Italians have the bonus of a 15% price reduction for progressing to the next age. Are there any build orders that take advantage of this?
Onestly, the 15% cheap age up doesn’t help that much, theoretically you could age up with one vill less, but in my experience, it’s better to simply use the standard build order and consider that you can click up a bit sooner and you have a bit more resources.
I dont think Italians can age up significantly faster. Just play ordinary build order and strategies, like Feudal Archers and then fast castle. At most, the bonus can help you save up a bit food and gold that can be spend on researching a tech. 75/120/150 Food and 0/30/120 Gold for each age up, 345 food/150 Gold in total.
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use the standard and click up a bit sooner - makes no sense. If you are going with standard amount of vills then you aren’t clicking up sooner. Except if u were doing it wrong before with like 30 seconds of town center idle time.
Anyways, I think it can be viable sometimes to go for 1 or 2 less villagers with italians fast castle, for dropping your town centers for booming as fast as possible. And you can also go into fast imp, with way less villagers than other civilizations.
Other than that, I guess its better to age up with standard amount of vills.
I prefer to use the standard amount of vills, and having more food for scouts.
Another option is to click up one vill sooner, then going archers, but I personally don’t see a big difference.
2 vills sooner I was never able to do it.
There is not, the special build is for Malay.
Italians do not age up faster, they age up cheaper, which is a much weaker bonus.
The Italian advantage is basically robustness, since if you do some mistake in your build order, you may still age up with zero idle time. But if you do everything more or less ok, you just spare some resources (not a lot actually).
Malay has a much much stronger bonus with a special build for fast feudal into eco upgrades into castle age…
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There indeed are a couple of things you can do differently when you go for straight fc with Italians. When you play arena and push in your deer, 2 farms is all you need to click up. I wouldn’t call it a build order because it depends on what map you play or which strategy you go for but in general you can delay a couple of farmers to wait for horse collar after the castle click before you make more farms. It’s quite a nice bonus for fc builds.
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Their bonus really isn’t enough to help form a build around
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More than faster, you can manage better the resources.
With access to Deer, pretty much all civs can do a 25+2 Fast Castle (assuming an Arena map, where you intend to go into a pure boom). Italians can try going a bit faster, say 24+2 or 23+2. I don’t think there are any specific tricks here, just need to manage the build efficiently.
Edit: Just thought about this some more. There’s a slight variation of a standard build that works for the Italians. Typically you can send 3 Villagers to mine 30 Gold, giving you a total of 130, then sell 100 Wood for 70 Gold at the Market (assuming you skipped Loom for the Fast Castle). With Italians, you only need to send 1 Villager to mine 10 Gold, since the Castle Age costs only 180 Gold. It’s pretty comfortable to click up on a 23+2 build with this, might even try to go lower, would need to test how feasible it is to keep 3 TCs running after that.
On a first attempt against an AI, here are some up timings.
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Might be worth considering although Italians can easily do 23+2 with the regular build if they go for the boom approach.