Chinese build order: Song Dynasty opening

[ARCAGNELL0]

Premise

Hello! It will not take much to know that I'm fairly new to AOE4 and am incredibly rusty at playing Real Time Strategy games, but I nevertheless bought this game after watching Turin start streaming it on YouTube and here I am.

I mainly tried to play Abbasid in the first...35ish hours in 1v1 skirmish, then got bored (and frustrated) and switched to the Chinese since they looked a lot more fun (there might be a vein of masochism in my civ choices, since they both do kinda suffer in the meta currenty), which brings me to this discussion I wanted to start.

I've recently had a VERY informative discussion with what I can only assume are much more experienced Chinese civ players about the ins and outs of the faction, so I wanted to create a separate discussion that will EXCLUSIVELY talk about a specific build order which I discussed with the folk in that thread, namely Cacomistle and Gundalf.

Without further ado, here's the actual reason for this discussion to exist:

Song Dynasty Open

The premise of this open
This is primarily to allow the civ to be rather flexible in what it wants to do against a variety of enemies, especially if the opponent plans to apply early 1 Town Center pressure. This build also should provide quite a big booming potential if the player can indeed transition to double TC and then go Castle age.

The "quirks" of this open
1)What this build does not do however is particularly endorse the use of the Repeater Crossbow unit, the Chuge-Nu.
While it can actually pose quite a threat against enemy archers and men at arms, possibly even rams (at least more than normal archers, especially if you have the upgrade advantage) the unit itself is prohibitively costly, sitting at a total of 120 resources (60 food, 30 wood and 30 gold) and can quickly turn an eco advantage you get from the Song dynasty into a resource pitfall that loses you the game
2)Apart from the real dynasty bonus we're looking for, the -35% villager production speed, the Dynasty also allows us to build a unique building, the Village. It increases the population limit by 40 despite only costing 100 wood to construct, making it twice as efficient as normal houses.

What's also interesting (and I have seen no case of it being used in such a way, anywhere) is that the Village also comes with 10 Garrison, potentially allowing a savvy Song Dynasty expert to use them instead of Keeps to keep villagers safe in case of light raiding, as they cost the same amount of wood as a Keep, without of course having any offensive/defensive upgrades of their own and no high vision range that sees though Stealth Forest. It does have 2000 health and 50 ranged armor tough.

Detailed build order
I've decided to include a full list of the town center activity and the villager shifting from building to other resource to make it as detailed as possible. You're welcome to provide me with what you think are better versions of builds that also use the Song Dynasty!


Edit: thanks to Cacomistle for providing a better build order pursuing the same thing, here it is :)

1. 5 vills to food, 1 vill to wood, lumber camp and mill near the berries are immediately built
   
2. Advisor is the first thing coming out the TC and it immediately goes to supervise the mill
   
3. 7th, 8th and 9th villagers go to food
   
4. Sheep are immediately moved to the mill and prioritized over berries by the villagers
   
5. Imperial Advisor needs to be microed to collect tax and drop it off every time the Mill reaches 20 tax
   
6. 10th villager builds a minig camp to gold, 11th villager goes to gold aswell
   
7. 12th and 13th villagers go to food, bringing the total of food villagers to 10
   
8. Barbican Of The sun begins building at 2:55 with 3 of the 10 food workers
   
9. 14th villager goes to food
   
10. 15th villager goes to gold, bringing the total of gold villagers up to 3
    
11. 16th villager builds a house and goes to food
    
12. 17th and 18th villagers go to fodd, bringing the total of food workers once the first landmark is completed up to 14
    
13. All 3 gold villagers are pulled to build the Imperial Academy at around 4:35
    
14. 19th villager goes to food, bringing the total of food villagers to 15 just before 6 villagers are pulled from food to wood, making it 7 wood villagers
    
15. 20th and 21st villager go to gold, bringing the total gold villagers once the ones building the academy return to 5
    
16. Imperial Academy finishes at around 5:40, thus beginning the Song Dynasty

And thus the "Song Dynasty Open" for the Chinese is concluded with somewhat of an open end, allowing anyone to choose what they want to do next. I have only done little skirmish practice (against the AI) to record what I was doing and to try and bring the landmark timings down as much as possible.

