Guide to Playing as British
by Ceres629
The British are an amazing boom civilization. They excel at building a great economy very quickly however they get off to a rather slow start and thus are very poor at rushing or early attacks. Even more so they lack early powerful attacking military shipments, hence you will most likely be on the defence in the early game. Playing as British, everything is centred on getting as many villagers as possible and finding a place for these villagers to work safely, you must become a master of turtling. This is the mindset you must have when you play as British and it is very important that you remember this at the start of each game.
I will soon have a guide to turtling up by the end of the week, that will show you some very cool ways to use units like, minutemen, walls, culverins, falconets and longbows. The are units that lots of people regard as useless but really they fill there role perfectly if you use them right.
Contents:
III. Recommended British Strategies
V. The Ceres629 gets Owned section
(Hot!)
Often time and time again people look at a replay and someone (lets call him Joe Noob) says 'OMG, your enemy was noob if he did <insert some random strategy> he would have owned you. Because of this I think I will put this section at the very beginning. In every British game I play, my build order is only similar until I press the age up button. From that point on, my entire strategy is completely based on what I observe by scouting, the map, and my enemies civ. Therefore I can only counter what the enemy actually does, and this is what you need to do as British. Don't counter what he may do, counter what he IS doing.
If the only strategies you like are ones that have a fixed build order, allow you to do the same thing every single game and win the game in the first 7 minutes then you may have the same comment as our friend Mr. Noob above. The strategies below are nothing like a Otto rush, or a Merc FF, or a Spanish FF or a Native rush. There is no build order, I just do what I consider best in each scenario. The only way to perfect playing as British is to experience yourself, what works and what doesn't it various situations. I will provide as many replays (even against noobs) to let you see what I do and give you ideas.
Some one pointed out to me that because there is no build order, this strategy is not easy to do and may be too hard for players under 1800 (cuetech) rating, and while I'm not sure I agree with that, I will certainly have to admit you need a deep understanding of the mechanics of the game to win as British. But I think that even if you don't understand the game enough to make perfect use of this strategy, if you stick with it and show some persistence, you will slowly begin to realise why you are losing and before you know it, you will obtain that deep understanding of the game that many one-trick pony build order copying players DON'T have. So even if you suck at micro management and only have a 1600 rating, don't let that scare you away from trying British.
The only thing that will cause this strategy to be a complete failure for you is if you expect it to be a build order where you just do the same thing every game and win, or fall into the trap of not being a flexible player.
This section was originally called Essential British Basics, however, I realised that they weren't really that basic, yet they were so essential to master in order to play as British that I had to include them at the beginning. Some of these things took me almost 100 games to learn myself (mainly from trial and error). Hopefully this guide can help you cut down on the time taken to learn them.
The Manor Boom (Easy)
Essentially all British strategies should be based on some form of a manor boom. Therefore it is probably the most important thing to learn first. British have the unique bonus of getting a free villager with each house they build. However their houses cost an extra 50 wood. The best thing about this bonus is it allows you to generate a huge number of villagers in colonial, by spamming lots of houses very quickly, i.e. 'Manor Booming'
The idea is that you propel yourself off to a huge starting economy that will slowly but surely take off the longer the game continues. If you do a big enough manor boom you can easily double the amount of villagers your enemy has going into fortress. If you can defend yourself before the inevitable fortress attack comes and manage to repel it with minimal damages, you are set to economically dominate the entire game, however economy is only half the equation of course you've got to play catch up on military.
Manor Booming (Click to Enlarge)
Ideally you want to start manor booming during the age up to colonial. Once you collect your 800 food to age up, transfer all your villagers to wood and start building manors. Once you are almost about to age up, transfer at least 6 villagers back to food (to enable constant villager production from your TC) and continue to spam down manors each time you get 150 wood. That's all there is to manor booming.
Now, there are many options available to make manor booming even better. These are due to HC cards that have various effects on manors in general. These are the 'Team Fast-Building Houses' card and the 'Virginia Company' card.
There are many variations to manor booming. Recently I have began shipping ATP and trying to spam trade posts for XP, and then manor boom. At any rate, the ability to produce 20 settlers independently of your HC at fast rate is the main advantage of using British.
