I got this idea from a 1650 I played on Anatolia who got a 3:20 classical, time shifted his temple outside my base and rushed me with Promethean. It took me totally by surprise and worked really well (although I did win eventually). So I decided to give it a try, and the next 15 or so games I tried it and won ~90% of my games.
You should be aiming for a 3:30-3:45
classical depending on your starting food source. Send your 3 scouts straight
to the enemy
base so you get a good look at where they are collecting food,
and where their hunting is etc. Then put the first 3 vils to food, next 1
builds a house then a temple and goes to food and next 1 goes to food as well,
so it’s a total of 5 vils all on food, then as soon as you have 400 food,
advance to classical and time shift your temple outside their base, preferably
where they can’t see it but also if possible next to one of their hunting
sources preventing them from hunting there. Send all your oracles next to the
temple and queue up 1 more. Meanwhile start shifting your villagers around, as
soon as you can afford to queue up another villager put 2 vils on wood and 2
on gold.
You should hit classical between 3:30 and 3:45, send vills to wood/food (what ever you need most of) as you are likely to have too much gold therefore build your houses with a gold villager. Use your hero GP on your oracles and start queuing up Prometheans from the temple. Send in your 4 oracle heroes and your free Promethean to their nearest vills; their food source if possible, delaying their advancement. Then simply start working your way around your opponents base killing vills and making him have to garrison them. Also as soon as you see his temple, de-construct it stopping him getting myth units for a while.
Build
2-3 counter barracks at your base and time shift them next to your temple and
start queuing turmas using the auto queue button if you like, and just keep
working your way round his base avoiding TC fire where possible and constantly
harassing villagers.
Also, at some point it will be worth building a mill and getting the economy upgrades; get the wood one first if possible. Anyway, if all goes to plan you should have harassed his vills, stopped them from working or killed them, cut off his hunting and other resource supplies and have won the game by 8 minutes!
It doesn’t really work very well on water maps because if you want to be fast enough to classical age you can’t dock because it wastes too much wood, so your opponent will be fishing and you won’t be able to, leaving them at a distinct advantage. It also doesn’t work nearly as well when your opponent is expecting it, since he can prepare and get heroes ready for the attack. Nor does it work that well vs Isis because of the free towers, monuments blocking GP, pharaoh and priests etc.
However, it works very well vs all other civs particularly Atlanteans (because harassing one of their vils with a Promethean is like harassing 3 vils of another civ). And it works very well when you take them by completely by surprise. As for the maps; it works best on the ones with hunting in the starting LOS.