The Saracen Scout Rush
Contributed by Administrator
Friday, 29 September 2006
Last Updated Friday, 29 September 2006
This is a strategy I (HC_Shanks__) developed about 4-6 weeks ago (can't remember exactly when) after playing around
with some of my resource gathering rate numbers. I'd read lots of posts at MFO and AOKH about using the Saracen
market bonus heavily in ORDER to gain an economic advantage. However, I always wrote those posts off because they
all either used the stone-for-gold-for-food method or went super-heavy on gold mining. Either way, they tried to
completely avoid farming and got all of their food FROM the market. I won't go INTO a lot of details on why I think that's
foolish; suffice it to say that there's a big long-term sacrifice made by spending all of your stone and gold at the market.
However, I was in the process of trying to develop a feudal strategy for every civ so that I wouldn't be stuck not knowing
what to do with a random civ (which had just happened a couple of times) and I decided to give Saracen marketeering
another try. Here are some of the conclusions I came to:
1) The real VS cost of buying food FROM the market is much less than farming for quite a while. The buying price of food
that is break-even FROM a VS standpoint with farming is 145, since it costs 2.84VS/g and 4.12VS/f. A Saracen can buy
2000 food before that method is no longer efficient. This can allow the Saracen to research horse collar before farming
and delay needing to get wheelbarrow, allowing for more villagers early on and more efficient farms later.
2) Selling wood and using that gold to buy food is also more cost-effective than using that villager to go FROM
lumberjacking to farming. The key to this is efficient wood pits. I have some DATA on the efficiency of woodchopping
over time with different numbers of lumberjacks per camp (not on MFO yet, I'm not done with it) and with 6 vils/lumber
camp and double-bit axe, the gather rate is 0.391w/sec as a base rate. Note: This is significantly higher than the values
recorded in my Real Resource Gathering Rates because that value is for 12 vils at a lumber camp. At 0.391w/sec the VS
cost is 2.56VS/w. Compare this to farming, which has a VS cost of 4.12VS/f. That's a 40% difference! Unfortunately there
is still a 5% penalty so it's not possible to do a direct 100w=100f correlation. Still, my calculations SHOW that selling
1100W and buying 800F with that gold (43 gold left over, which would cost 122VS to mine) costs 2694VS (I subtracted
122VS since you get that gold free ), compared to 3296VS it takes to gather 700F FROM farms. This was the empirical
break-even point where the VS difference between farming and buying food FROM sold wood started declining. Although
selling wood for gold is more efficient than gold mining as a means of gold collection only for the first 3 trades, wood is
typically not a resource that is exhaustible so the long- term effects of selling wood are far less.
3) The VS savings can be HUGE. The Mongols are considered the fastest civ with their hunting bonus, which gives them
about 900VS savings compared to baseline. As a point of reference, this can lead to an extra 300+ wood if that's how the
VS savings are spent. However, with proper marketeering the Saracens can save at least that many VS or possibly even
more. Buying 1200F at the market using only gold that's mined costs 3972VS. Compare this to gathering 1200F by
farming; it costs 4944VS. That's a 972VS savings, or more than the Mongol bonus. If you instead sell wood down to 76
and use gold mining to generate the rest of your gold to buy 1200F, it costs 4114VS, for a 830VS savings. The tradeoff
for the reduced efficiency is that you save over 900 gold that can be mined later, and some of that lost efficiency is gotten
back because you don't need to have as many gold miners all crowding around the gold mine.
Now that you have the background (hopefully not too confusing), here's the build ORDER for a Saracen scout rush:
- Villagers 1-6 sheep
- Villagers 7-9 mill, berries
- Villagers 10-11 straggler trees
- Villager 12 lure boar #1
- Loom en route to boar
- Villagers 13-16 wood, build lumber camp when possible
- Lure boar #2
- Villagers 17-19 sheep
- Villagers 20-22 mining camp, gold
- Click Feudal
While in feudal transition, build a barracks and a 2nd lumber camp. You should have 10 food gatherers at the TC (7 boar,
3 sheep); 4 go to gold, 6 go to the 2nd lumber camp. You should have 7 gold miners, 3 berry pickers, and 12
lumberjacks. Arrive in feudal 10:45-11:15.
