Transcription
Japanese are a civilization that is built around strong macro fundamentals, tight timings, and very efficient cavalry play, making them both flexible and difficult to play against when executed well. It's a civilization that has a very high skill ceiling, and it's also a very popular one for new players. So, you'll probably find that this is one of the harder saves to get started with, but if you do get good with it, it is going to be just one of the most banger s.
I'm going to be covering two Japanese styles here. One is the standard fast castle just with two towers and your gold, and the other one is going to be the spear rush that allows you to get ahead by making a small unit investment in the dark age and then gets a gas le while your opponent is trying to get back into the game after your early pressure.
The first build we're going to be taking a look at is going to be the Japanese Fast Castle. Now, Japanese Fast Castle is extremely simple to play. What you want to be doing is you want to get to Castle Age as quickly as possible. The way you open up is you build a house with one villager. That house acts as a mill as well, and you're going to get your Tovara upgrade. The Tovara is your wheelbarrow. It also increases your berry gather. So, we want to use the berries early as possible so that we don't eat our sheep first. In the meantime, you're going to send your scout out, try to get as many sheep as possible, and then you're going to rally three villagers to gold. So, six in total in food. Queue up the Tovara upgrade from the farmhouse. Continue to collect sheep. Then once the Tovara upgrade is through, you take all these villagers and send them over to berries. It's very simple. That way you get to castle age and uh yeah, you big chilling uh sorry to feudal age and then you macro towards castle right after. I'll I'll of course show you how. So now we have three going to gold. The upgrade is coming through now. So, we're going to rally. I just send my my villagers here to food. And then I rally the rest of my villagers to sheep. Now, if I'm up against a civ that likes to spear rush or something, I will usually open spears myself, unless it's something like Lancaster, in which case maybe you want to skip the Tovara upgrade and then just go straight feudal for archers, right? So that you can resecure your gold.
All right. So, we have three on gold, six in berries. Now, we're rallying food. Most games with Japanese that you're going to be playing are going to be either with a spear rush into a tower rush or spear rush into feudal age, or it's going to be this very opener here. I'm going to show you this one first, of course, because I think you should learn this one before you learn spear rushing. Spear rushing is only good if you kind of know what civs you want to do against and kind of how to not make it hurt you more than you're hurting your opponent. So yeah, we'll talk more about spear rush in a little bit. For now, just simply age up. You're going to age up with either or on food and it's going to be your sheep bills, and they will get you up to feudal age in about 4 minutes. So a standard age up time with that. You can actually just go straight into units if you need. Like if you're playing versus Byzantines, for example, you're going to spear rush into units. Um if you're playing against a civ that's going pro scouts, you might find that it's very useful to also go into units. At a higher level, if you're playing at an average level, silver, gold, platinum, diamond even, then you will find that it will be enough to just fast castle. After that level and you get to diamond two, threeish, you have to start figuring out when do you go units and when do you just go straight castle. Your goal is always to get castle age, but sometimes you need to make units first, and it can be very nice to have units to upgrade.
Continue to collect sheep. I like to scout aggressively around my opponent's base and get their safe sheep that spawn around the base, and then afterwards just scout around my own. Now you want to age up and you want to age up with literally only one villager. If you're not under pressure, this will give you the fastest possible timing. Why? Because aging up with only one villager is uh all you need to immediately go into the next stage afterwards. So if you've ever played HRE and you played mine rack into burger rush, you just got all your upgrades on your burgra. It's kind of similar. So you're opening up now with Kura storehouse, putting it on the wood line. Very important. Then you're putting a few villagers on wood. And you can just kind of wing this. Sometimes you put more villagers on wood, sometimes less uh fewer. So if you have dealing with a spear rush or something, of course you put a lot there and you also age up with more villagers. But if you're just going to go straight fast castle after this and you want to make one or two towers on your gold, then just gather the straggler trees like so with three villagers. I like to put foreign food here and then just rally sheep. These guys over here are going to gather berries. If you're up against somebody else who's also fast castling and not making units, maybe it's worth it to also go for the berries or just do it later on. The idea is you want to consume external food sources before you consume your safe ones. And so just continue to try and find sheep. Most games you'll get maybe a total of 12 sheep and start our house. Sorry, our tower and our house. So, we're going to get the wood here. And I'm just going to go with gold. And then I'm going to make a house. The reason I make the house here is because when I make farms around it later on in the game, if the game does go that long, which it shouldn't, uh, not always, then the daimo manners that I can upgrade will then add a gather rate on my farms here. So, that's really nice for me. Uh, if I just try to build my farms around my TC and my production just towards one side, like let's say here, I would build my production buildings and my HR building, flowing gate, that would be fine. I just don't want to take up all the space around where I want to build my farms. So, I want to at least have two tiles around this farmhouse now as it's acting as a mill later on in the game. That kind of layout is quite important, I would say.