Let me know what you think of this build, I'll be sure to listen and correct/modify the build order with something as flexible but more efficient, should it be so!

[Cacomistle]

Publicado originalmente por Harris:

Aussie Drongo's tier list of unique units, I highlighted a moment where he talks about Chinese (12:23):
https://youtu.be/A11IbM9FNhA?t=742

Gotta say I pretty much agree with all the placements. Official has a lot of utility but requires solid micro to get value from. Grenadiers would be S if they actually showed up in games. Palace guard is solid, but nowhere close to being a great unit, it's mostly there to shield artillery. Fire lancer is niche as such can be tricky to get value from. Zhuge Nu is very underperforming for its cost right now and frankly I don't see it becoming particularly good even after it's made cheaper - it still won't be able to defeat those knights and m@a that dominate games. And nest of bees is only good if you've amassed them - at which point you're better off massing bombards or even springalds.

I think zhuge nu aren't actually that bad vs knights/maa. They do 3 damage regardless of armor (unlesd you get +1 and they don't) on a 1.25 second cd. They're higher dps per cost than archers even now vs armor and you don't need to get +1 on them (if your opponent is ram pushing they'll have a blacksmith and likely get +1 defense).

Also maa ram pushes honestly suck. I'd only be worried about archers with maa. Knights you wouldn't want archers against either, they're for sniping enemy archers that kill your spears. And that's where I think their cost gets in the way. They're slower and slightly shorter range, so you have to be able to take a few hits on the way into engaging. They're not that squishy, but a few hits still kills them because you'll likely have small numbers. A cost reduction could help a lot.

I hate nest of bees though. I think there are niche scenarios where they're fine, but they're slow, easy to react to, awful vs armor, and their hard counter (springalds) is weirdly fast super long range and gets spanmed every game.

[Harris]

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

I think zhuge nu aren't actually that bad vs knights/maa. They do 3 damage regardless of armor (unlesd you get +1 and they don't) on a 1.25 second cd. They're higher dps per cost than archers even now vs armor and you don't need to get +1 on them (if your opponent is ram pushing they'll have a blacksmith and likely get +1 defense).

The whole Song rush kinda hinges on Zhuge Nu, so its viability will be decided by how spammable they are come the patch. The fact they do their minimal damage of 1 three times even if the target has 50 ranged armor combined with their fast rate of fire and combined with the rams are going to get their hp nerfed means China might suddenly become much more viable early on.

[ARCAGNELL0]

I find tournament players abandoning the meta civ bandwagon and start to focus on underpowered ones like China quite hilarious. They're really banking on next week's balance changes huh? That's a lot of faith right there :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmXalgo_0I

Viper going with a double TC first then into Song is quite interesting, also to note that he went for all the econ upgrades before putting it don at around 7 minutes, with Song Dynasty starting a 9 minutes!

[Harris]

It's good that competetive players are trying to uncover the secrets of civs that might not be immediately obvious. After all, they are looking for something to give them an edge over the others. That being said, a more difficult civ does not necessarily mean a better civ. English and French are some strongest civs ON TOP of being easy to learn and easy to use. The difficulty itself mostly comes in the form of microing those prelates and officials and while it gives neat bonuses, those are not necessarily better than something straightforward, like French spitting out vills faster.

No matter the balance, China will remain a faction with poor choice of units until age III as well as an array of tempting booming opportunities it just can't pursue if it wants to stay in the game. Even if Zhuge Nu get cheaper, rushing Song weakens Chinese player and delays them from getting an army. And they will still struggle against knights and such.

China is meta in 4v4 right now because of those OP bombards and grenadiers that actually get to see use since the game does not end by age II. This is where China makes more sense. I feel the pros will eventually settle for those civs that offer immediate and consistent benefits and allow to gain the early advantage.

