Hacienda boom into Mexico

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Espagnols

The revolutionary Mexican have a bad reputation on the back of their seemingly underwhelming revolutionary replacement. Hopefully, this build that exploits all the quirks of the cuerudos will make you change your mind. Enjoy.

Game plan

Perform an opening similar to the Piroshiki FF described here to reach age 3 as fast as possible. Then boom using two TCs and 2 haciendas boosted by "marvellous year" under the cover of a fort and some cavalry units. During your boom, ship military upgrades that will boost your current army and your future main revolutionary unit. Finally, if your opponent reduces the pressure, advance to the industrial age, ship your factories and revolt to turn your high number of settlers into an enormous force of boosted cuerudos.

Opening :

Perform a 12/10 opening. Explorer builds a TP, all settlers on food. Train 3 settlers at your town centre and ship 3 settlers from the home city. Focus on food treasures while in age 1. Age up with the governor.

When the transition starts, switch to wood and coin treasures as they are worth more villager seconds. Get 100 wood to build a house and 100 coin to pay for age 3. Queue 2 settlers in your town centre.

Age II :

As soon as you hit age 2, ship 700 coin, then 700 wood. Then build the tower, either in base (for safety) or forward (to make your opponent believe you are pulling a piroshiki FF on him). Keep gathering food with your settlers. New settler on the coin crates. When the 700c arrive, use 5 settlers to collect them. The others stay on food. Once you have 1200f and 1000c, age up with the bishop at ~5'20". We are planning to boom. Split your settlers 50/50 on food/coin.

Transition :

The 700w crates should have arrived by now. CHECK IF YOUR OPPONENT IS BOOMING. If yes, pivot to the good ol' piroshiki FF (age with the scout/marksman, ship the church card, build a church, a house and collect 1k wood). If the enemy is not booming, use the wood to build a house, a market (research HD+placer mines+steel traps) and a church (greed) OR a stable . You will have a shipment available that you can use right now (you will have another shipment available as you hit age 3). You have options :

8 pikemen : burn ennemy TPs or defend against cavalry pressure
7 rodeleros : to combine with town militia and the doggos for a good "pop" to defend a colonial timings
5 villagers : safe option to accelerate your economy
Medicine : extremely greedy as you will need ~5min to break even with 1000f assuming you keep your 2TC+hacienda working.
Church card (if you pivot to a piroshiki FF only)

Age III :

As you reach age 3 you will have another shipment available. Again you have options to adapt to what your enemy is doing :

You game plan is to expand with the TC and back it up by shipping a fort wagon. Secure extra hunts in the map as you will need a lot of food to boom
If you need defenses faster, you can ship 2 falconets or 9 rodeleros to defend against a push. Buy wood at the market for houses.

It's now time to boom. Pump these settler numbers up. Train dragoons/skirmishers to defend/harass. Do not commit big. Buy wood at the market (it is profitable until the price of 100 wood is 132) to pay for vice-royalty of new Spain (2 hacienda wagons). Place the haciendas on mines and set them to produce settlers. DO NOT put settlers on the hacienda itself. Your settlers are better used elsewhere. Your 3rd age 3 shipment is marvellous year that will turbocharge your economy. Make sure you never get housed during the next 6 minutes after it arrives and keep your TCs working. Do not age up until the boost is over to get the maximum value.

While you boom, you ideally want to ship the cavalry upgrades and makes lancers backed up with skirmishers and dragoons. Rodeleros are the usual complement of lancers. However, they do not scale well if we go for a revolt and we do not have any upgrade cards in the deck for them.

Branching paths :

Close the game : You should have a good economic lead unless your opponent greeded harder than you.
You are on the backfoot : assign settlers on haciendas and produce soldados. Provided you have not researched the mill/estate gathering upgrades, it is more efficient to produce soldadies.
Macro for a revolt : Go age 4 and revolt. Make sure you build a tavers before revolting and stockpile resources to pay for far west after the revolt.

If you choose to revolt :

Research far west in the saloon. Push with your overbuffed cuerudos. 

