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 in part two of this flexible Japanese build order. If you have seen one or both of the other parts, you can use the chapters I provided below to skip the opening. If not, I will now explain everything step by step.
Now we start by sending five of our villagers to the nearest strory for 50 wood immediately. And you can also hotkey these five villagers already, since we will be using them later to age up. The remaining villager builds a farm house near the berries. Once that house is built, we will be researching our Dark Age wheelbarrow to wara immediately, because this makes gathering berries just as fast as gathering sheep, which means that it is totally fine for the Villager to just stay on the berries. And we can also choose to use these five villagers, after dropping off the 50 wood, um, to also go on berries if we want to. And we want to do that in matchups where we need to save sheep under our Town Center to fall back to if we get denied on the berries by Knights, for instance, or long bows. Also in matchups where we maybe want to deny sheep by scouting more aggressively, we can also do this. Remember, however, that berries become even better for the Japanese with every wheelbarrow upgrade. So if we can save berries for later, we should do that. And in this example, I will be doing that by sending my Scout on a more defensive, uh, pattern towards the middle and then around this nearer side, um, coming back to deliver sheep at around 2 minutes, 2 minutes 10. And this is because this is why I don't send the villagers to the berries, but instead to the sheep. The first villager that came out also went on the sheep, and so all the villagers are just ried to that sheep that is already dead. One will then automatically slaughter the next sheep, and so we don't waste time having five clubbing animations. The next two villagers then go on gold, building a forge at, um, on the gold mine, as you can see. The Scout is doing the more defensive pattern. Then next villager out will also be on gold. And now we start to see the actual reason why we gathered the 50 wood earlier, which is that we now R three villagers to Stone and also build a forge on Stone. This will allow us to age up just before 3 minutes, and we will get our TC upgrade down your mana immediately after aging. If we want to, since we're going for two TCS in this build, um, we will be skipping the D mana for a short while, um, in order to have enough stone to build the second TC, but I'll show you that in due time. Um, now, just as the third villager comes out at 2 minutes, we should be arriving back home with our Scout, dropping off our sheep, and then use that Scout to scout the opponent's base. Because we need to be able to make our decision to have all the information we need for our for our decision of where to go with this opening, um, before 4 minutes. So the next two villagers go on sheep again, so that we go on nine food. And then the next one coming out at 3 minutes go on the strigler tree. And at that point, we also have enough food and gold to age up. So at this point, at 3 minutes, we have four remaining villagers on food, three on sheep, one on berries. You can obviously also use one or of of the villagers, like the berry villager, to age up if you want, if you feel that safer, um, but it's easier to just use the five villagers that have chopped this tree, hotkey them, and then drop off food, use them at exactly 3 minutes to age up, um, so the split is 41 2 3 and and waging up with five villagers. The next two villagers go on this strigler tree as well, whil we aging up. And in the meantime, we're moving our Scout towards the opponent's base to find out what is going on there. And now we have three on the wood line, and these three are immediately shift cued onto the actual wood line from the from the tree. And these five are also shift cued towards the wood line. Um, we are building a house before we build the wheel the lumber camp, which can be built immediately at 4 minutes, once these guys have dropped off their second to last number of wood, um, and now we make the decision, since we have scouted the opponent's base, to go for 2 TCS, which means that we don't need these two villagers on gold. So instead, they are also coming towards the, uh, wood line. And these three villagers stay on Stone, but we skip the D mana that we could be building now after this last villager, um, that that is in production right now. So at 420, we could be going for D mana, but we're skipping it for now, and we keep rallying onto wood. So once the our Storehouse finishes, one villager goes onto the farm. Everybody moves to wood. So now we at 13 on wood already. We just we just keep producing the villagers, and we go up to 15 on wood, always remembering to put villagers on farms. And at 525, we can use, I'm using eight now, which seems to be a good number, so that I can keep with seven on wood. I'm already moving out to the location that I've chosen for my second TC. Um, in this build order, I will be going basically, we'll always be going back to food with these eight villagers, but you also need six on Stone to get your Dio upgrades really quickly afterwards, um, so the best spot to choose for the Town Center should be your gold, protecting your farms, depending on your layout though, this can become complicated, and we will and it depends, um, you know, what you can protect. You should try to protect your gold because it's really important for your upgrades. Um, if your gold and your stone are not close to each other, like it is here, where they are very close, and it's very easy to just use three villagers to go to Stone and the rest to go to food, this is not always the case. And if it's not the case, you just use all eight of them, go back to your sheep, uh, or to your berries, and then the, um, villagers that you have here, which are three right now, because we're rallying back to food, they can go and gather Stone. So you want six on Stone after the TC is finished. Um, also, the next 150 wood are used to build a Barracks, just to be, um, able to defend if the opponent should be attacking you. You can obviously also make this a a, um, a range, an arery range, if you want, depending on what your opponent is building. Um, I'm using a more greedy scouting pattern here. In a real match, you should probably just run to your opponent's base again after dropping off, um, the the sheep that you have gathered on your second round, um, just to make sure that your opponent isn't being aggressive or if they are, to find out what units they're making, of course. So I'm building my first military production building at 6 minutes, and always maning the farms. And here you can see the Villager spit at 630, or let's say 640. I have 13 on F, six on wood, with the seventh one that the house, and then six on Stone. And I choose to upgrade the extended Town Center first for the D mana. If I have a good base layout, this will even help me buff up the farms, as you can see here, but this is not always guaranteed. So I definitely also want to upgrade this one to the DI your mana, and that will happen pretty soon, because again, I have six on wood, six on Stone, excuse me, um, and once I have 300 Stone, which should be happening, um, exactly 8 minutes, I drop off and I go on gold. And once you have 20 to 24 on food, um, which both of these GCS were relevant to food the entire time, this TC can now start ring on gold, and this TC can start ring into wood. And then you can build a third production building at around 9 or 10 minutes, and you can go for in, uh, space Fudal age all in, or you can just choose to have one on food and not go on wood, the other one goes on gold, and you age up, you know, depending on the situation, of course. Um, I'm also building at 9 minutes, I'm building another Farmhouse because my population is starting to get close, and then I just start adding farmhouses, um, all around my initial TC. This also obviously depends on your base layout, but you always want to have at least two, if not four tiles between your house and your town center, so that you can add farms in between as well. So yeah, from this point, you should be in a good spot. Um, at 9 minutes 20, I have 2487 as a split, and I can do anything from here. I can go Castle, I can, um, at a third production building, um, and build basically any units I I need to counter my opponent. So yeah, that is the TC 2TC version of this build. Um, I hope you learned something from this, or, um, and if you have any questions, any suggestions, please comment below, um, you know, because I'm always trying to learn and and trying to optimize the builds further. So if you have any ideas, let me know. Uh, thank you again for considering this build order. Class dismissed.