Transcription
Gamers, we're back and today we're going to be doing Golden Horde guide. Obviously, I have released one long, long, long time ago, but the guide that I'm going to show you is kind of the most, I guess, popular way to play Golden Horde and the best way to play Golden Horde these days.
And I chose a game where you get Dark Age rushed cuz I know that everyone that does play Golden Horde you get Dark Age rushed all the time. So, this is probably one of the games that you kind of struggle with or you're not sure how to deal with it. The current meta, and in my opinion the best way to play Golden Horde these days is to simply mass produce units in feudal age and then get a slower age up once you get some kind of advantage. And this works really well because Golden Horde can produce a lot of units in feudal age and even if your opponent is castle rushing, you can basically deny their castle rush or deny them of the gold and just win the game straight away.
So, what I'm going to be showing you is basically a mix of those two. My opponent will go for Dark Age rush and he will also go for castle rush after, which I think is like almost a perfect game cuz that's what most people struggle with, those two things with Golden Horde.
There's two ways to defend Dark Age rush, okay? Number one is the way that I'm going to show you right here and then number two, which is an option that you can have or you might have, which is you can make a Dark Age tower. Now, this would require you to chop tree and if you're if you see that your opponent is opening barracks, you chop the tree and then you make a tower.
Now, when do you do the tower? When do you do the just a simple age up? If you have both gold and stone next to each other like this, putting a tower here is actually a very good value because if the opponent opens Dark Age and you have a tower that protects gold and stone, and later on the tower is still going to be useful, that is very good and I would suggest you to go for tower if you want to. But this game I didn't do that because I wanted to show you what happens if let's say the gold is here and the stone is here because in that case if you tower the stone the opponent will go on gold if you tower the gold they will kill your Ubu, right? So this game I'm just going to play like you have a bad spawn and like it's not going to work out, right?
So in this specific game I go pretty early four on food and I go two on gold one guy's finishing up the golden tent and then I'm going to just hop on to the gold quickly. The reason I'm doing this quickly is because the opponent is most likely going dark age because he's playing Japanese. It's very very common. So I will have three on gold until the age up and then I'll be able to move away quickly. Now this is something I would advise you to do no matter which city you're playing against if that city is opening dark age do this, okay? I just sent three somewhat early on gold get the gold that you need and get out, okay? From this point on the only thing we're going to do I sent extra here just in case cuz we're playing against Japanese in cliffside which is like the fastest possible Spearman that you can get. The point being just get the gold and get out.
Now once you do that you will simply rally everything to the food and you will go for the age up. Now I'm going to speed this part a little bit I get enough gold for the age up and now my mission has been completed. Now what he will do is usually he will try to kill the stone straight away. Um and sometimes you can defend this stone aka the the Ubu, right? Sometimes the Ubu will be like here so then you can just repair it and be in the range of TC and if you can do that that's great. But this game if you look my TC is not covering the the villager that would repair, so I can't really do that. Okay? So, I have to just kind of let it die. But, like I said, if the stone was closer, I would probably just repair it with a villager, and that's it.
So, from here on out, we're going to age up, and we're going to go with Khan and Tour Goods. I think this is um just overall the better age up because um you can produce a lot of Tour Goods in uh early on in the game, which enables the the mass of Iranians to work out really well. Now, as soon as we start the age up, we're going to put eight on wood, and we're just going to go ahead and make a Gur, and just chop wood, and we're going to leave seven on food uh with this specific variation because we want to uh go with uh Batu Khan and then which only stone, but then we want to go for Tour Goods.
So, once your Uvu goes down versus a Dark Age rush, there's two options you can do. Option number one is simply waiting if you cannot remake the stone, and then getting an Archer Range, or if your age up is about 30-40 seconds away, and if your opponent didn't see the second stone that exists on the map, or they don't have a Spearman there, like you can check with the scout, there's no Spearman, you can actually immediately remake the Uvu right here. Because at this point, if I make the Uvu, he won't have the time to kill it, right? Cuz he has 30 seconds plus Archer Range being built, and Archer coming out, he can't torch that one, too. So, if you have a decent spawn, like if the second stone was here, I wouldn't be able to do that, but because the second stone is over here, I can simply um remake the the Uvu, and then if he goes there, it's not a problem because, like I said, Archers will be on the way very, very quickly.
