PART II
Advanced Strategies and Tactics
N
ow that you’ve covered The Age of Kings’ strategic
foundation, it’s time to build on that knowledge. While many of the tactics and concepts you learn here can be applied to the single-player campaigns, these chapters are particularly geared toward making you a top-notch multiplayer opponent. Chapter 4 expands on what you learned back in Chapter 1 and offers a detailed, minute-by-minute guide to quickly setting up a thriving economic infrastructure. Master its tenets, then hone your offensive and defensive techniques with the tactics presented in Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, Chapter 7 explores strategies specific to multiplay, including how to be a superior teammate, while Chapter 8 takes an in-depth look at each civilization’s strengths and weaknesses.
C H A P T E R
Advanced Economics
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ow that you understand The Age of Kings’ (AoK)
basics, let’s put that knowledge to use in a real game. Building a good economy is more than just understanding how to gather resources. You must plan your strategy and organize your economy to support that particular strategy. This chapter applies to every AoK game mode, but it’s especially useful for skirmish and multiplayer games. It discusses how to get your economy off the ground and into the next age. It describes the options available and how the economy must be shaped to support your choice of strategy. Finally, you’ll read how to keep your economy working smoothly in the hurly-burly period of the Imperial Age.
Chapter 4
Advanced Economies
Getting a Good Start Waging war is a tough business. Getting a good start is critical to success in AoK. The first ten minutes play a large role in determining the resources available to wage war with in the coming ages. This section shows how to get off to an immediate good start by outlining the key actions to take at the game’s outset and as the game progresses. Repeat these tasks in the order listed, game after game, until you feel comfortable with each step. As you develop your own style, you’ll want to alter these steps to improve your early game economy given your strategic goals. A unique aspect of AoK compared with most other RTS games is that random map generation makes every game different, so you can’t depend on a set “build order.” Keep the following principles in mind and refine your techniques as you get better.
Your First Thirty Seconds One of the drawbacks to playing random map games at default resources is that the first thirty seconds are very important to your long-term success. While it is quite possible to recover from a small stumble later on in the game, a stumble at the start can put you way behind your opponents. Then, like compounding interest on your credit cards, a mistake keeps adding up. Even getting behind an opponent by only two villagers at the outset can mean that opponent has a 400-resources advantage ten minutes into the game. The following steps will help you get the fast start that all the lads and lasses admire! At first you may not be able to do all the steps in thirty seconds, but keep practicing. This is a lot to do in a short time, but soon it will become second nature to you.
Queue New Villagers The moment the game screen comes up, use the hotkeys to select your town center (the default is H) and queue up as many new villagers (C) as possible. In the early phase of the game, constantly train new villagers. Failing to keep up with opponents’ villager production means you’ll have fewer villagers gathering resources than they will. Queue up as many villagers as possible.
Build a House Immediately select your villagers and build a house. You want to get a house up quickly, but you also want to leave open space around your town center for farming. It is important to get the first house up before your fourth villager appears, otherwise you
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Official Strategies & Secrets ™ to
Microsoft ® Age of Empires ® II: The Age of Kings ™ will suffer a delay producing your fifth. To build a house quickly, double-click on one of your villagers. This selects all of your villagers visible in the current screen. At the start, these are your three initial villagers. Use them to build a house near the villagers, but at least three tiles away from the town center. Figure 4.1 shows villagers building a house at the start.
Figure 4.1: Use two or three villagers to build a house next. Leave enough room between it and your town center for farms.
Starting with the Chinese You’ll generally use the same starting technique when playing a game with the Chinese civilization, but you have the ability to make some modifications. You already have twice as many villagers as any other civilization, but only enough food to make one more. Also, because your town center supports a population of ten, you do not need to make a house right away. Use these advantages to get all of your villagers onto food production right away. If you cannot see it available at the start, fan your villagers out quickly to locate the first source of food. Once you have enough food, queue up your eighth villager. Use this villager to build your first house. If you have a decent starting position—food readily available—and you play it just right, you might be able to maintain a one or two villager advantage from the start. Against evenly matched players, this can provide a significant advantage.
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Chapter 4
Advanced Economies If one of the villagers is too far away to help build the house, use him to help scout the initial area until you’ve found food. Once you find food, redirect the villager toward it.
Scout for Food While your villagers are busy building a house and your town center is training more villagers, use the scout located nearby to search for your initial food source. You can quickly select your scout using the hotkey “,” (which hops you from one idle military unit to the next) rather than searching by scrolling. Use way points (hold down Shift while right-clicking) to have the scout search around in a pattern.
Gather Food Getting food is the most important step you must take next. Gather the first food source you find. If you find both sheep and berries, collect food from the sheep first because this food source is faster to collect and gives you a greater chance of maintaining uninterrupted villager production. Get all your villagers on the first berry patch or sheep flock you find. Sheep are the best, but you can do well with berries, too. It is critical to get food flowing in quickly so that you can maintain villager production. Collect 50 food by the time the seventh villager is produced or suffer a break in villager production. If you find sheep, move all of your villagers to the town center to begin Queue up a new villager every slaughtering them. If you time you have the 50 food necessary to do so. find berries instead, move Don’t let your food level rise above 50 until your villagers to the you’re saving up to advance to the next age. berries, build a mill right next to them, and start harvesting.
Tip
Set a Gather Point for New Villagers Once you have the first food source identified, set the gather point for your town center to that food source using the I hotkey (or right-click on the resource). If you are really fast, you’ll be able to set the gather point before your first villager is produced so that the villager goes directly to that food source and begins working. Every second counts in the beginning phase of the game, and saving that one or two seconds assigning time per villager really adds up fast.
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