Introduction
In the year 1999 or 2000 I started playing Age of Empires II The Age of Kings. From the beginning I started playing it online and competitively online via the zone.com. Matchmaking for online multiplayer games was via the web interface of zone.com. With the release of Age of Empires 2 Definitive Editions, which also includes The Conquerors expansion which officially came late in the year 2000, many updates, improvements and additional civilizations have been added.
Fast Castle Build Order
This build order is based on the official Learn to Play, Advanced Techniques, Fast Castle Age, from the game. This is for land-based maps.
- 2 villagers build a house
- 1 villager build another house
- Immediately queue villagers at the Town Center until food is depleted.
- Optionally upgrade Loom.
- Keep your Town Center busy until you have created 27 villagers.
- Move your scout around, preferably two layers around your town center before heading out further, to find 2 boars and 8 sheep.
- First 6 villagers gather food from sheep, this is including your 3 starting villagers.
- Next 4 villagers gather wood, the first one builds a lumber camp next to it.
- Next villager lures the first boar to the town center and helps gathering it.
- Next 3 villagers gather berries while the first builds a mill next to it.
- Next villager lures the second boar (and helps gathering it)
- Next 3 villagers help gathering berries.
- Next 6 villagers build a second lumber camp and gather wood.
- If the boars are depleted, gather the rest of the sheep.
- If the sheep are depleted start building farms (8 in total).
- The next 3 villagers gather gold and the first builds a mining camp next to it.
- You should have a total of 27 villagers.
- Queue the Feudal Age.
- Queue 2 villagers after it.
- You need 235 wood to build a Blacksmith and Market as soon as you enter the Feudal Age.
- Use 2 villagers to build the Market.
- Use 1 villager to build the Blacksmith.
- Advance to the Castle Age.
- Idle villagers should be gathering wood.
- Upgrade Double-Bit Axe as soon as possible.
Shortened Villager Gathering Order
Assuming that you know when to build buildings, queue villagers, research technologies and scout.
- 6 Food (sheep)
- 4 Wood
- 1 Boar
- 3 Food (Berries)
- 1 Boar (second boar)
- 3 Food (Berries)
- 6 Wood (new camp)
- 3 Gold
The 8 villagers that gather sheep/boar should build 8 farms when boars/sheep are depleted.
How to Further Improve Your Play
I am certainly not the best player around (I am too old for that now anyway), but I do know I have been a fairly skilled online player in the past. I tend to think that I understand certain topics of what makes a good Age of Empire 2 player, by observing, analyzing games and trying a lot of different strategies myself. So whether you agree or not, I would like to share my insights and hope that you can use something.
Understand and Assess the Game
To become a (very) good player, I think you have to understand the game deeply. You certainly have to know beyond the basics, like a knight does counter an archer and an archer counters a Spear-man, right? But what if you have 20 archers and are up against let’s say 5 knights, do you engage or retreat? And what if the knights or archers have certain upgrades (think: Fletching, Scale Barding), what are the odds then? The better (and faster) you can assess each display of troops on the map and who would win, the more likely you can make game winning decisions. It’s best to know all counter units for each and every unit in the game. Learn about each civilization and their bonuses as well. Study all the maps in the ranked cycle as well and adjust your strategy to it. To learn yourself to assess the capabilities of your troops, I would encourage the use the editor to setup hypothetical encounters. Get a feeling of what can take on what.
This goes the same for upgrades. The upgrade from Cavalier to Paladin costs 1300 food and 750 gold (for Franks). If you have 10 stables, you could also immediately train 10 Cavaliers for that amount of resources. It really depends on the situation on what is better in that moment. Maybe the 10 Cavaliers are worth more, than the Paladin upgrade in that moment of time, maybe it’s the other way around.
Economic upgrades have the same considerations, although usually I would say especially the earlier economic upgrades are the earlier you research them, the better.
Speed & Hotkeys
If you understand the game well, the following absolute essential skill is how quickly you can handle your keyboard and mouse. You should memorize all the hotkeys for units, buildings and even formations. Learn to navigate the map using the mini-map as well. Know and memorize the controls. When holding the shift key for instance, you are able to easily place multiple foundations of a building to build. When double clicking a unit, you select all units of that type. With Control + Shift + Spacebar, you can select all military buildings and you can now easily set a new gather point on the mini-map. Look at the game settings for more of these hotkey combinations.
