Strategy Guide for Age of Empires II: Age of Kings (PC)
Before you begin, you'll need to know who you are. Each culture has its own bonuses, units, strengths, and weaknesses. You'll want to select a civilization that has strengths that counter your opponent's, fits the map and type of game you're playing, and matches your style of play.
If you favor archers and other long-ranged attackers, go with the Britons or Mongols. If you're an infantry buff, stick with the Celts, the Japanese, or another civilization that enjoys foot-soldier bonuses. Big on cavalry? The Persians or Byzantines will suit you nicely. Into the navy? Consider the Saracens or Japanese.
The Teutons, with the Elite Teutonic Knight and resistance to conversion, make a powerful all-around people. But, again, this decision depends on whom, how, and where you're playing. Be sure to study the culture's attributes and be aware of not only the culture you're playing, but also the ones you're facing.
Exploration is a key aspect of Age of Empires II. You begin the game with a scout. Using waypoints (which enable the scout to perform an extensive search while you kick your economy into gear), send the scout out in an expanding circular pattern, noting defensible "choke points" (such as narrow passes between groves of trees), food sources, water access points, and gold and stone mining areas. Along the way, keep an eye out for sheep. Sometimes you can expose them without actually gaining control. Bactrack to grab them before your enemies do. If directed properly, they'll also expose blacked-out regions while making their way back to base.
After you've scouted the immediate area, keep the scout on active recon searching for enemy positions. Initially, It's okay to be a little conservative. (You don't want to lose the scout as it can't be replaced until the Feudal Age.) But as soon as you have back-ups rolling in, explore more extensively. You recieve points based on the amount of terrain explored, so keep that in mind.
Familiarize yourself with the new shortcuts in the interface. For example, use the "Idle Villager" button (the period [.] key) in AOEII to give the villagers something to do after they complete the current project. Don't let them stand around. The hotkey for idle military units (the comma [,]) is especially useful at the beginning of the game to locate your exploring scout, who may be obsured by terrain.
The mini-mapis an exvellent way to jump immediately to hot spots and to direct troops and villagers to a distant position without scrolling halfway across the continent. You can also use the "Last Event" hotkey (the middle mouse button or the home [home] key) to immediately leap to a battle, a new villager, or a finished ship. (You can cycle through recent events by clicking the hotkey multiple times.) Setting a new hotkey to cycle through your unit-producing buildings (hold Ctrl and left-click a group of them) is a good way to quickly train new troops without taking your eye off a military hot spot for too long.
Know where the soldiers or villagers will be needed when they're created and set gather points so they head there directly. You can set the same gather point for multiple buildings by holding the Ctrl key and left-clicking them before setting a gather point. You can also set gather points for military units inside the building that makes them. They'll hold up to 10 units. Imagine your enemy's suprise when they come upon what looks like a villager-only civilization...and 10 champions, 10 siege onagers, and 10 arbalests appear out of nowhere.
Ring the town bell if you're being overrun. As soon as it's safe, ring the bell again, and your villagers will head back to their respective duties. For that matter, ring it early in the game if an enemy scout gets too nosey, it's possible your town center will kill the scout and put that enemy at a disadvantage.
Having a stockpile is a good tactic, but don't hoard resources as though the age were about to end. In general, it's much better to have the extra towers and troops out and about than to hurry them through production when you're attacked. When you see a resource growing faster than you're using it, move an appropriate number of villagers over to production of another resource, so your use outpaces its production.
Learn micro-management. It doesn't matter if you have a monstrous army of archers and knights at the front if you let your economy in the rear areas go to waste. Conversely, it won't do you much good if you've got enough gold and stone to build a dozen wonders, but not enough defenses to hold off a woodchuck with a head cold. Balance is the key.
The very best AOEII players can keep their resources balanced on the head of the proverbial in. Learn which resources you will need most in each age and anticipate those needs. For example, food is a priority in the Dark Age, but wood becomes more valuable for the farms and other buildings in the Feudal Age.
...is to constantly smack the living crap out of your opponents. If you keep the enemy on the ropes the entire game, it makes it much tougher for them to put you on the defensive. As soon as you can, begin attacking the enemy's weak spots, such as unprotected villagers mining gold or a lone scout. You can use guerrilla tactics to weaken your enemy without a heavy investment of resources, and a well-timed "rush" to knock them off balance. Remember that any military requires gold. If you can stop your enemy from getting gold, you will eventually destroy them.
But you also need to keep a wary eye on your own defenses. It won't do much good to have an army at the enemy's front door whily your town center is burning.
Setting up a few basic defensive towers and walls can hold back the enemy long enough to get an army in position. Set up outposts around the perimiter of your base to alert you to enemy movements. (This new building has a very long line of sight.) As soon as you can, build towers around the edge of your base as well as near resource-gathering points to protect your villagers from attack. Try to construct more than one tower in each grouping so they will be able to supplement each other's defenses.
