20 Frank Knights in 20 Minutes - Could it be faster?

I made this guide recently for 20 Frank Knights in 20 Minutes, but was wondering if anyone knew what could be done to lower that even further. Maybe 19:30 using Teutons? For my own calculations using resource income speadsheets, the fastest a Frank can field 20 knights is like 19:45 with perfect clicks and perfect map and perfect food intake. Don’t know enough about playing Teutons to say if they could pull off something even faster…

5 Likes

I didn’t get to watch the full video yet and I haven’t calculate the numbers myself especially since 20 knights in 20 mins is already an epic build so its really hard to imagine room for improvement. But when I saw the 2 lumber camps I began wondering if making 1 lumber camp that is 1 tile away from the wood line to fit more villagers on it instead of 2 might be slightly faster. Obviously making the 2 lumber camp right next to the wood gives you a better long term return on your 100 wood investment since the villagers will be more efficiently chopping for longer but that initial 100 wood spent would take a villager 4 mins and 26 seconds to gather (without calculating walking time). I am wondering if you might be able to get away with 1 less villager on wood by only making 1 lumber camp. The efficiency of the lumber camp that is 1 tile away wouldn’t really drop significantly until the first 3 or 4 rows of trees are chopped anyway.

Hmmm, maybe! That’s not a bad suggestion, especially since the wood lines in the corners get crowded. If I build it 1 tile away from both corners, I could potentially increase the efficiency greatly. Also, instead of that second lumbercamp, I could use 2 vills to chop the straggler trees near the TC instead? Saving 100 wood is pretty huge!

1 Like

Next up: 15 crappy Malay knights in 15 minutes. :joy:

I just had a chance to watch the whole build. Its is an awesome build. I am surprised that it isnt very popular yet. I guess thats because like you said its pretty risky even on hideout. At least its a do or die strategy which is going to work unless its interrupted. I cant imagine someone making 50 pikemen in preparation against this. I dont even think its possible to do that without memorizing a build order for that which im sure nobody has right now. Also you dont actually need that starting stone for TCs since this is for sure going to kill the other player if they tower rush you and dont get very far so you have the ability to drop one defensive tower without delaying the build too much. I can also see this working on coastal if your opponent is trying to go fire ships and even more viable if he is palisade walling his base. Also it could work on arena and black forest if you delayed a few minutes to make some onagers.

For the actual build though. I really think its an improvement to make only 1 lumber camp 1 tile away in the corner of the map and then sent the last 2 lumberjacks to get the straggler trees so they dont have to walk back to make farms.
Also I would highly recommend idling your TC after you hit castle age. You got castle at around 15:45 your first vil wont come out until 16:10 and then they would make a farm for 15 seconds to start gathering food. Lets say 2 seconds walking time to their farm location so 16:27 is when they start collecting food. It would take the vil 2 mins and 36 seconds to return 50 food assuming an average gather rate of around 0.32 per second. That means the very first vil that comes out after castle wont even return his investment until 19:03 and the next one until 19:28 seconds. So you would be way better off just getting scale barding armor and then chain barding armor after you send the 20 knights out which i think would help a lot in taking out his TCs insuring his end to justify the idle time.
Also since it takes around 7 farmers and 7 gold miners to produce knights none stop and you are just shy of getting even 14 and 14 before 20 mins that food and gold collected during castle age is really the only reason you can make 3 stable knights for a while so wasting that valuable food on villagers is a mistake.

I thought about Berbers for this build but after adding bloodlines into the equation 20% cheaper knights only saves you 90 food and 200 gold after making 20 knights. So i dont think that covers %25 faster gatherers. Like you said Teutons are probably the best civ for this since I think you can get away with pulling most if not all your lumberjacks off the wood and sending them to farms. And farms are even cheaper now in DE. But i think the difference is going to be small when you consider that Franks are getting blood lines for free and having the berry bonus. Sorry I couldnt be much help with figuring out the Teutons build for this, I really feel too lazy to calculate the numbers right now. Especially since I quit playing DE and went back to HD.

1 Like

I actually really like the idea of full-idling the TC after reaching castle to go all in. I’ll try this out to hut that 20 min mark with upgrades. Originally, I wanted to make this build so that your economy would be sustainable after the all-in, but if you’re going all-in you might as well do it 100%.

1 Like

Well yeah might as well go all in. Plus even if they survived the attack but lost more villagers than you did to idling your TC you are still better economically and can start villager production again.

2 Likes

this is a great video/build :smiley: ty man

1 Like

Haven’t watched it yet. I can understand that you wouldn’t want to idle a TC, but even Hoang seems to get away with it, going knights and mangonels, idling TC, having a horrible eco but still win because of applying enormous pressure.

thanks for that, i havent studied any knight rush builds yet, so this was a good place to start

I think that your initial focus on keeping the economy sustainable after the build is ideal for team games, where doing this strategy is actually safer if you are for instance a pocket player. You want to weaken an enemy, but not at the expense of yourself, so you still need a decent economy to continue the team game. I’m going to try out your build order for sure! Many thanks!

Going all-in makes more sense in 1v1, though, I agree.

1 Like

Awesome! I originally thought of using this as a 3v3 strategy as pocket where you and a flank would work together to either wipe out a flank or an enemy opponent. The problem was that after you attack that opponent, the other 2 have a lot more time to out-boom both you and the flank and it would actually set your team behind. This ended up being the reason why I was focused so heavily on a “sustainable” build :slight_smile:

With the surprise factor it might just work actually

1 Like

I tried this with Berbers and I can confirm it is possible, even with horse collar (and with room for some involuntary small mistakes). Here’s a video showing the Berbers 20 knights in 20 minutes.

1 Like

It’s all fun and games till build gets optimized to 1 knight in 1 minute :chart_with_upwards_trend:

2 Likes

11111111

The comment actually inspired me to make the 20 Elephants in 20 Minutes build order so maybe 15 knights could be possible who knows

1 Like