Team fast-building houses is a level zero card so when you first start your British HC, it is probably best to use it. Houses build almost instantly and enable your villagers to spend less time building and more time cutting wood. However once you reach level 10, you really want to get rid of the fast building card in favour of either the Virginia Company card or 700 wood. The Virginia Company card is very underrated since people often scoff at the small 35 or so wood it saves on each house. However since the manor boom is an exponential boom (i.e. it starts of slow, but once it gets going it gets faster and faster) the 35 wood saved enables you to get the boom off much quicker.
Recently I have favoured skipping Virginia Company and getting 700 wood instead to help with the houses, however I'm not sure which is better. Feel free to experiment on what you think is best.
Balancing Economy and Defence (Difficult)
So far I've spoken about manor booming but I haven't talked about the minor thing that often happens to British players... they get rushed! This is actually happening a lot less now due to the craze over FF strategies, but nevertheless unless you are playing a no rush game, you are going to have to start thinking about slowing your boom and getting a few defensive units.
How many do you need? When should you get them? What units should you get? Should I get them from the HC or build them from a barracks?
Unfortunately the answer to these questions only come with experience. If you don't boom enough, you are wasting the British advantage and will most likely pay for that in fortress age. If you boom too much, you may find you get crushed by a rush, or you can't make it to Fortress age in time to defend yourself and your economy. It took me at least 50 games before I could learn to judge how to balance my boom and a further 50 games to get to the point where I can pull it off almost flawlessly every game. However occasionally there is still a game or two that I mess it up and overboom and get myself into all sorts of trouble.
As a quick guide, try as much as possible to only rely on shipments and your free tower for defence (i.e. your 6 longbow and 6 musketeer card) Start of by shipping the longbow card at around 5:30 and then if your enemy isn't pressuring you or he is Fast Fortressing, don't bother with any more military, minutemen can deal with a sudden surprise attack long enough for you to ship muskets afterwards and build a barracks/stable. I personally like to build my free tower a good distance away from my base, so that I can spot an attack coming in and quickly take appropriate defensive measures. 30 seconds is enough time for you to get a barracks up collect enough gold for minutemen and shift your villagers to a safer location, the tower helps greatly for that!
Learning the balance isn't easy and requires scouting as well as checking the enemy deck, and predicting what the enemy will do. I guarantee you it will be the main area you have lots of problems with for a long time as British, but once you finally grasp the concept (from trial and error) then you will eventually become a natural at doing it. Checking the enemy deck is extremely important.
If possible, get a clan mate or someone who wants to practise rushes, and play a set of non rated games (if you really don't want to lose a lot at first). If you are brave though, just jump right into competitive online play. Always watch replays of when you overboomed and lost and see what you did wrong. Maybe you should have shipped the musketeer card instead of 5 villagers... if you don't look at the replay you may never know why you lost!
*tip*
I strongly advice that on maps with Lakota, Mayan and Aztec, that you get up a trade post ASAP and use a native shipment to defend. Not only do you prevent your enemy from getting one, but you get a much better defensive army. I would go as far as to say on any map with a Lakota camp, take it as if your life depended on it. (because it does!)
Securing Resources (Moderate - Very Difficult)
So you have mastered the manor boom and you even know how to balance your boom and defence perfectly. If done well this will get you to the 8 minute mark in very good shape, with a far superior economy to your enemy. But now what? You've got LOTS of villagers... but have you secured somewhere for them to work safely? Having 40+ villagers doesn't matter if they spend half the time running all over the place to avoid attacks, or you get half of them killed because they got shot at while running back to their TC. This is a bigger problem than you think, since all those villagers will very rapidly deplete the resources near your base, however unlike Portugal, you do not have a free TC to place to secure resources.
This problem can be partially solved by resorting to mills for food early (you will have lots of wood). However the main resource that you must secure is a very large patch of wood. Maps like Rockies and Texas will provide the greatest challenge since there is often not any nearby trees. But you must have access to a large patch of trees as British and you need to do everything it takes to secure it. Recently I've began building a wall right around the patch of trees during the age up and putting my tower in the middle of the trees, trust me, it is so important that it is worth doing this sometimes! I've even started walling my entire base like a 'noob'!
Great Plains (lol!)
