I don't like to produce soldiers but on an open map I'll make skirmishers and spearmen in feudal to stop most rushes. How many wood choppers should I have when I get to feudal? How many gold//stone? When upgrading from dark age to feudal I usually send 2 on gold. Sometimes on a standard-resource ES map I might upon hitting Feudal have a pause between getting villagers off of depleting berries//boars//deer (though I rarely go deer) into farming because I have too little wood. I usually put 1 mill on berries, and when sheep run out I put a second mill near a boar and eventually my farming expands to it, but I never farm until I'm in feudal so I can get horse collar first. I go to feudal with either 23 or 24 villagers (so 24 or 25 pop) but what the hell should I be doing? How many farms do I need in feudal, etc? I'm almost always Japanese, they have a significant dark age benefit in that their lumber camps, mining camps, and mills only cost 50 wood each. Do people specialize to map types? You know, play open only or water only or stupid closed maps (black forest, arena, etc) or only open maps? Or are decent players (1600ish) able to fight on all 3 and win? I think the problem is in feudal age, or it's that I should specialize to one kind of map. I keep getting wrecked by high-15's which means i suck.
