Outlaw rush

Germany does not have a monopoly over outlaw shenanigans. After a lot of trial and error, here is an Italian outlaw build I am happy with.

This build order will only work on maps with a good set of outlaws (renegado+commanchero/crabats/cossack daredevils).

Game plan :

Exploit the full potential of the medici age up by researching coin gathering upgrades and use your coin income to train outlaws from the Lombard. Ramp up the pressure on your opponent with outlaws.

Age 1 :

Do a standard italy opening with one notable exception : instead of building a trade post or a lombard after the first house, you will instead task the architect to build a large number of houses (leave space for the basilica in your base). Do not accelerate anything yet.

Age up at 15 villagers with the Medici.

Transition

Keep your villagers on food until you can afford gang saw and placer mines. then allocate 2/3 of you settlers on wood. Macro for amalgamation, then put another settler in queue. Once this is done (before the end of the transition), keep 5 settlers on food, and put the rest on coin. Rally new settlers on coin.

Age 2 :

Build the lombard, accelerate a house if needs be (on maps with high population outlaws). Start training outlaws. Ship 700w as your 2nd shipment. This will pay for house for quite a while.

Your third shipment is 700c. This will allow you to keep the lombard training full batches of outlaws. The excess coin will be used to train two extra architects. Put these on new houses. While your architects are trained you will start floating food. Invest it in the lombard.

Your 4th shipment is the basilica. Research the LoS techs to get more settlers. Your 5th shipment is flexible. You can ship regular military units, reduce the population of your outlaws or get more lombards.

Follow up

Unlike Germany, you can stay in age 2 for a while when doing outlaws for two reasons :

• Unlike germany, your production of outlaws is not bottlenecked. You can have up to 5 lombards to train your army.
• As italy you can delay your estate transition longer by using your lombards in a creative way.

The lombard transition :

Most players are well aware that investing food into a lombard is a gain of villager seconds. However, lombards can have more apllications.

With Italy you can research the last wood upgrade in age 2. Once this upgrade is researched, one unit of wood invested in a lombard is converted into one unit of coin, and 1,5 unit of food. Assuming you have all the wood upgrades researched it is a small gain of villager seconds to gather wood and invest it.

Wood is very abundant on aoe3 maps. Thus, you can delay the estate transition for a very long time by putting lots of villagers on wood and investing the wood into the lombard. You will naturally create a food surplus enabling you to age up. The architects will then be able to build the estates.

This is why the deck has no 700f for age up nor advanced estate, but advanced lombard and usury.