Argh! A map so lame it deserves its own section. Don't get me wrong, I am not such a loser that I only play maps that I have an advantage on (eg. New England ^_^). I love playing on maps that present a challenge, eg. Bayou (very little space to turtle, no trade routes, hard to wall) and Rockies /Texas (securing resources is very tricky, trees or hunting sometimes hard to get at). However the line really has to be drawn somewhere, and Great Plains is so far beyond this line that it is just a dot.
I personally never play on Great Plains as British (or any other non-rush civ) Every single feature on this map is so anti-British that the map must have been designed by Napoleon himself.
Hardly any food nearby? .... Check.
No nearby trees? ... Check.
OP natives in abundance? ... Check.
A trade post right next to your base just waiting for a rusher to ATP it? ... Check.
A trade route that runs straight thru your base ensuring you cannot wall or turtle properly? ... Check.
Complete lack of choke points to wall? ... Check.
If you are matched up against any of the four main rushing civs, play this map at your own risk, I know I've got better things to do...
In terms of cards, the British have a pretty ordinary set. While not extraordinarily powerful, they generally have very few useless cards. Among their best cards would be.
Cavalry Combat (+10% HP, +10% attack to dragoons + hussars, GET THIS CARD TO STOP FRENCH OP CAV!)
15 Jaegers
Estates (Manors can build settlers)
2 Monitors
British get very good Mercs and have the ability to spam 27 Jaegers along with up to 19 highlanders to make up for their lack of a powerful Fortress age unit. This along with mercenary loyalty can be a very effective combo.
Generally at low levels you want to focus on wood cards and definitely the free natives card. Then you want to focus on gold and then factory cards and then mercs and then the 2 falconet card. Food cards are generally useless for British.
I am still undecided on eco cards. While no doubt they will be highly beneficial in the long run, I find that sending them slows me down enough that the enemy can make sure that there is no 'long run' and that the game ends with me dying to a rush. Maybe I need to work a bit more on my defence, but feel free to experiment with wood cards and mill cards and even the militia card. The same for sheep cards, I find that although they have potential to be really good, they slow you down too much early game to be worth the effort. Maybe if I can somehow work them into my late game it could provide an even bigger boost, but again its just a though and shows that British have lots of different potential strategies.
III. Recommended British Strategies
Manor Boom -> Mercenary Fortress Attack
Turtle Manor Boom -> Fast Industrial (My personal Favourite ^^)
Manor Boom -> Colonial Warfare (coming as soon as FF strategies die out)
Sheep Boom (coming soon...)
Manor Boom -> Mercenary Fortress Attack
Minimum HC Level: 25
Essential cards:
The idea of this strategy is to make use of Mercs to fill the gap left by the British lack of powerful hard hitting Fortress Age units. As with all British strategies, it looks to take advantage of the British early economical boom opportunity and then quickly gather a powerful defensive/attacking force comprised of Mercs before your enemy can take your economy down.
As usual I won't post a build order just give a replay and a few pointers. This replay will be an interesting one because it is one that I actually lost, but as you will see, it was a game that I could have easily won had I only attacked the TC 5 seconds earlier. Anyway the main thing is to look at how well Brits are able to stand up to even the mighty German Merc FF and see how to do it, so the fact that I lost isn't really a big deal, the replay clearly shows how viable this strategy can be. These replays are 1.03 replays but I've tested them with 1.04 and they seem to work fine, I haven't used the Mercenary Attack Strategy for quite some time now, since I personally prefer the Fast Industrial one which we will get to next and is in my opinion a better strategy.
Ceres629 vs German Merc Rusher
Anyway points to look for in this replay against the German merc rusher are:
Notice that I go for a PURE manor boom against the German player, with zero military. Why? Because I correctly predicted that he would do a pure FF and attack only with shipment Ulhans. Why? Well not only did his deck suggest he was going to merc rush me, but the two tradeposts he built also gave his plan away!
As soon as I noticed he hit fortress, I cut my boom and devoted everything to getting to fortress as quickly as possible myself. Then I focus completely on gold to get mercantilism and mercenary loyalty then to get mercs.
The Black Rider/Jaeger combo is countered perfectly by British double Jaeger shipments.
Highlanders take down ulhans and Black Riders, but make sure you keep them AWAY from enemy Jaegers. Don't even let them fight in the battle. Keep them out of range.
