Using only women for economy

[Deicide4u]

How viable are the "women only" economic strategies?  

I'm thinking about using women to gathet food, wood, stone and metal and treat all other units as your army. With tech upgrades, they should gather stone and metal at an acceptable rate. 

This ties into one of my previous topics about Citizen soldiers having more of a military role.

Also, I'm asking from a more casual perspective, so mostly vs AI. This strategy WILL fall apart in the current economic model where your pure gatherers (women, lol) are severely handicapped when gathering stone and metal.

EDIT:
As to inevitable "what will your CS do, just sit around in base and do nothing?"....they will stay in towers/walls or train in barracks/stables. Like soldiers in real life would.

EDIT2: I have a game playing as Romans going on now, will try this and let you know how it ends. Romans and Spartans should have some advantages here. 

Edited April 26 by Deicide4u

[TheCJ]

For a casual game, this will work just fine I think. Even "competitively", I think @Atrik sometimes only has women working in the lategame? He's a fairly skilled player, so you can get pretty far with an economy like this.
Obviously, you should not keep any units in a tower that isnt currently shooting at enemies, you can rather attack and keep raiding the opponents economy, that way the advantage he gets from using more effective gatherers can be minimized.

This strategy can work because women are so much cheaper than soldiers (and produced faster, especially with Romans). 

[Deicide4u]

It was a challenge, but it is viable. Was it efficient? No. The only good part of it is that my elite troops destroyed his first attack without breaking a sweat.

I had APM taxing with re-shuffling of Barracks and Stable garrisons whenever my CS finished training in them. Easier to just rally them on some trees or mines and forget about them until an attack comes.

You really feel that opportunity cost of not using your CS to work. Half of your population in the early to mid game feels useless. Oh, well. Experiment failed successfully.
I'll just stick to making some females to gather food.

[Seleucids]

Some players make 90 women + cav then reach 200 pop at min 9-10. Your eco will be amazing and you can carry out huge cav rushes before everyone else is ready. However: if someone gets mad at you and pushes into your base with full inf army, you are 100% dead. 

[Deicide4u]

Nah, it's sadly impractical at decent levels. You need men in P2 to gather stone and metal fast enough. Preferably skirmishers as they are faster, but also some spears to kill cavalry.

Women in this game are only good for berries, farms and early woodlines.

On 28/04/2025 at 10:53 AM, Seleucids said:

you can carry out huge cav rushes before everyone else is ready.

The cavalry rush is an all-in. Once the enemy builds decent defense, you auto-lose. Your only chance is to capture the Civic Center fast enough, which can sometimes work. This is why I don't like the capture mechanic, and why I always try to destroy buildings.

[Seleucids]

2 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

The cavalry rush is an all-in. Once the enemy builds decent defense, you auto-lose.

You can develop your eco and rush at the same time. the 90 women at home farm and gather wood; 40 cavs harassing at the front, then you'd have 3 barracks popping out spear inf to mines. Eventually you reach 70 inf + 40 cav combo and your enemies are weak. Now you can decide between push or max yourself out by deleting 40 of your women and replace with champs

 

[Deicide4u]

On 28/04/2025 at 10:53 AM, Seleucids said:

Some players make 90 women

@Atrik, can you tell us your secret sauce? How do you do it?

Edited Tuesday at 09:18 by Deicide4u

[Atrik]

3 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

@Atrik, can you tell us your secret sauce? How do you do it?

I'll be glad to explain why I do it, and give some general build order ideas!

I. Cheap/fast economy!

Females as much for resource efficient woodcutters then CS and they train a little faster. They don't cost resources (wood) that you can invest elsewhere.
Theses reasons are obvious, and are why most players will start the game making females for the first minutes.

At some point, most players switch producing CS instead of females, because they will have enough/excess wood! And I don't! Won't I get too much wood?
My first military buildings are very rarely to produce woodcutters. They are either :

• Stables that can produce cavs to hunt (hunting gather a very good boost to your eco) and harass. The extra good thing is that cavs consume lot of food so they will eat up their own fast food production, and when it's your 1rst production building, it happens also when food is cheap from berries gathering.
• Barracks to produce minerals gatherers only. In that case, some civilizations are better then others to consume minerals, but a lot of them can consume metal very fast in p2 (on mercs mostly, like ptol, mace, athen, carth, kushs...). Even for civ that don't have mercs, gathering minerals only with CS can help you advance to phase 3 fast, then consume minerals with upgrades and p3 stuff.

In Team Games, you often have to think about which players will be in trouble, and which ones will have to be winning over nearby opponent ASAP in order to win the game. therefor going for some cav harassing, or early mercenaries attack provides a initiative advantage. As well, you can help allies with resources.
Because of this, swift/cheap economy feels like so much likely to provides you the opportunities to maximize your game impact.

II. Resilience to rush?

So now, you probably think that the drawback is that you can be so much more easily rushed. but remember, most players also make females until they have 60, you just keep on producing them a little longer.
Consider it that way : this create a growing feminization gap between you and an opponent often from minute 6 to 11. So at minute 6-9, you don't have that much of a gap. minute 9-11, you now have so much females, that even if you opponent come and kills some, it's only him killing workers that you would be replacing/deleting yourself soon! Doomed if you rush, doomed if you don't? Of course rushes might hurt you but they need to make much more kills to be effective. 10-20 deaths is just what you would have replaced anyways.

III. Late game economy management with females.

Surely in late game, having 100+ females is never useful. Wrong!
In late game females, (from fertility festival, or just from CC) can be a key variable to keep your economy at a great level in all circumstance. They only need to be alive a bit more then a minute to gather what they cost you, and if trained from houses, are so great to keep your population (and therefor your economy) maxed out. It's much, much better to have 200 pop with 100 females then 150 pop with only 50 obviously! If the fighting stalls, then you can always replace some females and grow your forces.

IV. More interesting meta

There are other topics talking about this and indeed (booming=turtling), often rushing is made hard on players that have tones of infantry on multiple woodlines, all around their base. Making any rush very easy to defend. If you have woodlines full of females, then you now have the woodlines having to be defended. I feel like it does make both attacking and defending more interesting.

 

TLDR: Females are the best economic unit.