A place for friends of ours to discuss the newly made Italy.
To start, let me introduce you to the 14/10 atp opening: queue a vil then split 2f 1w, rally to mine, with architect building market and finishing as usual, send to build tp after. Stack up to 10/10 in queue before first market upgrade finishes. Get your opening 4 market upgrades (dog, buss, saw, coat). Age and pull all but 1-2 to wood, should be able to get 4 tps up + stagecoach started before 4:40 with zero treasure (started construction on 5th tp or 1st house with architect), 1 shipment available upon reaching age 2, can send tp+booster. (note: atp reduces the cost for architect to finish but does not affect the base time for free construction).
You can also just open normally, getting a house, steel traps, and keeping constant vil production. If you’re getting steel traps you should be able to have enough vils in queue for the house to be free, after which the architect will construct another house before going to construct the a tp. This gets more value out of your atp at the expense of making your architect less efficient, and obviously your age-up and stagecoach are delayed in exchange for more vils. Alternatively, you can skip steel traps and the 2nd house, sending architect to tp immediately after 1st house and pay to finish once atp comes in. Good if you want 2nd shipment age 1. The biggest weakness for these atp builds is you don’t have wood age-up option like hausa or port, so you will have to choose whether you need first stagecoach or rax, tp or house.
A more standard opening you can do is 2 tp stagecoach: like above, after finishing house, start architect on tp, research stagecoach asap while aging, send architect to build another tp. Architect builds at the speed of hero when you pay, aka 3 vils, or 3.9 if you don’t speed up (factoring resource cost of building). You can send a tower or two there when you finish aging, and then the tp+booster card in age 2, or units, or play ff. The good part about this build is your first card isn’t atp - that is to say your first cards are flex picks, you can go furrier, hardwoods, advanced politicians, capitalism, marco, save, w/e. Same for age-2 though you probably don’t want to play lombard boom if you open stagecoach. Should probably delay stagecoach for rax vs aggro.
Lombard booms have been unsuccessful for me thus far. but in theory they should be ok as they cost as much as a tp while offering 0.2 more xp/s and a slight resource profit, but this requires a basilica shipment in age2. When it’s all up and running you can just spam age2 shipments non-stop. I would value xp lombards as slightly better than base tp’s, but unlike tp’s your upgrades for lombards are dependent on shipments in various ages. Furthermore, not only is this boom inhibited by the basilica shipment, but also:
- Cost of lombards - 200res is same as tp but a tp does not need 900 resource invested to trickle xp!
- Booms that generate xp will inevitably fall off due to the nature of the resource!
- You sacrifice 2 of your most important shipments to spam future shipments.
- If you cannot afford to invest 300w early game (and I don’t see how you can afford to as italy) then each lombard is worth less than a tp WITH the basilica shipment!
What’s the consensus on placer mines before age-up?
How about those bosniaks? 75 dmg 3 area charge attack, insane! I always try to get the shipment + build them from lombards when possible, complimented well by lancers and dragoons.
Schiavoni seem decent but their animation is annoying.
Anyone get suckered into the lancer shipment in age2? 900 res for 3x300 res units + a stradiot. Is a stradiot worth 700 res? No? Then don’t fall for this scam! Schiavoni + crabat in comparison is much more worth; would you pay 700 res for 6 crabat? I would, and they compliment each other since crabat counter cav.
Lack of age 3 skirm is kinda annoying and I guess is why a lot of players just play musk falc ff. I’ve been testing and I can get around 25 musk + 2 falc by 8:30 with no treasure, not quite as fast as spanish ff. I tested a few versions, 18/20 steel traps, 14/10 no steel traps, 14/10 steel trap before age (15/10), 14/10 steel traps after age, fastest was 14/10 no trap which beat runner up 14/10 trap after age by about 5 seconds, which beats 18/20 by about 15. The main difference is if you don’t build a house and instead get a tp, you get a shipment you can use for 700w during age-up, or maybe an age 3 unit shipment.
Think of 14/10 as a 12/10 but you have 2-4 vils permanently on wood in the architect. However the reason I believe building house after market is suboptimal for timing attacks is because:
- Unlike normal settlers, you cannot transition the architect to food, it does not help in your age-up at all, unless you use it inefficiently to chop for steel traps.
- Building a house is one of the most inefficient uses of the architect while building a tp is one of the most efficient (#1 is TC).
You can use the 200g from age-up on a second early architect, I like it.
Never cheyenne, always commanche. Better to build random walls around the map than ally with cheyenne!