Keys to 1vs1 Age of Empires 2 - Chris Bourque

Keys To 1vs1 Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors World Domination By: Chris "L_Clan_Chris" Bourque

Keys To 1vs1 Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors World Domination. Copyright © 2012 by Chris Bourque. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Contents Introduction

5

Dark Age Ninja Stories Sheep Stylin'

6 6

Lumber Metrics

9

Where's My Dock

13

It's Scouting Time

15

The Boar Mysteries Boar Havoc Loom2

17

21 24

Half Trained Lookouts FoOoooOOooD

25 26

He Built A Fence Score!

28

29

BO and Main Strategy Overview Section Galley Rush (Grush)

30

31

Feudal Rush (Flush) on Water Map

36

Feudal Rush (Flush) on Land Map Dark Age Rush (Drush) Fast Castle (FC)

40

49

Scout Rush (Scrush)

51

Feudal Age Fury Fun

54

The Scout Bump

54

Towers of Power Farm Shooting

39

55 57

Wolf Whispering Bait

57

Feudal Age Economy 119 Army Upgrades

57

59

Feudal Military Micromanagement Scouts versus Spearmen

63

Scouts versus Villagers

64

Scouts versus Scouts Scouts on Water

62

65 66

Archers versus Skirmishers, Archers versus Archers, Skirmishers versus Skirmishers Archers versus Scouts

68

Common Miscellaneous Feudal Battleground Galley Micromanagement Military Buildings

77

Feudal Age Land Military Tools StoneWallin'

71

80

78

68

66

Crazy Combative Castle Age

82

Castle Age Military Upgrades

82

(YOSNCMO) Your Other Shiny New Castle Age Military Options Castle Age Military Buildings Town Center Placement Economy 339

90 92

93

Castle Age Military Micromanagement Game Theory

100

Imperial Age Madness

103

TFEUFIA (Econ Upgrades)

103

Soon It Will Be An ARMY

105

The Murderous Mystery Section Death By Imperial Army

Mouse

112

114

The War Preparation Section Hotkeys

94

116

116 117

Customized Interface

117

The Generally Good Habits Miscellaneous Section You Are Here

122

119

86

Introduction Hello fellow Age of Empires II: The Conquerors fans. Welcome to the beginning of our journey to unlock special tactics and strategies as well as common sense and game specific knowledge to help prepare you for war in 1vs1 AoC. My name is Chris (yes, that Chris) and my goal is to provide you with as much battle-hardy information as I can in the following pages to step your game up. I have assumed that you are aware of most of the units and technologies but are still looking to put everything together to take yourself to the next level (or utterly destroy your AoC friends!). Keep in mind that lots of these tactics, ideas, and strategies are not unique to my game and most of them have been picked up through games and tournaments with many opponents in all types of settings. This book is detailed for version 1.0C but there are lots of tips and strategies that also apply to versions 1.0 and the original Age of Empires II.

Keys To 1vs1 Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors World Domination is the 1vs1 section of a potential 3 part series. Most of the topics are directly applicable to the teamgame environment too but there are a lot of extra dynamics to consider there so this will be the basic foundation for improving your gameplay.

Dark Age Ninja Stories Major Ninja Goals: Find your resources, look at your map, scout your enemy map and villagers, determine best strategy, have an efficient economy, harass enemy, think about future walling, setup for future goals.

Sheep Stylin' Sheep are typically your first food source in 1vs1 random map in AoC. They are worth 100 food each and on most maps there are typically 8 around your base (1 group of 4 and 2 groups of 2). They are also useful as mini-scouts in the early game.

In the early game (start to 6 minutes) you have 3 partially contradicting goals for your sheep: you want to scout as much as possible, you want to make sure your villagers never run out of food under your town center, and you don't want to lose your sheep to the enemy.

As a general rule, with your 4 starting sheep, you should send 2 back to your town center and use the other 2 for scouting. They should scout in the opposite direction of your scout (i.e. if your scout is going circular counterclockwise, they should start clockwise). You aren't trying to leave too much black but if there are small patches it usually isn't a big deal.

Due to hidden blocking tiles (like forests, cliffs, water, and berries) where the sheep can't walk, in order to get them to cover as much ground as possible when there are 2 in roughly the same spot, instead of just selecting both and right clicking (which moves them) to another spot 6 to 10 tiles ahead, select each one individually, and instead of making them exactly parallel (where they both would go to that spot in a direct line), make their trajectory offset from one another (click 6 to 10 tiles ahead forwards, however one will go to 2 to 3 tiles to the left of the straight line and the other will go 2 to 3 tiles to the right of the straight line). If you notice they are still following the same path, take the one who you thought would be going elsewhere and offset it even more (if it was 2 to 3 tiles to the right of the straight line trajectory, make it 4 to 8 tiles). This will allow you to scout around game objects much more effectively and cut your scouting time down substantially.

Waypoints are another useful tool for sheep scouting. Hold down the shift button and click all the spots you want your sheep to scout, realizing that if the sheep can't go in a straight line between the two points it will go in what the computer thinks the fastest way is (sometimes the computer is wrong! =P).

It can be difficult to know exactly how long you should use your sheep to scout. If you need sheep under your town center, it is a good idea to always have 1 extra plus the 1 that is being eaten. You should follow that rule fairly strictly unless you know your villagers will be hunting and eating a boar when the current sheep runs out. The other guideline for how long to sheep scout rests on two laurels: how fast your enemy will scout you and how much more resources you need to uncover. My approximation is that most decent enemies will find your base approximately from 3 to 6 minutes game time in most situations. Some kamikaze scout rushers can find your base as early as 1 minute but we will discuss how to deal with them in another section. This means that within the first 3 minutes you should sheep scout as much as you can until you find all your resources. Once you find all your resources, you can use 1 or 2 to uncover the small dark patches or potential choke points around your forests so that it's easier if you have to wall later on.

In AoC, sheep rot, by my very rough estimations at approximately 1 food every 3 seconds of game time. This is why you want to eat 1 sheep at a time in most situations.

One exception is when you have a lot of sheep or you are focused on getting to feudal fast (an example would be grushing on mediterranean). In those situations it is sometimes better to eat 2 or 3 sheep at a time since walking time to the next sheep under a crowded town center can make your villagers less efficient.

When you are in a laggy game where it is tough to manually dump the food to your town center it is usually better to split your first 6 sheep villagers into 2 groups of 3 or one group of 4 and another group of 2 so that your villagers don't switch sheep as often and they drop their food at spread out intervals for you to maintain constant villager production.

When you place sheep under your town center, you have to remember that the upper top corner (one quarter of the town center) is the only space where villagers can't walk. In an open area, you can normally expect to fit 8 villagers eating a sheep without any micromanaging difficulty. However, if you are against that top area where you can't walk, you might only be able to fit 4 or 5. This is why

you should always keep your sheep at least half a tile below that area.

When a sheep is done being harvested by your villagers, your villagers stand around idly for a second or two deciding what to do, then they typically move on to the next closest sheep or one that is already slaughtered. There are two problems with that: your villagers are not gathering resources for a little while and sometimes they will kill a sheep that isn't near them. In order to fix both problems, when a sheep is finished being eaten you select your villagers and right click on the closest sheep. It is a good idea to already have those villagers numbered for easy selection (select the group, hold down the control key and press any number key, then you only have to use that number to select them in the future).

Stealing sheep is a small area that most players have a firm understanding of, but for completeness let's discuss the main facts about sheep stealing. Sheep are converted from player 1 to player 2 when player 1 has a unit within 3 game tiles and player 2 does not have a unit in that vicinity. This definition teaches us two things. One is that if you and your enemy both have a unit within 3 game tiles of a sheep, and if you don't currently have possession of that sheep, you can use your unit to kill that sheep with a single hit. The other thing it teaches us is that if you are dark age scout fighting over sheep, if you run them away on the opponent's "back half circle" (the area behind their scout), they will be converted to your enemy's possession before they escape. This is why if you are fighting for sheep, you always want to kill them or run them away behind your scout. Another thing you want to do to prevent the enemy scout from stealing your sheep is to keep them as close to underneath your town center as possible without crowding your villagers so that if he tries to steal your sheep you can garrison your villagers to shoot his scout.

One more thing that can get sheep killed is if you have an enemy unit running directly beside your sheep while your villagers are garrisoned so your town center is shooting. If you know your scout is going down you might as well try to run it as close to as many enemy sheep as possible so they die with it.

Lumber Metrics Wood is one of the simpler types of resources in AoC. You chop it and drop it off and the only sources are chopping trees and buying it from the market. You use wood to build gather buildings and almost all food sources require some sort of upfront wood investment. When AoCer's gather in real life everyone always has a story about how there was no wood within one and a half screens and it forced them to do a kamikaze attack or at the very least mass units or towers that required a lot less wood than typical strategies. There obviously isn't a way to teach you to win every single game but at least in 1vs1 there is usually a decent chance that your enemy will get a reasonably fairish map in terms of forests in most situations. Now that we've established why wood is central to our game let's move onto some theory and practical examples.

One of the most important early game decisions you make is going to be where you chop wood. You often make this decision with imperfect information and you don't get to easily change your mind. Typically when you build your first lumber pit it is within the first 2 minutes of the game and you don't always have all the forests in your vicinity scouted.

Let's do a reverse thought exercise right now. The perfect spot to build your first lumber pit would have all of these characteristics: very close to your town center, on the opposite side of your enemy, at the edge of the map, downhill, with the area shaped in a way that you could efficiently put many villagers, and large enough that ranged units or towers wouldn't be able to do any damage from the back. The perfect spot would also not have villagers walk stupidly to the backside to chop wood and would not have any ponds where enemy ranged units could camp.