Properly upgraded, cuerudos are monsters. Officially they are countered by heavy cavalry, light cavalry and heavy infantry. With their upgrades, they can outrun pikemen, outshoot musk and do not suffer from melee pathing like regular heavy cav. Their most dangerous counter is light cav. To cover these weaknesses you can train bandidos (for light cav/pikes), cuatreros (for heavy cav only), or rodeleros (better in the long run but, need to be manually upgraded).

Ship 10 cuerudos+10 cows first as it is your highest value shipment. Economic rally point on one hacienda so that the cows speed up your settler production. Factories on coin. We are producing outlaws to complement our mass of cuerudos. Produce settlers out of your haciendas. The new settlers can go on coin (your hunts are likely gone). As you build a coin surplus, switch factories to food and start retraining cuerudos from your TCs.

Shipments of notes :

Zacatecas silver : new mines to get coin. Place them next to your haciendas
Outlaw combat : more upgrades for your whole army
Guadalajara ranching : allows you to go over your cow build limit. The later you send the better
Barbacoa : your haciendas are mini factories on top of mini TCs. Resupply the cows by training them from cuerudos
Citizenship : Usually you don't want to reboot your eco. However, you have the medicine card and two TCs already...

Notes :

Why 2 haciendas instead of 1 TC wagon ? Because your economy in early age 3 is weak. Adding one TC and keeping it working strains your economy a lot, especially without medicine. Haciendas generate settlers slowly, but do not require a resource investment to do so, allowing you to train some units to defend and keep your natural resources for longer.

Cards marked with an "X" are upgrades for your cuerudos. You don't have to send all of them. Cavalry combat and Cav attack are the two most important for cuerudos.

Cards marked with a "Y" are upgrades for your secondary units : Soldados, bandidos and cuatreros. They have an even lower priority than the cuerudos upgrades and can be changed depending on needs.

Water variant ? Replace theatre and caballeros with the two caravels and the frigate.

Comments (4)

TeCeboUnMate

Very good guide, I wonder if by making small changes the deck can be applied to Argentina, or if many more would have to be made instead.

jerome

TeCeboUnMate
Very good guide, I wonder if by making small changes the deck can be applied to Argentina, or if many more would have to be made instead.

I guess you could ship the 15sheeps+1homestead wagon in age 3 and revolt as the sheep finish fattening. I'd probably skip the hacienda and do fort=>15sheep=>marvelous year. Upon revolting, I'd just send granaderos and spam them, with factories on coin and the food coming from the livestock. Granaderos don't scale as well as cuerudos when it comes to upgrades, so you might want to swap out hand cav attack with stockyards for ex.

I prefer to use Argentina as a high tempo revolt rather than something sustained. See this build order.

TeCeboUnMate

jerome
I guess you could ship the 15sheeps+1homestead wagon in age 3 and revolt as the sheep finish fattening. I'd probably skip the hacienda and do fort=>15sheep...

But given the massive nerf to the Grenaderos, is a high tempo revolt with Argentina still worth it? Wouldn't it be better to have a boom revolt that allows you to fully upgrade the Lancers before revolting? That way, you can upgrade the Mortars with Argentina and build an army with Lancers, Revolutionaries, and artillery (where the Grenaderos or other cannons can support the Mortars).

jerome

TeCeboUnMate
But given the massive nerf to the Grenaderos, is a high tempo revolt with Argentina still worth it? Wouldn't it be better to have a boom revolt that allows...

In the context of playing Spain, I wouldn't consider Argentina to be my best tempo revolt. If I was playing Germany on the other hand, Argentina would be my best option for tempo.

If you wanna go for the über lancers with the discount on hand cavalry argentina brings... sure. Who am I to stop you. However, they are still lancers at their core. This is why I prefer the Mexican cuerudos who are similar to lancers but scale better in numbers thanks to their ranged attack.

The unique perk of Argentina that no other revolt have is to allow you to keep a livestock economy provided you have fattened animals as you have fresh cows to replenish your livestock pen and can train cows with gauchos. You don't have to send one shipment (Llaneros/Morrochucos etc.) to re-activate your livestock economy. Mexico has the livestock harvesting units but not the fresh cows, and the cuerudos need upgrades before they can be considered good.

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