India fortress age dominance

I'm not sure where to post this, so I'll give it a shot here and see what you lads think.

I play a lot of AOE 3, but I've never played vs other players. I always play 1 v 1 on expert level.

I've played all civs to about level 60 except Germany.

I recently started playing india, and I was really disappointed in their early game weakness to raids, but soon I figured out what I was doing wrong, and now I've won about 12 games in a row in devastating fashion (no reloads, no saves). In fact, I was winning so handily, even vs very tough opponents like the french and germans, that I had to try this tactic as other nationalities.

I tried as english, but it was quite difficult, and tried as dutch and it worked OK, but so far, india is in a world of it's own for absolute rampaging destruction in fortress age - we're talking wins by 16-18 minutes in absolute wreckage.

Please let me know if this is common knowledge or not, but anyway, the basics are as follows.

Card choices:

• 20% wood (exotic hardwoods) (1)
• 20% wood (woodcrafting) (1)
• distributivism (you don't need it, but it amps the win condition) (1)
• 700 wood (2)
• 700 gold (2)
• 500 wood (infinite) (2)
• 500 gold (infinite) (2)
• 800 wood (infinite) (3)
• 1 hill castle (2)
• 5 Sepoys (2)
• 9 Sepoys (3)
• Dravidian Martial Arts (+15% melee attack) (2 - not needed)

Basically, it goes like this: Age 1:

• 2 on close hunts
• 2 on wood
• remainder on baskets of resources (when complete, all to wood)
• TC gather on close wood to 7 vils
• once you hit 7 vils on wood and wood rate = vill prod rate, send to hunts
• first card is distributivism or 20% wood gather rate if you don't have distributivism, you can alternately do 300 food, but it's not worth it usually.
• build 1 house whenever
• keep building villies - you should be around 4 on wood, 6-7 on food
• start age up using the building that gives gather rate bonus and 200 each resource (can do with 1 or two villies), make location kinda near gold+2nd hunt if possible.
• keep 3-4 villies on food, at least 2 on wood but 3-4 is better, rest to gold, change TC gather point to mine near age building
• if you get 100 extra wood, build a market, or shift one vil to wood to make it up during age up and build market
• next card is 20% wood gather rate (you want to amp the fuck out of wood gather rate as early as possible)
• you should be nearing age up by now, and you might have between 15-17 vils, you want to be getting about 10+ on gold by now, and research the 40 food/40 wood +5% mining from market
• once you have about 10 on gold, start putting TC gather point on wood and get more wood production, you ideally want to have enough gold for racks during age up but you can usually manage if it arrives a bit after.
• build racks about halfway across map but not directly in line with enemy base
• as soon as you hit 1200 food+1000 gold start building the "fortress" type of age wonder. It shoots 25 damage projectiles, build this just ahead of the racks.
• next card, send the hill castle and put it near the racks+age building
• start researching the hunt gather rate boosts at market, and the vill armor/attack
• as soon as you got 1k gold for age up move all but 3-4 vils off gold and go mad food crazy. At this point, I usually split my gatherers, and I send two hunters to each of 4 different hunts to diversify and this also means if I get raided, they almost never can fully stop my food production
• As soon as you got 90 food+30 gold, start building 1 sepoy
• Distribution for resources should be about: 15 food, 3-5 wood, 3-4 gold
• keep tacking on a sepoy to the production line, ideally get 5+1 building, and your next shipment is either 5 sepoy or 700 gold or 700 wood, depending what you're low on but gold is best
• by the time you age, you want at least 5 sepoy, but ideally 7ish
• on age up you get 5 gurka, send these forward
• by now since you move many vils out of your base to do farther hunts, you maybe only have like 6-7 near base. If you get raided, no worries, food is still coming in, and your gold is on the way as a shipment, wood isn't important now so just garrison vils in TC and let your TC tank while you use sentries and shit to clear off the raid party
• get as many vils queueing as possible put all on wood
• NOW is important... You need to keep track of opposition, you need to get about 10 more sepoy which isn't too hard with 15ish on food, and with 10+5+5 gurka, you want to start advancing with your party looking for their fortress which is still in cart form. If you find it, your 20 man part can 90% of the time kill all their warriors AND the unbuilt fortress, if not, no problem. worst case scenario, you force a poor location and it gets built.
• all this time, you're queuing the fuck out of sepoys
• ideally, you got another 10 or so, but no worries if only 5
• as soon as you got 200 free wood, upgrade to veterans or discplined basically, the ideal time to upgrade is on the first march, so you're starting the death-knell on this first raid
• you skirt the enemy base, and break your 15 sepoys into 3 groups of 5
• if you upgraded to disciplined while marching, 5 sepoys can kill a single vil in 1 volley
• you micro your 3 groups, and you can almost always kill at least 3 vils very rapidly, sometimes as many as 6
• withdraw these groups, and walk them around the base to an area you think might have a different resource gatherer, just set them on these, or if you don't find a target, just let them attack randomly for a bit on a nearby structure
• bring a fresh vill up to the opposite side of map as the 3 building mini-base (forward operating base), and build a new racks
• start queueing more sepoy, and when you got 10, send to other side of base where there is no fighting happening
• build farms at base, spread more vils to further mines, and just keep shipping the inifinite resources to keep the resources up, and spam the fuck out of sepoy and just keep the base seiged from two sides

• win by 15minutes, in fortress, with about 40-100 sepoy wrecking the shit out of everything

• 100% win rate so far vs export, any nationality

Some notes: if you get swamped by raids and some shitty placed resources, and the enemy gets their fortress up, don't stress, just avoid it. Put the barracks VERY wide, and follow the same concept (sepoy spam, seige base on 2 fronts).

You can do other stuff like build elephants or whatever, but they aren't needed. Armory helps with some more HP, and you can go up to industrial, but none of it really matters. normally once I start my seige, I'll drop enemy from 36-40 vils down to under 20 with the second wave of sepoys, and then it's just a matter of wrecking base uncontested with some minor skirmishes as supplies (units) arrive from home city.