The Early Rush

If you're using your chariot to capture workers, pillage the land, capture cities with only a couple of defenders, it is.

 

True, but what if you only have horses but lack copper and iron? Those chariots are the only things you can use in that case (ignoring UU's which don't need resource like jaguars).

 

Yeah, I believe he needs to outsource some of the math, because early rushes involve much fewer units, so running a handful of stocastic simulations would be very helpful. However, even without probability trees, we could include some basic numbers such as year when borders pop.

My opinion? If you don't have an early UU, usually its not worth it to early rush if you have decent land to expand with until you get catapults. The real reason why high difficulty = early rush is because otherwise you'll be stuck with 2 cities until you get eliminated in the medieval times.

 

A very good early strategy is choking. The purpose of choking is to create economics differential.

Choking generally means you start war as soon as a target is chosen. You can start choking with a Warrior.

The choking force will be 4 units minimum; which covers all four directions. We love to harass AI’s workers. UU (dogs, skirmisher, impi, ..) are plus.

You will continuously replace the lost units to maintain four choking units.

You will otherwise expand as usual.

When you are ready, take the AI down.

Generally speaking, AI has nothing but archers, so attack with swords.

 

Actually, you were wondering why he mentioned Impis and not Holkans. That's because Impis can keep up. For any concern with the validity of the guide's advice, ask the guide maker =P

 

Enjoyable reading, cheers.


I'm currently playing on Emperor and consider myself a relative noob. I have played as the Inca's almost exclusively. Quechua rush has just become my starting strategy routine. So much so that trying to build an empire/claim territory by building settlers just feels wrong to me now.

Anyway, I'll just offer a few thoughts on Quechua rushing for people reading the thread (this is on a standard size map at normal speed):

In the ideal scenario your opponent has two archers in his capital. The capital has 20% defence and no terrain defence bonus. You should be able to take the city with 4 Quechua's and have two alive after the attack. This kind of scenario, or better, seems to occur at least 50% of the time.

If your capital city has a 3 hammer tile then you can delay growth and bang out Quechua's in 4 turns. Doing this you can quite often eliminate a Civ and take their capital at around turn 20. However, you may choose to let the opponents city grow and have his workers build improvements before you take it. They quite often still have just 2 archers at turns 40+.

Wiping out just one civ, at this stage, usually gives me more than enough territory to pursue any of the victory conditions with a great chance of success. However, you can quite feasibly go and eliminate a 3rd Civ using Quechua's. Most times this will give you a very large territory, for this stage of the game, so if you do this I find it's best to concentrate on building up 3 Mega Cities until Trebuchets. At this point you should be able to build a devastating army to conquer if that's what you want.

So, in the ideal scenario I would say a ratio of 2 Quechua's : 1 Archer will prevail most times, make it 3:1 if you want to play it safe.

The worst scenario I have come up against is Mansa Musa. I would write him off as being practically impossible to Quechua rush with success, so turn your attention elsewhere. In a city with 20% defence and no terrain bonus it takes roughly 7 Quechua's : 1 Skirmisher to take a city. So even if you manage to build all the Quechua's you need and take the city you will probably find yourself in a severely crippled position that leads to you getting anhialated quite soon after. There may be other UU that I haven't come up against that give a similair scenario.

Right, the cities inbetween the best and worst case scenario's will most times require 4 Quechua's : 1 defender, 5:1 to play it safe. Cities that are built on a hill, have high culture, have a mix of warriors, archers, spearmen, UU, etc, fall into this category.

Send your starting Quechua out looking for a target. Send all the other Quechua's out in the direction of your target when they are built. Hopefully they will have succesful encounters with barbs and get promo's. You may need to use your second Quechua to search out a civ too. The decision on what civ to take out is quite crucial so take note of what direction you see scouts and warriors coming from when a new Civ makes contact with you. This free intelligence is handy as you can usually go in the direction the scout/warrior came from and find that Civ. If Mansa Musa's on the left and Wang Kon is on the right it's a no brainer to go and take Wang Kon's poorly defended city now and take Mansa later, maybe in a collaborative war. You will have to make your decision about which Civ to take based on your intelligence of the cities and your knowledge of the civ/leader.

