Post by CotF | Amhaye™ on Aug 29, 2012 16:11:29 GMT 1
While Spain's Crossbow Pikeman rush is seldom used, it can be quite powerful when opponents get careless and assume you will play a musket/hussar or FF strategy. For starters, Spain can muster nearly the same number of crossbows as a French player can while only using one barracks. This strategy works on both TAD and Vanilla with very little changes. It's only slightly stronger and faster on TAD FP 1.2a due to Spain's free market wood upgrade from the start of the game, but changes are very little. Required Cards: Discovery Age: 3 Villagers, Colonial Militia, TEAM Archaic Soldier Training Colonial Age: 4 Villagers, 5 Villagers, 700 Wood, 600 Wood, 8 Pikemen, Advanced Arsenal, 700 Gold Fortress Age: 1000 Wood, 2 Falconets Industrial Age: 1 Factory, Industrial Revolution Build Order: Discovery Age: With your 6 starting villagers, move 4 villagers immediately gather food crates, while 2 go directly to hunting. As soon as you have exactly 100 food spam the villager queue, then move 3 of your crate villagers to hunting. The remaining crate villager will gather the remaining food crates, as well as your 100 wood crate. Build a house as soon as it's collected. Use your exploerer to scout out around your base, and be sure to keep him alive. The Spanish explorer is one of the best in the game, as it can train war dogs to help in battles, either making or breaking a successful Colonial strategy. Start to herd in your 2nd and third hunts, as they are crucial to the success of this strategy. Your first shipment will be 3 villagers. Continue producing villagers until you have 16 at the 3 minute mark. You'll be aging with the Governor (200 gold and a tower). As soon as you click on the advance button move 10 villagers to wood, 2 villagers to forward base, while keeping the rest on food. Queue up 1 villager at the Town Center. You should gain another shipment while aging, in which case you will send TEAM Archaic Soldier Training. While in transition from Discovery to Colonial, you'll want to chop enough wood to build a market, and research all the first tier market upgrades, build a house, and 200 wood for your barracks which you'll immediately build upon aging. Colonial Age: Immediately upon aging you need to do 4 things within about 5-10 seconds. First begin building the barracks with your 2 forward base villagers. Then immediately ship 700 wood, followed by moving all your wood villagers back to food. Finally move that tower wagon to your forward base, and have one villager collect the 200 gold crates you aged up with. As soon as you barracks is built, you can choose what your first batch of units will be. You'll have enough resources to train either crossbowman or pikeman or, 1 group of muskets. That's right I said muskets. You have 200 gold from aging, and you are still waiting for 700 wood to arrive. To keep unit production absolutely constant, I recommend training muskets as your first group of units, simply for the reason they are extremely versatile, and allow you to fight any other unit your opponent may have since muskets don't have a true hard counter till skirmishers and cannon come into play. It also gives your opponent the impression that you may opt for a musket hussar strategy, while in fact, you won't be making anymore muskets unless the game goes a longer than 10-12 minutes. You can also save that 200 gold, and use it to get the 2nd tier hunting upgrade once 700 wood, which will obviously give you a superior economy than going the musket route. Either way you decide to go, wether a musket or archaic infantry start, race in with that first batch and try to pick off a villager or two, then immediately retreat. After that first batch is created, you should have another shipment nearly ready which will be 600 wood. All new villagers created will be put on to wood from this point. Keep up the pressure, and try to keep the opponent contained and off hunting. Just race in back and forth with your crossbows and keep the pikes nearby and use only when you see cavalry approaching. Your next shipment after this will be either 8 Pikemen, if you need the troops asap, or as I prefer to go, the 5 villager followed by 4 villager route, as this allows you to dual barracks, or add in a stable for hussars. If your opponent has done some sort of fortress strategy, I recommend you kill their age up units with your mass of crossbows, which trust me you will have a lot, and then retreating, and sending 700 gold to age yourself. Fortress Age: Here, your first shipment is going to be 2 cannons almost always especially if you ran into an opponent that performed an FF. You'll want those two cannons to help knock out any cannon they may have, and if they've massed infantry themselves, all the better reason to send the cannon. If they've gone heavy on cavalry, age with the pikemen, then you'll just have to hope you kept your age 2 pikemen alive, and protect that cannon to the best of your ability. Once they arrive you'll need to push on your opponent again. In most cases though, you'll almost never get age 3 with this strategy. From here on out you'll need to adapt to whatever your opponent might do. Good Luck, and Have Fun.