So, this villager over here is going to go to gold afterwards. We're also going to control group eight villagers here so we have them ready for going into the castle age when we have the resources. So, you're going to bank some stone here. This will be enough stone to go and upgrade your tower fully, and that can help you a lot. Usually, with a fully garrisoned tower, it takes about seven torch units, like seven spears um to torch that tower down if it has villagers inside it. You won't be left with many torch units afterwards. Um but that's kind of like around that number. Uh it's a good benchmark for taking it down. If you start adding fire armor through the upgrade of the fortification and arrows that gives you more range, then all of a sudden it's a different story and your opponent will need a ram. So here you can start with areroslits and then uh after that you can then go into uh 45 outposts and that will make it so that even if your opponent's making units, if you have a bad gold like this, it's incredibly difficult for your opponent to deal with this. Speaking of having back gold versus front gold, etc., it's always something that people talk about. Use your brain. That's all I'm going to say. If you have a front gold and your opponent's making units and you have the experience of my tower doesn't defend, don't blame me. That's on you. Make units. Make those units, defend yourself, and then once you've taken a good fight, go next age. So, be smart about it. Don't just blindly age up. It's a strategy game, and uh therefore, we need to make the right call.
So now we are going to get the gold that we need here at about 6:30 and then we're going to age up here. Now this is still a nice farmhouse that I can uh use to make farms around later. Notice how I'm not taking these farms here. Some of you are going to sit there and be like, "Oh, that's not effective." The thing is, when you're playing a fast castle like this, you're often extremely exposed. So with that logic, I wouldn't even be gathering these uh berries, right? Because if somebody's raiding me with knights here or whatever, these farms are very exposed just like these berries are. That's also why we've been keeping um our straggler trees uh around our base. We haven't removed them by buildings or anything. It's extremely important that you don't remove these because you absolutely need the wood to be able to make stable or barracks or archer range or whatever uh when you're under pressure. And a lot of the times when you are fast castling like this, people are going to try to stop you because they know Japan is probably the best civilization for playing castle age. If they are unbothered and are allowed to make a lot of mount of samurai, they have extreme potential to just roll you over with all of the damage upgrades, the extra plus one, the extra four damage that they get from their banner men on their cavalry. Even going into Yumi spam is extremely cheap for them. It's a civilization that if you know what you're doing and you know how to defend and what units to go for it. It has answers to everything through going castle age. And um yeah, that's what makes Japan such an amazing civilization and why it's regarded as probably like top three or four by most tournaments tournament players, the professionals.
All right, so now we're going to build another house. And right now we're over gathering a bit of food here. So we could put a few more onto uh onto wood here just to get uh the stable. So right now the build order is over. Uh the last thing you're going to be doing is going into a stable if you're unbothered. But if somebody's about to go with spears and horsemen and take out your your tower here, which you would have fortified, right? Then maybe you go samurai instead. That's probably a better call since you're about to lose gold access and you need a cheap unit that only costs food. So in that instance um just go samurai instead, build a barrack instead. So this is the first sort of decision-making point. Are you able to continuously gather the gold or not? And that's going to sort of decide what unit will you go for here. Um I forgot to mention with the chorus storehouse the the the placement of this building. I didn't actually point it out, but for example, you might have noticed that all of the farms spawned on the left side and then went around in a clock movement. That's how it works basically. So if you were to place this the most defensively, I would have placed it down here. So over here by this um where my mouse is right now, because if it's right here, then the farms will spawn close to your town center and that will help me preserve food better. So that's a little bit of an extra thing you can do, an extra tip there. Uh so yeah, just want to point that out because it's quite good knowledge to have.