Now, the moment I age up, you can see I've 12 on wood right now. That's because I need to rebuild the Uvu and I will immediately queue up the Batu Khan and then Torguts after. Now, with these guys, you don't need to defend this, go across the map and try to put pressure on your opponent, okay? So, whenever you get dark age rushed, try to put pressure on your opponent. Um because running, you know, cavalry to spears doesn't really work out too well. And we're going to start some production buildings here.
Now, which production buildings do you make? Well, um depending which civ you play against from here on out, if the opponent has uh knights in feudal, like maybe JD open barracks, I would suggest you to go with barracks plus archers or if you're playing against a castle rush civ, I would also suggest you to probably go uh Spearman plus archer because if the opponent eventually gets to castle, they will make mounted samurai in this case. So, having Spearman now can be really, really good. If you're playing against, I don't know, some civs that's maybe going to stay in feudal and doesn't have knights, you can also go Keshik. So, Keshik archer or Spearman archer, in my opinion, are probably the best things you can do, okay?
So, as I'm making the archer range, I'm going to retake this stone suit and I'm going to retake the gold as well. So, what is my goal right now in this game? The goal right now, even though my build order got disrupted, I will just continue to attack from this point on. I will defend the Spearman and then I'm going to put pressure on his gold. And you can already see he has a tower, he's gathering the berries. So, he's doing everything he can right now to make sure to get enough gold, make sure he's protected on the gold. And he's getting the berries so he can be on the sheep later on. So, I'm going to speed up here a little bit. Second Uvu is remade, I'm making the archers. He ran away with the Spearman, which is a good decision. And now you can start harassing. And if the opponent doesn't have a tower here, you can cause a lot a lot of trouble. Thorguds are out. Make sure you have Karush in your army, no matter what you're playing with Golden Horde, always always have Karush in your army. They're very very important to have, okay?
Now, um here we go. We're going to retake the gold just cuz we want some eco upgrades and some military upgrades. And from this point on, I can 100% see that he is going fast castle. So, I'm just going to push straight across the map, and I'm going to start building my army, getting the blacksmith so we can kill the tower. Because if you prevent this gold from being mined, even if he edges up to castle, he will not have the gold to produce units like mountain samurai or samurai, and that's going to be probably GG, okay?
So, normally, if the opponent is playing for feudal age, and he's trying to fight you in feudal age, I would get eco upgrades first, so we get double broadax, wheelbarrow, you know, make sure my economy is good and it's it's still pumping. Obviously, make sure you have two Ubus. Um but because the opponent is castle rushing, I don't need more economy. I just need to get uh iron and undermesh as fast as possible so that I can dive this tower and go for it. You could also go siege engineering as well first, and then make a ram and go for it. But, yeah, I prefer to just have a more mobile army, and then just be able to go immediately and prevent that gold mining.
So, as we're waiting for this, we're producing Spearman, archers, we're producing another round of Karush, we're producing uh Thorguds with all the stone that we have. And the moment plus one is going to be completed, we're going to go for it. And bing bada boom, he's upgraded both of his towers, but he does not he did not use the stone to upgrade them further. And right now, if you look, both of these towers are shooting at this target, and they're barely doing any damage. And that's because of the bonus armor from the car rush and the bonus armor from the upgrade. And now, he tries to run away, loses a villager. He is in castle right now. We torched down the first tower. We torched down or we're going for the second one. I'm using my archers to kill the Spearman and the villagers. Boom boom boom. And from here on out, he cannot mine gold, okay?
