Dutch Skirmisher Spam Created by AirGuitarHero TAD1.01 patch

If you play dutch and enjoy team games then you will probably find that most of the time you will be asked to make skirmishers. This strat basically gives you a good eco whilst allowing you to spam skirmishers. Although you wont be able to make your first batch of skirmishers as soon as you generally would, normally your allies will be able to cover for you.

Discovery
Gather just coin and food crates and one wood crate. Put 5 vills on gold and queue vills asap to food. Your remaining vill should get food (remember to herd etc. etc.) You will age to colonial with 16 vills (3 of them shipped) which means you will need to gather 700 gold (400+ comes from crates) supplement your gathering with gold treasures. Age with the 400 wood politician.

Transition
Put 10 vills on wood and 6 stay on food. Gather any remaining wood crates that you didnt get before. You want to gather try to get 400 wood, but 350 is fine as well. Build a market and research gang saw and build a second house. Then once you have 150 wood after building these 2 buildings, put 5 villagers on gold and you should be able to begin villager production again as soon as you get to colonial. A further 50 wood is then gathered by your 5 remaining wood gatherers.

Colonial
Build a barracks if you have 200 wood, if not build once you have gathered enough of your age-up crates. Gather the crates with 3 of your 'wood-villagers'. Ship one bank wagon and build another bank. Leave a couple of vills on wood to build houses when you need them, so your villager ratio looks like this: 6 food; 2 wood; 8 coin. Villagers built from the tc go onto food or gold. You should now start to be able to spam skirmishers. The third card i normally send is 700 wood, i use this for a third bank, houses, market upgrades and possibly a dock, but it varies on your situation. Now you can have constant villager and skirmisher production.

What Now??
I can age anywhere between 8 and 15 minutes (depending on what the military situation is) to begin ruyter/cannon spam. I also get a 4th bank up asap and then try to max banks and get a lot of fishing boats, however if there is a lot of fighting going on you might need to continue to support with your skirmishers while hopefully your eco out-booms your oponents.

Notes
I use this strat whenever i play dutch in 3v3 games.
To adapt it to hussars, build a stable instead of a barracks and send 700 food instead of 700 wood, figure the rest out for yourself
This probably wont work in a 1v1 match, you get an army too late and any decent opponent would make quite a bit of cav against dutch

Cards
3 villagers [age 1]
1 bank wagon [age 2]
700 resource crates [age 2]
Banks of Rotterdam and Amsterdam [age 1]
Unique dutch improvements [age 2]
9 ruyters [age 3]
8 skirmighers [age 3]
8 halberdiers [age 3]
Factory wagons etc.

Not a bad strat, but I think youll have to fix some issues with it...

10 minutes with 3 banks is a fairly slow age up, and most enemies would be able to pressure you enough at this point to stop the strat in its tracks. At least comparitively with some of the faster builds.
For a skirmisher spam, this seems to lack a lot of skirmishers Cannons are better at field presense, but skirms are still needed in case the opponent gets culvs, or you simply favor microing more.

Other than that, its pretty good.

When i said i normally age up at 10 minutes, i meant more along the lines of i could, (sorry i will edit later) i normally have at least 30 skirmishers (some i would have lost in fighting) however many vills i can get in 10 mins + 3 (maybe 4 banks if i have resources to build) + possible fishing boats. Your eco is good and you army + your allies (i said before this strat isnt great for 1v1 games) should be able to hold of any enemy army in the two minutes (?) it takes to get to fortress. Also you can make more skirmishers while you age.
As for not having a lot of skirmishers, you can make continual batches of 5 skirmishers after 6:00-6:30 and if you get a second barracks up you can get more.
If you want i can get a recorded game and show you my strat??

I guess getting some early defenses would help a lot as Dutch, but in the end it depends on how long you want to stay in Colonial for.