So, now we're going to be hedged up. We We didn't get our stable yet, and that's because I didn't macro enough on wood. So, you can macro a little bit heavier on wood if you want to. Uh, you would have gotten a barrack if you needed to get a barrack, um, etc. Just kind of, you know, play it out the way you that you would. Um, yeah. So, now get that stable out and then start taking relics. Most games, if I'm under pressure, I'm not going to send my my monk out just yet. I'm going to wait until I have units to defend him. So again, it's about think about how you are going to move around the map. If you don't have map control, don't just send this monk out blindly. A lot of people just do that and they lose their first monk and they're going to have to wait another I think it's uh 2 minutes. Yeah, 2 minutes until they can get their next monk out, and it just slows down the relic collection a lot. So preserve this monk until you find uh an opening to be able to go out. A lot of the times once you have your first samurai out, you can start raiding your opponent. They will follow your samurai, and then you can sneak out here. Also get your attacks upgrade. And if you have map control again, head out on the berries, go on the farms now. Then we're pretty much big chilling. Of course, we're making knights non-stop here. So, uh, get on gold. You want to have about uh eight on food and and five on gold for full knight production normally, but this is basically the equivalent of having two stables when you have uh Oh, wait. It's actually a little bit I'm I'm not sure how much that's equivalent to when it's 125%. A little bit more than two stables. I would assume. Um so in that situation, in that scenario, you need, you know, around 10 on gold to be able to maintain uh non-stop production out of your stable.
All right. So now we're gathering wood here. A lot of the times this one stable will be just enough for you to continuously make uh mount of samurai, which is very nice. Uh, you're going to be doing that for a little bit. So now add in your Shinto shrine. Start dropping in those monks, those relics from the monk, and then uh just macro towards more mount of samurai. When your opponent starts spamming out crossbows and knights, which is the ideal counter to countering mounted samurai, or maybe they just go full spear crossbow. In that situation, you start adding in either spears or Yumi. Most of the time, it's going to be Yumi, right? So now on that one, now you start getting some nice gold income. You get the equivalent of uh two villagers on gold when you drop a relic. And in the later stages of the game for other civs, it will give you more. So, of course, with Japan, we don't have tithe barns, which is a unique upgrade in the shrine. So, in Imperial Age, we don't have uh that. We just get more Yurushiro, which are basically mini relics you can put inside the farmhouse. I like to go and put my first Yurushiro inside of my stable. The second Yurushiro, these are the guys that came out of the the flowing gate here. This is a Yurushiro that we're dropping. You can see the icon here. Basically, what you're going to do is you're going to put the first one in the stable or your other production building so that you can get a nice start to the to the castle Age. And then the second one goes inside the TC. You start taking the relics, and then the next two ones will go in the farmhouses. Why? Because food is the first resource that's going to run out for uh every single civ. For Japan, your food preservation is why your civ is good. A lot of the times when you are playing as Japan, you are the last civ to run out of food. And uh that is uh truly the reason why this civ is S tier. It's definitely the power spiking castle with the Yuri and everything, but the food not running out of food is amazing. So, a lot of the times when people start farming and you're just chilling with your Yurushiro and your map control and you're taking the berries, which by the way give you a really, really high gather rate compared to uh to other civilizations, once you're taking those resources and your opponent starts to be on berries, they have a low gather rate, you have a high gather rate, you're not running out of food. Quite the contrary, you will uh be able to uh start your fun transition for free earlier. And uh that's just something that a lot of civ struggle with is that time around 18 to 20 minutes where you're just going to die if your opponent doesn't have to farm. That's why most people die to Malians at minute 18 20ish because Malians just doesn't care that you have to farm. Like they don't. So they just push you. And it's a similar story when you're playing as uh as Japan, right? So just go crazy with the knights and just keep making knights. When when you reach that farm transition time, if you can all in at that point or raid a lot and just try to kill your opponent, great. If you can't, go imperial. Why? Because your opponent is now farming, spending a lot of resources on making farms while you are not. And so, you could spend those very same amount of resources on going Imperial and upgrading your 20, 30 knights and 40 Yumi that you might have at that time in the game, and all of a sudden your opponent has completed their farms and you just went Imperial and now you have elite uh high quality units and uh they're kind of stuck with their spear crossbow composition. And that's how you play Japan. You play this uh very aggressively. You maintain your knights like you would with French, and then you just kind of, you know, win the game because the civ is just that good.