Now, this way of playing Golden Horde is the way that you can play against any castle rush civ, Ayyubid, HRE, OTTD, you know, juicy legacy if they rush castle or China or Japanese Sengoku daimyo, whatever. You just make a bunch of units, get a plus four range armor, and dive on their gold. And now, they have two options. Either they can make a market and sell resources to get gold, or they can yolo go somewhere on the gold in the map and hope they don't get found. Now, the problem is actually not the gold with these kinds of castle rushes. The problem is that the opponent runs out of food. So, you can see that not only he's not mining gold, he actually doesn't have any food. He's got two sheep, I think, here. Yeah, like 100 250 food remaining, and that's it. So, now he has a lot of idle villagers already. And if you look at the unit count, even if he gets a mounted samurai out, I have 12 Spearman, 14 soon, with some tour goods, with some archers, and he is just he just does not have the upgrades even. He doesn't have the the armor for his mounted samurai either.
Now, he is doing the yolo move here. He's going to go to get the gold, in which case you should try to you know, if you're playing on this side of the map, uh you can try have one patrolling unit on these golds, one patrolling unit on these golds, and then just put pressure [laughter] on this side, and the opponent will eventually just be kind of dead. So, now you can see I'm going for a dive. His whole eco is idle right now. My units barely take damage because of all the armor we're having. I'm going to go around, make sure that he is not on gold, and I can see that he's not, but if you see that the unit count is increasing. So, if you see more and more and more mounted samurai coming, then he's probably mining gold somewhere. So, try to pay attention to that.
Now, one thing to note, how do you transition out of this, let's say? So, as you can see, I am still producing units somewhat, but I have so many on food and so many on gold that I will be able to age up soon as well. So, I don't plan to stay in feudal forever. The whole point of this kind of play style is to put enough pressure on your opponent so that you can age up a little bit later, but have basically better economy and less idle time on your villagers. So, right now, yeah, I have a tower good patrolling here, so I'm going to spawn his gold soon. He's trying to do some harassment, but I have spearmen back in my base. You can see I'm getting siege engineering, uh wheelbarrow, and like I said, very quickly, if I stop producing units, I can go for the age up as well. I find the villagers, so obviously I'm very, very happy about that because now I know, oh, that's where he's been getting the gold. And at this point, because he's harassing me with mounted samurai, I just decide to dive on their town center and even if you lose these units, I've killed 16 villagers to the game is pretty much over. So, don't be afraid to do dives like this if the opponent has no units because he cannot garrison all the villagers. And once I kill all these units, I can actually just go back now, age up, and I'm ahead by a lot a lot a lot in this game and there's not much he can do about it. So, this is where I go back, but he actually just taps out.
So, this is how to how to basically deal with dark age rush. This is a question I get probably the most for Golden Horde because people just have a pretty hard way, I think, dealing with that in general. Actually, let me just show you a build. I'm going to do a live one cuz I tried playing a bunch of games, but I kept either having weird games or I kept having like games where my opponent is castle rushing or something weird always happened. So, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a play-by-play on basically how to do this build if the opponent was not tower rushing you or sorry, uh spearman rushing you, dark age rushing you, and instead was just playing a quote-unquote normal game. We'll put easy AI cuz uh you know, I don't want it to be too difficult. It's very simple. It's very easy. You just don't panic and you got it, okay?
Versus Byzantine, uh Byzantine is basically doesn't have knights in feudal age or they do have keshik, but they almost never go for it. So, against Byzantine, you basically want to go for keshik plus archer. That is a lot better combo than going for spearman cuz spearman will just get picked off by long bows or which something that opponent will most likely go for longbow plus limitanei. So, you're going to start with five uh or sorry, four on food. You're going to rally one round onto the food. And then we're going to immediately build the golden tent with the same villager that built the Uubu and then we're going to uh have them make girl over there. Now the simple simplest way of doing this with Golden Horde is once you have eight on food, you're going to take one of the food and put it on gold as well. So you're going to have eight and then you move one to the gold plus this one so you have a seven to split and then you just rally on to the food until they age up. That is the best way of doing it. So and the thing that I love is like this first villager does everything so you don't need to worry about you know making buildings or positioning buildings too much or anything like that. One thing that I would suggest when you're making Golden Dent, try to leave three squares of space between your TC and that Golden Dent because it's either for the stockyards or for the production buildings later on. So don't don't block up your TC too much, okay? Because you want to make stockyards around your TC later so you can carry stuff easily, okay? And from this point on we just rally on to the food. I'm going to keep scouting a little bit. I'm I'm trying to play slow and not play too fast so you guys can follow through. Um and I can explain as much as possible.
