|
The Saracen Scout Rush
This is a strategy I developed about 4-6 weeks ago
(can't remember exactly when) after playing around
with some of my resource gathering rate numbers.
I'd read lots of posts at MFO and AOKH about using
the Saracen market bonus heavily in order to gain
an economic advantage. However, I always wrote
those posts off because they all either used the
stone-for-gold-for-food method or went super-heavy
on gold mining. Either way, they tried to
completely avoid farming and got all of their food
from the market. I won't go into a lot of details
on why I think that's foolish; suffice it to say
that there's a big long-term sacrifice made by
spending all of your stone and gold at the market.
However, I was in the process of trying to develop
a fuedal strategy for every civ so that I wouldn't
be stuck not knowing what to do with a random civ
(which had just happened a couple of times) and I
decided to give Saracen marketeering another try.
Here are some of the conclusions I came to:
The real VS cost of buying food from the market
is much less than farming for quite a while. The
buying price of food that is break-even from a
VS standpoint with farming is 145, since it
costs 2.84VS/g and 4.12VS/f. A Saracen can buy
2000 food before that method is no longer
efficient. This can allow the Saracen to
research horse collar before farming and delay
needing to get wheelbarrow, allowing for more
villagers early on and more efficient farms
later.
Selling wood and using that gold to buy food is
also more cost-effective than using that
villager to go from lumberjacking to farming.
The key to this is efficient wood pits. I have
some data on the efficiency of woodchopping over
time with different numbers of lumberjacks per
camp (not on MFO yet, I'm not done with it) and
with 6 vils/lumber camp and double-bit axe, the
gather rate is 0.391w/sec as a base rate. Note:
At 0.391w/sec the VS cost is 2.56VS/w.
Compare this to farming, which has a VS cost of
4.12VS/f. That's a 40% difference! Unfortunately
there is still a 5% penalty so it's not possible
to do a direct 100w=100f correlation. Still, my
calculations show that selling 1100W and buying
800F with that gold (43 gold left over, which
would cost 122VS to mine) costs 2694VS (I
subtracted 122VS since you get that gold
"free"), compared to 3296VS it takes to gather
700F from farms. This was the empirical
break-even point where the VS difference between
farming and buying food from sold wood started
declining. Although selling wood for gold is
more efficient than gold mining as a means of
gold collection only for the first 3 trades,
wood is typically not a resource that is
exhaustible so the long- term effects of selling
wood are far less.
The VS savings can be HUGE. The Mongols are
considered the fastest civ with their hunting
bonus, which gives them about 900VS savings
compared to baseline. As a point of reference,
this can lead to an extra 300+ wood if that's
how the VS savings are spent. However, with
proper marketeering the Saracens can save at
least that many VS or possibly even more. Buying
1200F at the market using only gold that's mined
costs 3972VS. Compare this to gathering 1200F by
farming; it costs 4944VS. That's a 972VS
savings, or more than the Mongol bonus. If you
instead sell wood down to 76 and use gold mining
to generate the rest of your gold to buy 1200F,
it costs 4114VS, for a 830VS savings. The
tradeoff for the reduced efficiency is that you
save over 900 gold that can be mined later, and
some of that lost efficiency is gotten back
because you don't need to have as many gold
miners all crowding around the gold mine.
Now that you have the background (hopefully not
too confusing), here's the build order for a
Saracen scout rush:
1-6 sheep
7-9 mill, berries
10-11 straggler trees
12 lure boar #1
loom en route to boar
13-16 wood, build lumber camp when possible
lure boar #2
17-19 sheep
20-22 mining camp, gold
fuedal
While in fuedal transition, build a barracks and a
2nd lumber camp. You should have 10 food gatherers
at the TC (7 boar, 3 sheep); 4 go to gold, 6 go to
the 2nd lumber camp. You should have 7 gold
miners, 3 berry pickers, and 12 lumberjacks.
Arrive in fuedal 10:45-11:15.
In fuedal:
build the market FIRST, then build a stable and
start queuing scouts. Buy as much food as you can
and buy double-bit axe. Keep making villagers and
buy horse collar ASAP. Your first 2 villagers go
to wood, then build farms with every subsequent
villager. Note: if deer are close by you can send
your berry pickers to hunt deer and put new
villagers on berries instead of having them farm,
giving you a bit more wood. You should be able to
have 4 scouts (including your original) before
14:00 and 8 scouts by 16:00. I haven't built more
than 8 scouts because by then they'll have reacted
with spears. I will usually build an archery range
and blacksmith as wood allows. I have researched
wheelbarrow around the 16:00 mark and gone castle
immediately afterwards with around 37 villagers
and a 20-21 minute castle time.
The advantages of this strat are fourfold: one,
you get to use Saracens in a competitive situation
against civs that are typically considered weaker
late-game than the Sarcs. Two, you aren't
penalized by having a strong-late game civ; your
econ will be keeping up with a Mongol or Mayan
player. Three, the amount of deception can be very
strong. Careful scouting pre-fuedal can actually
work to your opponent's disadvantage, since
finding 7 gold miners in dark almost always means
archers, and while skirmishers counter archers,
they get beaten soundly by scouts. It can also be
extremely surprising to an opponent to see only a
few scattered farms, yet food-heavy scouts and a
quick castle time. Four, you can achieve these
goals without completely sacrificing your gold or
stone supply. By only delaying farming until
fuedal instead of not farming at all until castle,
you only need to spend 300-400 gold, which will
not cripple you later on.
The disadvantages to this strat are relatively
few. Having the market up immediately means that
even a tower rush pushing you off of wood won't
kill your econ, and if the enemy has spears
waiting for your scouts, you can easily regroup
and make archers, or go straight to castle and
make x-bows. It is a fairly flexible build in that
if you find the enemy is doing something unusual,
you can always adjust your economy to compensate.
Although the VS savings from marketeering can make
up the VS advantage a Mongol has, there is the
cost of gold spent that the Mongol doesn't have to
deal with, so that's a disadvantage for the
Saracen. However, the tradeoff is that the Saracen
has a much more diversified imperial age army with
a wider range of upgrades.
Note: One great advantage of going gold/wood heavy
and using the market to generate food is that you
can use this start for any kind of fuedal attack
(except a tower rush).
Enjoy!
|
