I've been reading a lot of articles and trying different things, and had a look today at a British strat called "BWiTK" or something like that. The one where you call in the knights from the church using the unique card. I liked it, but wanted to try and improve it a bit and remove the need for a trading post early on, so I developed the following strategy. Now bear in mind, I've never played on ESO, so please don't flame me if this is horrible, I'm wanting to get thoughts from people who have played on ESO a lot.
This strat will have you some very nasty highlanders (11) in under 8 minutes, with 4 shipments available in the fortress age in under 9 minutes with the Brits.
Build:
Grab the crates you start with, send one vill to herd and have the other 5 grab and the resources there. Once they are done, send four of the five to join the hunter and the other fella to build a house. A new vil will pop out of the house, send both the builder and the new one to hunt, keep your villies queued and ALL going to hunt. Have your explorer pick up 2-3 treasures if possible, try to grab a food treasure too.
On your first card, send for the 3 villies. Continue to create them at the town centre, until you have 13+3 from shipment. 16 total. The last of the 16 villies should pop out almost exactly on 3:00 if you've kept up with time, and you should have just enough food to advance now, so hit the button and take the polititian with 500 food (this politian may not be available until a higher level home city). Now leave all 16 on food for the moment, queue two and only two villies on the TC for a pop of 18/20.
After having queued these two vills, your goal is too save up 800 food. 800, no more. Anymore we burn seconds. Start taking them off food as you approach 800. Your second shipment will arrive at about 2/3 of the way to colonial, so save it for the age up.
By the time your age up happens to colonial, you should just have made the 800 food. At this point move several (5-6) of your villagers to the SECOND closest gold mine to your TC, and the rest of them to the closest gold mine to your TC. Grab 3 to quickly swipe up the 500 food that appears then straight to gold as well. Also grab the 700 gold card straight away on advancement.
So shortly after colonial, you will have gathered the 500 food, for 1300 total. 12-13 of your vils will be on the gold mine closest to your TC and 5-6 on the second closest.
At this point, those two vills we queued during the advancement will be well on their way, set the gather point for that same close gold mine. If those 5-6 vils on the second gold mine are looking vulnerable, move them to the safer one only when the mine (the further one) is less than 1600. You need 400 from that outer mine.
Now, your two villies will be done, grab that 700 gold from the shipment and advance immediatly, using the politian who gives you 400 wood + a caravel. EVERYBODY on gold now, no exceptions. All 18. Queue one more villager with that remaining 100 food for a pop of 19/20. If you do this right, you should hit the fotress button at dead on 5:30.
It takes 90 second to hit fortress, so you'll be there at 7:00. Now you will have amassed a tremendous amount of gold very quickly during the age up. When you hit fortress you want to do the following:
-Call in the 11 highlander card at a cost of 1200 gold. LEAVE everyone mining. This card may be slightly (10 seconds or so) late, so if you can get an extra exp treasure, you can save a tiny amoutn of time here.
-Take three vils and grab just enough wood from the piles to build a church. Once you have 250, send two back to the gold, and have one build a church. Ignore the rest for now. We will use that to start our manor boom later. Alternativly, it an be used to build a market.
By 7:45, those crazy highlander merc's should have arrived and you should have amassed 500 in coin with roughly 500 left in the mine while they where coming.
Continue on the gold till you hit 1000, this will take about another 45 second. The mine will run out about when you hit 1000, and hit mercantilism in the church. This will go very quickly, should be done in under 9 minutes, and gives you a total of FOUR shipments.
So we are now under 9 minutes, have a crazy bunch of 11 highlanders to defend from whatever is thrown at us (those guys are really really strong, no german ulhans or streletes will touch them), we have four shipments to bring stuff into our town (could be 1000 gold or food, 2 falc's, a fort, etc...), and we are the Brits, so we have an amazing boom ready to happen while the troops fend any problems off.
It does seem very vulnerable to a rush though. Those russians or Otto's in there at 5:30 will cause hell with this strat.
Id be interested to hear opinion of some people here with more ESO experience that me as to how they think this would go online?