If you find a narrow, defensible path, build a wall across it. You can build walls faster by dragging the cursor across the whole section you want walled up. It won't take much time or resources, and it will block off any attacks from that side. (Watch the villager who builds the wall. They'll often wall themselves off on the enemy side.)
If walls aren't available, or if you're interested in a two-for-one special, use houses to block these pathways. Houses go up quickly, don't cost much in resources, and, doubling as walls, represent an efficient use of space. Just be sure to toss in a gate if you or a teammate are going to need access through that area.
When you've made it to the Castle Age, build a castle or two. These are great defensive structures with good attack rates and range, tons of hit points, and plenty of room inside for up to 20 troops.
You can also garrison villagers and troops at town centers, castles, and towers. They not only provide protection for the militia units, but they also heal them, in return, the soldiery increases the attack strength of a tower or town center and can prevent the enemy from getting an accurate head count. A good tactic is to leave an archer or two in a town center to beef up its ranged attack.
In addition, garrisoning relics can be an excellent sourse of all-important gold. As soon as you have a monestery and a monk, send the priest to nab any relics you've located and squirrel them away for easy gold production.
By knowing what units are useful for countering specific types of attack, you can be ready when a particular type of unit rushes your town center. Be aware of which units have bonuses against other units. The laminated sheet that comes with the game has a list of units with which to counter various situations. Know these intimately. In general, you'll want to use archers and other long-ranged units against infantry. Use quick skirmishers against archers and other long-ranged attackers. Use stable units to defend against siege weapons, and use pikemen or stable units to defend against other stable units.
On the attack, grouping like troops together can be a good tactic. AOEII allows you to create up to nine different groups for easier crowd control. If you make a group homogenous, it won't take a speed hit--and you can use it quickly for specific counter-measures. If you assign each group a number (by holding down Ctrl and a number key when the group is selected), you'll have faster access to them.
In a lot of combat situations, a player can select an entire army to attack. This will result in several seconds of chaos as the melee units assume their various positions in the formation. By having preset groups, you can select targets for infantry, stable units, and long-ranged units seperately.
But you can also group together different types of units for strategic reasons. Including infantry with siege weapons offers protection for the powerful but vulnerable catapult class. Similarly, using monks with any other type of unit provides automatic healing. AOEII's new auto-formation allows groups to move at the same speed, but the speed is that of the slowest unit--so be careful not to group fast strikers with plodders.
If you're planning a peon rush--cranking out many low-level troops early in the game and then knocking your enemy back with them--think it through carefully. A well-planned rush can cripple your enemy (for example, using 20 soldiers to nail your neighbor before they can advance out of the Dark Age), but a fought-off rush might leave you vulnerable to a swift counterattack or leave your economy so far behind that you won't be able to catch up.
If you're rushing, be sure to scout out the lay of the enemy land. Make sure you're not going to bang up against a newly created wall that gives your enemy enough time to produce defenses. An early rush is best used to slaughter enemy villagers, destroy deer and livestock, and generally over-whelm the opponent before they can advance in ages. One nice rush tactic is to swarm gold mines and build several towers before the enemy can claim them. If you can deprive your enemies of gold, you'll definitely win in the long run.
A safer but still effective offense is to use guerilla tactics. These can begin at the start of the game, and they won't cost you any extra resources. Use your single scout to harass enemy villagers, chase off deer, destroy new construction, and so forth. Just be careful. If the villagers surround the scout, they can bring it down.
As soon as you've begun advancing, use small groups of troops to harass your opponent more heavily. A squad of archers can take down mining villigers, and a unit of infantry can destroy a dock or a mill. A cool tactic is sneaking a group of souped-up monks to the edge of the enemy's forces and starting the conversion process--it wont win a game by itself, but its extremely satisfying to kill the enemy with its own troops. Just be sure you always cause more damage to the flow of the enemy's resources than you lose in troops.
When defending in the latter stages of the game, siege weapons are invaluable. But you'll need to know what each siege weapon is useful for and plan their development accordingly. You don't want to take scorpions up against a castle or unpack trebuchets too close to a watch tower. Scout out the enemy and know which siege engines you need to breach its defenses. And, as mentioned above, always provide protection for siege weapons. Nothing is worse than seeing a villager slap your bombard cannon around because you weren't defending it.
If you're planning to control the water, totally commit yourself to the effort. Produce lots of ships, upgrade them as soon as you can, create more than one dock, and destroy any enemy docks as soon as construction begins. If you're a landlubber, make sure that your key buildings aren't within range of sea attacks. It's pretty frusterating to watch a cannon galleon pummel your buildings while you sit by idly wishing you hadn't given them that prime beachfront location.
While you won't always need to manage melee battles in great detail, a hands-on command of your troops can save units when you're defending against long-range weapons like trebuchet and cannon galleons. For instance, in a sea battle, keep your ships highlighted, wait untill the enemy galleons fire, and then move. Their shots will land harmlessly in the water, while your own should strike home, provided the enemy galleon's owner is otherwise occupied.
