AOE3 Forums

The 'Sioux Early-Aggressive Raid'

Premise of the strat:

To utilize the Sioux’s speed cavalry and military shipments to damage your opponent’s economy more than you damage your own.

 
Build Order:

• At the start of the game you’re going to collect ONLY your food crates and queue 3 villagers. All villagers will go to food, with 1 villager herding any nearby huntables.

• Send your Warchief immediately towards the enemy base to steal any treasures around him. Why take close treasures when you’re much faster than him, right?
  

• Upon collecting the 800 food necessary for aging up you’ll want to choose the ‘Messenger' (Fast Age Up) tribal member. During the transition to Colonial you should have 6 villagers on food and 2 on gold.

• Once you’ve reached Colonial your first shipment should be 4 Axe Riders. Use these to raid enemy villagers and keep him from gathering resources. If he has somehow managed to herd everything into an easily defended position you can use these troops to help gather any large treasures on the map.

• The first 3 villagers you create in Colonial should go to gold, then after that villager coming out should head to wood so you can create a War Hut. (You have 6 on food, 5 on gold, then guys on wood until you can afford a War Hut)

• Your second shipment will be 3 Axe Riders, use these with your initial Axe Riders for additional raiding power, or on big treasure maps extra treasure gathering ability.

• Your 3^rd shipment will be 10 pistolero, you should have 500 gold just in time for this. Once you have the necessary 500 gold for these re-distribute your villagers to food and wood as you see fit for your army.

• At this point in the game you have options. One is that you used a War Hut and can mass a Cetan Bow/WarClub army with your Axe Riders an Pistolero. The other is to create Bow Riders and massively raid your opponent. This is very map dependent and civ dependent so using correct judgement here is crucial. Personally, against a non-musk civ I’ll go Cetan/War Club, and against Musk civs I’ll stick with Bow Riders but this is a matter of preference.

 
This strategy leads to extremely exciting and intense gameplay. I hope you enjoy it, and have fun killing all of those undefended villagers. :) 

might try it someday...

BTW, i like this kind of strat, as you said, it's funny to do, every game is different

Sporting_Lisbon:

Nice and creative strat, it's innovative, I hope it works ok. I suppose this shouldn't be done vs Japan?

maybe, that cherry ochard(that should be nerfed) makes japan very hard to raid, but you can force him to hide his vils on the TC anyway, you can also kill his explorers, to prevend him to build shrines all over the map

Im assuming this would kill the Ports outright?

Might try it, will first try it on a Port Comp on hard to get the gist of it...

Actually Matt, I think Ports may be actually better able to handle this rush more effectively then other civs.

I wouldn't try this vs Dutch, not if the Dutch knew what I was doing..... 

Yeah, a pike spam would murder this...

Maybe it would be good against Brits? Actually, its quite hard to think of a civ that this strat would work against...

GuitarHeroMatt:

Im assuming this would kill the Ports outright?

Might try it, will first try it on a Port Comp on hard to get the gist of it...

if you're fast enough, and your opponent doesn't do a very good discovery age, you can hit his second TC before it's finished.

once i rushed a guy and could kill his TC wagon before he got the chance to start building, of course he made some mistakes, like trying to building the TC far from his first(that's when i spotted the wagon) and making a slow age up

 but if he manages to build his TC(as he normally will) i don't think ports would do much better than other civs against that

ES_WaCkO_:

You can use it against Japan to prevent him from creating an early Barracks. Also, killing his explorers hampers his ability to shrine boom effectively. If you see he's making Ashigaru be sure to build defensive Cetan Bows and have some wood on hand for teepee's just in case he pushes.

Japans explorers have the OP smokescreen thing so you can't kill them.

Strat looks very promising against civs like ottos, dutch, and ports.