I know Greeks aren’t used by most of the top players, but I quite like using Zeus. For those of you who do enjoy playing as Greeks and Zeus in particular this is a reliable and very powerful strategy that works vs. most civs. I guess since I’m writing this up I’d better make a name up for the strategy so I’ll call it the Centaur Strangle. I’ve been using this strategy since about a month in to aom and have found that it works quite well vs. most strategies.

First off why Zeus for this strategy:

Well this is rather simple really, zeus generates favor much faster than either hades or posiedon does in classic age. As well zeus gets centaurs which are one of the most powerful units in classical IMO. Posiedon does get centaurs as well so I’m starting to think he might actually be a better choice for this strategy, I’ll have to do some testing on that though.

Now I guess I should tell you why centaurs are so great (as I have seen many people complain how weak they are), well they absolutely rock as both econ raiders and fighters due to their high accuracy, decent range, good attack, and decent speed. Centaurs are the best way to raid because 2 of them can do an awful lot of damage without reducing the size of your army dramatically, as well centaurs get a nice damage bonus modifier vs. myth units so if your opponent is using lots of MU it’s pretty easy to take them out with your multiple centaurs + hero’s as well. Centaurs special ability is probably one of the best ones in classic age it gives them 1 shot that is guaranteed to hit and does 2x damage to the enemy which is fairly significant at 24 damage. Something to keep in mind is that this attack takes longer to perform than a standard attack so don’t try to stop and shoot a quick shot with your centaurs while running from a pack of hero’s or cav.

Archaic age your main goal is (drumroll please) to get to classical!!!! but that’s not all while going to classical you are going to skew your resource intake a fair amount from what most people would be used to. This works best if there is a decent amount of hunting, but can work as well without it. I’ll just give you a loose build order, I say loose because I don’t follow anything specific except when I am actually going classical already. So basically early on you want to hunt first, get the hunting upgrade right away if you think the hunting is going to be worthwhile (as in at least 2 sets of animals totaling over 600 food each pile I’d say is decent). So once you get your hunting up and running you’ll want to go to wood and gold fairly quickly as this is the only way you will get your temple up in time. Usually I put my 7th and 8th vils or so on wood and gold, try to put your lumber pit closer to lumber than gold, but make sure there is a gold mine close enough that your vils won’t have to walk forever. Early on you won’t have the res needed to build that second resource depot so you’ll have to live with just 1 until your temple is going up. After you get your vils on gold/wood send 2 more to food at most, sometimes you don’t need any sometimes you do, then send a couple more to gold, then ALL wood. the second you get enough wood/gold to build your temple grab 2 vils off of gold and build it, take any vils you have except 2 or so and put them on to wood, if you are slow getting your temple up then you might be able to do more on gold, but it just depends how many vils you advance with. The fastest you are going to want to advance is right after your 19th vil, it’s tough to do so don’t count on being able to every game.

In the meantime your scout should be able to explore almost the whole map in archaic age, note where the gold mines are on the map, they will become very important to this strategy. Make sure to keep your scout alive as he is tough to replace and very good at what he does. Now comes the fun part, once you hit classic age you should have (depending on the speed of your upgrading) 32 favor, 500-700 wood and enough food to keep your tc flowing with a decent amount extra. You won’t have much gold but no worries you don’t need much yet, build 2 centaurs from your temple, build jason, and your second hero from your tc, as well as a stable, then start putting vils on gold until you feel you have enough there. If you do a fast rush you should hit classic age at about 4:50 or so, so your centaurs should be out by the time your enemy hits the second age.

Now here is the nice part of this strat, if you catch your norse opponent trying to forward build your hero’s + centaur can wipe him out pretty good, this really can slow down a norse player, so finding their forward build is very nice. If you don’t find a forward build, your two centaurs should be used to raid economy, they do a really good job as 2 of them will kill a villager in 1 shot most of the time. Their initial shot does tons of damage. Use your hero’s in conjunction with the centaurs to take out any enemy hero’s. The greek archer hero is the only one that could possibly give you any trouble, if you don’t have anything to really take him out fast before he does some damage to your centaurs, it’s time to use the lightning bolt . Keep pumping out the centaurs, in most cases you can never have enough, sometimes vs. norse however you might want to stop at a certain point as they can easily mass hersirs, and the centaurs die to them pretty bad (if they can catch you hehe). As you get the resources start to build barracks or stables or archery ranges as the situation needs them. Vs. norse it wouldn’t be a bad idea to actually just build archers as your main core of units, however things can get difficult as archers are such slow units, so I almost always prefer to build hippo’s to take the hits in front of my centaurs. Once the initial skirmish’s are done with comes the strangle part, you know where the gold mines are on the map, try to figure out which ones he’s using by scouting him out, once you have found what he’s using send the centaurs to raid while your army fights off his army (hint give your centaurs a ctrl # so you don’t have to watch their raiding 100%), you won’t win many fights this way, but you will hurt his econ so don’t stay in the fights for the most part, do hit and runs just to keep him distracted while your centaurs do the real damage. Don’t do non stop raiding as this will make you too vulnerable in your main army, and he could quickly over run you. More strangling can be produced with a nice little set of walls all over the map, if you can wall off sections of the map that contain gold fairly easily I’d suggest doing so with 1 vil, it’s no rush to get these closed off, so no need really to have more than 1 vil taken off of your economy. If you can keep strangling like this your opponent will eventually run out of gold and that will be it for him.

In instances where you can’t strangle enough of the map off and keep him off all the gold you just have to keep raiding and keep the fighting in his territory, try to stop the enemy from raiding your econ as much as possible. One nice trick is to keep your ceasefire for later in the game, if the opportunity arises where you think you can take out a tc go for it (hoplites work great for this), use everything you have on the tc even if it means his army just gets to hack away at you. Make sure to have some vils ready and as soon as that tc goes down start building on the settlement spot, you only need to just start on it then hit ceasefire immediately, great way to pick up an extra tc, just make sure you mass up your army again as they likely outnumber you at this point.

Recorded games:

Here are some links to some of my more recent attempts at the Centaur Strangle, I find that even several months after I stopped using it, it is still quite useful and very powerful.

1v1 vs. L_Clan_Jwayne as Thor on Savannah I think this is my fastest rush with this strategy to date, it works really well I think.

2v2 vs. Goofy and Jerry Seinfeld Again speed plays a big role in this one. Savannah is a great map for this strategy due to the wide open spaces and the amount of raiding possible.