Your goal is to reasonably assess potential locations and pick your first one relatively quickly. The most important factors are definitely proximity to your town center (for efficiency and safety) and size/shape (for longevity and efficiency). My decisions are often based solely on these two metrics. The reason for that is because if you have a more efficient economy than your enemy, you should be able to make enough units to defend your area by the time the enemy walks across the map to attack you. Over time it's certain you will have a few games with absolutely terrible forests, sometimes they will be small and more than a screen away, so make sure you take advantage when your enemy is in

those situations!

If you still are unsure of where to build a lumber pit, or you haven't found wood yet (unlucky you!), you have several straggler trees around your town center that can hold you over for another couple minutes.

The shape of the trees will influence the best way for you to chop them. If your lumber pit is directly against a straight line of trees, you can have an extremely efficient forest for your first 30 to 40 trees. When moving around wood chopping villagers, you have 2 goals: to have them work as close as possible to the lumber pit and to not get crowded so much that they stand still. This is how you should set them up for maximum efficiency (with T's being trees, LL being lumber camp tiles, and the numbers being what order your villagers should be placed): XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX 8641LL2357 LL

Your 1 and 2 villagers should be chopping the trees directly facing the lumber camp (they will be chopping diagonally). This can be done by chopping the trees immediately on the outside and then once they get to work right click to diagonally cut those inside trees. Not only is this more efficient at the start, it will also allow you to place more villagers in efficient non-crowded areas as you deplete the front trees.

Most other forest variations are similar to this. Going for a flat forest and setting up as above is more efficient for large numbers of villagers and is especially great when you are going for wood heavy builds where you will probably have 8 or 9 villagers working. If you are aware that you will only have 3 to 4 villagers working for several minutes it is often better to build in spots like this: XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX

XLLX 41LL23

By the time you add more villagers, you will have depleted those first two trees and will look like the forest above.

However, if you put a 5th or 6th villager on a forest like this: XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XLLX 541LL236

It is very common for villagers 4 and 3 in the above diagram to be occasionally stopped in position while doing nothing, so it's better to add them so that they have to walk a tile or two further but don't get stuck.

Another situation where your villagers can get stuck is when you make your lumber pit in a spot like this: XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XLL12X LL3

where villager 1 is chopping wood diagonally behind the lumber pit, villager 2 is chopping the tree directly up, and villager 3 is chopping the tree one tile to the right of the lumber pit. Villager 2 often gets stuck in this situation so it is better to have him in the same spot chopping the same tree as villager 3 in the diagram.

The villager chopping diagrams above are mostly useful in the early game. As the game progresses, you are going to have inefficient villagers. Your goal will be to minimize the net inefficiency as opposed to individual inefficiency because you won't have the time to make everything perfect. This is where you will make multiple lumber camps as new gather points and you will try to avoid having too many lumberjacks as determined by the forest size.

The other major thing you should think about is where you place your second lumber pit. If it's a map where someone towering your wood is unlikely, and if your main forest is big enough, it is usually a good idea to build your second lumber pit as part of the same forest. This makes it easier for defending. However, if it looks possible that it could be towered, or if it's at the bottom of an offensive hill that you can't maintain control of and it isn't thick enough to stop ranged units from hitting your villagers, it is usually a better idea to have your second wood pit somewhere else so that you can't easily be completely cut off from wood.

Re-pitting, where you build another lumber camp closer to the chopped trees, is something you do when villagers begin walking far to chop wood. Wheelbarrow and handcart affect when you should re-pit, as well as what your other uses for wood are at that given moment and how fast a new lumber camp will pay itself back in efficiency, but the general guideline is that you should make a closer lumber camp when villagers are walking an average of 5 or 6 tiles to chop wood (your furthest villagers might be walking 8 tiles and your closest villagers might be walking 4 tiles). In the first 20 minutes of the game you should have a maximum of approximately 10 villagers to each lumber camp, and in the later stages of the game that maximum can be 12 to 15 villagers because they walk quicker, carry more, and you are less concerned with villager efficiency and much more focused on managing your military.

Where's My Dock According to one of my friends docking is a "form of art". I wouldn't go that far. Most people intuitively have a feel for good spots to dock but when they get a bad spot they usually blame it on luck rather than trying to determine what they can do to try to prevent that in the future.

There are many things to consider when you place your first dock: are there deep sea or shore fish nearby, will my villager die to wolves and/or the enemy scout on the way, can I build it right when I have the required resources, is it congruent with my strategy, and is my goal to win water or merely hold and contain my side for the time being.

Of course, if you physically can and you have time to, it is best to scout the land right at the edge so you can see if there are fish where you are planning to put your dock. It is also great if you can see the outline of other land masses nearby so you know how approximately how much water there will be. Deep sea fish are usually randomly generated based on the map and how much water area there is, and usually you will find that in narrow rivers there are very few deep sea fish. Anytime you can tell there is a lot of water, it is probably a good spot to dock from a fishing perspective.

When you can't scout the other land masses, you can often make educated guesses based on the map's characteristics. As a pretty general rule, if there is water in the corners of the map there is usually fish, and you generally would want to choose the corners or edges where the land is furthest from the edge of the map (meaning you are guessing there is more water and more water generally means more fish). Area approximations can be done by using the edge of your screen lengths. You have to realize that your screen isn't a square so you are just doing a very quick area estimation by guessing tiles across multiplied by tiles to the edge of the map.

You can also estimate approximately how much time it will take for you to have the necessary resources to build your dock. The general rule of thumb is that a villager will gather about 10 wood every 30 seconds. So if you have 4 wood chopping villagers, 90 wood, you already built 1 house

ahead, and it will take you 45 seconds to walk to your build spot, and you know there are no wolves on the way, that is perfect. You might also want to know where the enemy scout is or be researching loom if the spot is far away from your town center. You obviously can't stop all the risks from happening every game but just like in driving, it is usually beneficial to wear your seat belt (scout for wolves, loom if it's far).

As far as building fishing ships and houses non-stop while having 1 dock, 6 efficient wood choppers will almost perfectly get the job done (and a 7th villager building houses when needed). If you are on a map where you know it's too far to do a fast grush, you might want to add wood chopper #7 just to be sure you have 100% constant fishing ship production.

Another random docking tip is that if you are using an unloomed villager it is a good idea to palisade him in to prevent a scout from killing him. If you place a dock foundation (even before it is built) overtop of any deep sea fish tile those deep sea fish will no longer exist. You can also use that to your advantage by building a foundation over enemy fish tiles close to land when you have enough wood in the early game (usually the only time you have that much wood and your enemy's docking location is just before you build your dock).

When you are placing additional docks make sure you place them in such a way that they don't create a trapped water space between them. When you build docks like that and you build a galley or two you either have trapped boats or you have to delete one of your docks. There is also a similar bug when you dock where there is 1 or 2 tiles of land behind the dock and then water behind that and your boats might spawn in the water trapped section even if you have your gather point facing the other direction. One other useful docking move is when you are on a map with only a couple tiles of water against the edge of the map. You can build a dock there as a wall which is effective if you are trying to keep your fish ships alive as long as possible.

It's Scouting Time Your scout (or eagle) is one of your units with the most functions in the dark age. You use it to scout your base, your enemy, steal sheep, steal boars, prevent your enemy from doing the same, kill villagers, and is necessary to constantly figure out what you should do next.

The first and main intended use of your scout has been to see your map layout and find your resources quickly and efficiently before you need to consume them and before your enemy finds them. In order to be efficient, you always want your scout to be maximizing his line of sight and to be constantly moving. If you move your scout to a destination he can't directly reach, he will go by the game's quickest way to approach. This is often inefficient if you are clicking behind a forest or other obstacles that you don't see which will leave patches of land undiscovered or that you have to go back and scout after. This is why you should always click only a small distance ahead when you are scouting your base (5 to 15 tiles) and check on him often to see if he is going a direction you wouldn't expect. This brings me to watching your scout, you should definitely give him a number every game (hold down the control key and press a number) so that it is fast and convenient to move him (by pressing the number once) or to focus your screen on him (by pressing the number twice).

There are three broad categories of ways to scout the majority of maps in AoC. Typically you have a very rough idea of what the map could randomly generate based on past experience but you always need to get firsthand knowledge to plan everything effectively. The most standard and consistent method for scouting is to scout your base by finding your 8 sheep, your 2 boars, gold, stone, and 2 lumbercamp spots. Then you scout your enemy. For any open map warfare where you are going to at least make as much army as your opponent this is usually the best way to go. Another method is "the kamikaze scout" we mentioned earlier. This involves finding very few of your initial resources (sometimes only your starting 4 sheep!) and then going to find your enemy's base. It involves risk, especially if you didn't find your boars or a good wood pile before going on the "offensive scout mission," but if you steal enemy sheep, kill a villager, or steal their boar it can be quite strong. You also run the risk of your enemy doing the same but stealing your sheep or boars where those are the only ones you had scouted which can make a game end extremely fast. The third broad way to scout is much more uncommon these days. It is where you scout outwards approximately another half screen from the standard scouting when you are definitely sure that it would be easier and cheaper to just

wall your map. You are trying to make sure that you understand your side of the map well enough to be sure there are no surprises and that you see all the ideal walling spots. On some maps you don't have access to your enemy's land and so your intent of scouting your entire area is also so that you can efficiently plan your economy and you can defend it better.

