[Intermediate] Offensive Gaul Start

Written By: Zileas
Edited By: Steve/Sag Sag


 

Don't bother unless you can afford at least a reasonable sum of gold. This strategy does not work well without the NPC merchant being used.

Don't bother unless you can get near 24/7 activity. Get 2 buddies doing the same thing in other timezones and cross-sit. Or get a dual. Theutates Thunders will easily out-perform fields and even clubs when 24/7 active.

1) Start 2 days late. This is critical as it allows you to not be near the swarms of experienced teutons. An ideal start location has a cluster of croppers with one at 125% at about 30 distance from you, but not a lot closer.

2) Your basic strategy in the first 2 weeks must 100% raiding. Your advanced strategies are co-operating with 1 or 2 allies, destruction of all local teutons (unless they are one of your important allies) and securing key croppers.

3) DO NOT build fields. You may get fields to do all but the last quest, and then upgrade crop fields as needed to get upgraded buildings, and warehouses/granaries to prevent overflows. But no other fields for first week or two minimum. You may want to start inching them up after 100 or so TTs but this is not critical. This is because the economic returns of fields is far inferior to that of active raiding TTs.

4) To do this, first build around 75 phalanx (upgrade barracks as needed to make sure you aren't backing it up with lots of phalanx), then research TTs. Once you have TTs, train only TTs and build stable upgrades.

5) Early on, your raiding strategy can be phalanx vs people of pop 8 or lower. Once you are near 40 or so phalanx, you can start braving 3 phalanx raids at small Teutons, Romans and Gauls under 40 pop. The idea is that you send 3 phalanx as scouts effectively, then send more if it works out. You will use this technique later with TTs as well.

6) It is important to use small raiding stacks. Repeated raids of 2 TT or 3 phalanx over a ton of targets give the best results. Don't Ever put more than 20% of your forces in one attack unless its a sure thing.

7) As you accumulate TTs, ask your neighbors who you arent getting bounty from who the local Teutons are. Ask them to share intelligence with you about when they attack. Consider getting a Teuton or aggressive Gaul/Roman friend who is maybe 35 distance from you (and not by your croppers) to help spot either by scouting, providing intel/1 sec counter opportunities, etc. You might want to get up to 2 such friends.

8) It is important to identify who the active Teutons are and if possible provoke them into giving you an all out attack so that you can 1sec counter them with TTs. In almost all cases, they won't have spears in enough numbers to cause you concern. If you cannot get their clubs, relentlessly raid them with TTs to force them to spear up, sweeping them every 15 or 20 minutes if possible. This is because once a Teuton starts hitting an inactive with clubs, if they do it frequently, you will see 0. Cranny dipping is an enormous advantage, and you cannot allow Teutons to leverage it near you.

9) Around the 9th or 10th day in, grab your 2nd village, this should be at minimum a 125% or 150% 15c, preferably with a selection of nearby croppers. For fast growth through the midgame, its actually more important to have tons of croppers than the highest possible bonus. This is because croppers give the best economic returns of any expansion village. You will need around 2 parties to expand quickly.

10) Grab a 3rd village when you can if there's risk of someone settling (typically another high % cropper nearby). Otherwise make loud noises and keep people away.

11) Be sure to structure your expansions so that your capital will end up with 3 empty slots and an expansion cropper can end up with 2. Or vise versa. But either way, you dont want to be chiefing villages with armies from yourself later.

12) I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having distant friends in the 35-40 range so that they can tell you when they are getting hit, and you can TT counter. A Teuton who is 30 or 40 distance away is going to be eating your farms inside a few weeks.

13) This development pattern continues until about 2 months in, but you slowly go to fields as you approach 2-3 weeks.

14) It is key to not relocate too close to your starting village when you grab a cropper. This is because you will be pursuing a scorched earth strategy near your original village, and won't see villages grow. When you expand, you should try to take out local Teutons and let people grow so you can chief them later.

15) Under no circumstances spend resources that don't give economic growth and advance this plan. Avoid swords as long as you can. Same with catapults (Though you might get forced early on those at your cropper). Don't mess around with defending attacks. Don't even build a trapper! Resources need to be invested in TTs and TTs need to be treated with great care, don't mess with Romans with legionaires or gauls with phalanx until you can totally bend them over. Have a Teuton friend deal with these people for you. You should feed on inactives as well as Teutons as long as you possibly can. You can always scout someone with 3 phalanx raid or a single pathfinder through the first few months.