Well hello guys, I’d like to improve my gaming in multiplayer.
I still have a lot of Aussie Drongo videos to study but so far, the decks for my 2 main civs have worked well enough for me (Russian and British).
Still, I’d like to see what you guys think on how I can improve my decks.
Notes:
I only have 1 deck for both civs, they are an all around deck for any situation.
I never play water maps so I don’t bother making a deck for them.
On each civ I’ll write a small synthesis of my strategy.
On each deck I wrote in pink numbers the cards that I send normally when things go my way and I don’t need extra resources quick instead of upgrades.
RUSSIAN DECK
Age I - I go for the faster gathering and cheaper mills/estates so I have a set late game. Age II - I start either turtling with blockhouses gaining pop space with the special politician or raiding settlers with cossacs (Cossacs for sure if it’s a french player), I end colonial age with the church upgrades (Allows me to level up all my units at once and get 2 reinforcement upgrades). Age III - Who doesn’t go 2 falconets in age III? Plus eco upgrades Age IV - If I’m already pushing in, I reinforce with oprichniks, If not, factories.
MAIN STRATEGY: Raiding and booming .
BRITISH DECK
Age I - I start with the settlers and the 2 manor upgrades (This allows me to spam settlers quickly if centered on wood). Age II - Since I’m spamming settlers, I survive colonial with military shipments or hussars. Age III - 2 cannons men, can’t go wrong with that, also eco upgrades. Age IV - I finish my boom with 2 factories, I push in with the artillery upgrades.
MAIN STRATEGY: Booming and spamming cavalry .
Oh man, the pros of the community will surely take a dump on my cards hahah, be nice u guys…
id replace either medicine or 700 food with 700 gold to allow fast age up to fortress, probably medicine.
textile mills is likely much less useful than 1k wood for kickstarting your eco and getting infrastructure(and town centers) up.
manchu are pretty good, maybe consider replacing horse archers with them. 6 opri for immediate raid power is also fine.
2 heavy cannons and tsar cannon(2 more heavy cannons) are better cards than 12 oprichniks and heavy fortifications. 1600 wood can be great as well. id consider replacing forts as well unless your sure you need them, getting crates or extra units instead, or even keep textile mills and other eco upgrades.
everything else is playstyle dependent.
as for your british deck, id ditch fast houses and Virginia company, as well as medicine. get some 700 wood(which gets villagers out for your boom faster than virgina company and can be flexed) and gold crates(easy fortress), and atleast a 1k wood crate age 3(more tcs, houses or lb).
replace advanced fortifications with lil bombards, infinite 2 rockets, or age 3 jeagers/5 hussars. it should be fine then. the church card for highlanders and skirmishers are ok as well, and if your going cav heavy consider getting some cav upgrade cards. like the above deck, unless your sure you need them id replace one or both fort cards with more crates, units or eco upgrades.
1st card distributivism
Age up logistician
2nd card 700w
3rd card either 700g or cossacs (depending on type of semi FF)
4th card either 4 coss or 13 strel or 700g or 600w.
Your russian deck is a team deck. in 1vs1 you need more unit shipments than upgrades.
so you need a 1vs1 and a team game deck. So in 1vs1 you dont put in your deck “Land grab”, “700f” “advanced arsenal” “riding school” “medicine” “fort” textile mill" “heavy fortification” "castramentation.
In team games you can have all these cards but i would still take HF Castramentation Fort 12 opri, 5 Cav archers from the deck.
Aussie drongo has his deck picks in his discord. As a starting point i would go there and copy them.
Some ideas.
Forts are not good you can go around forts or age up and destroy them
700g and 700w are a MUST have card for both civs
Medicine is only relevant on team games or treaty. Dont use it for brits, unless its treaty (and even there…)
You dont need a single merc card in age IV, especially if you are starting to play.