The other main things you should potentially use your scout for in the dark age are to defend your docking (or forwarding) villagers from wolves, lure boars to your town center, or lure deer to where your villagers can more efficiently eat them. In order to lure deer effectively, approach them with your scout from the opposite direction you want them to go. Sometimes the deer will run 2 tiles immediately and sometimes you will have to wait behind it for a few seconds. When the deer moves the 2 tiles, if you forget to move your scout closer the deer will usually run another 2 tiles, it will go back, or it will stay there doing nothing. If it decides to go back you will have to restart luring the deer as the only thing that can cause it to "snap out of" going back is if it gets shot once (twice would kill it) which usually isn't practical. During brief testing the deer went back after 7, 10, and 24 seconds of standing still when the scout wasn't moved closer which seems pretty random. The morale being that you should keep moving your scout closer as the deer runs. One other pitfall is that if you are behind it such that you will make the deer run into something it can't pass through (gold, stone, trees, water, etc) then it gets confused and sometimes gets stuck or runs around like a crazy animal on drugs. The other thing you have to watch for is whenever the deer stops moving, the unit closest to it (whether it is yours or your enemy's) will determine which direction it moves next. This makes it a bit difficult to lure deer in spots where your villagers are constantly walking so you should take the shot to kill the deer even if it is a couple tiles away from your town center. Make sure you use 2 villagers because sometimes 1 shot combined with a unit nearby can make the deer run fast and far.

One more thing you can use your scout for is to try to kill enemy farm foundations. When they are built if the villager isn't directly adjacent or on top the foundation is laid with 1 hit point so you can hit it once with your scout and it will cost your enemy 60 wood.

The Boar Mysteries If there was a single confusing and necessary evil that every battle savvy AoC'er had to deal with to strengthen their economy in preparation for war it would be luring and eating boars. They definitely provide an entertainment factor for spectators when shit goes sideways. There have even been important tournament victories where one opponent has stolen both boars of their enemy and they have resigned before 6 minutes game time. This next session is going to teach you everything you need to know about boars so you can hunt with the best!

Let's go through hunting the average boar step by step as this should provide some insight as to common mistakes that are made. The very first thing we do is find out where the boar is which tells us how far our villager will have to walk to lure him, where the hills are, and if there are any choke points. Close boars that are downhill can be lured without loom since there is much less distance to cover. Boars do added damage when they are attacking downhill and they do reduced damage when they are attacking uphill.

Now you have found your boar and you are deciding to lure it. What time should you send your hunter? You want to have the boar come under the town center as close as possible to the time when the villagers working under your town center finish their last food source to prevent excessive rotting. As rough approximations, for close boars you should send your boar luring villager if you have 6 sheep villagers when the sheep carcass has about 70 food remaining. For far boars, send your boar luring villager with 6 sheep villagers when the sheep has just started being eaten. If you are building a house before hunting the boar, keep in mind that it takes 25 seconds to build a house which is approximately the time it takes 6 sheep eating villagers to eat 58 food off the sheep carcass (so send him that much earlier). When you are luring your second boar, you often have 8 boar eaters, so as another approximation, you should send your boar lurer for close boars when you have about 130 food left on the boar carcass or you should send your boar lurer for far boars when you have about 180 food left on the boar carcass. These are just approximations and don't take into account the enemy messing with your boar luring.

Now you have chosen when to send your villager to hunt that boar. Most often when you change

the gather point of your town center you do it by selecting your town center and then right clicking on a location. Unfortunately, that is also the way you have units attack one another. So if you want a villager to directly hunt a boar as the first priority when it's being created, you have to use the gather point hotkey ("i" by default) or you can just send your villager near the boar and manually hunt him.

Another issue that comes up if you select your town center and right click on your boar is that if your boar is within range of your town center and if you have a villager garrisoned to give it attack power, your town center will shoot the boar. In very rare circumstances such as luring a boar with 2 villagers on nomad at the start of the game this can be helpful, but in almost all other circumstances you are risking the town center getting the last shot to kill the boar. If the town center gets the last shot to kill the boar, you will have 0 food to harvest. ZERO!!!

When you lure the boar, there are some dangerous things you can do that will make your life miserable. Boars are fickle creatures in AoC. You have to do damage to them twice in order for them to lock onto your unit. The weird part about that is, if villager 1 shoots the boar once and villager 2 gets the second shot, the boar will follow villager 2. If you only shoot the boar once there is a good chance he will run back to his area. However, if you are luring a far boar without loom, it is often a good idea to shoot the boar once, run away a few tiles with your villager, and give him a second shot then. He might run back those 2 or 3 tiles but your villager will make it back to your town center with more hit points when he does follow. Boars sometimes get confused (just like in real life!) by paths that aren't directly in the open. So if your villager runs through a pond forest with several 1 tile holes the boar might double back 2 or 3 tiles. You can keep the boar chasing your villager by staying within a close distance to him (1 to 3 tiles) and continually shooting him (the shots probably won't matter unless he is outside that 3 tile range in which case the shots will get him to retarget your villager).

If your villager is luring a boar and you realize he is not going to make it safely back to your town center, you have several options. The first option is apparent, you can use your scout, a sheep, or another villager to get between your villager and the boar to slow him down. It is unlikely that more than 10% of AoC'ers know this next fact because it seems like no one ever uses it. The fact is that if you lay the foundation for any building and your villager gets to the tile next to it so it can start building (your villager can't build on top of himself!), and the boar is on top of that building foundation, right before the villager starts construction the boar will walk off to the side and stop

targeting your villager. This gives you time to use another villager to attack him or at the very least save your villager from a boar-destruction death.

There is one other terrible pitfall when it comes to luring boars. Your villager has shot the boar twice so he is chasing you. You decide to send him back to your town center by right clicking, but you accidentally right click on a sheep, a tree, your current boar carcass, or any other spot to gather resources. What happens!?! Is it bad!?? Oh yes it is! Now every time the boar hits your villager, your villager will turn around and start shooting it. Only goth villagers can kill a boar 1vs1 and even then you don't want the boar carcass out in the middle of nowhere. Let's say you choose to right click a non-resource tile once after your mistake thinking that will fix it, the next boar hit will still turn your villager around to fight! There are two things you can do to cancel this "must-fight-boar" mentality: you can tell your villager to garrison in your town center (default hotkey of holding down the alt key and right clicking the town center) or you can repeatedly right click (3 clicks is usually enough) a non-resource gathering spot (open land or a spot under your town center where no villagers are working).

Oh, by the way, sometimes you will shoot or hit a boar twice and he will still go back immediately after. Boars by game design naturally wander around every so often and if that time coincides with the time you are attacking it that could happen. The only thing you can realistically do is to keep an eye out for it!

We are almost through all the bad stuff that can happen on your hunting spree, but there is still one thing left that makes me wonder if the game designers really did incorporate basic survival animal spirit. You've brought your boar back to your town center. It's your second lured boar so you already have some injured villagers from earlier. You garrison your current lurer, but Lo! and Behold! the boar is going for the weakest link in your villager pack! This happens far too often for it to be a coincidence although it is still seems too random to identify the real reason why. Funny stuff imagining a boar being slayed by 6 people and the boar deciding to go after the cripple in the group. The best way to deal with this random boar anger is to garrison your lowest hit point villagers for the first few seconds of slaying the boar.

As with sheep you are trying to kill the boar underneath your town center so that your villagers don't have to walk far. You also don't want it directly against the top corner of your town center because then less villagers can harvest it at the same time.

Command lag and connection lag are two other things you have to carefully consider when playing AoC. Command lag is the amount of time that passes between when you take an action and it is executed. In most 1vs1 games it is usually minimal but it is still common in larger teamgames. Connection lag is where the game speed is slower or fluctuates. The reason we have classified them as such is because it is very crucial for boar luring villagers. When you are in a game with lots of command lag (5 seconds between you taking an action and it is executed), you might even have to send your villager back to your town center before that villager takes the first shot to lure the boar. Connection lag occasionally feels like command lag because the game might slowdown for a brief period but it doesn't affect how long your actions take to respond. The morale is to be aware of the command lag and do your actions that far in advance to prevent mishaps (sometimes that is much easier said than done)!

Boar Havoc Yippee! We have finally made it to the more fun section: boar stealing and laming! It is definitely one of the most ninja style dark age tactics in AoC because of the difficulty and care required to do it properly.

Most AoC'ers are almost always either strongly for or against boar laming tactics. In my opinion boar laming is completely fair and most of the people who are against it do not fully understand the specifics behind it or lack the skill or knowledge to steal boars or stop an opponent from taking their boars. If there was a possibility of considering boar laming unfair, sheep stealing would have to be considered way worse given the lack of skill it takes to find enemy sheep, select them, and right click your own town center. Sheep stealing is also 100% risk free as compared to the struggles of boar laming.

If you are one of the AoC'ers in the other camp, don't despair, there are going to be some tips in here for you to help prevent your enemy from doing too much damage. In certain cases you might even act as a venus flytrap waiting for them to steal your boar so you can wreak havoc and revenge. However the majority of the tips will be for how you can initiate mayhem and utterly mess your opponent up!

The safest way to do decent damage while taking minimal risk is to find your enemy boars, scout the area around them, guess or scout how far they are from the town center, see what other obstacles are in the way, and then wait for their villager to shoot it once or twice. Then you go in to try to kill the villager. If it's a situation where you are pretty confident that they will need the boar ASAP (like when fast grushing on mediterranean), you can even start attacking the villager after he shoots the boar once because it is likely your opponent will still try to lure it. Then you are going to try to get the boar to do most of the work by moving back and forth in an almost perpendicular zig-zag motion to slow the villager down. If you practice it a lot and if there is minimal game lag you are very likely to kill most unloomed villagers and sometimes even loomed ones (especially if the boar is far and behind a forest!). If your enemy is doing this to you, it pays to have loom researched and it is also a good idea to zigzag your villager. If you have 25 to 50% health left and you realize you won't make

it back to the town center, use the building foundation trick discussed earlier to stop the boar. This will be even more difficult because you can't lay foundations down on top of enemy units (although the scout should typically be in front of your villager and the boar chasing your villager) so you will need to be opportunistically time it.