Don't treat a heavy-duty assault on your home base as if it's Custer's Last Stand. You may live to fight another day. Your attacker's hands are likely to be full with the detailed destruction of your community. Make use of this time to conduct a thorough evacuation--to an ally's camp or even just an unoccupied corner of the map. Make sure villagers are included in this pilgrimage (as you'll have to build a new town center) and you have enough resources to create basic structures.
Send out a small work battalion of villagers in hte wake of your scout and use them to build simple out posts all over the map. They don't cost much in the way of resources, and even if they're destroyed, they serve as an excellent early-warning system for enemy troop movements.
Produce villagers constantly and make sure they always have something to do. In the early stages of the game, it's food gathering. As soon as your scout locates a food source--such as sheep, wild boar, fish, or a berry patch--send 'em in. (With berries or fish, build a mill right next to the source; with sheep or bears, move or lure them to the town center to save travel time.)
As soon as you've found your food source, set the gather point right on it so that your new villagers will immediately head over there and get to work. You'll want to stay on top of house-building so you don't run into a wall during villager training. (It's a good idea to build houses in blocks of four or five at a time.)
Before you've exhausted the food from your initial sources, you'll need to either scout out additional ones or start farming. If you're into farming, be sure to have enough villagers gathering wood to cover the resource expense and research the horse collar as soon as you advance to the Feudal Age. (We'll cover other technologies that are vital to research in the next section.) In general, you'll want to train a lot of villagers (20 to 30) before advancing out of the Dark Age.
The easiest way to waste time in AOEII is to make those villagers walk to work. Build the necessary lumber camps and mines as close as possible to the respective resources and your fields close to the mills and town center. Pay particular attention to the wood gathering--after a while, your villagers may have cut quite a swath through the forest, and building a new lumber camp closer to their current location could save time.
When building your village, be sure to leave room around the town center--and not simply for the amber waves of grain. A community with widely spaced buildings will present a less inviting target to the forces of an assaulting enemy--which will have to take on each building separately--and won't create an obstacle for the passage of your own armies.
You'll need to tailor your economy to whichever military stategy you're intending to use. Know the cost of each unit you build and have the appropriate number of villagers on each resource. For example, if you're building a slew of knights you'll want a little over half of your villagers on gold mining and the rest of food gathering as each knight costs 75 gold and 60 food.
If you're in a pinch for a resource, AOEII allows you to shop for it at the market. The initial penalty is high (30 percent, which can be reduced through upgrades), so it needs to be a serious pinch--and you should always try to gather the resource in the traditional manner first. But if you really need the wood, for example, it's good to know ou can get it.
Which technologies you'll want to research depends on your overall game plan, the civilization you're playing, the map type, the enemy's tactics, and so forth. But a few technologies are vital, and if the research is performed early, they can give you a definite advantage.
For starters, research the loom technology (at the town center) early on. It toughens up your villagers, increasing their hit points and armor. They are the most important units early in the game (and throughout the game, it could be argued), so you need to keep them hardy.
The more you research economy-related technologies, such as increased gathering speed and carry rates, the better your villagers will work. You'll find it a challenge to research them all and win, so choose the ones that benefit you the most. For example, if you're really beefing up wood production, then research those specific technologies (most of them are at the lumber camp).
Similarly, weapon and armor upgrades can really turn the tide in a battle. Again, technologies are expensive, so you'll want to research only the ones that will benefit you the most. For example, if you're attacking with Elite Teutonic Knights, souping up their already incredible armor can make them a devastatingly effective assault weapon.
Ballistics (at the university) is a great all-around technology; It'll increase the accuracy of ranged shots from your buildings and the often inaccurate towers, as well as from your offensive long-ranged units.
A lot of these strategies will work equally well in single-player games, multiplayer games, and team games. But if you're playing with a team, there are some specific strategies you'll watn to consider so your teammates don't drop-kick you over to a Seven Kingdoms 2 game.
Always let your teammates know what's going on. Don't attack the enemy without first clueing them in. Keep them abreast of any enemy movements, new resource sources you've found, or stickpiled resources you might be able to share.
Setting up trade lines is an effective way to generate extra gold. Set the gather point for the trade carts on your ally's marketplace, start building them, and watch the lucre flow. Just be sure that you'll be able to defend them adequately--undefended trading carts and ships are easy targets for the enemy. Also, if you're playing a single-player game, I've found it quite useful to, while you're sacking an enemy village, keep the enemy trading post intact. If you do this, and you're fighting multiple enemies, you'll have a constant cash flow to help you defeat the others.
Finally, take advantage of being a team. Dont just build up two seperate armies and play as individuals. Share the work and use complementary strategies. If youre teammate is building a large cavalry army, toss some long-ranged units and monks into the mix. Armies with combined arms are the most effective in AOEII, and they're much easier to build and deplory with more than one player behind them.
These strategies are the basics. They'll get you through a game without a serious beating, but you'll need to experiment and develop a style of play that works for you. This openness and flexibility is the beauty of Age of Empires II. Experience may be the best advisor of all. Let the trumpets sound!
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