So here is my first post about Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots. I begin with the strategy I'm most proficient with, which is also the easiest to learn: rushing. In this game I am Japanese on Himalaya, 2v2 with Bantu in front of me. My opposing player is not really skilled, so this is partly why this strategy was so effective, but nonetheless there are a lot of good players around who do not take into consideration rushes and can't defend them properly. With a good rush you can gain a strong advantage over your enemy early in the game - or even turn a 2v2 in a 2v1, like in this game. But with a bad rush you can fall behind and never recover! Remember that rushes require more resources from the attacking player, but it also gives greater prizes to the attacker.

Now as for the game itself: as soon as I discovered that I am Japanese I decided to go for SCI1 MIL, build a little army to explore/collect ruins and either rush or raid the player in front of me. I was lucky enough to have the Bantu in front of me and not the Chinese (rushing the Chinese is a bad idea and should generally be avoided because they have large cities), so I went for a rush. Note that it is really important to scout for ruins, since while rushing you spend a lot of resources on military units, so you have to keep your economy going through ruins. Luckily with lots of units scouting the map you collect more ruins, compensating for the resources spent on building units. Also it is important to learn a little ruin manipulation, it's not as hard as it seems: ruins will give you a bonus in a resource you are collecting (except knowledge) which is the lowest one you have. So to get a food ruin, right before taking the ruin hit C, SHIFT+V (that is select city, create 5 citizens) and then cancel that with SHIFT+\. To get timber, just before taking the ruin select a citizen and start building a lookout, without actually building it. So next thing I do is exploring the enemy territory to find the other player's capital. I should actually have explored beforehand with my scout, so that I could go directly to the capital undetected, but hey! I'm no pro after all... Notice that while I'm heading towards the enemy capital I also build my second city, so that if my rush fails I won't be too late to recover and also if I conquer a city I will have three cities instead of two. If I don't build my second city I won't be able to build another one until CIV2 or until I lose the city, leaving me behind on my economy. Also notice that I recruited 4 HI and 2 LI to counter archers. This is the best combination of troops for an ancient age rush, anything else is mostly a waste of resources. Now my opponent builds barracks, which is the right thing to do, but he made two mistakes: the first one was to not build barracks right away when he saw my HI near his second city and the second one was to train HI instead of FA. The first thing to do in this situation is to kill my HI, so FA are the right answer. To avoid getting killed by my LI, he could have garrisoned/ungarrisoned the archers to protect them while still attacking effectively. The best thing would have been to create 2 FA and garrison them in the city, then ungarrison them at the opposite side of the city and kill my HI. Of course in this case avoid losing the capital was difficult, a temple would have helped reinforce the city, but there was not enough timber. But anyway taking back the capital was possible. Since I saw that the defending player didn't know how to defend effectively (no shame about that, we've all been there - next time he will do better) I decided to build some more troops with the capital sack bonus instead of going right away to classical age, knowing that I could keep his capital and take him out of the picture. This is actually what happened, so now my team had a real edge. After killing my opponent I went mostly booming (my booming is horrible, don't even mention it!) because I wanted to get to Gunpowder before attacking my chinese opponent: their LI is a killing machine in Medieval! From this point on the game was pretty much over, I could have done better raiding the other player, but anyway 2v1 is almost always a gg.

As you can see there are a lot of mistakes on my part too, but overall the strategy was effective and mostly done correctly. Hope you enjoyed it!