you have your quick
early army: (1) find your opponent’s military building, and if it is in an
accessible place, camp your army there and attack it, taking down any units
that might come out with your superior mass or (2) go straight for his economy:
because you’ve scouted well, you’ll know exactly where he’s gathering
resources, so you can kill villagers and force him to garrison them! While all
of this is going on, be sure to continue military production, making sure that
you don’t get housed.
Send the Right Cards
and Build the Right Units
If you don’t win the game early with your
initial push, your next best chance to win is by making the right decisions
with your further card and unit choice. This is a vastly underappreciated, and
I think under-analyzed, aspect of the game.
Cards: You have two main
options for your first card: 13 strelets and 5 cossacks. After sending one of
those, you’ll usually want to send: 13 strelets, 5 cossacks, 4 cossacks (if
you’ve already sent 5 cossacks), or 700 food. Good cards to send as your third,
fourth, and following cards include those above, 700 wood, 600 food, Schooners
(making fishing boats cost 40 wood), and Boyars (also known as Unique Combat
Russian, which boosts strelet, cossack, and oprichnik attack and hp by +15%). What
cards you send will largely be in response to what your opponent is doing and
how the game is playing out. Are they building mostly ranged infantry, like
crossbowmen? Send more cossacks. Are they going more heavy on heavy infantry,
like musketeers? Ship strelets or perhaps Boyars to boost your strelet army. If
you feel that an immediate military boost of a military shipment carded isn’t
needed right away, but you still want to push heavily, send a food crate card.
When you send these, you can usually start training villagers again while maintaining
infantry production. If he is playing more defensively or the map doesn’t allow
you to make a strong push, consider 700 wood to grab and upgrade trading posts,
or Schooners to start a fish-boom.
Units: You have two main concerns unit-wise: (1) which
infantry unit should you build? Musketeers or strelets? This question largely
depends on your opponent’s capacity to make cavalry and (2) when should you
build a stable and start training cossacks? The Achilles-heel of Russia in the second
age is cavalry, as they don’t have access to pikemen and musketeers are slow
and clumsy when you want to counter cav. This requires that you scout well
(surprise!). You must be able to identify when your opponent can build cavalry.
Look at what resources he’s gathering: are those resources that allow for cav
production? Do you see a stable? What cavalry shipment cards does he have in
his deck? When you see that your opponent might be building cavalry, it’s time
to make some musketeers. Finding a good mix of musket/strelet can be tricky,
but it’s largely contingent on how much cav your opponent has, so keep your
eyes peeled. As far as cossacks go, you generally don’t want to build them too
early: Building a stable and reorganizing your economy a bit to make cav can be
tricky, especially when you don’t have many villagers to work with, so I
generally don’t want to build a stable until at least ten minutes into the
game. Once you have a some, however, they are a great compliment to strelets as
they can slow down longer ranged units like crossbowmen and force your enemy to
make pikemen, which strelets eat for breakfast.
Start Making
Villagers Again
Usually
around ten minutes into the game, if not sooner, you’ll want to start making
villagers again. As I said before, sending food crate cards are a great way to
get your economy rolling while still maintaining military production. When
playing aggressively, like you will with this strategy, I still like to stop
making villagers for short bursts even after the ten-minute mark, if it means
getting a critical push with extra army.
Rush the Right Civs
Now
that you’ve got a good idea about how to execute the strategy, I’ll give you
some thoughts about what civs to do it against. I use this strategy against
every civilization, with the exceptions of Russia, Aztec, and Iroquois. Those
civs can age-up quickly, have a very strong early military, and have shooting
barracks, which don’t make them ideal targets of an all-out rush. Fortunately,
this strategy is very effective against some of the best civs in this patch, Japan, India,
and Germany.
Against Japan, I suggest not
shipping cossacks early in the game and focusing on an all infantry strategy,
while against Germany,
you’ll definitely want to use those two cossack shipments in a hurry to counter
all of his crossbowmen.
Good luck and have fun!