Yes, yes, I know that everyone says that Ports are a piece of shit but with this strategy when used effectively is SOOO useful! It work against The rest of your deck you can do whatever the hell you want with BUT try to include both Factories and the Advanced Aresenal Card. How to do this strat: -Put ALL of your villies on your starting crates, when they are done, have ONE vill build a house. Put the rest of your vills on hunting and make SURE that they are protected. -Make 11 villagers before you go Colonial. Do anything you need too to go Colonial between 4-4:30! Age up with the 500 food Politician. -When you go Colonial you should make 3-4 villagers and put them ALL on food. Use your Gold shipments the SEECOND you get Colonial! Put ONE villager onto the food crates and the Gold crates. IF the crates come in too fast for one vill to handle it and collect them before the next ones come in then put a second vilager on them. -The crates from the Colonial Politician and the Shipments will furnish you most of the resources to go Hit the Fortress button Around 5-5:30 minutes. Age up with the Marksman Politician. -Once you press the button put ALL of your villagers on gold so that you will have enough gold to buy those Mercs. -Once you reach Fortress Age put your Town Center close to your enemies town. Have HC shipments delivered to it. If you have a shipment and the Gold then ship in the Corsairs. Them, combined with your Cassadores, can slaughter armies made up of Infantry, cavalry, or any combination of the two. If you have a battle, you should easily come out on top. -IF your enemy has no army or a very small army, slaughter it and kill their villagers! You should be getting a fair amount of XP from all of this and your next shipment should arrive shortly. -IF you do not have enough shipments then you can research Mercantilism. Try to avoid doing this because then you will need more gold. If you are drastically short of Gold then you can ship in the 1000 gold Card or the Mercenary Loyalty Card but I try to avoid sending those because they tend to slow my getting the Mercs. -IF you researched Mercantilism don't be afraid to use the shipments! Send in the Gold, send in some regular troops. If after all of this you have a spare shipment you can ship in you Surgeons. IF you have the Gold for Mercs but aren't sure whether you want to use it to go Industrial or ship in Mercs, SEND IN THE MERCS! They will kill you enemies army and villagers! If you are not sure which Mercs to pick, make sure that you know what your enemy has! If he has walled himself up then you should be sending in Infantry. If he is trying to raid your Eco then send in Mamelukes to rush around defending your villagers. -IF your enemy happens to reach Fortress Age immediately build a barracks and make Halberds, they will tear down buildings such as a Fort. If you opponent somehow manages to get a fort all the way up and running go Industrial ASAP and get some Mortars to take it down. -Once you have raided substantial portions of his villagers and seem to have a big economic advantage then you should go Industrial and ship in your Factories. -IF he used mills early on then you should stop trying to raid ASAP, and go for his TC. -The final push: Use you Mercs combined with Halberds to take down his TC and if there were enemy villagers garrisoned inside you sohuld not let ANY of them escape. I have had to many people simply run their villagers away and start building anew, causing me a lot of bother with finding them and then killing them, which is usually a big pain. -IF at the beginning of the game you have 100 gold from the crates you should put ALL of your villagers on gold and make Minutemen BEFORE you make new villagers! Use them to raid the shit out of your enemies villagers! Be VERY careful with your no-hp Minutemen. Keep your Explorer on attacking their TC so that if they garrison villagers the TC will just shoot your Explorer for the firsat shot! If they garrison their villagers in their TC or try to shoot your Minutemen after they have no HP then you should quickly run them away! Do not let ANY of your Minutemen be killed! It takes EXACTLY 6 Minutemen to kill a regular villager! If you kill even two of their villagers than you are ahead economically already and this will help you HUGELY because if they tried to kill your Minutemen or garrisoned their villagers inside their TC then you gained a HUGE victory in Colonial age time! I will continue to update this with new tips and whatnot to help you on the path of victory! [This message has been edited by Philbo1 (edited 12-20-2005 @ 03:29 PM).]
1) 600 Gold Card
2) 700 Gold Card
3) 11 Barbary Corsairs
1) 1000 Gold Card
2) 7 Ronin
3) Mercenary Loyalty Card
4) 7 Hackapell or other age 3 Merc cards
5) 2 Surgeons
-Unit Costs for 5-Philbo1-Explorer Micro-
B_E looks like a demented evil smiley.-Botolf
Stonewall Pwns