Italian Fast Imp Silk Road anyone?

So I'm a low Elo noob who likes to theory-craft, and a noobier friend of mine goes feudal trade carts, which got me thinking, is there a world where trade carts ASAP make sense?

It turns out after silk road and caravan, Italians trade carts are almost as good as gold miners as far as return on investment* goes. Now why would you go imp, invest in a castle, and pay 700 food and 450 gold early on to do with a bigger latency something you can already do with a 100 wood mining camp and villagers? This is the question I'll try to answer.

First, by building trade carts ASAP, you are growing your economy by means other than town centers (in a way similar to docks). Since Each cart takes twice as long to be trained, each 175 wood market can be thought of as a half town center. Since you need your first market anyway to go fast imp or fast castle in maps which warrant it, it's as if you "saved" 137.5 wood and 50 stones. Any subsequent market used to continuously produce carts can be thought of as trading 37.5 wood for 50 stone, or the equivalent vill times.

Second, in very closed map, such as Amazon Tunnel, it's often good to have a first castle up early. That could be yours.

Third, Fast imp as Italians is sensible, because of the reduced age up cost and strong gunpowder. So if you have to bail out, you have good ways to spend your banked up food and gold for things other than Silk Road and caravan.

So the ideal conditions might be something like:

- Spanish ally. Obviously.

- Very closed map. We're playing the long game. Amazon tunnel is great.

- A Teuton ally. Or any strong defensive ally, but Teuton can also sling farms, of which you need many for a fast imp. Especially great on amazon tunnel where the whole team start close by and there are extra boars so the Teuton player can be slung a few herd-ables and hunt-ables to still do a decent fast castle boom. Alternatively, the Italians player could be slung animals and forego farms for a long time.

- An ally which can burn through gold fast. Like Khmer double dumboes or Turks. Since you will mostly touch your main gold, and will sling a lot of gold late game.

Economically speaking, this strat is obviously much worse than 3-5 TC boom, so you'd have to apply some military pressure to make it worth. One way to do it would be to help your teammate clown pushing in castle age with trebs, to make maximal use of your castle.

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Alternatively, I guess one could go for a regular fast TC boom strategy, maybe with one less TC (2-4) and consider starting trading upon aging up to imp in a more usual way.

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I can't possibly be the first to think of similar junk, henceforth if you've seen something similar discussed elsewhere I'd be very grateful to have pointers (even regular Italian fast imp are of interest to me).

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*For reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m65-6mpCyR4