Transcription
Hello and welcome students of AE4 to my Humble House of learning. In this three-part series on the Japanese, I will showcase a new and flexible opening on land maps that allows the Japanese to transition into 1TC aggression, 2TC boom, or even fast Castle in a very smooth way.
The focus is to make use of the Japanese farms and TC upgrades early on. So, dime your mana and then later on down your palace and shunet castle, as well as the coral storehouse, to play them almost like the English, whose safe food and easy transition timing allows for a lot of flexibility. So here we are with this new and flexible opening that you can use in every matchup and on any land map.
Note, however, that this build order might require some intermediate level macro and villager splits. Aside from that, this build order should be quite beginner-friendly, though. Now, even though I liken Japanese to English, the Japanese do not start with as much wood as the English. And so we will begin by sending five villagers to the nearest struggler tree. We want 50 wood immediately, and we can also hotkey these five villagers already, since we will be using them later to age up. The remaining villager builds a farmhouse at the berries.
Once that house is built, we will be researching our Dark Age wheelbarrow, called toara, which makes gathering berries just as fast as gathering sheep. And this will allow you to move the other five villagers to berries in matchups where you want to save sheep because you may be denied food later, or against civs where you want to deny sheep by scouting more aggressively. Remember, however, that berries become even more valuable for you with every wheelbarrow upgrade, since the Japanese obviously have three of them. And so, if you can save berries for later, you should do so.
In this example, I sent my scout on a more defensive route towards the middle and then around the near side, and I will be gathering from sheep. The first villager coming out goes on sheep as well. And then all those five villagers from wood drop off the wood on the TC and then go immediately to the same sheep, which means that one villager will automatically go through the next sheep clubbing. And so we don't waste any time with five villagers all using the clubbing animation.
Now, the next two villagers go onto gold. The first one out building the forge, and only after this will we see the real reason why we just went on wood. Because after those two are on gold, we rally onto stone and we build an additional forge. Now, this additional forge and three villagers on stone will allow us to age up just before 3 minutes and get RTC upgrade for Di your mana immediately after aging up, and that is the plan.
So, once the third villager comes out at 2 minutes, or between 2 and 2:20, our scout should return. Drop off all the sheep, and from RTC, we will be rallying onto food again for two more villagers, so that we go to nine villagers on food, two on gold, three on stone. And once we reach those nine villagers here, the next villager will be going onto the already chopped down straggler tree, and we will be rallying onto wood for a while.
Now, this is the time where your scout is starting to look for the opponent's base, gathering some sheep on the goal, and we think about aging up and where we want to age up. In this example, I will be using this area here to age up with my farm, with my farm house, my storehouse, you'll see that in a second. As the villager comes out, I use those five villagers that I grouped earlier, and they go onto the cor storehouse. The next two villagers also go on the straggler tree, so that I have three on this regular tree in total, and those five are aging up.
So, right now at 3:20, we have 4, 2, 2, 3, and we should be aging up at a very competitive time. And we start looking for the opponent's base because we need to make a decision very soon of how to transition this opening. Now, in this example, I will decide to play on 1TC aggression. But in the next videos, I will also show how to transition into fast castle and how to transition into 2TC from this point.
Just before 4 minutes, you should have enough wood to build another house. You're at 18 out of 20 population at this point, so it's a good time to add another house. And as you can see, I'm adding it at the berries as well, because this will make future food gathering from the berries much more efficient, having the houses on both sides. And I don't really need the food right now, I have enough with three on food.
Also, I'm adding, after the three villagers on the straggler tree, I'm rallying onto the main wood line, and one villager immediately builds the lumber camp. From this point, all these three villagers from the from the the tree are already shift-queued onto the main wood line, and those five villagers building the landmark will also go to wood. And now I'm making the decision to not go for 2TC, to not go fast castle as well. You'll see in a second, I am dropping off all the stone. I have more than 300 stone gathered already. You can stop gathering stone at roughly 4 minutes, 4:10 is the safe bet. And I'm moving those three villagers onto gold.