As we discussed above it is the second hit on the boar that causes it to choose a target. This gives you a second option with minimal risk: wait for their villager to give it the first hit and then give it a second hit with your scout. The boar will chase your scout and if you time it well enough and run immediately you won't even take any damage. Then you can try to lure it back to your town center or just bring it a few screens away to slow their feudal time.

The downside to the two previously discussed strategies is that you are often luring your boars at nearly the same time as they are which can make simultaneous micromanagement of both situations difficult. Even experts who are planning to do this stuff often miss their opportunity because they don't want to risk losing a villager at home. If you find an enemy boar quickly, it is usually better to steal it right away. When you steal a boar you still have to hit it twice with your scout, so if it is possible, attack the boar from an uphill position so that you take less damage from the 2 boar hits of return fire you will take. Make sure that at all times you stay within 3 tiles of the boar or it will turn back. Since your scout (or eagle) runs faster than the boar, make sure you keep zig zagging while it is chasing you. The best counter your enemy (or you if you are the boar stealing victim) have to an attempted boar steal is to go directly with your scout to the path your enemy will take to their town center. The sooner you realize it the better. You have several options: you can just attack their scout which will cause them to take a decent amount of damage by the time they make it across the map, you can try to block their scout with yours (through 1 tile pond forests this works great!), or you can try to block the boar so that their scout gets further than 3 tiles ahead and turns back. What is often the safe and effective course is to just attack their scout with yours and if you see an opportunity where their scout is almost 3 tiles away from the boar turn back and try to block it for half a second to make it go back. You also know that they are micromanaging like mad when they are stealing your boar so if you can't directly attack their stealing scout, you can often do other mischievous things. My favorite is to try to steal sheep from the side of the town center. Normally people watch their town center closely in the dark age but when they are stealing a boar you can often get away with stealing a few sheep to level the playing field. They won't be able to use their injured scout to get them back either because you will have a higher hit point scout guarding those stolen sheep!

There is one more boar killing technique that is used more commonly on nomad based maps but occasionally has its place elsewhere. If you are close enough to your enemy or if you know that killing their boar(s) will royally screw them over, tap palisade walls on all 4 sides of a villager next to a boar and then shoot the boar till he is dead. If you think they might still eat the rotting carcass then palisade wall it in after the boar dies. Sometimes the boar's dead body will land on two tiles so you will need 6 palisade tiles to wall him in. Obviously this trick isn't usually too cost effective or safe on most maps where you risk being seen or dying to wolves or getting there too late but it is excellent when you are scout on scout fighting your enemy and you still want to prevent them from eating fresh boar meat under their town center.

Loom2 Loom is one of those technologies that takes 25 seconds of your town center time. It takes 25 seconds to build a villager so you are effectively trading one villager for the much added safety of stronger villagers. On maps where safety isn't much of an issue (such as early game arena or islands), it is better to delay loom to a point where you need it to lure a boar, you don't have 50 food ready, you are at risk of a villager running into wolves, or you are clicking it right before you up to feudal to make sure you have enough food to upgrade. The longer you delay researching loom the more villagers you have working. On almost all maps where early fighting is possible it is generally a good idea to loom (at the latest) before you click feudal.

Half Trained Lookouts Wolves are randomly generated on the map and can't be closer than a certain distance to your town center. They are approximately as strong as an unloomed villager and typically attack units that are 3 to 6 tiles away. Wolves don't attack scouts or eagles unless you manually attack them first. They also don't attack monks or missionaries.

Although forward villagers are more uncommon these days than they were 10 years ago, there are still several types of rushes that involve forwarding. Since it was extremely prevalent in the days of old, players came up with several good ways to detect forward villagers. The first and most obvious is to scout them, but that isn't foolproof. Another tool you can use is to watch the wolves. Every time you scout by a wolf, build a single unbuilt palisade foundation on top of the wolf. Even when your scout isn't in the line of sight you will see if the wolf is still there. If the wolf leaves there then you know that something caused it to attack your enemy (villagers or militia in dark age). Another way is to look at areas where you have scouted but with the fog there for wolf bodies. When you kill a wolf the body is still shown in the grayed out fog area. This is why if you are planning on forward building every time you kill a wolf you should put your own palisade foundation overtop of the body and then cancel it, which for some odd reason removes the body.

Another great way to scout for forward buildings is to use phantom scanning. What you do is select a villager and have him about to lay the foundation for a building, but instead of placing the building, move it around in the open fog area to see if there are any areas it can't be built. Any areas that it can't be built on are enemy units or buildings. Make sure you use a building that can always be placed on any type of open landscape such as a house, farm, or wall foundation or else you might get some false positives from weird landscape. Sometimes you get a false positive from an enemy scout or militia but the easiest way to confirm that is to check the same spot 5 seconds later and see if it has moved.

FoOoooOOooD Yum. The other 3 resources require less planning than food gathering in AoC. This is because you gather food in a lot of different ways: sheep, boars, deer, berries, farms, shorefish, deep sea fish, fish traps, or you buy it at the market. Food gathers at different rates for most of these and most of them require an upfront wood investment to be efficient. Efficiency is also determined by how close your drop off points are and what upgrades you have. The estimation equation for wood gathering of approximately 30 seconds of villager time for 10 wood (includes walking time) is still surprisingly close for most forms of food gathering. It is slightly slower for berries and farms and slightly faster for gathering deer, boars, or shorefish. It is even a good approximation for fishing ships gathering deep sea fish about 5 to 6 tiles away (although it's 45 seconds for 15 food). Using fishing ships to gather shore fish takes about 60 seconds for 15 food.

By default most maps only have a limited amount of food which are typically 8 sheep, 2 boars, a 6 tile berry patch, and 1 pack of 3 or 4 deer. Your food related goals in the dark age are going to be used to: maintain constant villager production, build militia if you are drushing, upgrade to feudal, and to set your food production up for your requirements in the early feudal age.

The best way to accomplish your food goals in the dark age is to satisfy the constant villager production goal first (which uses 6 sheep eaters), then start on going for your other goals (wood pit and wood choppers so you can build a mill for your berries, a dock for fishing ships, or a barracks for drush), then focus on gathering enough food to click feudal. You are trying to balance your uses so that you don't have excessive rotting, you don't overspend your resources on farms, and you don't run the risk of 100% of your food sources running out at the same time. Most tried and tested build orders incorporate these factors extremely well in the dark age.

You can also deal with most attempts at stealing your boars or sheep by rebalancing your economy. On land maps you can add 1 or 2 more villagers to berries, use your scout to lure deer, and/or build 1 or 2 more farms (if you are adding extra farms, it is a bit counterintuitive but you want to add an extra wood chopper or two when your boar is stolen so that you can afford the extra farms) to make sure you have enough resources to upgrade to feudal. On water maps your best bet is to find a

couple extra sheep or lure deer with your scout.

Most players realize that they will need food, but one of the most common mistakes even for experts is that if you don't constantly add villagers to food as the requisite wood becomes available, often too much wood is gathered and then too many villagers are switched onto food. In some cases you are waiting for a farm upgrade before building farms but typically players get into a similar situation by accident when they have too many wood choppers for a few minutes. The other downside to building a lot of farms at the same time is that they will expire at the same time, and if you don't have a lot of wood stockpiled at that exact moment to rebuild them then you will have to do some rebalancing (of course it will be in the middle of a huge fight where you need to micro a lot =P).

Since food doesn't gather that fast it is one of those things you will figure out once you start stockpiling more food than you can spend. Switching villagers off of expensive farms is necessary but an expensive endeavor because the farms cost more resources than the villagers themselves, so you really want to attempt to have the right number of farms for what you are planning in the near future.

Farms take up 3x3 tiles of space but your villagers only gather from the 2x2 section on the far left of the farm. This is probably a game designer oops from back in the day but it does mean that the closer that section is to your drop off point the more efficient your farmer villager is. This is why it is common for experts to build their first farms on the right hand side of the town center or mill. Another tip is to put your boar lurer villagers on farms so that they have less risk of dieing from enemy units because they are already injured.

He Built A Fence "He built a fence" was what some translation software spouted when one of my not-so-hot with english teammates told us after an unexplained 10 minute pause at the start of a 4vs4 tournament match. He was talking about the other team breaking the rules by building palisade walls too early on land nomad. Palisades are a useful tool that you can use in the dark age. They cost 2 wood and take about 5 seconds per tile to build. The main use for palisade walls that you would expect in the dark age is to wall choke points around your town to prevent the enemy from walking there on their way to attack you. They also have a lot of other random uses (we already discussed stopping boars, using villagers to hunt enemy boars, and phantom scanning previously). Another use is to build a palisade wall over top of your enemy's chopped straggler tree which deletes it. You can also do that to your own straggler if your boar dies in an awkward way right next to a straggler. A use that isn't seen too often anymore but is still very effective is when you palisade wall in your enemy's resources (gold for most strategies but have seen enemy stone palisaded in while doing a tower rush being effective). You can also build a palisade tile on all 4 sides of a relic so that your enemy can't pick it up. Also, when you are walling watch out for any straggler trees or relics where the enemy can quickly create a hole in your wall (using a monk or villager, respectively). If you can't wall choke points, sometimes it is easier to just palisade in your villagers. This is commonly done for gold mines, wood pits, and berries when you know your enemy is going to attack you soon with scouts or militia. You don't even have to finish building the palisades, you can just tap them for a second so that they have enough hit points to give you enough time to build any single tile if your enemy starts attacking it. When you are watching for enemy towers, outposts are quite expensive in the early game. It is usually cheaper to just lay palisade foundation in the most likely spots your enemy will tower and you will see if they try to. One more use for palisade walls is when you are attacking your enemy and your enemy has spots where 1 to 5 villagers can be blocked in with resources on one side and gathering buildings on the other by a palisade tile or two. This is especially useful when you are rushing and you have more army than your enemy and you are surprising his gold villagers or his berry villagers because those often have spots where a couple palisades can completely block his villagers in, causing him to either delete the gather building or risk losing his villagers once you bring ranged units or tower the area. Occasionally your enemy will be scouting one of your resources and you will have the opportunity to wall his scout in and you should definitely take it.