Ideally, you should never be idle for more than a second. Keep paying attention and use the idle villager button. Check to see if your scout found something of strategic importance. Where is gold located? Where are enemies?
Your villagers should be busy 100% of the time, never doing nothing. You can use shift to let a villager build a house and automatically gather wood afterwards or automatically go to the berry bushes after finishing gathering a deer. Use the shift key often.
Strategy and Planning
This differs greatly when playing 1v1 or more player games, but let’s say it’s a 1v1. Who is your enemy? If you are up against Ethiopians for instance, there is a great chance they will attack you in the Feudal Age with archers. If you are Franks yourself, you should focus on making Scout Cavalry in the Feudal Age. But you know they know and they know you know, right? Maybe you can make a few archers yourself if they try to counter you with Spear-man.
Whether you Fast Castle or not also depends greatly on the map. If you know you are against a strong Feudal Age civilization on an open map like Arabia, you will have a very hard time defending when going for Fast Castle. So maybe, in this specific case of being against an Ethiopian player on an Arabia map, your default strategy could/should be Feudal (counter) aggression. This would be my best bet. Usually I would say it is best to quickly find out what you should be going to do. You should learn a few strategies for the civilization you are playing with. You should know the strengths and weaknesses of each civilization. Franks have strong horses, but therefore rely more heavily on food and gold.
Scout and make sure what your enemy is probably up to. Choose a strategy, try to stick with it so you can execute it efficiently, only adapt when you have to. Look at the terrain as well, what would be a good location to build forward to gain map control? Are there choke-points? Elevations? And again, where is gold? Gold is essential to win a game.
With a strategy chosen, you should plan for that strategy. If you are going for a Fast Castle yourself and you notice your enemy goes all in on a Feudal Age attack, know where and how you want to defend yourself if possible. Where are you going to build your castle? How can you secure a steady flow of gold income?
Awareness & Multitasking
Besides being quick, you should also train yourself to be aware of everything that is going on at the same time. Impossible offcourse, but as best as you can. Try to cultivate a mindset that asks itself if you cycled to each important part of the game, like: economy, military, combat, scouting, planning. You should practice this so it becomes a routine.
Something like:
Economy: I notice we need 26 villagers for this strategy, so 4 more and those 4 should all gather wood, so I set my Town-Center gather point there already.
Military: We will create 4 scouts when we are in Feudal-Age, we are still in the Dark Age so not yet.
Combat: Looking at the mini-map, nothing going on.
Scouting: Enemy buildings found, let’s reroute quickly to discover where their lumberjacks are. Hotkey back to Town-Center.
Planning: One idle villager found and we need another house. One villager is almost done building a wall, so I will shift click to let it gather berries after.
Monitor each subject over and over.
The better you are able to multitask and be quick with making assessments with what you see on your screen, the better you will become. I know how easy it is to get distracted by an event, like an unexpected rush and have your mind focus too much so you become too narrow with your observations. You are busy ordering your troops around and you missed that a group of your villagers somewhere else is being massacred in the meantime. So, basically, if you can manage to keep a somewhat cool overview in the game, that would be better mental state in my opinion. Have a habit of scanning the mini-map often as well. Staring at something does not make it go quicker or be stronger so to say. Using your APM on a unit that is already moving usually does not help either.
Timing & Micromanagement
I really dislike it personally (I don’t really like micro-managing), but timing and micro management are important as well. Micro-managing means moving out of the way of an Onager shot (with accurate timing), but also that your Town-Center has not a single idle second (where it doesn’t do anything) in the Dark-Age. It also means that all economic drop-off points are placed on the most effective spots so that your villagers have to walk as little as possible. Build additional lumber camps when your villagers start walking too far.
You also literally should get used to using the time in the game, the clock. If you notice that your rush strategy depends on a quick arrival in the Feudal Age, and you notice you are 40 seconds late, consider adapting your strategy to something else. I cannot tell you what that it beforehand, because it greatly depends. The point is, that if you will think about all these situations and be prepared of what usually might happen, you can play into it more easily.
In my opinion, the importance of timing and micromanagement correlates positively with a high online rank. If you and your opponent both play sharp and efficient, the details matter and might make the difference. For instance, if you and your opponent both advance to the Feudal Age with 19 villagers and your Town-Center was idle for 15 seconds, you will enter the next Age 15 seconds later and have a little less resources. The enemy has access to new buildings sooner and can now start to pressure you instead of the other way around. The game is unbalanced from this point and versus a high ranked player it will likely cost you the game.