Once you notice you have an advantage, go on a villager killing spree. Split up your Jaeger groups and focus on multiple villagers at a time. (See Cassador Micro avi for example)
Highlanders are very good at taking down enemy TC's, this is especially useful if the enemy sieges your base with cannons. Don't stay and fight, run your villagers to a remote location abandon base and attack the enemy TC, you have the mobility advantage!
Ceres629 vs (Can't remember) All I remember about this game is that I was a noob and overboomed and got my whole base destroyed and just rebuilt and still won.
Turtle Manor Boom -> Fast Industrial
Minimum HC Level: 10
Recommended HC Level: 20+
Essential Cards:
This strategy is similar to the Mercenary Attack strategy except instead of spending lots of gold and relying on mercenaries, you ship ordinary units or a fort to defend and then use the saved gold to head straight into Industrial where you can use mercantilism to help you ship all of your industrial cards in to defend. However since you will be using non-merc units (mainly longbows and cannons) to defend, your army lacks the power to take the enemy down in an all out fight. Therefore you must turtle well with the few units you have to repel the bigger and stronger enemy army.
First you must manor boom as before, then you will use the huge momentum the colonial manor boom will give you to enable you to head straight into industrial, yet still maintaining your economic advantage. Once there you need to get factories up ASAP and once you have established a good defence with rockets from your factories, ship the estates card and watch your eco skyrocket!
The good thing about this strategy is that you main resources will be food and wood. As long as you secure a good patch of wood to build mills you will be okay. As before the essential balance between military and eco is important, more so now because without a doubt you will be outnumbered for the majority of the game. If you you are heavily outnumbered when you reach industrial, ship the 3 rocket card first to give you some breathing space. Never fall into the trap of following a set build order... adapt, adapt, adapt!
Here is a replay of me on Sonara against a Frenchie,
I think this game does a good job of highlighting how effective proper turtling can as well as emphasising how you have to adapt to different maps and enemies. Points to look for:
The map is Sonara which means OP natives. Either you take a native post or die, I sacrifice both my boom and age up time to ensure that I at least get one post to protect myself. The enemy seeing this seemed to change from his intended native rush to an ATP spam boom, so I took both native posts and used my natives to knock down his ATP's (heal rules!).
Due to my native start, my boom is slower and the frenchie is able to keep up with me a little bit but normally I can outboom my enemy by a far greater amount.
Once he hit fortress I knew that meant skirms, I didn't even see his skirms (they were just out of sight range) but I knew they were coming so I back off immediately wall and age up (no need to get half my army shot up by skirms that must be around somewhere!).
I ship falconets and build culverins. These are ESSENTIAL for turtling. You want these cannons out ASAP, this is the quickest way.
Notice I keep my falconets and culverins in the middle of base in limber mode, ready to move out to defend.
As soon as my mills are all set up and I have food coming in I go to industrial and build a temple and research mercantilism.
Mercantilism gives me 3 shipments which I immediately use to ship two factories and the estates card.
Once I am confident my army is big enough to defend I immediately look to secure a gold mine.
Once estates card comes I start making 10+ villies at a time!
Make sure you use fully upgraded hussars against French. Hussars own cuirassiers as long as they are better upgraded. They are also fast enough to quickly block cuirassiers from your artillery. Look how well those hussars did against those OP cav! Make sure you use your better economy to boost your hussars (I also sent the cavalry combat card as well)
He gave up earlier than I thought, but to be honest, he was gonna lose :)
Here is another replay, not a very good one because it was when I was just starting out trying this strategy, but it shows what can happen if you overboom a bit too much and the type of trouble you can get yourself into (and how to dig yourself out of it!)
Pointers:
Again as soon as the enemy hits fortress I concentrate on getting to aging up as quickly as possible.
In this particular game you can see the consequences of overbooming. I manor boomed a bit too much and I got myself in trouble because of it.
Notice how I drag all battles towards my TC, and avoid fighting outside of my base.
My cannons are protected by both walls and dragoons and in this game I was forced to build jaegers to defend, normally I go for longbows but because I overboomed my fortress time got slowed, you have got to decide on the fly, what strategy you can use.
Dragoon raids to keep the number of enemy Cav units reduced. Since you are going to be relying on rockets a lot, you need to prevent the enemy from going heavy on cav, which can raid you and destroy your rockets when you try to expand. During fortress if you build dragoons and keep hit and running any cav, not only do you reduce the number of enemy cav units, but you discourage them from building more.