Now, if the gold is on the other side of the base, you can obviously switch these three to food and the three food over to gold. I'm also queuing up Diell mana and making sure that I don't have another villager queued afterwards, because a villager that comes immediately from the Diell mana doesn't come out until after that villager is also finished. And here we go, do another one immediately. And I'm now rallying back to food again, and from now on, I will just be rallying onto food until at least 9 minutes. So you can basically forget about it.
The thing that you have to think about, though, is that you want to add a villager onto the farms every 50 seconds that a new farm is dropped. And this is why it's also quite easy to rally onto sheep now and then move one off of sheep onto the farms every time a new farm becomes available. So at this point, at 5 minutes, the villager split should be 6, 10, and 5 on gold, and then nobody.
I'm also at 5 minutes adding a barracks. In this case, you know, depending on what you scout from your opponent. In this case, I'm pretending like I'm playing maybe against a Knight civ or a Delhi player would would try to rush me with Ghazi Raiders, so I'm making a few Spearman. But you really have all the options here because you have five on gold. You can also immediately start going for Honor Bugia or for Samurai. And because you have a lot on wood right now, you can even go into archers, which I will be doing in this example, just to play them a little bit more like English. But you have all the flexibility, which is a core idea here.
If you're going Spearman Archer like I am doing, having five on gold really allows you to take advantage of the two forges and getting all your upgrades. Because we've already gotten Lumber Pres, we've already gotten double boardex immediately after finishing the lumber camp. And now we are just as double Brad as X stops, we are building the second wheelbarrow from this house. You can also choose to do it from the cross storehouse. The only thing that is important here is you want to build your first military production building before building before getting your Takasu upgrade. This also costs 50 wood, so you don't want to delay your military production for that.
At this point, we've made the decision to go 1TC aggression, so we're starting to produce units. We're also starting to get upgrades. In this case, to Tara first, because we're making exper. And another decision that we could be making is if we were playing against a really aggressive Knight civ, instead of getting the second wheelbarrow immediately after the barracks, we could also wait for 100 wood, build a tower here, build an outpost, and then get our upgrade.
Now we're adding an archery range, as I said. After this archery range, this villager will immediately build a house. I will then add more houses and eventually move this food because I'm choosing to go archers. I have nine on wood still. If I were to not make any archers but instead go for Horsemen or maybe even double barracks, which you can definitely do with the Japanese, I would instead move three off of wood eventually, once I have enough production buildings and houses, and move them to food.
So at this point, I have the upgrades. It is not really worth it to get specialized pick yet because we don't have enough villagers on stone or gold. And so I'm starting to get all the upgrades from my forges, continuously adding onto farms, and building a couple of houses. Dropping off the last wood that I have and making more houses because I know I want to produce a lot of units. And I don't have enough production, like enough villagers on food or gold or or wood yet to produce from more than two production buildings. That point will come at roughly 9 minutes, where you can add a third production building if you want, or choose to go Castle from that point. This obviously depends on how the game is going.
It's also really easy to transition to Samurai from this point. Once you have a couple of Spearman, because you will already have your important forge upgrades. And at that point, you have all the gold that you need to go into Honor Bugia or Samurai. And it's also quite easy to get your Banman. In this case, I went for the Uni Banam to upgrade the archers because if you go archers with the Japanese, you always want to go with Uni Banam to buff them so that they are not just faster than other archers and cheaper, but also just about as strong.
When it comes to the houses, you want to consider leaving at least two tiles of space between the houses and your main Town Center so that you can add farms. I'm doing this as an example here. You can slowly start adding farms if you have enough wood. You can also leave fertile space, like I did here. It really depends on how defensive you think that side of the TC is, how well I just defended.
And now in this case, it's 9 minutes and 10 seconds. I have 19 on food. I technically have nine on wood. I'm just building with one, one on wood, just building another barracks. And I have five on gold. And I'm, I have almost all upgrades finished. I'm transitioning into building Samurai, continue building archers. And I'm now choosing to all-in in feudal and building another barracks. I could also just as easily decide to move like three or four from wood to food and just age up now. So that is the entire idea here.
Thank you for considering this build order. If you have any questions or suggestions, please comment below. And if you have any ideas how to optimize this build order further, let me know, because, you know, learning is what we do here, after all. So thank you, and class dismissed.