Score! Your score is kind of a mix hodgepodge of how many units you built, how many units you've killed, how much you've explored the map, and what you've researched. There aren't too many useful things score can tell you but let's discuss two of them here. The first useful observation is that your opponent's score will drop fairly dramatically when they research the next age. It will drop 50 points for feudal, 100 points for castle, and 180 points for imperial. The other useful thing score can tell you is how big your opponent's economy is compared to yours. If there is a couple minute period with no fighting and his score has gone up much more than yours it is likely due to a larger economy (provided they haven't hit the next age or researched large upgrades which can provide a solid boost as well).

BO and Main Strategy Overview Section Build orders are similar to any approximation tool that helps you finish your goals. They are like a procedure for a task you have never done before or a stepping stone for a stream that is too far to jump across on the first try. Once you understand why and how they work it is great to adapt them to your playstyle and seize opportunities as you see them. These are not written in stone but they are trying to convey a way to look at the game based on what you need and when you need it. If you are an experienced player my recommendation is that you skip this section entirely. This topic came up very frequently when I was training people for cash so I figured it would be better to have it all in one spot.

In the discussion ahead there are usually a few variants of the same strategy that are tailored for offensive use, defensive use, or something in the middle. Since AoC has random maps and you have to scout to determine what this particular one looks like it is quite common for there to be several strategies that are great on a particular map with characteristics that should force you to adapt.

Villagers are numbered as they are built so your 3 starting villagers would be villagers 1 through 3. Your scout isn't included in these numbers so if your population is 8 but your scout is alive, the next villager you build will be villager #8. The strategies ahead are in the order: 1. The Grush 2. The Flush 3. The Drush 4. The Fast Castle 5. The Scrush

Galley Rush (Grush) Type: Aggressive Objective: you are having a slightly inefficient economy in order to disrupt your opponent early (and in a way that it should cost them more than you). Primary Goals: - Feudal fast (9:45 to 10:35) to attack early (you have 3 to 5 fishing ships) - Fight enemy ships when you have more - Kill their fishing ships - Keep your fishing ships alive Secondary Goals: - Watch for landings or forward villagers - If you are losing water, attempt to re-take it, or land/forward your enemy (secretly if possible) - Get to the Castle Age Key Strategic Risks: - You don't find your enemy fast enough - You find your enemy fast enough, but he has done a style that is slightly slower with a slightly better economy, therefore he has enough units to defend and will slowly pass you in resources Mitigation to Risks: - If you realize your enemy hasn't docked near you so you can't do any damage and he reaches feudal later than you, you can build some extra fishing ships after your first round of galleys to recoup some of the economic benefit Here is the approximate build order for the aggressive grush: - 1 - 6 sheep

- 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters (dump sheep food first) - 11 house dock (sometimes plan it so he lures your second boar) then food - 12 wood - 13-21 sheep/boar (lure your 2nd boar per rules set out in the dark age section, build fish boats as wood becomes available, put them on deep sea fish if possible) (build houses when you are 3 population lower than your next needed house, 4 population if both villager and fish boat are about to finish) (depending on how smooth your economy is, you might be able to upgrade to Feudal after 20 villagers, or you might have to wait until you have built 22 or 23) - Loom (if you can loom this late it is ideal, if you can wait even longer because it is a map where no enemy land attacking is possible that is even better, but if you are going to have idle town center time or a potential boar lurer death research it earlier) - After you click feudal, with your boar/sheep eaters, send enough of them to your first lumber camp to make it so you have 7 to 9 wood chopping villagers there - Put the rest immediately on stragglers - When you have the wood take another 7 to 9 to build a 2nd lumber pit - 1 or 2 villagers can build more docks (use 1 if your scout is defending or 2 if your scout isn't around and the enemy scout could be near) - When you are 1/3 of the way to feudal send 4 villagers to mine gold - Since your 4 fishing ships should allow you to have constant villagers for the first couple minutes of feudal age (plus allow you to research the wood upgrade when you hit feudal), you don't need any villagers on food, but if you only made 3 fishing ships or if your fishing ships are gathering from shore fish or if the fish are really far, have 1 or 2 villagers gathering sheep.

Galley Rush (Grush)

Type: Standard Objective: to feudal not too fast and not too slow but with constant fishing ship production to allow you to build ships just in time for an aggressive enemy grush but also to let you go on the offensive if your enemy does a slower build. Primary Goals: - Feudal at a mid-range time (10:10 to 11:00) with 5 to 7 fishing ships - Fight enemy ships when you have more - Kill their fishing ships - Keep your fishing ships alive Secondary Goals: - Watch for landings or forward villagers - If you are losing water, attempt to re-take it, or land/forward your enemy (secretly if possible) - Get to the Castle Age Key Strategic Risks: - Your enemy was a lot closer than expected and is aggressively grushing - Your enemy is a lot further than expected and is doing a defensive grush Mitigation to Risks: - If you realize your enemy hasn't docked near you so you can't do any damage and he reaches feudal later than you, you can build some extra fishing ships after your first round of galleys to recoup some of the economic benefit - If he is much closer than you guessed, he still might have had some idle town center time when he grushed you so quickly. You are probably in a bad position if he got your fish boats but if you don't lose the initial fight too inefficiently and you ran your fishing ships you might be able to take water back. Here is the approximate build order for the standard grush:

- 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters - 11 house dock (if you can, have him lure your second boar) then wood - 12 - 13 wood - 14-23 sheep/boar (lure your 2nd boar per rules set out in the dark age section, build fish boats as wood becomes available, put them on deep sea fish if possible) (build houses when you are 3 population lower than your next needed house, 4 population if both villager and fish boat are about to finish) (depending on how smooth your economy is, you might be able to upgrade to Feudal after 22 villagers, or you might have to wait until you have built 23 or 24) - Loom (if you can loom this late it is ideal, if you can wait even longer because it is a map where no enemy land attacking is possible that is even better, but if you are going to have idle town center time or a potential boar lurer death research it earlier) - After you click feudal, with your boar/sheep eaters, send enough of them to your first lumber camp to make it so you have 8 to 10 wood chopping villagers there - Put the rest immediately on stragglers - When you have the wood take another 8 to 10 to build a 2nd wood pit - 1 or 2 villagers can build more docks (use 1 if your scout is defending or 2 if your scout isn't around and the enemy scout could be near) - When you are 1/3 of the way to feudal take 4 villagers to mine gold - Since your 5 to 7 fishing ships should allow you to have constant villagers for the first couple minutes of feudal age (plus allow you to research the wood upgrade when you hit feudal), you don't need any villagers on food

Galley Rush (Grush)

Type: Defensive Objective: to feudal with a powerful economy but also just in time to build enough galleys to defend your fishing ships. Very commonly this involves building a second dock and extra fishing ships in the dark age. Primary Goals: - Feudal at a late time (11:00 to 11:50) with 8 to 12 fishing ships - Keep your fishing ships alive - Fight enemy ships when you have more - Kill their fishing ships Secondary Goals: - Watch for landings or forward villagers - If you are losing water, attempt to re-take it, or land/forward your enemy (secretly if possible) - Get to the Castle Age Key Strategic Risks: - Your enemy was a lot closer than you guessed and is doing an aggressive or standard grush where he can outnumber your galleys Mitigation to Risks: - If water is very important to the map, you may have to suicide several fishing ships or run them in all directions to distract his galleys so you can focus a few enemy ships to try to gain back military parity. If too many units die you might be at an economic disadvantage though.

Here is the approximate build order for the defensive grush: - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood

- 8 - 10 wood - Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters - 11 house dock (if you can have him lure second boar) then wood - 12 - 14 wood - 16 second dock then wood (when he should start walking depends how far it is, send him so that he gets there when you have about 150 wood when your other dock has a fishing ship that is about 50% produced) - 17 - 19 wood - 20-25 sheep/boar (lure your 2nd boar per rules set out in the dark age section, build fish boats as wood becomes available, put them on deep sea fish if possible) (build houses when you are 3 population lower than your next needed house, 4 population if both villager and fish boat are about to finish) (depending on how smooth your economy is, you might be able to upgrade to Feudal after 24 villagers, or you might have to wait until you have built 25 or 26) - Loom (if you can loom this late it is ideal, if you can wait even longer because it is a map where no enemy land attacking is possible that is even better, but if you are going to have idle town center time or a potential boar lurer death research it earlier) - After you click feudal, put all your sheep/boar eaters on straggler wood - 1 or 2 villagers can build more docks (use 1 if your scout is defending or 2 if your scout isn't around and the enemy scout could be near) - When you have the wood take all of them except 4 to build a 2nd wood pit - When you are 1/3 of the way to feudal take 4 villagers to mine gold - Since your 8 to 12 fishing ships should allow you to have constant villagers and be a great help in gathering enough food for you to research fletching and click the castle age upgrade, you will need a lot fewer villagers on food throughout the feudal age.