In feudal:
Excalibur Clan
http://excalibur.haba.dk Powered by Joomla! Generated: 19 January, 2009, 14:22
Build the market FIRST, then build a stable and start queuing scouts. Buy as much food as you can and buy double-bit
axe. Keep making villagers and buy horse collar ASAP. Your first 2 villagers go to wood, then build farms with every
subsequent villager. Note: if deer are close by you can send your berry pickers to hunt deer and put new villagers on
berries instead of HAVING them farm, giving you a bit more wood. You should be able to have 4 scouts (including your
original) before 14:00 and 8 scouts by 16:00. I haven't built more than 8 scouts because by then they'll have reacted with
spears. I will usually build an archery range and blacksmith as wood allows. I have researched wheelbarrow around the
16:00 mark and gone castle immediately afterwards with around 37 villagers and a 20-21 minute castle time.
The advantages of this strat are fourfold: one, you get to use Saracens in a competitive situation against civs that are
typically considered weaker late-game than the Saracens. Two, you aren't penalized by having a strong-late game civ;
your economy will be keeping up with a Mongol or Mayan player. Three, the amount of deception can be very strong.
Careful scouting pre-feudal can actually work to your opponent's disadvantage, since finding 7 gold miners in dark almost
always means archers, and while skirmishers counter archers, they get beaten soundly by scouts. It can also be
extremely surprising to an opponent to see only a few scattered farms, yet food-heavy scouts and a quick castle time.
Four, you can achieve these goals without completely sacrificing your gold or stone supply. By only delaying farming until
feudal instead of not farming at all until castle, you only need to spend 300-400 gold, which will not cripple you later on.
The disadvantages to this strat are relatively few. HAVING the market up immediately means that even a tower rush
pushing you off of wood won't kill your econ, and if the enemy has spears waiting for your scouts, you can easily regroup
and make archers, or go straight to castle and make x-bows. It is a fairly flexible build in that if you find the enemy is
doing something unusual, you can always adjust your economy to compensate. Although the VS savings FROM
marketeering can make up the VS advantage a Mongol has, there is the cost of gold spent that the Mongol doesn't have
to deal with, so that's a disadvantage for the Saracen. However, the tradeoff is that the Saracen has a much more
diversified imperial age army with a wider range of upgrades.
Note: One great advantage of going gold/wood heavy and using the market to generate food is that you can use this start
for any kind of feudal attack (except a tower rush).
By HC_Shanks__
source
Excalibur Clan
http://excalibur.haba.dk Powered by Joomla! Generated: 19 January, 2009, 14:22
Contributed by Administrator
Friday, 29 September 2006
Last Updated Friday, 29 September 2006
This is a strategy I (HC_Shanks__) developed about 4-6 weeks ago (can't remember exactly when) after playing around
with some of my resource gathering rate numbers. I'd read lots of posts at MFO and AOKH about using the Saracen
market bonus heavily in ORDER to gain an economic advantage. However, I always wrote those posts off because they
all either used the stone-for-gold-for-food method or went super-heavy on gold mining. Either way, they tried to
completely avoid farming and got all of their food FROM the market. I won't go INTO a lot of details on why I think that's
foolish; suffice it to say that there's a big long-term sacrifice made by spending all of your stone and gold at the market.
However, I was in the process of trying to develop a feudal strategy for every civ so that I wouldn't be stuck not knowing
what to do with a random civ (which had just happened a couple of times) and I decided to give Saracen marketeering
another try. Here are some of the conclusions I came to:
1) The real VS cost of buying food FROM the market is much less than farming for quite a while. The buying price of food
that is break-even FROM a VS standpoint with farming is 145, since it costs 2.84VS/g and 4.12VS/f. A Saracen can buy
2000 food before that method is no longer efficient. This can allow the Saracen to research horse collar before farming
and delay needing to get wheelbarrow, allowing for more villagers early on and more efficient farms later.
2) Selling wood and using that gold to buy food is also more cost-effective than using that villager to go FROM
lumberjacking to farming. The key to this is efficient wood pits. I have some DATA on the efficiency of woodchopping
over time with different numbers of lumberjacks per camp (not on MFO yet, I'm not done with it) and with 6 vils/lumber
camp and double-bit axe, the gather rate is 0.391w/sec as a base rate. Note: This is significantly higher than the values
recorded in my Real Resource Gathering Rates because that value is for 12 vils at a lumber camp. At 0.391w/sec the VS
cost is 2.56VS/w. Compare this to farming, which has a VS cost of 4.12VS/f. That's a 40% difference! Unfortunately there
is still a 5% penalty so it's not possible to do a direct 100w=100f correlation. Still, my calculations SHOW that selling
1100W and buying 800F with that gold (43 gold left over, which would cost 122VS to mine) costs 2694VS (I subtracted
122VS since you get that gold free ), compared to 3296VS it takes to gather 700F FROM farms. This was the empirical
break-even point where the VS difference between farming and buying food FROM sold wood started declining. Although
selling wood for gold is more efficient than gold mining as a means of gold collection only for the first 3 trades, wood is
typically not a resource that is exhaustible so the long- term effects of selling wood are far less.