Fencing school and riding school are for team games (unless you have a little more experience under your belt)
Well first of all, thank you 2, you guys are awesome :3
I will certainly take off a lot of the cards that you 2 told me, medicine for the British for example (Calculating a second time, it just doesn’t pay, even if you lose all your settlers and have to re-train).
I will try the manchu in my next game brother, as for the cav archers, I only switched them from 6 oprichniks since my artillery shipment kept getting wrecked by cav as I sent them hahah , but seeing that you get 900 resources by sending opri instead of 800 by sending cav archers, i’ll switch them back.
True, you can get more value early game by sending the shipments of resources themselves instead of the discounts alone, but man, I made such a play with manor spamming one time that my whole town was wrecked, I had to set all my settlers to wood and instantly got back the manors+settlers+pop space with a great discount and build speed.
None the less, thanks man
Never thought of it that way until now, you are right, I do have 1toomany upgrades for russia, and forts DO SUCK , I guess I’ll copy that deck for team games and get a new one with more rush intensive strategies.
However It would break my heart to get rid of land grab , if you get 3 mills and 3 estates you can get 1200 wood progressively, and potentially more.
True that, it’s gone forever, for brits it sucks, for russian I haven’t calculated it’s payback but the discount isn’t as big I imagine (I rarely used it for them anyway).
You can justify having it in your deck (if you like). However, you can never justify sending it as your 2nd card in any circumstance, as you have still huntable animals available at that time. Send military shipment, ressources crates, but you can’t justifiy sending something that you will need 10 minutes from now.
Personnaly, I’d always prefer sending 1000 woods instead, if I need to build mills/estate over land grab. With land grab, you save 160 wood for each mills and 240 wood for each estate. It means, that for 2 mills and 2 estate, you save only 800 wood, but you have to spend 1200 wood cash. With 1000 woods, you can build 2 estates with 1000 woods + 200 fom your pocket. As your economy grows, you can afford having more settlers on wood and the discount on mills/estate will not matter that much.
A lot of new player will enjoy building mills early (because your settllers are more difficult to kill/raid when they are near your town center). However, you have to keep in mind the gathering rate.
Huntable animals : 0.84 food/sec (base rate, does not include the time your settlers walk to another dead animal/herd). With hunting traps and steel traps (two upgrades you can manage to obtain very early), you have a gather rate of 1.1 food/sec (you can probably remove 10-15% for the walking time for conservative estimate)
Mills, however, have terrible gathering rate. Officialy, the base gather rate for mills is 0.67 food/sec, but secretly it’s closer to 0.47 food.sec. The reason for this is that settlers walk constently in the mills, and while they are walking they are not gathering. Even with the two mills upgrade, you only reach a real gather rate of 0.67, and you had to spent 400 wood for the mills and 480 wood/gold for the two upgrades. In conclusion, always gather from huntable when available. You can also gather from berry if you are forced too, it’s still better than a mills and you don’t have to spend anything. You should secure herds and mines to avoid having to build mills and estate. (I did not present the calcul for the estate/vs mine, but it’s the same, mine : 0.6 , estate 0.35
Well yeah hahah, no debates on that, I know that mills are not the way to go if you have 30 bison below your TC, and with just a little map control defenses you can gather every other herd as well, same with estates and mines.
True that, I only sent them as the second card when I had a surplus of XP early game from treasures, that way I don’t have to worry about gathering XP for sending the card when I’m already out of huntables/mines. I don’t send it as the 2nd card every time, but I should do it less often.
Yeah, every single player that straight up dies without hitting 2nd age has at least a mill on their base.
It’s like they didn’t see the tutorials or art of war levels.
I love land grab, and the calculations are correct.
I dont have it in my 1vs1 deck because i never exaust all my natural res. in a 1vs1 (even if i go late industrial i am usually able to pay the wood price with the factories) and i need other military shipments to maintain pressure.
In 2vs2 i usually ship land grab after factories or if i am short on res, in late fortress. In the begining of the game you need to focus on your age ups, boom or units for rushes.