Feudal Rush (Flush) on Water Map Type: Offensive Objective: to do as much damage as possible to your enemy and/or cut off key resources while keeping him under enough pressure that he can't attack your economy. Primary Goals: - Forward build near your enemy (try not to be seen!) - Build units to attack your enemy, use them strategically - Tower key resources or important spots (denying gold is usually the best, but if you are more concerned with him fish booming, try to limit his wood) - Maintain a foot-hold near their base Secondary Goals: - Prevent your enemy from attacking you by keeping him on the defense - Maintain positional advantage Key Strategic Risks: - You get spotted by your enemy before your buildings are built or soon after so he can kill your villagers with his and/or palisade your buildings in - You get spotted before you have enough army so he can wall effectively - He quickly realizes what you are doing, kills your fishing ships, and either walls or makes army quickly at home Mitigation to Risks: - If he spots you early enough you might use the rush as a fake-out while still building a lot of galleys elsewhere to grush - You might be able to kamikaze rush (use everything you can muster!) to still take him off a key resource or make him slip up in strategy or execution Here is the approximate build order for the flush on a water map:

- 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters - 11 house dock (try to dock as far from enemy docks as possible, as long as there are 1 or 2 tiles of deep sea the fish won't matter much) then wood - 12 - 13 wood - 14-23 sheep/boar (lure your 2nd boar per rules set out in the dark age section, build fish boats as wood becomes available, put them on deep sea fish if possible) (build houses when you are 3 population lower than your next needed house, 4 population if both villager and fish boat are about to finish) (depending on how smooth your economy is, you might be able to upgrade to Feudal after 22 villagers, or you might have to wait until you have built 23 or 24) - Loom (if you can loom this late it is ideal, if you can wait even longer because it is a map where no enemy land attacking is possible that is even better, but if you are going to have idle town center time or a potential boar lurer death research it earlier) - After you click feudal, with your boar/sheep eaters, send enough of them to your first lumber camp to make it so u have 8 to 10 wood chopping villagers there - Send 4 forward villagers - Put the rest immediately on stragglers - When you have the wood take another 8 to 10 to build a 2nd wood pit - Build your forward barracks and forward base in a good area (top of a hill, near key resources, close enough to be threatening but far enough that it will cost a lot of villager time and give you time to prepare if he villager rushes your building spot) - If you are landing your opponent, build your barracks on your home island before you land so that you can put your archery ranges up as soon as possible - If you are completely unseen your best bet is to do build archers, and you can build a mining camp with 4 villagers on the way to feudal age just like grushing, but if you are

seen it is usually safer to go with the conventional skirmisher spear rush so he can't counter your initial archers with some fast built skirmishers - It is also a good idea to mill your berries on the way to feudal or in early feudal age because your fishing ships will likely die. - Even if you have no fish, if you get a real good tower built or you kill a few villagers you might be on par with your enemy in terms of economy and in a better position militarily

Feudal Rush (Flush) on Land Map Type: Offensive Objective: to do as much damage as possible to your enemy and/or cut off key resources while keeping him under enough pressure that he can't attack your economy. Primary Goals: - Forward build near your enemy (try not to be seen!) - Build units to attack your enemy, use them strategically - Tower key resources or important spots (denying gold is a good choice) - Maintain a foothold near their base Secondary Goals: - Prevent your enemy from attacking you by keeping him on the defense - Maintain positional advantage Key Strategic Risks: - You get spotted by your enemy before your buildings are built or soon after so he can kill your villagers with his and/or palisade your buildings in - You get spotted before you have enough army so he can wall effectively - His map is easy to defend and he uses all his units on your economy Mitigation to Risks: - When you choose to rush you see the map before pulling the trigger so if he has a very easy to defend map you shouldn't be rushing! - You might be able to kamikaze rush (use everything you can muster!) to still take him off a key resource or make him slip up in strategy or execution Here is the approximate build order for an aggressive flush on a land map: - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood

- 8 - 9 wood - 10 house then lure boar - 11 sheep - 12 - 15 berries (lure boar so that it lines up with first boar ending) - 16 - 18 sheep/boar - Take your 2 lowest hit point villagers and build 2 farms - 19 - 21 wood (build a second lumber camp) - Loom (if you can loom this late it is ideal) - After you click feudal send 3 sheep/boar eaters to gather wood and 3 sheep/boar eaters towards the spot you want to build your forward base - Build your forward barracks and forward base in a good area (top of a hill, near key resources, close enough to be threatening but far enough that it will cost a lot of villager time and give you time to prepare if he villager rushes your building spot)

Dark Age Rush (Drush) Type: Offensive Objective: Disrupt the enemy more than it costs to drush. Keep enough pressure so that you can feudal quickly and flush your enemy. Primary Goals: - Make it to the enemy base while running into as few wolves as possible and keeping your militia together so that 1 wolf won't take off more than 50% of a single militia's hit points - Fight when you can cost effectively kill villagers - Run back if a horde of villagers is going to attack your militia - Since you are being aggressive, provided the enemy hasn't fully walled, try to keep your militia in decent health and form since you will likely be adding 2 more militia and upgrading to men at arms (if your enemy drushes and wants to fight your militia, run them away until you have added some more militia or they are upgraded) Secondary Goals: - If they are doing defensive scouts, keep them on defense long enough for you to feudal and build a spearman or two and also keep your militia far enough away that they won't be killed before turning into men at arms - Maintain positional advantage Key Strategic Risks: - You get spotted before you have enough army so he can wall effectively - His map is easy to defend and he uses all his units on your economy - You lose too many militia before you upgrade them - He realizes you are going to rush and uses a well placed defensive tower and/or starts massing archers and skirmishers with a better economy and a few walls to keep your men at arms from doing serious damage Mitigation to Risks:

- When you choose to rush you see the map before pulling the trigger so if he has a very easy to defend map you shouldn't be rushing! - You might be able to kamikaze rush (use everything you can muster!) to still take him off a key resource or make him slip up in strategy or execution Here is the approximate build order for an aggressive drush: - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - 11 house then lure boar - 12 sheep - 13 - 16 berries - 17 - 23 sheep/boar (build your barracks when you have 175 wood, use one villager to gather 10 gold before you need to build your 3rd militia, food is very tight with this strategy so it is a good idea to lure a deer to your town center or steal enemy sheep or boar) (you might need to build villager 24 and 25 while you wait to gather enough resources to upgrade to feudal) - Take your 2 lowest hit point villagers and build 2 farms - Decide what type of rush this is going to be (one good choice is using men at arms to defend villagers doing a tower rush, another good choice is two archery ranges as a standard rush) - Tower rushing requires more forward villagers while conventional rushing requires less, as a standard guideline 4 for tower rushing and 2 for conventional rushing should be sufficient (in conventional rushing you shouldn't be fighting too much with your villagers unlike the standard flush) - Mine gold with 2 villagers while a 3rd builds a mining camp - Mine enough gold to build 2 militia and upgrade to men at arms (80 gold), take them off gold if you are tower rushing, if you aren't tower rushing keep as many as you need for building archers and researching fletching (3 villagers mining gold can keep an archery

range building archers 100% of the time) - If you are tower rushing put 5 villagers on stone when you are halfway to feudal, if you aren't those villagers should be wood choppers so you have enough resources to build an archery range (and a second soon after)

Dark Age Rush (Drush) Type: Standard (Feudal Fighting) Objective: Disrupt the enemy more than it costs to drush. Feudal in time to prepare for enemy attacking. Primary Goals: - Make it to the enemy base while running into as few wolves as possible and keeping your militia together so that 1 wolf won't take off more than 50% of a single militia's hit points - Fight when you can cost effectively kill villagers - Run back if a horde of villagers is going to attack your militia - If you think your enemy is doing an aggressive drush, try to fight his militia (in a spot where you can win or at least break even) so that it won't be effective for him to research men at arms - If you think your enemy is doing a standard drush fast castle, try to keep your militia alive so they can either help you destroy walls or become men at arms if the situation warrants Secondary Goals: - You probably chose this strategy over drush fast castle because your map is too risky to fast castle but you still thought your drush could do more damage than a standard scouts build, so you have time to make a few walls and have a slightly better economy Key Strategic Risks: - This is a very versatile and usually safe strategy, similar to standard scouts

- If your opponent does drush fast castle and has a great map, you might have a difficult time cost effectively keeping your economy safe Mitigation to Risks: - You are giving your enemy some pressure as well as making a feudal army so you have a good feel for what your enemy is up to so you should have time to respond or counter Here is the approximate build order for a standard drush (feudal fighting): - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - 11 house then lure boar - 12 sheep - 13 - 16 berries - Decision Time 1) fast feudal with scouts 2) fast feudal doing 2 ranges 3) slow feudal with 2 ranges 4) men at arms - Decision 1) and Decision 4) are both most effective when you know you can get at your enemy. Decision 1) is usually the best if you can't get at your enemy but your map is very open and he is going scouts against you. Decision 4) is good when you know you can keep your starting militia alive and you can use them to stop your enemy from fully walling in. Decision 2) and 3) are effective when you can palisade enough to keep enemy scouts from doing damage. Decision 2) is better when you are pretty sure you can find a good angle to attack your enemy with ranged units and Decision 3) is better when your opponent is doing some version of Decision 2) as you will have a better economy and still ample military. Got it? =P - Decision 1) fast feudal with scouts: - 17 - 24 sheep/boars (good idea to lure a deer or steal enemy food) - Use one villager to gather 10 gold before your 3rd militia - Build 2 farms with lowest hit point villagers as you have the wood