If your opponent makes a lot of spear crossbow, uh to talk a little bit about compositions. But your opponent makes a lot of spear crossbow, you make Yumi Aigaru, right? They counter both of those. If your opponent's making horsemen, small amounts of spearmen, knights, mana arms, anything, you go Mount of Samurai. And the moment that your opponent goes for a composition to try to counter you, like spear horsemen or something, um then go uh into puga, right? So you have basically uh three comps. You have only mount of samurai. Then you have uh mount of samurai into Yumi, which is your natural comp. That's your go-to. And then you have uh into Yumi into buga, which will counter full melee compositions. And buga are really really good for this type of heavy castle play. If you want to go Imperial, just raid more with your mount of samurai. Don't make buga. Go imperial instead. Um then of course you have all the reaction comps like just making standard samurai to count a few lins etc. Um, but yeah, that's pretty much it for compositions. Uh, you might find that it's a bit hard to go mount of samurai and archers every single game if your micro doesn't serve you very well. That's objectively the correct composition. If you find that it doesn't work for you at your elo, you can do two things. You can uh play the wrong composition, and that's going to keep you at your level. So, if you start playing uh mount uh normal samurai and on a mushia or whatever to try to get that manarm crossbow comp that you might have been used to from playing English, um that's a bad idea. I wouldn't recommend it. Uh it might be a good band-aid fix for the time being, but learn how to micro the the mount of samurai and Yumi archers. It's extremely easy because they're both very fast, especially Yumi archers are faster than normal archers. And then uh when it comes to uh uh just in general like compositions, yeah, just get really really good at maneuvering around the map and mounted samurai and Yumi will be the best comp you can go for in 95% of games. No kidding. I'm not joking. You will see that in every single pro game.
All right, let's uh talk a little bit about the uh opener for spear rush and then I'll show you a quick game and give you a little bit of a rundown of how a fast-paced um spear rush into castle should go. All right, so I'm going to be showing you Japan versus JD, which is same as playing Japan versus um French. You're basically going to open up with a barrack. And why is that? Well, it's because you want to cut their gold access so that you have more time to go to the castle age without them building up too many knights. And so that's matchup specific knowledge. It's something that's uh um you're going to be finding is more and more valuable as you go through your progression as a player. Um it's absolutely necessary for me to go for this opener in this matchup. And I want to show you the opener. It's a bit of a sort of free ball uh opener. Uh there is a certain uh macro split for the initial uh part of it, but how many spears you're going to make if you're also going to tower uh is going to be up to you. So, most of the time you're going to make two spears and then you're going to go into uh basically just a castle age macro with a few towers. Other games you might go, you know, a few spears and then into units as in the case of Byzantines. Um, but basically what you're going to do is you're going to open up with two villagers on the barrack, two villagers on the straggler tree, and two villagers on food. One of them building a house. So, there's a lot of macro here. Um, that you need to do very quickly. Uh, and that can be a little bit off-putting if you're a new player, which is also why I'm not saying that this is uh necessary for you to learn if you're an average level. Most people make so many mistakes that you can get away with just fast castling in every single game. Um, but if you are uh trying to become a better player, you need to learn this if you want to main Japanese.
