Your Building Sequence in the Early Game

[cumi]

Originally posted by Mountain Sage
Cumi, my

Now, back to the thread: 2 questions for you:

1. If you want to Archer-rush, when do you build barracks and how many?
2. Do you go on rexing, or just build Archers?

Good questions!

1. I think, Arrian or Dominae didn't wrote anything about barracks. I think the archer-rush can be planed without them. You can train your units on the (poor) barbarians.
2. I don't really think, that rexing and archer rush can go well together...At least for me...

[Mountain Sage]

Originally posted by cumi

Good questions!

1. I think, Arrian or Dominae didn't wrote anything about barracks. I think the archer-rush can be planed without them. You can train your units on the (poor) barbarians.
2. I don't really think, that rexing and archer rush can go well together...At least for me...

1. From what I understand (I even do it regularly!), the whole point is to RUSH. If you spend your time chasing barbarians...

2. I would agree with you, but then when do you start it? If you have only 2 cities, you get a weak rush and if you wait until you have 5, then it's probably too late...

[Arrian]

MS,

It depends on which type of "archer rush" you're going for.

If you're going to build more than 1-2 archers, I'd say build the barracks.

But I typically try to send out 1 or 2 regular archers (get 'em out quick!) to find potential targets as soon as possible. A warrior will go first. If he sees borders by the time I finish an archer, I que up another archer & send the first one to join the warrior. Then the 2nd archer joins them and I march on the capitol of that civ. If my 1st exploring warrior found them that quickly, they're too damn close.

If my warrior hasn't found anything yet, I will probably sent the archer in the opposite direction (especially if the warrior has uncovered unpromising terrain). I may also decide that I don't want to spend the time building another archer & switch over to a granary. In this case, I've pretty much guaranteed I can't grab somebody's capitol, but I still stand a chance of bopping a settler team - and if I kill some barbs first, I may have myself an elite archer with which to do my damage.

-Arrian

[Nor Me]

Originally posted by Mountain Sage
1. If you want to Archer-rush, when do you build barracks and how many?
2. Do you go on rexing, or just build Archers?

1. As Arrian said, it does depend on the type of archer rush.

As a rule of thumb, I'd count veteran units to be worth slightly more than the number of hit points. So for a militaristic civ a barracks and 3 archers with 4 hit points each is slightly better than the equal costing 4 archers with 3 hit point each. Although you can divide a larger regular army and heal them more quickly, the casualties are higher.

The big disadvantage of building the barracks is that you might miss a opportunistic target. This is why a strategy of hoping for one is helped by building archers before barracks.

So I'd only build a barracks if I knew exactly what the target(s) is (/are) going to be and expect that it might need that many archers.

It's rarely going to be worth a non-militaristic civ building a barracks for an archer rush unless they're waiting to research warrior code or would lose shields switching from a granary or settler due to a change of plan.

Another thing is that regular spearmen are less worse compared to veteran ones than archers so if I need those, they are often built in cities without barracks.


2. Broadly speaking no for a serious rush. Build as many cities as you need for archers then stop until you are fairly certain that you will have enough.

This tends to mean two cities if you have a close rival you want to take out as easily as possible.



In general archer rushes are too dependant of your current knowledge to give any good rules. I've still not worked out how to get them working all the time so you could ignore everything I've said on that basis.

For example, my capital build order in AU401 just doesn't make any sense out of context:

scout, barracks, archer x4, granary, pyramids.

The last time this topic came up, I criticised Datajack Frenit for building a barracks and too few archers before the Pyramids but it can reasonably happen.

[Arrian]

Good rule of thumb, Nor Me:

If you have a known target and you want them dead or crippled, build the barracks, and then build a bunch of vet archers. If not, such an early barracks might be a mistake.

My early archer builds are typically all about opportunism - I usually do not use archers to conquer. I wait for swordsmen & horsemen. The archers are for harrassment & maybe GL farming (via whacking single AI counterattackers as they appear).

-Arrian