- Build a second lumber camp on the way to feudal - Your economy balance when you click feudal will be 4 on berries, 11 on wood, 4 on farms, 3 to 5 on sheep (potentially a palisade waller or two) - Decision 2) fast feudal with 2 ranges: - 17 - 24 sheep/boars - Use one villager to gather 10 gold before your 3rd militia - Build 2 farms with lowest hit point villagers as you have the wood - Build a second lumber camp on the way to feudal - Your economy balance when you click feudal will be: 4 on berries, 12 to 13 on wood, 4 on farms, 2 to 3 on sheep (potentially a palisade waller or two) - if you are doing archers start building a mining camp and putting as many villagers as you need (3 villagers gather enough gold to keep 1 archery range 100% busy building archers) - Decision 3) slow feudal with 2 ranges - 17 - 19 wood - Use one villager to gather 10 gold before your 3rd militia - Build 2 farms with lowest hit point villagers as you have the wood - 20 - 26 sheep/boars - Your economy balance when you click feudal will be: 4 on berries, 12 to 14 on wood, 4 to 6 on farms, 2 to 4 on sheep, 2 to 6 on gold (with this strategy you can start palisade walling earlier if you think it is necessary, if you have gold miners put them on gold approximately when you hit feudal so you don't have a gold buildup, you can also build extra farms if you have enough wood and know you are aiming for just enough units to defend but also a quick castle time) - Decision 4) men at arms - 17 - 24 sheep/boars - Use one villager to gather 10 gold before your 3rd militia

- Build 2 farms with lowest hit point villagers as you have the wood - Build a gold mine next with 3 villagers mining - Men at arms are almost always a 1 time thing where you don't mass them, so you have to decide what you are going to do after. While your men at arms are keeping him distracted you can do 2 ranges, a stable, or distract him long enough to wall your base in

Dark Age Rush (Drush) Type: Standard (Walling + Fast Castling) Objective: Disrupt the enemy more than it costs to drush. Keep your enemy busy enough to give you time to palisade in so you can fast castle. Primary Goals: - Make it to the enemy base while running into as few wolves as possible and keeping your militia together so that 1 wolf won't take off more than 50% of a single militia's hit points - Fight when you can cost effectively kill villagers - Run back if a horde of villagers is going to attack your militia - If you think your enemy is doing an aggressive drush, try to fight his militia (in a spot where you can win or at least break even) so that it won't be effective for him to research men at arms - Have enough walls/defense to prevent major damage in feudal age warfare Secondary Goals: - Use palisade tiles to try to watch for your enemy attempting to tower your key resources. If you a spot a tower going up it is sometimes a good idea to build your own tower quicker to prevent his from completing or to prevent him from breaking a wall section. Key Strategic Risks:

- If your opponent breaks in or denies key resources while keeping either enough army to fight you or enough towers to keep their economy safe you could be in trouble. - If your opponent does a standard drush fast castle without walling so he hits castle age first and booms quicker while keeping enough army or attacks with more army than you can stop (because you spent villager time walling in your base) - If your opponent has a very easy to wall map and he fast castles Mitigation to Risks: - You get to see how good your map is before you commit to this strategy

Here is the approximate build order for a standard drush (walling + castling): - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - 11 house then lure boar - 12 sheep - 13 - 16 berries - 17 - 20 wood (build barracks around this time, also start walling with 1 or 2 extra villagers) - Use one villager to gather 10 gold before your 3rd militia - 21 - 24 wood (build farms as wood becomes available) - Build an extra 2 farms with your sheep/boar eaters - 25 - 28 farms - 29 - 31 gold plus send a sheep/boar eater to gold - Send sheep/boar eaters to berries when they are finished until you have enough resources for the castle age upgrade and the wood upgrade

Dark Age Rush (Drush)

Type: Standard (Fast Castling without walling) Objective: Keep your enemy busy enough so that you can make it to castle age. Primary Goals: - Make it to the enemy base while running into as few wolves as possible and keeping your militia together so that 1 wolf won't take off more than 50% of a single militia's hit points - Fight when you can cost effectively kill villagers - Run back if a horde of villagers is going to attack your militia - If you think your enemy is doing an aggressive drush, try to fight his militia (in a spot where you can win or at least break even) so that it won't be effective for him to research men at arms - Be pretty sure your enemy is doing a drush + wall strategy or a couple scouts + wall strategy Secondary Goals: - Use palisade tiles to try to watch for your enemy attempting to tower your key resources. If you a spot a tower going up it is sometimes a good idea to build your own tower quicker to prevent his from completing or to prevent him from breaking a wall section. Key Strategic Risks: - Your opponent does too much damage to your economy while you are castling - If your opponent has a very easy to wall map and he fast castles (by forcing him to repair walls you are probably almost on par) Mitigation to Risks: - You get to see how good your map is before you commit to this strategy

Here is the approximate build order for a standard drush (then castling): - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - 11 house then lure boar - 12 sheep - 13 - 16 berries - 17 - 20 wood (build barracks around this time) - Use one villager to gather 10 gold before your 3rd militia - 21 - 24 wood (build farms as wood becomes available) - Build an extra 2 farms with your sheep/boar eaters - 25 - 26 farms - 27 - 29 gold plus send a sheep/boar eater to gold - Send sheep/boar eaters to berries when they are finished until you have enough resources for the castle age upgrade and the wood upgrade

Fast Castle (FC) Type: Standard Objective: Go straight to the castle age. Primary Goals: - Make sure it is safe enough for you to do so (usually it is because of the map or distance from your enemy) - Decide around 7-8 minutes game time whether this will be a straight boom, potential for army, or a pure army type of castling. This build is for when you plan on building a castle age army. Secondary Goals: - Decide what your general plans are for early castle age

Key Strategic Risks:

- Your opponent does too much damage to your economy Mitigation to Risks: - You should know ahead of time that the map lends itself to fast castling.

Here is the approximate build order for a standard fast castle build: - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - 11 house then lure boar - 12-13 sheep

- 14 - 17 berries - 18 - 20 wood (build farms as wood becomes available) - Villager 19 or 20 can build second lumber camp (depends how efficient the first one is) - 21 - 22 wood (build farms as wood becomes available) - 23 farm - 24 - 26 gold - Send sheep/boar eaters to berries when they are finished until you have enough resources for the castle age upgrade and the wood upgrade

Fast Castle (FC)

Type: Boom Type (or building a castle to make unique units) Objective: Go straight to the castle age. Primary Goals: - Make sure it is safe enough for you to do so (usually it is because of the map or distance from your enemy) - Decide around 7-8 minutes game time whether this will be a straight boom, potential for army, or a pure army type of castling. This build is for when you plan on booming (building your economy as much as you can). Secondary Goals: - Decide what your general plan are for early castle age Key Strategic Risks: - Your opponent does too much damage to your economy Mitigation to Risks: - You should know ahead of time that the map lends itself to fast castling.

Here is the approximate build order for a standard fast castle build: - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 10 wood - 11 house then lure boar - 12-13 sheep - 14 - 17 berries - 18 - 19 wood (build farms as wood becomes available, you don't need a second lumber camp) - 21 - 23 farm - 24 - 25 stone - Send sheep/boar eaters to berries when they are finished until you have enough resources for the castle age upgrade and the wood upgrade - Sell 200 stone or 100 stone and 100 wood when you hit feudal age - Variation is if the map doesn't require you to loom you can gather 30 gold and sell 100 wood without needing to mine stone if you are going for a 3 town center boom - This build also works for going to castle age to build unique units, just have a lot more villagers mine stone on your way to castle

Scout Rush (Scrush) Type: Offensive Objective: to cost effectively kill units, distract the enemy (or in some cases, kill a good portion of their economy), and take map control. Primary Goals: - Do more damage to the enemy than he can do to you - Maintain map control by hunting down everything and anything (even if they rush, go for stray villagers and units) Secondary Goals: - Prevent your enemy from attacking you by keeping him on the defense - Try to prevent your enemy from walling in Key Strategic Risks: - You get rushed in such a way that you lose a lot of economy and you can't fight his army straight up - Your enemy has a super easy to wall map Mitigation to Risks: - With the scout rush strategy you have the most information about your opponent compared to any other strategy - You can change gears or your army mix easily to adapt to what your enemy is doing Here is the approximate build order for an aggressive scrush: - 1 - 6 sheep - 7 lumber camp then wood - 8 - 9 wood - 10 house then lure boar - 11 sheep

- 12 - 15 berries (lure your second boar to arrive in time) - 16 - 18 sheep/boar - Take your 2 lowest hit point villagers and build 2 farms - 19 - 21 wood (build a second lumber camp) - Loom (if you can loom this late it is ideal) - After you click feudal send 3 sheep/boar eaters to gather wood

When you do an aggressive scout rush you intend on having more scouts than your enemy if you are doing the same strategy. This is almost always the best approach against other strategies and is still usually a good call even against a defensive scouts style. The difference between offensive and defensive scouts isn't much in the dark age game, it's more in how you act in the early feudal age. When you are doing offensive scouts you might even make 0 spears and no walls but if you are doing a defensive scouts style you will probably make 2 or 3 spearmen and do some palisading. If you are doing defensive scouts your goal is to set yourself up to defend easily and then decide whether you are going to mass army or skimp and go to castle. The trick for the person doing offensive scouts is to match what the defensive scouts player is doing. You will have more economy and you can defend against their army by the time it gets to your base. If you are doing the defensive scouts strategy, you want to not show what you are doing so the offensive scouts player has to half-guess. Some games, just do a few ranged units behind your walls and go to castle age. Other games, mass army and when your opponent is about to click the castle age upgrade hit him with 3 or 4 extra scouts that have bloodlines and armor upgrades as well as your ranged army. If you do the opposite of your enemy when you defensively scout rush you will usually have the upper strategic hand. Somewhere between these two extremes is what most top players generally aim for. Most maps aren't good enough to do the defensive style cost efficiently and there are too many hills and risks if you leave yourself completely open. You just have to make a judgment call based on your map and what your enemy is trying to do.