So, barrack opener, very very good. Uh, two on the on the barrack, two on the on the wood, one to get the house farmhouse. And then what you can do here is you can get Tovara immediately. And you can get a spearing queue. And you can only do that if you immediately send your villages to wood, right? But if you didn't immediately get them to wood, just prioritize the spear first. Afterwards, get the Tovara. And then now what you're going to do is you're going to decide your macro. It's going to be either heavy on wood or just two on wood. So if you have two on wood, you can make constant uh spears. I like to make two spears and then make a decision. Do I want to put more on wood for a tower and then make five spears to fill up the tower completely? Then I will put, you know, five on wood and send one villager out to build the tower. In all other instances, I'll just keep two on wood, build two uh spears, and then get enough wood for a mining camp. So, that's a lot of information. I hope you guys can keep track here. Um, do feel free to uh ask questions in the comments if there's something I glanced over too much. I did a little bit of a misclick here, but uh solved it again pretty quickly. So, now uh I'm going out. Always take your scout with you together with the spear here. I'm charging at the enemy scout with the spear to try to get a little bit of a movement speed bonus. And then I'm going to make uh two spears in total. And I was considering going for a tower rush as well. Also with your scout, if you're going across the map with the spears in the early game, use your scout to uh get aggro on the on the wolves so that your spears don't show up at the enemy with very low HP. So I'm sending out a villager here because I wanted to go for a tower on the enemy's gold, but he had already gathered all the gold that he needed. And so I was kind of expecting him to just go straight into um you know an archer and then secure his gold in the back, which is a very good counterplay. In which instance I did not want to overcommit because this is what I'm talking about when I say you don't want to hurt yourself more than what you do to your opponent. It will not make a difference in this game whether or not I make uh two spears now and push him off gold or if I make five spears in a tower on this gold because he will still have the same response and it will not be worse or better for him depending on me making more than two spears. So, he's just going to go to the second gold uh if I lock down this gold. And if I don't lock down this gold, he's still going to make an archer and push me away or whatever. JD is going to level up and go into archer mode or spear on or melee mode can be also that. Um it's basically just I'm going to be making two spears. My opponent is going to react the same way and making more spears in a tower isn't going to give me more value. So I don't instead I pull off wood.
Now I had put uh four villagers on wood. Now I just take four villagers and put them over to gold. I think I'm going to go up to five villagers in total on gold now. Uh, that sort of depends on how many units you made and that's kind of why I'm not including build order for this. I'm just going to show it to you because you need to get a feeling for this. So now I got my spears coming here. You can kind of see this spearhead killed a wolf, took a bit of damage, which is unfortunate. And now I'm just torching this uh this mining camp here and uh aging up. So I put some villagers in the berries because berries have a very fast gather rate with Tovara. That's why we got it in the first place. And then gathering this gold here so we can speed up the game a little bit. He's going to be aging up now. As we can see, it didn't delay him too much. And so, he's actually chilling. He just doesn't have gold access, so he can't get fro scouts immediately. And he can't get that knight out immediately. And that's very nice for us. And that's good value for simply making 75 wood barrack and and two spears, right? He's going to start a tower here. I'm going to torch that tower until uh he gets it up. He's going to pull another villager, and that allows him to to get the tower. So, there's some nice idle time there. And um in the meantime here, I have only had four on gold, so I didn't actually put five. And then uh storehouse uh is going to go up. I'm going to build it with just one villager here. So I started with four. And then I made a decision that I wanted to just build it with one. Gather the wood that I needed from the straggler trees to get my gold secured. And then I'm just going to go for castle.
So with any kind of game, you're going to have to make decisions like this. Um, that's why I can't just say do this, do that, because every matchup is different and uh I'm not going to try to fool you guys. So, nine villagers here on berries. I'm just trying to get the max gather rate. I have or on gold. I'm going to put a fifth one over here as well. And because he just aged up, I know there's going to be 29 seconds for that knight to come out if he gathered the gold afterwards doing his age up. 29 seconds. And then that's going to make it quite um tight for me if I want to build the tower. That's going to take 1 minute with one villager. So I do put an additional bill there that's going to decrease the um the time of that to like 40 seconds or something um something like that. Maybe 35 seconds or something something around that. And that's going to be the outpost. And then I'm going to build a second outpost because the way you counter Japan building one tower is to build a counter tower. And that is very good idea to do here because there are two golds right after each other. That my third gold is here. So, uh, if he towers this gold, I'm not ever getting gold again, and then I'm just going to die to