Split your villagers, putting 3 or 4 on the wood crates, sending 2 to your first hunt. Once the vills on the crates are done, send them to wood. Rally the tc onto food. Build a house and train 13 vills (14 once the first shipment comes). Once you have the 13th vill in queue, switch all vills onto food.
1) First shipment is distributivism
Age up with the tower of victory, and put 5 or so vills on the wonder. Transition 6-7 vills onto wood and the rest split on food and coin, except for one to herd in you 2nd or 3rd hunt. Train villagers and put down a market and maybe house. Putting more villagers on wood means earlier market ups, but lessen the chance of a full first batch of sepoy. Aggression=fewer vills on wood, Eco=more vills on wood.
Hit age 2 around 4:10-4:30. (earlier with food and wood treasures. I have aged before 4:00 with this build with a 100w and 90f treasure. Treasures really help out this build. Like, a lot. Early food treasures are just as helpful as wood treasures so pick up everything you see.)
Place a barracks, forward or in base, with the 400 wood from the age up. Stable if playing team and starting zambs. Also get 1st food upgrade and civil servants, as well as a house or two. Queue sepoys at the barracks. Pressure their potential FB with elephants. Your elephants should be posted around their tc when you age up to try to kill their tower or harass vills going forward. Split your vills with around twice as many on food as coin, and a few on wood to have barely constant vill production.
2) 600 wood
Continue to build houses and market upgrades (2nd food, Imperial bureaucracy, and coin ups, in roughly that order.) Split 60% of vills on food, 20% on wood, and 20% on coin. You only need 5-6 villagers+1st trickle to sustain villager production. Pressure enemy Fb with sepoys. Mix in Guhka after a few batches of sepoys.
3) 2nd Wood trickle.
If they try to age, you can ship 600 coin instead, and try to age yourself, or just try to pressure and mass, and maybe add in a stable and switch to zamb/guhrka.
Continue to produce troops and skirmish. Try to raid with small groups of sepoy and try to contain them and force them off hunting. Around now is a good time to mix a second rax. You can mix it earlier, too.
4) 300 export
Now, this is when you need to make a decision. If you have won a few early fights, you can ally with Otto and get vills with the export. If you want to end them game now, ally with brits and send redcoats. (You can also ally with french and try to age with the crates, though if you are planning to do this, it is better to just ship 600 coin IMO.) When you push in, you also now have the Inspiration ability, which is a really nice caveat from this build. After this, what to do is up to you. You can ship 600 coin and age, ship 5 sepoy and continue to pressure, or you can do something else, maybe shipping 4 sowars and raiding or an eco card, like exotic hardwoods.
Some final notes: This build really benefits from not full out aggression, unlike in a agra rush, but containing and raiding. India is not the strongest civ on the ESOC maps, so take advantage of your early age up to pressure your opponent's hunts, which wont be all they way toward their tc now. Your explorers are really good at denying an FB. Against brit, esspecially, make sure that they are near your opponent's TC and can pressure the tower wagon. Also, I know that in some India builds, the export is shipped before the 2nd wood trickle. This can be done if you like it more, but it means that you have to make the decision of aggression or eco a lot earlier. If you ship 300 export after 600 wood, I wood probably go with the aggressive option, and really just try to hurt them a lot with that really strong 7ish minute timing push.
Also, inspiration is a very strong ability, increasing attack, speed, HP, and I believe RoF by 15% for around 15 or 20 seconds. Do not use this ability lightly. Make sure that when you use it, you are making a defining moment, either winning a crucial fight, or just ending the game. It is a very strong ability.
On 600w, you can do a number of things, though the best, IMO is to get market ups and houses (this is really important, if you dont get at least 3 houses off of this shipment you can get crucially housed). One option, and probably the second best one, is to build a stable and mix sowar or zambs. Zambs can be helpful against a Samwise french build, because they can shut down raids very easily. Against Japan, zambs can also be very good if they are going full ashi. They also deal with the daiymo very well. Mixing Guhka is also a very crucial part of this build, because it is hard to deal with, just like Jan/Abus. Taking adavantage of the range is also very good if your opponent is going musk/huss.
I have been trying to use TP's more with india, and currently (december 2016), I suggest putting all vills to wood in transition and building a TP, shipping 300e before wood trickle, allying with french and getting the wood and coin crates. The TP is extremely good, as for a normal civ, Goodspeed estimated (with math) that a TP built around 4-5 minutes is around 3-4 vills, but with india, you also get an extra villager for each shipment (also just some really good shipments too), so it really can amount to more like 5 vills in value. It also means that, if you mix a stable early you get the camel cards in a fair bit earlier (up to nearly a minute earlier in some cases). You can also build a TP on a 400w 200f start, and can sometimes even get away with it on 400w 100f. It is actually pretty good, and only delays you age up by 10-15 seconds if you macro correctly. If you do do starting TP, I would try to play the contain game a bit more in 1v1.
Any Suggestions welcome! Happy playing