Sweet culverin ownage. Check out at the end where my culverins come from the side of the main battle to own his artillery without him knowing. (check out my Turtling section on how to maximise usage of this greatly underappreciated unit)
Here are more replays just to show you that you often have to do different things every game. Many of these are from when I just started trying this strategy so often I kinda mess them up, but they can still provide some help I think.
(Kinda decent game, but my enemy just built mercs and then sat outside my base for awhile which sort of defeats the purpose of a merc rush... maybe he went to get a drink?)
Ceres629 vs One-Trick-Pony Ottoman rusher
(Well I consider him
a one trick pony because he seemed to be confused as to what to do since I
walled my base. He didn't even build a mosque so he flatlined at 25
villagers, rofl! I guess he is not used to the game lasting that long?)
Ceres629 vs
Spanish
(Can't remember if my enemy FF'd in this game or not)
Anyway this is probably the first time I tried this strategy and I
foolishly massed
musketeers, (what ever you do don't mass musketeers), even fully upgraded
British ones, I still won, but muskets suck.
This guy won't be happy if he finds out I posted this replay of him
since he posts on HG ^^)
This section will contain useful bits of information that doesn't neatly fit into the above categories.
Postgame Stats
Maybe you lost a game and you wondered to yourself, how well did I out boom my enemy? Did I lose because I overboomed? Did I lose because I didn't boom enough? How can I tell how much of an economic advantage I had over the enemy at each point in that game? My favourite way is by looking is using the villager counter graph in a slightly different way to most people.
For anyone who has done a some form of calculus this probably won't be anything new, but to those that have not, it is simple really and involves almost no math knowledge to understand. Your economic advantage is easily understood by looking at the area between your villager count graph and the enemies, not just the villager count. Click the picture below to understand more. (obviously if the enemy is Dutch then this doesn't work since they have banks but it is still useful)
Analysing your boom
Note that the graph doesn't give an indication of whether your villies are actually work or if they are idle in a TC due to an attack, but with good walling, and clever garrisoning you can avoid unnecessary villager idle time.
Trading Resources
British economy can be very hard to manage. Sometimes you have too much of one resource and not enough of another. Add to the fact that your strategies must keep changing throughout the game and it is hard to know what units you will end up building later on. Don't be afraid to sell any resource you have a lot of, to get one that you really need. Sometimes saving just 10 seconds of time by selling resources at the market to get that vital unit out quicker is the difference between life and death. My favourite is to sell food for gold to age up only if I have LOTS of hunting. This way you save your gold mines for the long run.
Checking the Enemy Deck
Not many people seem to know how to do this essential tactic. By pressing F6 and clicking on the enemy flag you can look at the enemy HC and their deck. This is extremely useful for trying to guess the enemy plan. You can only see the enemy deck AFTER they have selected their deck, so the best time to check is at the 2:00 min mark.
V. The Ceres629 gets Owned section
Due to popular demand :(, here are replays of me losing to known experts, I don't know how known these experts are since not being one myself means I'm not very acquainted with them but they are 2000+ players so surely they can't be noobs. These are old 1.03 replays and many are from as much as two weeks ago when I just start using British so prepare to see some major suckage, but I think I don't perform that badly, but my inexperience with the British shows through a lot in these replays.
Me against a top 20 (at the time) Spanish player. At this time I hadn't yet discovered that I could turtle and still boom and I still try to expand early. I push his army back, but then do some really dumb things and mess the game up and get owned by mass lancers. If only I had been seconds quicker at taking his dock down he wouldn't have been able to boom with me.
This time against a top 50 who asked me if I was an expert too, so I'm assuming that means he is one, and his stats back it up. Again this is from an early replay where I still hadn't discovered the art of turtling and even though near the end I had DOUBLE the amount of villagers he had and a decent sized army to defend, I foolish think I can attack otto and extremely poor cannon micro coupled with merc cavalry that I didn't scout resulted in a premature end to what could have been an exciting game had I only had the wisdom to defend instead and wait for my eco advantage to kick in... This replay was what initially sparked me to start turtling.
*Disclaimer*
If you get owned online trying my strategies, I shall deny that it was my strategy and this webpage will self destruct along with all evidence.