Now Golden Horde by the way also requires four on food in order to constant produce villagers. Some people think that you need more but you don't. It's just it's four. It's just like any civ. Even though they're more expensive, they take longer to produce. And make sure you're always producing. Like if you're sometimes like 380 food and the villager is about to finish, don't age up and then wait for the next 100 food. Like make sure you have the villagers queued up, okay? Uh don't do not skip out on that. That's another thing that I see people make the the mistake of. So these two guys are going to stay on the gold for very very long You don't need to move them because you're going to be getting upgrades with those guys, okay? Um and when you start aging up, the food guys will be moving on to the wood because we need second oval, we need production buildings, and so on and so forth. So, as you can see, we're nearing the age up. Now, my advice here is like once the gold gets dropped off, you could age up. Boom. But, make sure that you have enough food to start the next villager uh the moment you can, like that. And the moment you start aging up eight, you want to transfer them onto the wood straight away, and you can leave eight on food for a very very long time until much much later. And watch out for that bug with the shift click. Okay. I'm going to send the scout back, and then I'm going to just focus on the builder part.
Now, if you're playing This is very important. If you're playing against um knight civ, you will make barracks plus an archery range. Sometimes you will even make a tower and then barracks and then archery range later on. If you're playing against um civilization that doesn't have knights, then well, you do, which are Keshik. So, you're going to go Khan, Torgud, Keshik plus archer. So, you'll be the knight civ. And obviously, in that case, you will want to make stables plus archery range. Now, the reason why we're rallying onto the food now is because we need to keep making villagers, obviously, but for Torguds as well. So, initially, what you want to do is harass with your Khan and Torguds as fast as possible and put some pressure on the map um so that you can get your eco up and, you know, get everything going. Another thing what you should try getting used to, no matter which civ you're playing against, is making um immediate stone, okay? That's all. So, as we're aging up, you can take whatever villager, gold villager, wood villager, food villager, and as you're kind of getting to closer to the age up, just move one villager close to the stone and immediately plant Ovo because it's just free resources that you're getting from it, so you want to get it up as fast as possible.
Now, I will play this like I'm playing against Byzantine or against like an infantry civ uh type and I'm going to start with a stable and you can put I forgot to make con. You can put let's say 11 on food and now I want to rally someone gold because Keshik are actually very, very expensive and if you also want to produce eco upgrades, that's also going to take an extra layer off of resources that you're going to need. So, you don't need to rush any buildings because Golden Horde units are pretty expensive, so you don't need to like build with five villagers or anything like that. And you can see I I need 160 gold, so we will get that in a second. That's because I put the gold guy to make an Ovo. We're going to go for the uh archer range right there. Mhm. So, if I didn't take the guy to make the Ovo, I would have enough gold.
Now, once you do this, Golden Horde's macro is a bit weird. Like, you don't need to now constantly produce Keshik or whatever cuz the cost so it's kind of weird. We'll do another round or two of villagers on gold because what we want to do is also get some eco upgrades, right? But already with these units, you can put pressure on the map against whatever player you're play facing against and you can start harassing and so on and so forth. And if you look, now we're fully producing from all three buildings. We're going to have six on gold and we're going to rally back onto the food for a little bit. Now, as we're producing the next gold we can use is for perhaps double broadax or wheelbarrow, or you can just use it to produce another keshik if you want to put some heavy heavy heavy pressure. But, in general, this macro, the way it works out is you're going to be able to produce units somewhat constantly. Obviously, the more villagers we have, the more eco will grow. If you're playing this kind of style with keshik and with torguts, uh you can harass with them while building up your archery count back in your base. I'm going to go wheelbarrow here first. So, I'm harassing with these guys, which is already a pretty good army, and I'm just going to build up my archery count behind because, let's say the opponent is now making limitanei or Spearman, you just want to make sure your archer count is slowly building up.