[ARCAGNELL0]

Publicado originalmente por Harris:

It's good that competetive players are trying to uncover the secrets of civs that might not be immediately obvious. After all, they are looking for something to give them an edge over the others. That being said, a more difficult civ does not necessarily mean a better civ. English and French are some strongest civs ON TOP of being easy to learn and easy to use. The difficulty itself mostly comes in the form of microing those prelates and officials and while it gives neat bonuses, those are not necessarily better than something straightforward, like French spitting out vills faster.

No matter the balance, China will remain a faction with poor choice of units until age III as well as an array of tempting booming opportunities it just can't pursue if it wants to stay in the game. Even if Zhuge Nu get cheaper, rushing Song weakens Chinese player and delays them from getting an army. And they will still struggle against knights and such.

China is meta in 4v4 right now because of those OP bombards and grenadiers that actually get to see use since the game does not end by age II. This is where China makes more sense. I feel the pros will eventually settle for those civs that offer immediate and consistent benefits and allow to gain the early advantage.

Yup, it's hard to argue with that logic.

China used to spawn with 8 vills instead of 6 but that was patched out before the full release, I honestly wish Relic did away with the French faster vill production speed and gave it to the Chinese instead (make it a -15% flat bonus across all ages and maybe nerf the Song Dynasty to only provide 25%) , that I think would solve a whole lot of different balance issues, namely

-how France can keep up the pressure to the point of almost being unsustainable for the enemy to contest, while also getting ahead on eco

-how china has all these eco boosting capabilities but is simply too slow early game to make use of it

I'm getting ahead of myself now tough, that said when even Delhi can be more aggressive than another civ in age 2 you KNOW that other civ has a lot of issues in feudal...

[Cacomistle]

If they for example made zhuge nu 80 resources, 5 minute song into supervised zhuge nu would counter pretty much anything. Even knights (you'd just have to be prepared to garrison vs the first knights that come in, tower your wood barbican your food and you're safe enough because a ram push is never gonna work if you actually get out significant zhuge nu numbers).

Besides, only 1 civ gets threatening feudal age knights. Rus technically get them too but I see rus constantly lose when they go feudal knights and the current FC build seems far stronger. Zhuge nu are already at least ok vs everything else (just not usually worth spending the gold on when you could instead spend it on castle age or eco upgrades).

[ARCAGNELL0]

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

If they for example made zhuge nu 80 resources, 5 minute song into supervised zhuge nu would counter pretty much anything. Even knights (you'd just have to be prepared to garrison vs the first knights that come in, tower your wood barbican your food and you're safe enough because a ram push is never gonna work if you actually get out significant zhuge nu numbers).

Besides, only 1 civ gets threatening feudal age knights. Rus technically get them too but I see rus constantly lose when they go feudal knights and the current FC build seems far stronger. Zhuge nu are already at least ok vs everything else (just not usually worth spending the gold on when you could instead spend it on castle age or eco upgrades).

Well, you're more or less getting an archer unit that requires an extra 400 food/200gold to unlock but that has less range and makes it up with a lot higher DPS and very cost effective blacksmith upgrades.

Archer spam would probably still work against them, but I can see them being very good combined with horsemen, since the latter will incentivize spears from the opponent which the Chuge-Nu is really good at deleting.

That said, I don't think even this admittedly ridiculous 80 resource Chuge-Nu would actually save you from English longbow spam. Good luck trying to catch those before they delete half your units or if they use their age 2 men at arms to screen for them if you get too close.

The same can be said for Royal Knight Pressure, altough they would hold up fine if combined with keeps and maybe some spearmen, assuming your eco is not severely crippled by the time you get to Song.

A Longbowman is 40 Food 50 wood = 90 Res
An Archer is 30 Food 50 wood = 80 Res
A crossbowman is 80 Food 40 Gold = 120 Res

I would hypothesize the cheaper Chuge-Nu will be around the same cost as an Archer, I would personally go for 40 Food 20 wood 20 gold.
It's not a direct upgrade over the Archer like the longbowman is, so it does not require to be as expensive, not to mention it would still require you to mine Gold, unlike the Longbowman.

Also, can you imagine Chuge-Nu imperial age spam with the spirit way? They'd become even better than Palace Guard are at running across the map and sniping enemy eco...

