The Persians

The Persians


The Persians are one of those teams that has a great unique unit that
you just want to exploit. Elephants in large numbers are hard to stop,
their only counters are halberds, mamelukes, and scorpions, so if
you're facing a non-saracen team that lacks in the counter, definitely
go with Elephants. More than likely however, the enemy will prepare for
your elephants with many halberds and scorpions together, this double
counter will thrash elephants, so you will sometimes want to use
calvary archers or hand cannonners, a bombard cannon or two, a few
onagers and maybe a few scorps, depending on what resources you have in
excess. Personally, I prefer elephants with onagers, cavalry archers,
and a few bombard cannons. It's important to make sure you bring trebs
or rams along to, as elephants are good siege, but those things do the
job much better.

One strategy I often use is called "The Elephant Factory", it starts
off with your first villager building 2 houses while your other two
make a castle. From there you make 5 more castles (6 in all) before
making anything else and just constantly pump out elephants. Within 10
minutes, you'll have about 80 elephants, an army that is hard to stop
unless you made a counter from the very beginning. Not even a large
army of pikemen will stop this, only siege and mamelukes. Once the
castles are up, make about 55 farms, put 25 on wood, and put 30 on gold
in some fashion or another. One last tip for the elephant factory is to
include rams, as once you wipe out the enemy defense, you can send in
the rams to destroy everything else and use the surviving elephants to
wipe out another enemy.

When playing as the Pers however, no matter what strategy you use, it's
important that you use elephants correctly. This means pulling them
back when halberds come but sending them in when you see Paladins,
other infantry, or archers. Elephants take so much abuse that castles
aren't much of a threat, but always make sure you have some siege to
take down those castles quickly. If you see bombard, make rams, and
many of them, 15 rams will destroy A LOT.