French Republic pressure & boom

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Franzosen

One of the strangest revolutions in the game, the French Republic is primarily seen as a counter-revolution, as its flagship unit, the sans-culotte, eats heavy infantry (i.e revolutionaries) for breakfast while still being able to gather resources and boasting high siege to burn the colony that dared revolt against you. However, I present a build that uses this revolt to combine pressure with a boom.

Game Plan :

We perform a good old-fashioned industrial and revolt immediately after sending the two factories. Then we leverage the ability to batch train our angry worker units to catch up with our opponent and steal his natural resources, thus choking his economy.

Age I :

14/20 market+house (Hunting dogs will have the time to pay for itself before you revolt)

Governor age up

TP in transition

Age II :

Train 2 cdb. Ship 700c => Exiled prince age up => Church in transition.

Age III :

Macro for age 4 while maintaining cdb production.

Fort => 1k coin => 1k wood (build 2 houses) OR 2 falcs OR 5 goon => Tycoon age up.

Age IV :

Research mercantilism. Ship the two factories (on wood to help revolting) => Macro for revolt, then revolt. 

Revolt :

Send cantinières. Factories on food. Switch one factory on wood if you approach the population limit to build houses. Keep the TC working and grow your deathball.

Take your blob of sansculottes and put them on the natural resources that your enemy's settlers are on. You want to starve the other guy. When not fighting, gather something. Anything will do. You can leave some sansculottes behind to gather at other spots. They are not puny settlers. Artillery and heavy cavalry are your main threats. Train a few dragoons from the fort to manage these threats.

Your whole game plan revolves around staying on natural resources, especially the ones close to the enemy's base and forcing the opponent to move to renewable resources while keeping your TC pumping batches of 5 sansculottes. You will need your factories on food for that. Once you have 80 workers, it is time to save money, switch the factories to heavy cannons and enter a new Napoleonic Era.

Napoleonic Era :

This age-up takes the form of a costly shipment. However, upon the arrival of the card, a shipment is refunded to you (not the food and coin though). The main attraction is the embassy wagon that can train the imperial carabiniers. They will be your anticav to complement your deathball of sansculotte. Your first shipment is likely to be génie troops (summon the young/middle/old guard in the church) if you want eco, or the flying battery if you have canons on the field.

You can correct your macro by switching factory production and market abuse. Your base sansculottes are worse than settlers at gathering anything. Even with two gather rate shipments, your sansculottes will not gather much faster than settlers with market upgrades on hunts and mines. Your berry gathering rate will be incredible, though.

Conclusion : You may be able to batch produce your workers, but your economic ceiling is garbage as your worker build limit is still 80 instead of 99. The moment you have to move on mills/estates you are screwed. Close the game before that happens.

Comments (1)

jerome

Technical trivia

Sansculottes are reskinned coureurs des bois. The two units have the same internal ID in the game files. When revolting to the French Republic, a large number of "shadow nerfs" are applied to your cdb alongside the reskin. Here is the list :

HP nerf of 25% (from 180 to 135)
Cost reduction of 20% (from 120 to 100)
Speed buff of 0.25 units (from 4.5 to 4.75)
Hunt gather rate nerf of 32.65%
Wood gather rate nerf of 19.5%
Coin gather rate nerf of 10.5%
Berry gather rate nerf of 27.5%
Mill gather rate nerf of 40%
Estate gather rate nerf of 36%
Lose the "Villager" and "Land villager" tag. Gains the "Land military", "Affected by villager combat upgrades", "infantry", "ranged infantry" and "gunpowder infantry" tags.
Can be trained in batches of 5

Since you lose the "villager" tag, you lose the benefits of gathering upgrades on top of the shadow nerf.

Gather rates of the sansculottes

This is important because the gather rates shipments scale off the base cdb gather rates instead of the ones you can see in game. Their impact is much larger than what the percentages suggest. This is why shipping cantinières first is a good idea. It raises the hunts gather rate to a level slightly above a regular settler. Combine it with Cult of the Supreme Being and you gather hunts faster than a settler with steel traps.

Combat upgrades of the sansculottes

Short story : get your villager combat upgrades BEFORE revolting and your military combat upgrades AFTER revolting.

Example 1 : If you research blunderbuss before the revolt, your sansculottes get a +4 range and +3 damage upgrade. If you research blunderbuss after the revolt, your sansculottes only get +1 damage.

Example 2 : If you research flint lock (advanced arsenal) before the revolt, your sansculottes get no benefit. If you research it after the revolt, your sansculotte will get 18 extra HP (10% of the 180 base health).

Long story : The game keeps a database of the stats of all units for each player and updates it as the game progresses. When researching a technology (or sending a shipment which is also classified as researching a technology) the game applies the technology to all the entities in the database with the matching tag, and then moves on. An upgrade is never applied retroactively. Thus, if you research a military upgrade before the revolt, your cdb will be benefit from it as in their database, they do not have a "land military" tag. If you research the upgrade after the revolt, the sansculottes (in truth a renamed cdb) will benefit from it as the game will detect their "land military" tag.

BUG ! The game retroactively nerfs the "Northwest Passage", "Pionniers", and "Great coat" upgrades upon revolting. However, the HP nerf of "Pionniers", and "Great coat" is not applied if you have also sent "Wilderness warfare". This leads to sansculottes with more than 350HP. I don't know why. It's aoe 3, it's buggy.

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