[Cacomistle]

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

If they for example made zhuge nu 80 resources, 5 minute song into supervised zhuge nu would counter pretty much anything. Even knights (you'd just have to be prepared to garrison vs the first knights that come in, tower your wood barbican your food and you're safe enough because a ram push is never gonna work if you actually get out significant zhuge nu numbers).

Besides, only 1 civ gets threatening feudal age knights. Rus technically get them too but I see rus constantly lose when they go feudal knights and the current FC build seems far stronger. Zhuge nu are already at least ok vs everything else (just not usually worth spending the gold on when you could instead spend it on castle age or eco upgrades).

Well, you're more or less getting an archer unit that requires an extra 400 food/200gold to unlock but that has less range and makes it up with a lot higher DPS and very cost effective blacksmith upgrades.

Archer spam would probably still work against them, but I can see them being very good combined with horsemen, since the latter will incentivize spears from the opponent which the Chuge-Nu is really good at deleting.

That said, I don't think even this admittedly ridiculous 80 resource Chuge-Nu would actually save you from English longbow spam. Good luck trying to catch those before they delete half your units or if they use their age 2 men at arms to screen for them if you get too close.

The same can be said for Royal Knight Pressure, altough they would hold up fine if combined with keeps and maybe some spearmen, assuming your eco is not severely crippled by the time you get to Song.

A Longbowman is 40 Food 50 wood = 90 Res
An Archer is 30 Food 50 wood = 80 Res
A crossbowman is 80 Food 40 Gold = 120 Res

I would hypothesize the cheaper Chuge-Nu will be around the same cost as an Archer, I would personally go for 40 Food 20 wood 20 gold.
It's not a direct upgrade over the Archer like the longbowman is, so it does not require to be as expensive, not to mention it would still require you to mine Gold, unlike the Longbowman.

Also, can you imagine Chuge-Nu imperial age spam with the spirit way? They'd become even better than Palace Guard are at running across the map and sniping enemy eco...

Against english you could pretty easily just open with 2-3 horsemen then song dynasty. Or even just a tower or 2. I think that's a pretty reasonable opening even now (its just worrying later into feudal, because you probably won't get a larger army than them before you run out of food and english will just kill you when you have to farm transition).

I personally think professional scouts makes sense against english because you're probably getting the stables anyways. If they try to longbow allin, you can just deny it with horsemen instead of song dynasty and you'll probably annihilate it. If they start adding spearmen you'd probably be ok just towering your wood/food (whichever doesn't have the barbican) and mixing horsemen+archer+zhuge nu (even if they deny gold you can currently produce off a non supervised range with just tax, so if they were 80 resources you definitely could).

Maybe both professional scouts + song would be too greedy but you could definitely get away with stables into song into range or maybe even just range+song if they were actually that cheap.

If you want to run across the map and snipe eco I think fire lancers do that the best. I wouldn't use zhuge nu for that (fire lancers are a lot faster, aoe down vills so they kill faster, and they can burn down buildings when villagers garrison. Zhuge nu would just be better in direct fights).

If you do a decent build order there's no way your eco will be crippled before song dynasty vs knights btw. You can have song dynasty started before the first knight even hits. Barbican on your food, if you're really that scared tower your wood and abandon gold (you don't need it for spears anyways), they can't touch your eco. I prefer second tc vs french though because it gives an extra garrison point and if you gather like an extra 50-100 stone 1-2 handcannon towers are a pretty good deterrent to knight raids, so you force the french player to at least diverge from blind raids with knights (although they can kind of secure their hunts pretty easily).

[ARCAGNELL0]

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

-snip-

Against english you could pretty easily just open with 2-3 horsemen then song dynasty. Or even just a tower or 2. I think that's a pretty reasonable opening even now (its just worrying later into feudal, because you probably won't get a larger army than them before you run out of food and english will just kill you when you have to farm transition).

I personally think professional scouts makes sense against english because you're probably getting the stables anyways. If they try to longbow allin, you can just deny it with horsemen instead of song dynasty and you'll probably annihilate it. If they start adding spearmen you'd probably be ok just towering your wood/food (whichever doesn't have the barbican) and mixing horsemen+archer+zhuge nu (even if they deny gold you can currently produce off a non supervised range with just tax, so if they were 80 resources you definitely could).