Regarding russia, you need in every deck (eithe 1vs1 or team deck) distributivism, 700g, and 700w, boyars, church card, strelet combat, Cav Combat and the factory cards.
Decks are always subjective, but the cards I would remove from the Russian deck are land grab ( if your raiding as you say that’s your style of play, your going to have good map control, you can make a blockhouse in the center of the map near a hunt and let your villagers hunt from there, if your enemy tries to kill your villagers, garrison them) and maybe the advanced church card, what I would instead put are 2 heavy cannons in age 4, and 700 gold in age 2, your deck seems to have a focus on age 4 and the king of age 4 unit shipments is the 2 heavy cannons, 700 gold is a nice economic shipment because the gold can be used to make Cossack, or to age. The card order I would go for a boomy raiding strategy would be this,
Economic theory- 700 wood,- 5 Cossack-medicine- 700 gold- age to 3 and send either royal mint or 2 falcs
Land grab is a pretty decent card, but with Russia it’s easy to get map control and it’s better to take advantage of that
For the British deck what I would recommend is getting rid of faster building houses and getting 700 wood, I would send 700 wood instead of 5 villagers because if you send Virginia company and use that wood only on houses it’s like a 8 villagers shipment
Distributivism are unraidable wood villagers. Its either that or 300w as first card. Eco theory is not a viable option for a russian 1st card (although it should be on the deck for a later card)
True, but this guys said he wants to boom, and a assume he means like a cav semi into a tc boom, wood trickle is good for age 2 focus, but for a tc boom ( witch I think is what he means by booming) economic theory pays off better than normal because you have more villagers
Well guess what you guys, I have both :3
This is the new deck, it worked great for the 2 matches I played with it, it really felt easier to just age up and to get that map control early on, as well as raid settlers in the late game.
Notes:
A - Land grab is only for the moment I run out of natural resources and I can’t get map control for the ones far away (I’m trying to get more bold with map control now, it’s working alright).
B - I always end age II with church upgrades so I get the veteran and guard upgrades for my troops in an instant for a discount.
C - If I’m lacking in settlers for food scarcity, this goes in (Also reinforces my late game).
D - If my age III shipment of 2 falconets and my 2 falconets age up politician die, this would go in, that way I dont bother much at all in making artillery foundries just yet.
N°1 & N°2 - Depending on the map [I either need the wood = Distributivism] [or the food = economic theory]
In general: All of this changes really helped and showed a lot more versatility from my last one, and as a plus, at imperial age I have a lot more cards to send twice now.
Thanks again for supporting this deck making heheh :3
I agree with most of the cards - this is a nice team all purpose deck. (if you wanna go 1vs1 competitive you need another).
You always need distributivism first since those are 3/4 unraidable vils on wood and you can focus more on food because of it. (Eco theory takes A LONG TIME to pay off. Only civ that sends that in the begining are Ports because of synergy with their spice trade strat)
You will find that you will get a LOT of faster map control and presure if you send the eco theory later (you can and should have this card in your deck but send it later, either late colonial or late fortress).
Second card should be 700w to make blockhouses/strelets or 700g to faster age or 5 cossacks to start raiding.
If you get your second shipment during age up or a little before age up, just hold to it until you get to second age.
you dont need 700f in the deck switch it to 700g.
Boyars make your main units similar to veteran - but in age II - so you should send that card early (i usually send it as 5 or 6 or 7 card to make my strelets and cossack more powerfull)
Always send your factories back to back (unless you are under pressure) cause you get a nice eco spike
With 2 factories you dont need 1600w (you can have those res with less time than the shipment) Trade this card with the 1000w for age 3.
with 1000w you can make 2 TC or make more blockhouses/Stables
If you are going Opri you should have team cavalry scouts on your deck
On the Brits: Well, to be honest since I am just a pro wannabe, my British decks is 90% copied from Haitch (Number 1 player in the ladder right now), changing very few things. So I guess it would be better to me just link it to the video where Haitch explains his decks and give my takes afterwards, so you can decide which opinion you prefer:
Again, Haitch is a better player than I am, but I made some changes in my deck, and my points are:
I’m really not buying the 9 Musketeer in age 3 on he 1v1 deck, because at least in my experience, as British I always seen to have a lot of Musketeer anyway, and I prefer to ship a unit that I lack. In case a skirmisher like one (The 10 Jaegars). Plus, I generally eat all my hunts very fast, but my coin mines are not consumed as fast, so sometimes I can collect a lot of coin and ship mercenaries to push out.
