Having apparently given up on the Romans, the French are now HL's favorite nation. Here he has written up an excellent strategy article that takes advantage of the French bonuses to conduct an early attack. French 150 Attack.

This is a strategy for my new favorite nation, the French. I like all of the French bonuses, they allow for aggressive play from the start. Lumber bonuses are awesome, great for booming, and you can go offensive early with raiding or siege and still have plenty of lumber for Unis, Mines, Markets, etc. Their siege bonuses (cheaper, faster, faster to build), free early wagon, and UUs are great. And the free general, what a fun nation. This is basically a modified 150...there are dozens of ways to do a 150 and this is one of them.

HL has a recorded game of the basic strategy here. Richter syas, "Good strat, but don't try it on maya." So HL later goes on to post a recorded game of him doing this strategy against a 2000+ rated Mayan player. (That'll show him!) He includes some good analysis of the game from his perspective.

Regarding the game vs Mayan opponent, he didn't handle the rush particularly well, and I made several mistakes too. This isn't an ideal game for knowing how to defeat maya, but we'll analyze what happened and what could have happened.

posted by Tim at 11:00 AM