Maybe both professional scouts + song would be too greedy but you could definitely get away with stables into song into range or maybe even just range+song if they were actually that cheap.

If you want to run across the map and snipe eco I think fire lancers do that the best. I wouldn't use zhuge nu for that (fire lancers are a lot faster, aoe down vills so they kill faster, and they can burn down buildings when villagers garrison. Zhuge nu would just be better in direct fights).

I don't find that low amount of horsemen to be any effective against even just an equal number of longbowmen. Basic scoot and shoot micro combined with their damage per shot and possibly even an offensive keep more or less reqjuires you to have more horsemen than the english has longbows, and horsemen are 120 resources compared to the 90 of Longbowmen. This is also before inserting Pailings or the Campfire into the equation.

I really want to like Keeps against England, especially the handcannon upgraded ones, but a single one of those is 100 wood, 25 gold and 50 stone (175 resources in total, almost 2 longbowmen) to set up across (68*0.75+30=)79 seconds, assuming you only have 1 worker on it.

This also means you're going to need to mine stone or aternatively build a market and obtain 100 of it for your keeps that way. Which is not a good thing to do when you're being rushed and you need all your vills mostly on food to pump out horsemen.

It's a static defence that can't even match the Longbow range until it gets the handcannon and has pitiful enough health to go down to even just men at arms, unless you're planning on investing an additional 100 stone to Fortify outpost, which also takes an extra 30 seconds and I find to rarely be worth it, especially considering you're going to need that stone for a second TC.

It's a lot more decent against French and Rus knight harass and can keep them off of you for a while until they get a ram.

It will be interesting to see how the rush tactics are affected now that the Battering Ram is getting a well deserved nerf in feudal but actually becomes more usable in castle-imperial.

Man, I really wish
-Chinese could build Keeps cheaper and have their upgrades take 25% less to go through
-have the arrowslits upgrade only require wood and food
-have the handcannon upgrade for the chinese only require wood and gold
-buff the fortify outpost tech across all civs, it basically NEVER gets used.

Wishful thinking, I know. It's not like anyone but TheViper does the tower rushes anymore, really. They're not all that effective.

[Harris]

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

That said, I don't think even this admittedly ridiculous 80 resource Chuge-Nu would actually save you from English longbow spam.

No, no it wouldn't. The only feasible use of them I can theorize is to put them on a stone wall to boost their range and durability, and then make use of their fire rate and sheer numbers to shut down ram pushes, as they can be surprisingly good against rams especially if those do get their hp nerfed.

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

Also, can you imagine Chuge-Nu imperial age spam with the spirit way? They'd become even better than Palace Guard are at running across the map and sniping enemy eco...

In my experience by imperial the main problem is the popcap, not resources. If you could get 100 Zhuge or 100 lancers, what would you rather get? Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Against english you could pretty easily just open with 2-3 horsemen then song dynasty.

I'm afraid it's either going all-in with defenses or focus on booming and hope you won't get wiped out by 10th minute. There's no middle ground here. 2-3 horsemen will get wrecked before they get to deal any real damage.

[Cacomistle]

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Against english you could pretty easily just open with 2-3 horsemen then song dynasty. Or even just a tower or 2. I think that's a pretty reasonable opening even now (its just worrying later into feudal, because you probably won't get a larger army than them before you run out of food and english will just kill you when you have to farm transition).

I personally think professional scouts makes sense against english because you're probably getting the stables anyways. If they try to longbow allin, you can just deny it with horsemen instead of song dynasty and you'll probably annihilate it. If they start adding spearmen you'd probably be ok just towering your wood/food (whichever doesn't have the barbican) and mixing horsemen+archer+zhuge nu (even if they deny gold you can currently produce off a non supervised range with just tax, so if they were 80 resources you definitely could).

Maybe both professional scouts + song would be too greedy but you could definitely get away with stables into song into range or maybe even just range+song if they were actually that cheap.