But honestly, I think I would rather have 4 hussars in deck than 9 musketeers.
By the same token, I like 4 privateers on the antisea deck intead of the Frigate. It’s just so amazing shipping 4 ships. Rarely the opponent can contest such a shipment on the water.
For the same reason I also don’t like royal mint on the antisea, because I always feel like I’m floating coin, not needing it. As British I always feel like I need food as British, not coin. Could be just me being bad and not knowing how to macro? Likely. But I much rather have Refrigeration or some other food card on a deck instead of Royal Mint.
On the Russians: I play they more often, so I guess I can elaborate more. I will separate per age:
Age 1:@DAC1789 said well about Distributivism and @Abrahamburger2 also said well about Economic Theory. Since Russia does not have Settlers shipments, is the best shipment that you have available on age 1, is worth about 2.5 settlers on wood, and is always the first card that I send. Economic theory is also a awesome card to have on late game for any civilization.
I don’t know about Land Grab though. As Russia you always have map control thanks to putting blockhouses all around the map.
The biggest problem for Russia on the late game is the fact that their units are weaker than the units of other civilizations, their eco system is okay-ish thanks to the fact that they recruit settlers faster than other civilizations. I would add Team Cavalry Scout on age 1 so your units may suck less in the late game onward.
You need to stack more your age 2. Is where Russia shines. Again, because Russian units cheaper but are weaker than the other civs counterparts, I don’t recommend going with a late game approach, because the longer the game goes, the worst your units will feel compare to the opponents one. Being cheaper though, makes those units be more useful on the second age where ecosystems are not fully developed.
I would add at least 700 coin and 600 wood. You can also add 600 coin and 4 cossacks. A good trick to keep in mind is to send 700 coin as the first shipment, put all settlers on food and spawn a lot of Musketeers. That’s generally the build that I like to go. Having the 600 coin could help you if you want to age up on the future.
I don’t think you really need 700 food, because the vast majority of your settlers will be on food.
On age 3 you need 1000 wood. You want to do extra town centers, which is very useful for the Russians since their settlers recruits faster than the other civilizations. I sometimes even like to do a variation of “the build” for the Ottomans, aging up with the Bishop for the fortress age and getting 4 town center down, to really take advantage of the extra training time on the Russian town center.
Also I would have only one of Royal Mint or Refrigeration. It’s depends if I want to go with Cossacks + Musketeer + Cannons or Cossacks + Halberdiers + Cannons. If I go Musketeer, I will have Refrigeration, if I will go Halberdier, I would have Royal Mint. You can add 11 Musketeer or 11 Halberdier instead of the card that you remove.
I also would take out the Strelets combat card. You don’t really want to do Strelets on fortress age onward, because they always get kitted away and die for other skirmishers, and they don’t kill Dragoons either.
On age 4, I honestly would only have the 2 factories and the 2 heavy cannons shipment. I would remove the other 2 cards (1600 wood and 12 Oprichnicks) to add cards on other ages.
→ An additional thing: The only time that the fort and National Redoubt are good cards is if you have both infantry training time upgrades on age 2 (Fencing School and Team Dueling School). Because, with the addition of the church tech, the units trains pretty much immediately from the fort.
Anyway, hope any of this ramble helped you somehow.
Hi there
and booming 
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, but seeing that you get 900 resources by sending opri instead of 800 by sending cav archers, i’ll switch them back.
, if you get 3 mills and 3 estates you can get 1200 wood progressively, and potentially more.
The new deck:
