French Fast Expand

Dark Age:

  • Queue up a scout and start looking for sheep with it.

  • Take one of your initial villagers and build a house.

  • Rally your first 2 villagers from the TC to Gold.

  • Rally villagers to food until you have 9 on food. Make a lumber camp after.

  • Age with 2 villagers on School of Cavalry as soon as you have the resources. Don't idle your TC for the age-up.

  • As soon as you have 200 gold, even if you haven't clicked up yet, take Gold villagers and task them to Stone.

Transition:

  • Villager distribution: 5 on Food, 5 on Wood, 2 on Stone,

  • Rally to Wood until 7 on wood, then rally to Stone (until ~6).

  • Build a house in transition.

  • There is no need to gather more than 300 stone. Once you have the Stone, move out the Stone villagers to your second hunt.

  • Similarly, you just want enough villagers on Food to maintain villager production. Take villagers off of food and onto wood if you have several queued up.

Feudal Age:

  • As soon as you're in Feudal, you should have the necessary resources for a 2nd TC. Build it on a hunt. Rally that TC to the hunt.

  • Villager distribution: ~15+ on Food, ~10+ on wood, ~7+ on Gold

  • You'll probably want to build production buildings, ideally 4 or more.

  • You'll need sizeable food income to fuel your economy.

  • Decide if you want to commit to Feudal or go Castle. In any case, try to get Wheelbarrow at this point, as well as a Blacksmith and its upgrades.

Transition:

  • Pump villagers out of both TCs. Keep your macro clean and work from there.

  • Staying Feudal for a 3 unit composition is quite good,

  • Aging to Castle is also an option,


Overview:

In this build, we're going for a second Town Center right upon hitting Feudal Age. This is a beginner friendly build, since effectively countering this build order requires a very tailored response with crisp execution. You should be able to get away with this build unpunished at levels up to Diamond.

This build does forego an early Wheelbarrow and Knight, but that's fine. Getting a 2nd TC going quickly in order to utilize the French bonus of faster villager production sooner is a huge boon to your economy.

You can follow this up with Feudal play, using a 3 unit combo. Alternatively, you should be able to get to Castle rather quickly if you deem that appropriate. As always, scout what your opponent is doing and try to decide what the best move is.

This build will give you the economy necessary for Archer, Spearmen and Knights, which is an excellent composition to have. A more well rounded army goes further than a 2 unit composition.

I like to open with a Scout before my first villager. With a 2nd TC, you'll be able to recoup your lost villager easily. The extra food you get from scouting out the sheep on the map is going to help fuel your game plan.

Having a second scout also means that you can kill deer preemptively at your 2nd TC without require your villagers to do so. The extra scouting information allows you to make a more informed decision when deciding where to next take the game.

You'll lose out on the harass that a knight opening can give you, but I find that this is fine given that you're going to come out ahead thanks to your 2nd TC.

Raiding with Knights is very strong. Try to raid with Knights the same way you scout for Sheep in Dark Age. Having a pair on the map to mess with your opponent can be very strong.