Premise: this build order was tested with a wood crate start and no treasures. In an actual game you need to keep these variables in mind.
BUILD
Usual start, gather the crates and put all vills on food except for a couple of vills that will gather 25 wood.
With your explorers build a trading post and a shrine. The trading post is necessary in order to have our third shipment ready by the time we age up.
Move all your villagers to food and age up asap (it should be possible to start aging before the 3 minute mark) with the toshogu shrine.
1st shipment: 2 villagers. It's not really obligatory to send 2 vills but i think it's the most appropriate shipment in this circumstance.
Once you start aging, queue another vill and move all of your villagers to wood except 6. Remember to switch the shrine to wood. With the wood that you are gathering you should build:
-2 shrines
-Consulate
The consulate will be ready more or less when diplomatic intrigue arrives if you use 1 villager for its construction.
2nd shipment: Good faith agreements. We will need this to get the dutch bank.
You will hit age 2 at max 5 minutes if you did everything correctly, and you will have 1 shipment ready to send.
3rd shipment: Diplomatic intrigue.
When you have gathered enough wood to build a barracks, switch the shrines to food and move 5 vills to gold while all the rest goes on food.
Wait until diplomatic intrigue arrives to ally with the dutch. Send the bank first and queue a batch of stadthouders next.
Produce 5 ashigarus from the barracks, and once you have the bank up you can leave just a couple of vills on gold in order to keep producing ashi from the barracks and move the rest to wood/food.
At 6:20 minutes, if your execution is not too bad, you should have:
1 shipment ready; what you will send with this shipment is up to you, but i suggest that you send 600 wood so that you can build a market, start getting some upgrades, maybe add a couple of shrines or a second barracks etc etc.
ECO:
23 villagers
1 bank
Dutch cons trickle (the bank, together with the alliance trickle, equals about 6 vills on gold)
1 trading post
Toshogu shrine
3 shrines
ARMY:
6 stadthouders
5 ashi
Also, since you have already sent GFA and diplomatic intrigue you can use the consulate very comfortably for the rest of the game.
That's it. Let me know what you think about this build. I don't know if it's any good. I just enjoyed trying it and writing the build down.
(I might edit this post in the future if necessary.)Video demonstration a few posts below.