Economy
Economy is the backbone of your game, without economy there is no military. Having a stronger economy than your opponent can be the ticket to victory. But there should be a balance. I myself tend to be over-focused on economy, postponing the training of military units for too long, because investing more resources in the economy will boost it even more! A real pitfall for myself, and a mistake really. If the difference in military power becomes too great, it is hard to come back from it. You can lose a game versus a Feudal-Age civilization after you just managed to pull of an impressive Fast-Imperial time. How would you be able to defend yourself after 20 upgraded scout cavalry raid your villagers and each military unit that spawns will be overwhelmed immediately? Where can you expand if the enemy has built all around you?
Hunting is quicker than farming or berry bushes. Drop-off points (Lumber-camp, Mining-Camp and such) should be as close as possible to the resource, while not obstructing the walking paths of villagers.
When the game progresses you always want all of the available economic upgrades for your civilization. Always, with the exception that if you do you do not have farms, because you use fishing for food, you may omit those mill upgrades (or the other way around, the dock upgrades).
On water maps, such as Coastal, you should in the beginning always try to fish as soon as possible in parallel to land based food gathering. Fishing ships can be build while advancing to the Feudal-Age which helps you invest in a greater economy. For good water economy strategies you should tend to lean to gathering more wood in the Dark Age. There are definitely guides about this.
Military & Combat
Know the counters. Know when to retreat. Micro-manage attacks from specific units to specific units, to exploit the counters. Pay attention to the mini-map and see if there are multiple battles happening. Usually, don’t let your army be destroyed in battle. It is important to avoid that. The thing is, even if your economy is still extremely strong and you lost your entire army, there is (especially in 1v1) a great chance you will not recover from it if the enemy still has a rather big army standing. Because it takes time to train an army and the enemy can pick off newly trained units one by one. Even with a stronger army statistically, you can still lose to mere numbers. The Goths (civilization) are a perfect example, if they manage to spam and keep up an endless stream of cheap foot soldiers you might eventually succumb to it. While training a new army yourself, the enemy has not only the time and space to build where-ever they please, but also has time to train more troops to keep the overhand and harass your villagers.
I my opinion the game has an important psychological factor, where a lot of enemy buildings feels like a dangerous presence, but in reality only Castles, Towers and Town-Centers have the ability to somewhat defend. Sometimes a bold strategy, like attacking a Castle with Knights can work if their army is not around and murder holes has not been researched by them.
If the game allows it, keep upgrading your units. In the end, you should have all Blacksmith upgrades, the most important University upgrades and the backbone of your military units should be of the latest type (e.g. Champion if you use foot soldiers, Arbalest if you use archers).
Map Control
Map control means that you can train units in the areas you want and have them possibly quicker on location. It means you have more control over resources and have better opportunities to see enemy activity. It gives more room to build, more room to create and plan your defenses. Having the last pieces of gold can win you the game.
There are Strategies that greatly depend on map control, like a strong Feudal Age rush with the Sicilians where you contain and cut-off the enemy while you slowly progress faster than them and eventually take them out. More map is always better. If you have to choose, tend to conquer/build towards resource rich areas and towards the center of the map, so you army can be more central to attack and defend.
You could bring a group of villagers towards the center of the map guarded by your army. They can setup a forward base and have them build a Town-Center or lumber camp nearby to collect resources and keep them around. You can use these villagers to keep expanding. You could have multiple groups of them.
If you manage to keep pressuring the enemy, it usually means you will have more map control.
Buildings
On the zone.com, I remember people jokingly referred to Age of Empires 2 as Age of Buildings. Buildings are important. In the beginning they can be used to help wall of your vulnerable starting location. Later on, more buildings especially Barracks, Archery Ranges, Stables and Siege Workshops, means that you can refill your fallen troops more quickly. If you play with Franks and heavily rely on Knights, you will keep building stables as the game progresses. Ideally, you keep aggressively expanding with buildings throughout the game, never stopping with it, if your resources allow it. As with everything, learn to assess, consider and make quick choices, with buildings as well. If a game progressed into an Imperial Age face off, I sometimes end up with something like 20+ military buildings of each kind (except Castles)