Broken lance timing

The Italian civilization in aoe3 is famed for 3 things : the complexity of their openings, their oppressive bersagliere in age 4, and their mercenary company timings. In this build, we will focus on the latter aspect of this civ. Due to the sheer complexity of Italy openings, I will provide a detailed explanation in this guide.

Game plan :

Age up quickly and prepare a devastating timing attack between minute 7 and 8 using a mercenary company.

Age I

Let your settlers gather crates and task your architect to build a market and a house in this order. Once you have enough food to queue your first settler, task one settler to the wood crate. Accelerate the construction of the market once its cost is 75 wood. Put the settler gathering the wood crates back to food crates.

While doing all that, look for coin treasures with your explorer. You need 50 coin from treasures as soon as possible. As you accumulate food, queue settlers until you max out your population.

In your base, put your settlers to hunt. In the market start researching hunting dogs, blunderbuss and great coat. If you do not have the coin yet, delay hunting dogs and go for the other techs.

If you have followed the instructions above properly, the architect will complete his house a few seconds before the last queued settler pops out of the TC. Your first shipment will be capitalism. Queue more settlers until you are at 15/20 population. Send the architect to build a TP (on a TP map) or a lombard (no TP map). Keep gathering food and age up with the governor.

Transition

Keep your settlers on food and research gangsaw and placer mines. Then put all settlers on wood bar two who will herd hunts toward your base.

You need enough wood to accelerate the tp. Get the architect to build a house once the TP/lombard is done. Do not accelerate the house. Simply bank 200w plus whatever will be necessary to boost the house for when you are in age 2. Once you have banked the wood, put all settlers back to food.

Age II :

Send 700w asap.

Boost the house and the barracks. From this point queue many houses with the architect. Train 2 batches of musketeers from the rax. The coin crates and the trickle will be enough to sustain batches for the moment.

When the wood arrives, boost the production of 4 houses and use the rest to hire a mercenary company.

• By default, broken lance combines very well with your musketeers. This should be the most common.
• The maltese company has superior siege potential. To use against pleyers defending with musket infantry or dragoons.
• In the odd case where your opponent is doing a timing on you with a skirm goon comp (e.g India), the croatian company will act as a perfect counter

Your mercenary company should arrive around the 7 min mark. Push at this time.

Follow up

You have plenty of possibilities. The most straightforward way to play would be to train architects, get the remaining market tech and get a lombard boom on the way, to extend your economic lead.