And in case it isn't obvious: build Quechua's non stop from the start until you have enough to attack. I'll stop now.

 

Would a larger map size be a significant not to do the early rush? Like a Huge map?

 

Thanks for that! I haven't done a lot of Quechua rushes, but I know some players swear by them.

In Beyond the Sword I would say the other Civ that would present a formidable UU obstacle to the Quechua rush, besides Mansa, would be Hammurabi. His Bowmen replace Archers and have a +50% bonus versus melee units, which includes Quechuas, of course. Heck, Bowmen fortified in a city on a hill are painful even for Praetorians. They are, however, more vulnerable to Chariots than Skirmishers are. Hint, hint.

It depends on how many civs are around. A lot of players play huge maps but leave the number of civs low because they like room to spread out. Well, right away, your purpose in playing the map that way is contrary to the early rush. However, if you load up a huge map with civs (which is another way many players like to play), then an early rush is certainly viable, even called for. 2 or 3 civs can and will expand more quickly than 1, so if you don't rush at least one of them you could find yourself with no room to peacefully expand very quickly.

 

Very well written. A few thoughts:
1) Proximity is a big determinant when I'm deciding whether to rush or not. I don't have hard-and-fast rules, but an enemy capital within ~10 tiles of mine has me looking for the opportunity. Larger maps seem to have more space/civ, so close neighbors are less likely.
2) If your capital has a food resource, I think it's usually best to get the tech to improve it (Ag, AH, Fishing) before going to BW. Get your best tiles under cultivation as soon as possible. The added growth will more than pay for itself.
3) Rushes come in different sizes, and you should decide on your objectives before launching it. If you plan to wipe them out completely, you need to keep building units throughout. If your goal is just to claim one or two border cities, then seek peace, you can probably switch to economic builds around the time you declare. Also, think about the order in which you plan to attack cities. Especially in BtS, you can often claim the first city without too much trouble, but the second will be much more heavily defended. This might lead you to attack a hill city first, when few defenders will benefit. Or attack his best production city first, to limit his ability to make new defenders.

peace,
lilnev

 

First, I want to thank Sisiutil for this hundredth, wonderful, job.

I'm a just registered user, but I've lurked a lot, mainly his valuables guides (I've discovered this forum searching for a beginner's guide and I found his )

But I want to emphasize the importance of this one: maybe it could be most important strategy article of all!

Everybody agrees on the importance of playing well the start, and how it is probably the most crucial moment of the game, in particular at medium-high levels.

There are a lot of threads discussing on which is the best starting strategy, if is better to build a worker or a warrior, if is better to pursuit growth in few cities of expanding more possible, about early wonders, early religion and so on....

But maybe the answer is in the introduction of this guide: seeing how many and fundamentals benefits derives from a successful early-rush, could we say that, at least at medium-high levels (maybe at lower levels it works better go for early wonder, religions, etc., I don’t know), and at least for standard maps (like pangea, earth, continents, etc.), the best start is to follow the general rules to pursue an early-rush?

I’ve played very few games like these until this moment, but the arguments contents in this guide are so convincing, that I think I’ll play almost all my future games in this way!

And, as Sisiutil says, this is not only profitable... this is FUN!

... and, all in all, this is just a game!

Now, if we assume that this rule could be correct (the best starting strategy is to pursue an early-rush), I think that there could be two exceptions:

1) Playing with a leader that doesn’t have any characteristic that could help with this (having traits like philosophical or industrious and no having an early UU and maybe starting with mysticism and no mining). In these cases, maybe it could be better to adopt others tactics. It could sound like a logical interpretation, but Sisiutil himself has recently showed how is possible to have a haughty axe-rush playing with Isabella (spiritual/expansive, no useful UU or UB for this intention, starting with myst and fishing) versus a protective leader like Charlemagne (!!!)

2) Playing with some customed maps, or, more important, with casual maps (like fractal, etc.).
In the first case, if i.e. we are playing a huge map with 3 Civs, we already know that we won’t meet other civs until a lot of time, and so we can peaceful orienting towards others strategies.
But in the second case, if we are playing for most random settings (I like this very much), it’s sad to discover that we are isolated in an island after being mad about the iron (maybe there wasn’t copper) sacrificing all others good targets of a powerful, peaceful expansion!
So we have to establish a sort of “trigger-point”, maybe in terms of turns, after then it’s maybe better to stop to prepare for the early-rush and go for others strategies if we don’t encount close enemies.