Now, one way to balance your economy with golden horde is if you start struggling for certain resource, right? So, for example, I have almost everything balanced out, but I just added like four or five on food, you can do like a round of villagers, what like two villagers on wood, and maybe two more on gold, and then back on food. Just to kind of buff up those uh resources a little bit up, and then you continue doing whatever you were doing. So, you can see the macro is pretty good. You cannot constantly produce with golden horde this early on, but it's as close as it can be.
Now, once you start running out of food, there's two ways you can play this. Number one is the very obvious one, you just go on deer, okay? And then you, you know, get the deer, get the deer, get the boar, and then later on on berries. Now, this works great against infantry sieves because you have the map control, and you can do that. Now, if you're playing against cavalry it is different. So, the reason why that's different, I'm going to pause right here. If you're playing against cavalry sieves, while getting the deer is great, it's also exposes you to harassment and you can lose a lot of villagers. So, what you can do, if you're playing against uh cavalry sieves or knight sieves, whatever you want to call them, instead of putting eight on wood, you can put 12 on wood initially, right? You put eight and add four a little bit later. And then, what you're going to do is if you're producing, let's say, Spearman, Archer, Tarkan, whatever wood you have left over, just add a stockyard. So, 250 wood, add a stockyard. 250 wood, add a stockyard. And then, slowly your economy is going to build up around TC, while your opponent's economy is constantly going to basically expand on the map, which gives you a lot of different attack points. And the reason why Golden Horde is played at the top level quite a bit these days, and why people are using it in order to like mass units and stuff like that. If you look, right now, we are 9 minutes into the game. I've 10 archers, four Keshiks, six Tarkans, and I can also start my blacksmith now to get some upgrades, cuz you can see I have too much gold. So, right now, because I have too much gold, and I was getting the upgrades, I don't need to put more villagers on gold, because even with blacksmith upgrades, I will have plenty. So, I just need to get more wood and more food. As you can see, those are the things that I lack currently. So, that is pretty much it.
So, like I said, depending which unit comp you go for, depends on which civ you're playing against. So, cavalry civ, go Spearman. Um if you're playing against non-cavalry civ, go Keshik, and then you have the map control. One last thing that I wanted to say, if you are playing against the cavalry sieve, you can also go Spearman Horseman. That is completely okay to go for as well because then you're basically playing Spearman to kill the knights and then Horseman to argue it to kill the archers. Should you put stockyards near towers? No, you don't need to do that because that edict, is that what it's called, is that really used because you usually use the Karash edict in the late game. That's going to be it. If you're watching this on YouTube, I want to thank you so much for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed this guide and I hope you learn a little bit more how to play Golden Horde.
Now, as far as what's to do in Castle Age, my advice is simplest is to simply make units that counter your opponent's units. So, if your opponent is going knights, just go for Spearman crossbow or Man-at-Arms crossbow. Make sure you have Karash in your army. If your opponent is going Spearman Archer, then you can go Archer plus Keshik and just upgrade your units. The question of which unit should you get the triple production for first, that depends on which units you want to mass the most. So, if you need crap load of archers to kill a lot of Spearman, then go for the Archer range one. If you're aging up to castle, I would strongly advise you to age up with the Muscovite Yasak, I think that's what it's called, which gives plus two armor to your armored units, which is very very strong. That's going to be it. If you're watching on YouTube, thanks so much for watching and if you're watching on Twitch, let's keep going. >> [music]