ill give you a quick overview of Zeus with my personal dreaded experience with my loki vs zeus players and what they do to me and finally actually dedicating myself to zeus for a while and achieving a 1740 or so rate.
Firstly, as zeus there is many, many strats to use, but i like about 4 which ill list.
1) Hermes 345 centaur rush/raid- u can only pull this off if your very attentive to your centaurs, can micro with 2 groups of centaurs (2 in each, for instant vill kill). If you lose your centaurs, ull prob lose.
BO: All too food, NO HUNTING DOGS, be sure to find goats/pigs. when you advance you should have around 16 vills. It is normal to run out of food on your initial food source, move to herds and garrison vills to collect food faster. Rearrange 2 on favor, 10 on wood, 4 on food. When you reach classic, make another centaur and then research centaur polemarche (something like that) From there autoque centaurs and raid and raid till about 6,7,8 minutes, where you will need an army. Make hips generally, maybe tox vs norse. After advance be sure to aq vills on food, and then switch to gold.
Use can use this strat on almost any god (eggy might be tough) on almost any land map.
2) Water 430 galley rush- This is prob the most important strats to learn if you want to be successful on water. bo is first 2 vills to wood (the other make dock), vills go to pigs, then vills go to wood. Stop at around 5 or so wood vills. Stop dock production at around 6 or 7 boats give or take. Garrison to get food faster. Plant a dock before you advance and be ready to micro your ships. You also need to regonize when you have sea won, dont overkill on ship production, if he hasent resigned, you need a land army quick.
3)Hermes 2 tc- actually i lied, i only did this strat once and i lost, dont like it, im a rusher true to norse playstyle
But ya, easy stuff, 515-530 normal advance and two tc, can grab a forward if you'd like. Spam vills, make tox and be ready for a longgg game.
4)Athena hop/mino rush- best strat in the game! can be done vs atl (less hops)/ norse ofcourse and sometimes eggys. I also use this strat on water aswell like midgard. With eggy, dont go for the tc ever, made that mistake a number of times .
Anyways, the goal is for a 515/530 advance, plenty of food vills, bout 6 or so vills on gold with pickaxe. 3 barracks all spam hops. When your vsing norse, it is usually not worth making the 2nd mino as he will have alot of hesir early on. You can also bolt his first starting mu, so u can also pass on the hero at first. This can give you alot of hops which tear norse apart. Use resto to get a decisive advantage and from there you can 90% of the time win this matchup. When his army is not composed of many hesir anymore, research the mino up, and make an archery range. Take off aq on one barrack and autoque mino, also aq tox. You can then focus fire on heroes.
vs eggy, same thing, rush hard, be aware of tower fire, alot less room for error. Be content with just switching to map control -> gold control.
vs atty, less hops, make alot of tox to focus fire. Buy the 2nd mino asap and hero and just watch the own [This message has been edited by NorseBash (edited 03-23-2009 @ 09:07 PM).]