3) The VS savings can be HUGE. The Mongols are considered the fastest civ with their hunting bonus, which gives them
about 900VS savings compared to baseline. As a point of reference, this can lead to an extra 300+ wood if that's how the
VS savings are spent. However, with proper marketeering the Saracens can save at least that many VS or possibly even
more. Buying 1200F at the market using only gold that's mined costs 3972VS. Compare this to gathering 1200F by
farming; it costs 4944VS. That's a 972VS savings, or more than the Mongol bonus. If you instead sell wood down to 76
and use gold mining to generate the rest of your gold to buy 1200F, it costs 4114VS, for a 830VS savings. The tradeoff
for the reduced efficiency is that you save over 900 gold that can be mined later, and some of that lost efficiency is gotten
back because you don't need to have as many gold miners all crowding around the gold mine.
Now that you have the background (hopefully not too confusing), here's the build ORDER for a Saracen scout rush:
- Villagers 1-6 sheep
- Villagers 7-9 mill, berries
- Villagers 10-11 straggler trees
- Villager 12 lure boar #1
- Loom en route to boar
- Villagers 13-16 wood, build lumber camp when possible
- Lure boar #2
- Villagers 17-19 sheep
- Villagers 20-22 mining camp, gold
- Click Feudal
While in feudal transition, build a barracks and a 2nd lumber camp. You should have 10 food gatherers at the TC (7 boar,
3 sheep); 4 go to gold, 6 go to the 2nd lumber camp. You should have 7 gold miners, 3 berry pickers, and 12
lumberjacks. Arrive in feudal 10:45-11:15.
In feudal:
Excalibur Clan
http://excalibur.haba.dk Powered by Joomla! Generated: 19 January, 2009, 14:22
Build the market FIRST, then build a stable and start queuing scouts. Buy as much food as you can and buy double-bit
axe. Keep making villagers and buy horse collar ASAP. Your first 2 villagers go to wood, then build farms with every
subsequent villager. Note: if deer are close by you can send your berry pickers to hunt deer and put new villagers on
berries instead of HAVING them farm, giving you a bit more wood. You should be able to have 4 scouts (including your
original) before 14:00 and 8 scouts by 16:00. I haven't built more than 8 scouts because by then they'll have reacted with
spears. I will usually build an archery range and blacksmith as wood allows. I have researched wheelbarrow around the
16:00 mark and gone castle immediately afterwards with around 37 villagers and a 20-21 minute castle time.
The advantages of this strat are fourfold: one, you get to use Saracens in a competitive situation against civs that are
typically considered weaker late-game than the Saracens. Two, you aren't penalized by having a strong-late game civ;
your economy will be keeping up with a Mongol or Mayan player. Three, the amount of deception can be very strong.
Careful scouting pre-feudal can actually work to your opponent's disadvantage, since finding 7 gold miners in dark almost
always means archers, and while skirmishers counter archers, they get beaten soundly by scouts. It can also be
extremely surprising to an opponent to see only a few scattered farms, yet food-heavy scouts and a quick castle time.
Four, you can achieve these goals without completely sacrificing your gold or stone supply. By only delaying farming until
feudal instead of not farming at all until castle, you only need to spend 300-400 gold, which will not cripple you later on.
The disadvantages to this strat are relatively few. HAVING the market up immediately means that even a tower rush
pushing you off of wood won't kill your econ, and if the enemy has spears waiting for your scouts, you can easily regroup
and make archers, or go straight to castle and make x-bows. It is a fairly flexible build in that if you find the enemy is
doing something unusual, you can always adjust your economy to compensate. Although the VS savings FROM
marketeering can make up the VS advantage a Mongol has, there is the cost of gold spent that the Mongol doesn't have
to deal with, so that's a disadvantage for the Saracen. However, the tradeoff is that the Saracen has a much more
diversified imperial age army with a wider range of upgrades.
Note: One great advantage of going gold/wood heavy and using the market to generate food is that you can use this start
for any kind of feudal attack (except a tower rush).
By HC_Shanks__
source
Excalibur Clan
http://excalibur.haba.dk Powered by Joomla! Generated: 19 January, 2009, 14:22
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