Hey all, I recently made a video for Bulgarian Man-at-Arms + Tower Rush, but was wondering what other new civ strats are out there? Do any of the new civs (Cumans, Bulgarians, Lithuanians, Tartars) have any strats out there have rushes specifically designed for them? The ones I can think of:
Are there any others? Any help or pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! 
I’ve been working on cuman standard scout rush, followed immediately by a 2nd tc. The idea is to keep the feudal pressure on with scouts but also adding more eco than your opponent does. If he makes it to castle, well you should have a big enough eco to reach it as well to counter any xbow or knights he is sending out. Would love to see a build order for it!
In theory, tatars with extra food by sheep and free thumbring can do scouts into archer into crossbows easily.
I’ve been trying to think honestly how to take advantage of that extra food bonus… Assuming 8 sheep with 800 food in each, thats a theoretical 400 extra food from those sheeps (not counting decay for either). Granted, you don’t gather those sheep any faster than any other civ, but you can delay building farms I guess? Or maybe it translates into extra scouts in feudal? I just don’t know how to best take advantage of that idk
Based on eco bonusses the BO for a civ can be a bit different than normal. For example: With Brits you only need 5 on sheep for constant vill production. Cells gather wood faster, so maybe you can have only 3 on wood, even when you go drush / MAA, where you need normally 4 on wood early on.
For the new civs i mostly think about Cumans:
Feudal boom
Feudal boom with scouts
Feudal agression into feudal rams
Castle age capped ram push
Lithuanian start with extra food. Maybe this can be translated into a quicker feudal time and so doing scouts or archers with vills upon reaching feudal age.
Maybe Lithuanian FC is a bit different to other civs, since you need to gather 150 food less. So maybe the FC BO is just adjusted?
If you can delay farms, you can also use more villagers yo gather food instead of wood so the scout rush is a viable option.
Also, you can opt to use that wood for crossbows with free thumb ring if you go fastcastle
Also, you can opt to use that wood for crossbows with free thumb ring if you go fastcastle
I feel that without arbalest it makes for an awkward transition for Tartars you’ll have a nice Castle Age spike, but then your army doesn’t scale into imperial which always feels bad…
Also, you can opt to use that wood for crossbows with free thumb ring if you go fastcastle
Maybe with all that extra food something normally too food expensive like m@a into scouts might be possible? Hmm…
Delaying farms has a lot of potential imo. I tried that multiple times the past days and I had pretty good results doing the following: I aim for an early scout rush clicking up pop 20. Usually you’d need some eco bonus with faster gathering rate or the like for that so I compensate by not adding the last 2 vills to wood (or just adding 1 because you do not need to go for fast horse collar). If you can push dear it’s even way easier but for the sake of a BO let’s not assume that. That way I gather a lot more from sheep when transitioning to feudal age. I then switch more vills than usual to wood (to have 11 or 12 in total while going up).
What that does is you have food to afford some scouts for early pressure and you bank a lot of wood to go for an achery range. If you put the first feudal vills to gold it’s a super fast way to get 3 extra scouts and almost an immediate archer follow up. The villager distribution might not yet be optimal idk but so far it seems really strong to me.
Now that you asked, I’ve been wondering if FC into Shotel warriors -> TC snipe is still viable. IIRC Shotel warriors + Arson was pretty strong before it was nerfed, but I wonder if it’s still strong enough for some cheesy all in strategy?
Here’s how it was 5 years ago, although Zero wasn’t really prepared for any kind of agression in that clip.
I don’t think a shotel rush is a good idea, as while you get your castle up the enemy will just have to mass knights/archers, and the shotels will drop like flies. I once had the occasion to spam them in a messy nomad game, they are effective at cleaning bases but villagers repairs will be super annoying as the shotels will get killed by TC fire super fast. So going straight for villie is the best thing to do, and oh god are they good at that (3 hits kill in castle, 2 hits kill in imp) They will get the job done even under some absurd amounts of enemy fire, as they will still be able to kill them faster than they die. So I would say overall you should make shotels if you have the lead and want to make sure the enemy won’t make a comeback thanks to their eco. So in no way a rush strat.
Shotels also got nerfed with production speed so they aren’t as good at suprising as they used to be. You can still research the tech that makes them be produced instantly, but it delays the shotel smash too. I agree with Cactus when he says that its not necessarily a rush strat but more of a finishing move you put on the opponent