Ooh! Ooh! I've been wondering about this for a while and have tried it a few times, but I can't seem to get it to work too well. I wanna see what you can do with it. Got the idea from the Dutch Wildcard Strategy in the Strategy Section, then realized that you could get a bunch of banks with it. Maybe it's just not possible, but I dunno. :P
Anyway, here is the gist of it. Standard age up. Age up with either 400 wood (if you started with 100 wood) or 500 food (if you started with 200 wood). Put all villagers on gold. If you aged with 500 food build a church, get wood treasures. If you aged with 400 wood get the wood and build a church. Get mercantilism ASAP. Ship the bank wagon, ship a defensive card or 4 villagers or 700 wood (depending on the situation). Start queueing villagers one by one to wood (if you aged with food) or food (if you aged with wood) once you hit ~900 gold. Ship 700 food, ship South Sea Bubble. The goal is to get 1050 wood from SSB, and to have 1050 food when it arrives. Build three banks. It might just be faster to gather the resources for four banks instead. I dunno.
EDIT: Pretty much wrote out the strategy already looking back at it. Can you try it out and see if you can make changes to it to make it faster? I wasn't sure about the aging with 500 food thing, so maybe you should just age with 400 wood always. Thanks in advance though.
Meh. I come and go I guess.
I no longer play on ESO. Just GameRanger.
Also playing Starcraft II Beta though.
My account name on SCII is Caiaphas.wisdom.[This message has been edited by Masquerade Pig (edited 12-27-2009 @ 10:59 AM).]