If you want to run across the map and snipe eco I think fire lancers do that the best. I wouldn't use zhuge nu for that (fire lancers are a lot faster, aoe down vills so they kill faster, and they can burn down buildings when villagers garrison. Zhuge nu would just be better in direct fights).

I don't find that low amount of horsemen to be any effective against even just an equal number of longbowmen. Basic scoot and shoot micro combined with their damage per shot and possibly even an offensive keep more or less reqjuires you to have more horsemen than the english has longbows, and horsemen are 120 resources compared to the 90 of Longbowmen. This is also before inserting Pailings or the Campfire into the equation.

I really want to like Keeps against England, especially the handcannon upgraded ones, but a single one of those is 100 wood, 25 gold and 50 stone (175 resources in total, almost 2 longbowmen) to set up across (68*0.75+30=)79 seconds, assuming you only have 1 worker on it.

This also means you're going to need to mine stone or aternatively build a market and obtain 100 of it for your keeps that way. Which is not a good thing to do when you're being rushed and you need all your vills mostly on food to pump out horsemen.

It's a static defence that can't even match the Longbow range until it gets the handcannon and has pitiful enough health to go down to even just men at arms, unless you're planning on investing an additional 100 stone to Fortify outpost, which also takes an extra 30 seconds and I find to rarely be worth it, especially considering you're going to need that stone for a second TC.

It's a lot more decent against French and Rus knight harass and can keep them off of you for a while until they get a ram.

It will be interesting to see how the rush tactics are affected now that the Battering Ram is getting a well deserved nerf in feudal but actually becomes more usable in castle-imperial.

Man, I really wish
-Chinese could build Keeps cheaper and have their upgrades take 25% less to go through
-have the arrowslits upgrade only require wood and food
-have the handcannon upgrade for the chinese only require wood and gold
-buff the fortify outpost tech across all civs, it basically NEVER gets used.

Wishful thinking, I know. It's not like anyone but TheViper does the tower rushes anymore, really. They're not all that effective.

You don't need the handcannon upgrade on the keeps against a civ like english. Just the arrows and the garrison point do fine. You obviously will need army too (if you only have keeps they can just walk under a bit, pick off a vill, then back up and campfire) but I'm referring mostly to like the first 5-6 minutes.

I just tested out a song dynasty build, I can have song dynasty started by around 4:30, near immediately after I hit feudal so probably around when longbow production starts. I had a stable at 5:50, so I could have had 4-5 horsemen by around 6:30. Considering you have the barbican of the sun, english might be able to like force a villager to run away or something but they shouldn't be able to kill a villager before then. 4-5 horsemen and a tower on your gold should mean you're fine against a longbow attack. If they add spears it might get annoying, not entirely sure how it would play out but that's when you can just switch to pure archer yourself, and if you survive long enough you should be ok.


I think maybe even just tower your gold mine and go for scouts with the professional scouts upgrade. You can get that and start off with picking up a bit of their hunt by like 7 minutes, and if you force them into a ram allin you can throw down a few towers, put the scouts in the towers, and focus down their spears/archers, then kill with your own army. I think it'd probably be a tough fight (and you could run out of food during the fight if you're forced into using the scouts defensively), but towers+vills to kill the archers do pretty well even against longbow allins and if they spend that many resources on fast ram+siege engineers they shouldn't be very far ahead in total resources.

I'm not sure how that plays out. I'm pretty sure you can get away with song dynasty against english, and maybe even with adding in professional scouts. Just might require you to have better micro than them.

I do not think handcannon slits are good vs english btw. They're worse against unarmored than arrow slits and english is likely to hit you with unarmored longbow. I would only build them vs french or a rus that goes knights but honestly rus knights is a worse version of french so I'm just not scared of that. A regular tower is good enough to just prevent them from running past and going for your villagers and gives a place to garrison, and that's all you need from them. I'm not remotely scared of maa so I don't really care whether towers can kill those.

[Cacomistle]

Publicado originalmente por Harris:

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

That said, I don't think even this admittedly ridiculous 80 resource Chuge-Nu would actually save you from English longbow spam.

