WHY MILITARY ACADEMY
First thing first the Military Academy is an investment that pays in military unit “trickle”. Since military, generally speaking, has the strict function of fighting and intimidation, this should be the premise of what you hope to gain from investing in this building.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
The payback period is dependent on the units trained compared to the EFFECTIVE cost. And this is the case because it appears all the base training times of the academy starts at 4.47 times standard training times before any blacksmith/university or pvizor buff. For examples the base military academy training time for a Spearman is 67s, for Archers 67s, Mehter 125s. So for feudal age examples of payback time: a spear+spahi combo (2min 54s payback); OR an instantly more impactful combo do Mehter first + spear/archer (3min 12s payback) And you’ll have a unit that will absolutely do something for your whole composition.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA
The idea behind this build order is to take advantage of the starting free 50 stone (yes free you’re not rushing to get arrow slits and not having it won’t delay your 2nd tc in any meaningful way) AND taking advantage of the closer placement of the 3 straggler trees. This BO will delay your age up macro BUT with optimal micro you can reduce that delay of being ready to age to only 40s or less!!! Lastly you can effectively regain some of that deficit in your feudal timing at a comparatively low cost…by adding just 1 extra villager to your landmark building.
BUILD ORDER
- Pull 5 of your starting 6 villagers thru the TC rallied to the nearest Stone cropping and que villagers to be trained.
(note: In case you do not know how to pull villagers thru the TC; first you select your units that you want to go to said resources and directly task them to the resources, immediately after doing so you press the hotkey “SEEK SHELTER”, this will garrison the units inside the nearest (most times…kekw) building, then you click that building (in this case the TC) and spam the hotkey “RETURN TO WORK”, the villager will file out of the TC one by one choosing the most optimal path from the TC to the said resource. This trick we’ll use often and really saves you time on straggler trees and alike.)
- take the 6th villager and start chopping the nearest straggler tree, feel free to pull thru TC if need be.
- Set TC rally point for new villager to said straggler tree.
- Take your scout and capture the 3 sheep near your base and purposefully place them on the open side away from straggler trees and preferably directly in line of the stone mining villagers. Then continue scouting
- Once the 5 villager from stone starts heading back, EITHER have them click the TC then shift click onto the sheep directly in front of them, OR have them directly rally to the sheep and use the pull thru TC trick, they will auto drop off the stone by passing thru the TC.
- NOW that you have the 150 wood and 100 stone, task 1 of the 5 sheep villagers to build the Military Academy.
- Meanwhile once you have 3 villagers on a straggler tree change the TC rally point to your sheep.
- Next have 1 of the 3 straggler tree villagers build your first house.
- Once you get another 50w pull 2 of the 3 straggler tree villagers to gold and build a mining camp.
- The final straggler tree villager you can do 1 of 3 things with:
a) collect 50w for your 2nd house then pull villager to gold/food to shave off a few more seconds aging
b) collect 50w go make a lumber camp and work on getting the next 50w for a house (u have some time)
c) in step 9 take all 3 straggler tree villagers to mining and shave even more time, BUT you gonna have a tight macro in getting your 2nd house. - Depending on what you did in step 10 you should be ready to age at 3min 10s - 3min- 20s.
Traditional timing for being ready to Feudal aging up is 2min 40s for most standard civ BO’s, so by comparison you’ll be 30-40s behind that timing BUT you have a will have 3 spearman (240 resources worth) by the 4min 31s mark (traditional age up time). Remember you can add 1 extra villager than normal and regain about 14s off your age up in the example of 5 villagers building the landmark as oppose to 4 villagers, with a comparative gathering loss of 17 resources.
Lastly because I’m dedicating the 50 stone is FREE essentially (having no bearing on your feudal age up macro), and that 50 of the 150 starting wood is nonessentially to your age up macro (due to closer straggler trees), this means by the 4min 31s mark you’ll be a net +90 resources worth of spearman (240 resources spearman minus the effective 150 resource Military Academy).