knights. So, I'm going to make a second tower here, and I'm going to upgrade both of these towers, and that's going to make it so that I can't be counter towered. Counter towering is where you build another tower here outside of this one's range. Upgrade this one, which will then in turn make it so that you can target the vills under the gold. Finishing up with one villager and then I'm just going to go uh straight to gas mage. Building a house, keeping track of how many knights my opponent has. JD should go archer JD or melee JD. And now basically I have two spears inside of this tower and they're just going to be uh shooting. And uh I have the uh enough garrison space for all the vills that I have here and have about six villagers just kind of macroing uh to castle age. And then I'm going to build some walls here to prevent him to from taking out this wood line. And that's very map specific due to the fact that I'm playing on a map called Boltland, which uh has some spawn uh generation stuff. Usually you have a safe gold in the back. I didn't in this one. You can see he has safe gold. And then you have these extremely tiny wood lines. So you always kind of want to, you know, protect them from towers and night raids and stuff. So that's kind of the the whole purpose of this wall here. I'm not making walls per to to deter my opponent from raiding me. Um, he can go through them if he wants to, but that will give me the time I need. Um, I'm making these walls to sort of angle him and have him move uh all the way around here, which is very awkward. Um, yeah. Now, I'm going to age up here with flowing gate, and I'm going to collect the wood I need. So, I'm putting some more V over here, getting the stable cuz the stable will counter uh anything that he can make besides night spear. So, his only counter is to kind of stay in feudal, take all the deer on the map, and then go night spear. Yeah, he's going to go here. I'm going to age up, get the stable. Same as the game before. This was basically just the leadup to the same outcome of the build that I showed uh in the previous section of this video. Um you you just want to get to this point every single time you play Japan. You don't want to finish games in feudal or boom in two with 2DC or anything because your civ is the absolute strongest when you get to this stage of the game where you have gold control, you have the stable, and now you're taking relics. That's the best sort of feeling when you play Japan and I recommend it every time.
This I didn't see uh in time. So he is going to be able to do some damage here. Uh, I think I lose one vill, which is honestly a cheap price to pay for lack of awareness. And then, uh, he's going to lose some knights here. I'm going to be able to make knights and I have my spears as well. And, uh, now I can start taking relics. First, second out of my film gate goes into the TC. Third, fourth goes into farmhouses. And I'm going to start sneak out some some monks here. The only reason I'm doing this instead of following it with knights because I know all his knights are out here. So, I'm feeling just fine sneaking this one. The amount of samurai come now. And I'm just going to go full mount of samurai. And he's going to have to stay and make feudal knights and maybe add spearman. That means that I will have to do a lot of micro here. And this is not required, so to speak, to play this out. You could go on a musher as well. Um, that also requires micro. Of course, this game is defined by micro as well. Um, if you want to be a good player. Um, not throwing shade at anyone. There's just a lot of people that ask me how can I play Japanese without having to play mount of samurai and archers because I'm not very good at that micro. And I'm just basically always resolving it to uh you can't. You have to get good at this comp. Get good with knight spear or nightmush or whatever it is. Um, it's going to be a struggle for you to play any other sort of comp. Um, then I would play another civ. So just kind of hinting at that. Uh, you want to get good at this sort of night micro. So right now I'm just going to start out raiding him. Uh, basically never fighting, just fighting villager kills, idling resources, having multiple groups out here while I'm buying time to take the relics and the map resources. So I have these berries in the back. That's very nice for me. I'm going to lose two man samurai here cuz he had a very nice intercept, but then in turn I'm going to kill some villagers. Um, so there's a cost to everything. Of course, you want to be as deadly as you can. And uh, here he loses his scouts that he was pro scanning with. Um, for reference, this is one of my students. He's about 17, 1800 elo. And, um, which means he's better than pretty much anyone who will be watching this video. So don't go saying that this is not representative because it definitely isn't. This is a pretty high level uh guy and uh yeah, it's just you want to be that kind of raiding force that can just completely, you know, turn a situation where you have very inferior numbers into one where you have greater numbers in effective uh greater effective numbers. Now I'm making spearman. I'm sending the spears over thinking uh if he is out of gold, he's not going to be able to make knights, which means I can take a big fight. He loses some more bills and then he knows it's kind of over. He sees the spear and then he calls it. Anyways, didn't want to throw too much shade there at the end of this video. That was not my point. Just wanted to clarify a few things. And yeah, I hope you guys have enjoyed this video. If you have, don't forget to leave a like and subscribe. And uh yeah, if you have any comments in the comment section below, I'll be there to uh answer them. And yeah, I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.