No, no it wouldn't. The only feasible use of them I can theorize is to put them on a stone wall to boost their range and durability, and then make use of their fire rate and sheer numbers to shut down ram pushes, as they can be surprisingly good against rams especially if those do get their hp nerfed.

Publicado originalmente por Cacomistle:

Against english you could pretty easily just open with 2-3 horsemen then song dynasty.

I'm afraid it's either going all-in with defenses or focus on booming and hope you won't get wiped out by 10th minute. There's no middle ground here. 2-3 horsemen will get wrecked before they get to deal any real damage.

2-3 horsemen is the number I'm saying by like 6 minutes. Its to deal with them just rallying longbow. You can go song dynasty and still have like 20 units around 10 minute mark, and if you see a ram push just throw down 3-4 towers. 3-4 towers with vills in them focus firing down archers + 20 or so horsemen+archers can beat a say 30 unit ram allin.

Its fine to get more eco than your opponent without just being incredibly stupid. Go song dynasty, scout them, if they go 2nd tc throw down a 2nd tc yourself (or get professional scouts and steal their hunt then go second tc). If they don't, build units, being just ahead instead of stupidly ahead on vills is fine. If they're going castle, go castle. In all these scenarios, you should come out ok (and probably pretty far ahead if they rush 2 tc, I think only abbassids could reasonably try to boom with chinese). I'm pretty sure fast song dynasty doesn't have a build order loss to anything, at the very least not at the level of any one typing here.

80 cost zhuge nu would also I'm pretty sure just dominate everything. They have over double the dps longbows do, and more hp, so if they also cost less literally all you'd have to do is not die outright and you just kill them later feudal.

[ARCAGNELL0]

Song Dynasty by 4:30 sounds amazing Cacomistle, compared to my current 7:40. What did you do to get there so fast exactly? Did you go for a fast mill on the deer?

I might just edit the OP with that build you have there since it achieves the same result over 3 minutes earlier...

[Cacomistle]

Publicado originalmente por ARCAGNELL0:

Song Dynasty by 4:30 sounds amazing Cacomistle, compared to my current 7:40. What did you do to get there so fast exactly? Did you go for a fast mill on the deer?

I might just edit the OP with that build you have there since it achieves the same result over 3 minutes earlier...

I go 1 wood 5 food, instant imperial official supervise the mill (and return gold whenever you have 20, I personally force drop offs with 3 vills to generate gold, something I do to still start age 2 before 3 minutes without gold, but its probably not good when you're mining gold anyways), put everything on food, when you get to 40 wood rally the next 2 vills to gold (and obviously build the gold mine at 50 wood), place age 2 landmark when you can, build it with 2 vills, as you're going up rally a 3rd villager to gold.

If you don't do force drop offs to generate gold like I did (and you probably shouldn't), you would probably just rally a 3rd vill on gold slightly earlier. I think I got the gold before the food anyways though.

I recommend hotkeying the imperial official so you can instantly go back to them for tax drop offs. Also taking berries is ok for your first drop off if you can't get sheep there in time, but obviously take sheep. Click them past the mill to get them as close as possible, and kill them at once with 1 vill each or your vills do this stupid thing where they run the entire way around the mill to get to the other side of a sheep because they won't go to living sheep.

You could also place the mill right next to the tc so you don't have to walk as far, it makes your early eco a tiny bit better, but I like the flexibility of putting the mill on berries personally. It means you don't have to return your scout to your base fast, because if you run out of sheep because your scout is trying to get more deer its a slight inefficiency rather than game ending.

Also I technically had the resources at 4:35 and only placed it at like 4:42, but I think if you did it perfectly earlier than 4:30 is achievable.

If you wanna see it you don't even have to friend me actually, you can search someone through the add friend then just go to their profile and match history. At this moment its I think the 3rd most recent game I played (vs the ai to try the build out), the most recent one was professional scouts into song dynasty.

[ARCAGNELL0]

Professional Scouts into song Dynasty is quite nice. Does this also mean you got a stable up to not clog the TC production with scouts?

I'll try the build out right away!