In Age of Empires 3, what is a good build order for the British?

The British Black Watch Kick.

Takes advantage of the British strengths to get the economy up and running very fast.

Direct from the guide, the different strengths it plays to:

• The 2 falconet card, an excellent card indeed.
• The opportunity to create 8 Black Watch highlanders from the church VERY quickly. Highlanders are great anti-cav units and all-around bruisers.
• The Black Watch are delivered in seconds, unlike conventional mercenary shipments, which take 1 full minute.
• The Thin Red Line is also available from the church.
• Excellent economic recovery due to the manor boom.

The way I play the British is for a really good long term economy. It is really easy to get settlers with the various cards and building houses, so you make sure to build a lot quickly.

At the beginning of the game put one settler on gold, two on wood, and three on food. Use all your food for a while on building settlers and put the settlers you make on wood and food. Make houses pretty much whenever you have a good amount of wood, and once you have about ten settlers, save up some food to age up. While you age keep building houses to get more settlers. This way you should start age two with a much better economy than anyone else. I'd suggest playing on a no rush game for this strategy to really work.

During age two keep building settlers, add some mills, and get upgrades from the markets. You'll have to put more settlers on gold and wood at this point. Build a barracks or two, but don't bother building guys.

At age three build a fort for defense and start massing musketeers, especially with the thin red line improvement. Add a couple artillery and you should be good. Also, rockets are awesome, and with the cards, they're pretty easy to get.

These other strategies are okay. Here is what I do:

Send all villagers to food at the start except for 2 to gather crates and build houses. Those two cut wood and build houses when they can. Do not mine coin in the first age, thats just silly. Keep making villagers until about 17 or 18, age up with the 500 food opinion. Send all but 3 villagers to wood and 1 on coin (2 on coin depending on how much you started with). Buy the market and get the wood upgrade, make more villagers and send them to wood. Every 135 wood build a new house. After a few minutes youll be at 20 houses and have 20 free villagers. Do from there what you wish but using this you can really boom quickly.

I have found that the best thing to do is use all but one villager to take down the nearest forest. Use the one to take the free materials. Get your explorer to as many trade posts as possible. This will enable your experience points to rise more quickly. Use the one villager to build manor after manor, and in turn using those villagers created by the manors to gather food. This is great through each age, especially if you use the villagers from home shipments only to gather coin. Military wise, build up musketeers and upgrade them as much as possible. Use free falconetts to cover your infantry.

I have some build orders that exploit British strengths. Of course, this is my opinion and some things I write may not be completely correct.

Age 1

At the start:

• 200 wood and food = Build 1 manor house
• 300 wood and food = Build 2 manor houses
• 200 wood and 100 coin and food = Build 1 market first, get the hunting dogs upgrade and then gather some wood for a manor, OR if you have found some gold treasures simply mine gold to 125 and trade it for wood.
• 1st shipment always 3 villagers
• Age with 17 villagers (or 18 villagers if you have found a good food treasure and think you wont get attacked too early)
• While aging gather wood with all but 3 villagers and try to bring with these 3 villagers hunts to your base.
• Get a market up if you hadn't (do hunting dogs and gang saw upgrades) and build a manor house. If you had a market simply build 2 manor houses and get the gang saw upgrade.

Musket Spam (you should have aged up with tower and 200 gold)

• Get your villagers to chop wood until you have 200 wood and switch all but 2 of your villagers to food (those 2 gather gold).
• Queue a vill before anging up.
• As soon as you age up build a barracks; build the tower defensively or aggressively positioned (depends on how aggressive you want to be) and ship 700 wood.
• Gather coin from age up with 2 villagers and spam muskets.
• Gather the shipped 700wood and buld one more barracks and as many manors as you can. You usually want about 6 or 5 villagers on gold and resto on food to support 2ble barracks musket spam.
• Ship 600w, add a stable if needed and build manors with the rest of it.
• Ship 5 villagers and/or musket hp. (note: never stop making villagers and queuing muskets. Be careful with the muskets you don't want to lose a single one of them without an exchange that is worth it).

Longbow pike spam (age with 500 food)

• As soon as you get 200 wood switch some vills on food so that you have 11 villagers on food.
• Build barracks as soon as you age up
• Ship 700 wood gather food for age up and queue:
  • 5 pikes if you are aggressive
  • 5 longbows if defensive (in this case adding walls isn't a bad idea).
• Build 2nd barracks from 700w and with rest of it build manors.
• Ship 600 wood and build manors. By the same time you gather units with these resources
  • Don't overdo it! Economy comes 1st unless you are very aggressive, which is not advisable in most matchups
• Ship 5 villagers and you should have 50-50 on food- wood separated your villagers.

Good luck and have fun! British is a really strong civ that wins against most civilizations if played right!