No Villager Russia Rush- Sourced from Age Comm- Tad Patch 1.01a

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!