P.S.: anyway, I owe you an apology for my very bad english

 

I agree with this. Moreover, I think improving your best tile is so important that it's usually best to build a worker first. In the guide, Sisutil recommends building a warrior first while growing to size 2. ("Building a Warrior first is probably the best choice. It will allow the capital can to growto size 2, first of all; this will make later builds a little faster. In addition, having a second exploring unit accelerates the revelation of terrain and increases your chances of finding tribal villages, locations of rivals, and enemy Workers ripe for stealing.") The guide should at least mention that many players prefer worker first in most situations.

 

Once again, Sisiutil comes out with another great how-to guide. I have some comments

When talking about the early rush, you need to take several things in to accout, like is this feasible/worth it, what effect will this have on my economy, do I have an early UU or UB to exploit, and so on. One thing you don't get ito much detail about is how the leader traits play into conquest. You mention the obvious ones, like Agg/pro for free promos,Char for cheaper promos, and IMp for faster GG's, but what about the other traits such as creative and org. Something that needs to be stressed is that ANY LEADER can do this and get use out of his or her traits. For example,
Creative and organized can repair an economy in a flash, and creative allows you not only to grab your BFC earlier from conquered cities, but also lets you be more leininent about where you place your cities becuase any resource within the BFC will be acessible within 5-7 turns, so that's a massive bonus allowing you to skip Mysticism and its monuments and put those beakers and hammers into other places.
Financial and Philo can keep your respective economies afloat during the Rush.
Spiritual can be used to switch when needed between war and peacecivics every 5 turns with no loss, which is a massive boost. Sure, your initial options are limited, but if you get(read capture) the 'mids, that can be very helpful indeed.
Expansive lets you build the all important worker faster, and more importantly, GRANARIES. city, baby! More Health also means you can keep those lucrative cities in the middle of the jungle.
Ind has no purpose in an early rush unless you are going after stone/ marble.
Just my 2 cents.

 

Well, I already have an article that goes into the traits, so I didn't want to rehash it here. In the article, I discuss 2 traits that have a direct and immediate advantage for early rushing (Aggressive and Charismatic). I also mention, as you said Hackapell, that a rush can be done with any leader. I've done several with Elizabeth even though she lacks any early rush advantages.

 

Well, you're right... I missed that you've already specified in the guide that it can be done with any leader....

I'm very sorry

 

Hey, no big, it all contributes to the discussion.

 

.... and what about my second observation?

 

VoU suggested something along those lines as well. I'll be adding a "When NOT to Rush" section to the first revised version of the guide.

 

I'd only add Sisiutil that to me Elisabeth is a very nice girl to have for rush. She's Financial, and starts with mining. Only problem is that sometimes she misses bronze and one has to get IW to play, but not always, and coastal start gives enough beakers to get IW if needed in time.

Nice guide Sisiutil, I am full of respect for people loosing soooo muuch time doing work for others for nothing really. ALC, guides, dj_anion's reference sheet, not to mention Flouzemaker's brilliant stories... Boy, I think I'd need deserted island with CIV as the only game on my solar-powered laptop and about a year time to do such things...

 

Yes, I had a look through the BtS UU's and the Babylonian Bowmen definitely appear to be the other early opponent that you don't want to use a Quechua rush on.

 

Well I tried a Quechua rush on the weekend in an off-line game and noticed something interesting because I played through the rush twice with two different targets.

The first time I took out De Gaulle. Shortly after he was done Stalin DoW'd on me and had Axes and Swords to my Quechuas. Not good.

I was about to abandon the game completely when I realized my mistake: I let the Aggressive neighbour live. So I reloaded a very early save. The second time I destroyed Stalin first, before he could field any of his Combat I melee units (well, besides Warriors). This worked out much better; De Gaulle, Saladin, and I were neighbours and all became Hindu so we were peaceful for most of the game, especially with the Aggressive leader gone. Though Moscow was far from Cuzco, that left me with plenty of territory to backfill.

So, lessoned learned: another use of the early rush is to take out the biggest threat before he becomes one. I'll have to add that into the guide.