Feudal Age Fury Fun

The Scout Bump The second you hit feudal age your scout gets 3 bonuses which make it a much better unit: it becomes faster, it gets more line of sight, and it gets an additional 2 attack. This makes the feudal scout a deadlier weapon and a better spy. There are lots of things you can do with this new found power depending on where he is, what he sees, and what your overall strategy is.

Your enemy should be scouted by time the time you feudal and you should have a good idea what they are likely to do. If neither you nor your enemy accidentally ran their scout under the enemy town center or stole an enemy boar then the biggest risk to your scout is the enemy scout if they feudal faster. You are also more worried about where or how your enemy could attack you in early feudal so it is generally a good idea to bring him to your side of the map in 1vs1 about thirty seconds before you feudal. This way you have your area scouted for enemy activity and if you feudal first and you see the enemy scout you can chase him down and kill him. This is the safest and an effective way of using your scout power.

Another option is to try to see if the enemy has any low hit point villagers. If you see any villagers that require less than 2 hits to kill (less than 8 hit points), wait for a distraction (such as galleys fighting or him just hitting feudal so he is building units, getting upgrades) and kill that villager.

Your scout is also really effective at getting any villagers trying to wall at that point in time. If you see your enemy is trying to palisade wall in entirely and not make any feudal army while you already built 2 archery ranges and some ranged units, it is great if your scout is on the inside. When you try to break in use him to attack the inside of a palisade wall while your ranged units defend him. If your enemy looks like he is going to try putting a second layer of walls or buildings to stop you from getting in than move your scout a tile or two further onto his land because your enemy can't build on top of your scout.

Your scout is also great for finding and killing stray ranged units in feudal. In the old days when

skirmisher rushing was popular you could often force a lot of the rusher's decisions by harassing their newly built ranged units with your scout.

The last main use of your feudal age scout is to kill farms. When your enemy builds a farm, if his villager isn't close enough to seed it right away, you can see the outline and that it has 1 hit point. If you hit the farm while it was 1 hit point you have just cost your enemy 60 wood.

Towers of Power In the old days when scouts and walling were less used towers were an essential addition to the ranged feudal wars that usually ensued. If you knew all the "tower lore" you had a huge advantage over others. They still have lots of uses and are very effective in specific situations but this knowledge isn't as important as it once was. Towers cost 125 stone, 25 wood, and take 80 seconds to build with 1 villager. They have 1020 hit points and have a base ungarrisoned attack of 5 with a range of 8. Enough of the technical details, what can we use them for? The primary intended use of towers in most games are defensive buildings to protect an area of interest. In AoC this is the most common tower use as it is usually used to partially defend gold, wood, stone, or farmland. They can garrison 5 villagers although unupgraded towers do full damage with 4 villagers garrisoned (5 arrows per burst).

Tower on tower wars used to be very common especially in feudal push situations so there are a few useful things for all you old schoolin' feudal rushers here. First let's outline all the main offensive situations where you would use your first tower: towering an enemy wood pit, berries, farms, stone, gold, an advantageous hill, your military buildings, their military buildings, or some combination of this list. This is where you make a command call based on the map and what your enemy is doing. If you are going to be fighting you won't have time to build a tower, although often you can send 1 villager behind their wood and build a tower. If they don't know you are there yet, it is perfect because you can build a tower just outside of their line of sight but within range of something important. Make sure you wall it in before it is done being constructed because you could take heavier losses than your enemy if 10 angry villagers storm a newly constructed unwalled tower. If you start towering your enemy's wood and he realizes it and starts to build a counter tower, you have three choices depending on how far away it is, how important those resources are, and what else is going on in the game. If it is 8 tiles away (remember that units right next to eachother are 0 tiles away so you start counting 1 tile when there is 1 tile of space between units) then you can either try to kill their tower by garrisoning in yours and repairing your tower (with fast fletching so you can kill their repairers), or you can just keep repairing your tower until your enemy gets fletching, or my personal favorite, if your tower construction is less than 60% complete and you realize a direct tower fight would be disadvantageous, cancel your tower when theirs is greater than 60% complete (you will get more than 50 stone back so the starting 200 will be 125 or more), and build your tower 9 or 10 tiles away from their tower while still hitting some of their resources. WARNING: This is extremely

effective and can make your enemy very mad! It is even funnier and more effective if they cancel their tower at slightly more than 60% completion and don't have enough stone for another.

There are some other useful things you should know about towers. Villagers have a large bonus against villagers and on flat land they do 11 damage per hit. If a tower is attacked by 6 or more melee units it usually stops shooting until you manually tell it to attack again. If you palisade it in on 4 sides villagers and units can still attack it diagonally although you might have to right click attack several times because your units occasionally get confused and stand there from the first click. Towers don't have murder holes by default so you can stand right next to them without getting shot. Towers on weird hills sometimes act as if they have murder holes in certain situations where it seems that there is no way your unit is further than right next to the tower but it still gets shot. If that happens try moving them around the tower until you find a spot where you don't get shot.

Farm Shooting

If you are pushing slowly with towers and ranged units in the feudal age, there are often times when you are in a near stalemate position with your opponent. You have a tower or two up, he has some small walls and a tower up, but you are in a defensible position. You see there are farms nearby but not enough to tower and too close to the town center to effectively kill the villager, but there is still something you can do! If you put an archer or skirmisher outwards from the town center and attack the farm, garrisoning the town center will not be able to attack your ranged unit, and your ranged unit attacking the farm will cause the villager to stop working. It isn't a huge benefit but it beats having your ranged units standing around doing nothing!

Wolf Whispering Bait On some maps there are lots of wolves and if you used palisades to identify where they were it can be a great idea to use a unit (pretty much anything but a scout, spearmen are the standard because everyone always has a barracks and they have the best speed and hit points) to bring wolves to the enemy base. The best spot to leave the wolves is the furthest place your enemy has villagers from his or her town center.

Feudal Age Economy 119 The feudal age is when you first have access to technologies that boost your economy. We are going to discuss all the economy upgrades here and when you should get them: The wood upgrade gives you a 20% speed increase for wood chopping and costs 100 food and 50 wood. You should get this upgrade every game immediately when you hit feudal age. The only time you should delay it is if you don't have enough resources to make villagers from your town center or if you are fast castling and you would have 100 food less than you need to click the castle age upgrade. In that case you would research it immediately after you click castle.

The farm upgrade gives your farms an extra 75 food before they go fallow and it costs 75 food and 75 wood. If it is a land map where you are going to make a lot of farms and if you are playing a defensive style and your enemy is playing defensive, get this upgrade immediately upon feudaling. However, if either you or your opponent are feudal rushing or if it is a water map you can hold off until much later (typically research it right when your first feudal farms go fallow and before you replant them). It takes the same amount of time for this upgrade as it takes for 1 villager to build a farm so if you click the upgrade first and use 1 villager to build a farm after it will have the extra food.

Wheelbarrow is usually the next economic technology you will research. Wheelbarrow disproportionately helps farmers but on average it makes each villager work about 7% to 13% faster. Since it costs 175 food and 50 wood and takes 75 seconds to research, it is approximately optimal to research this technology when you have about 35 villagers. For those who don't count their villagers, in an average game where you keep constant villager production and don't lose too many to fighting this is usually from 17 to 19 minutes game time. If you have more farms you can research it slightly earlier and if you have very few farms and efficient wood pits on a water map you can research it slightly later.

The last two upgrades are the gold and stone upgrades. Each costs 100 food and 75 wood and makes the respective mining 15% faster. Since two villagers cost 100 food, it is usually not a good idea to get these upgrades until you have a bit of extra resources and you have at least 10 villagers

mining that resource. If you have so few resources that you are comparing it to building new villagers from your town center then you should wait until you have at least 15 to 20 villagers mining that resource. In most games you get the first gold upgrade on the way to castle or half way through castle age and skip the stone upgrade entirely.

Army Upgrades Upgrades for your army make a huge difference in AoC. It isn't uncommon for a single upgrade to make a unit 20% more effective at a relatively low cost. Not all upgrades are created this way, but let's look at each of the individual upgrades for units in the feudal age. Make sure you keep in mind that in some situations, even if you have the required army to make the upgrade cost effective from a straight up military fighting standpoint, it may be better to wait until you know you will be fighting in a minute or two before you get the upgrade.

Fletching: This technology researched at the blacksmith adds 1 range and 1 attack to all ranged units and buildings for a low cost of 100 food and 50 gold. This technology is usually the reason you build a blacksmith when you are fighting in the feudal age and affects archers, skirmishers, towers, galleys, and your town center. Here are some general rules of thumb: If you are researching it on a water map for galley wars, get it when you have 8 to 12 galleys. If you are researching it on a land map in skirmisher or archer wars, get it when you have about 7 to 10 ranged units.

If you are researching it for your towers, make sure the 1 extra range allows you to attack something important, such as villagers repairing an enemy tower, or enemy resources if one of your towers was accidentally 1 tile too far away. Most times you shouldn't bother researching fletching just for towers in feudal.

Bloodlines: The next most common technology in feudal age fighting is bloodlines. It is researched at the stable and only affects scouts in feudal but in most 1vs1 matchups having bloodlines will help immensely down the road. Bloodlines adds 20 hit points to all cavalry based units in the game. The general rule of thumb is that the best time to get it is when you have 6 to 10 scouts. Make sure that if you are in a scout war that you check both the number of scouts and the upgrades they have if you are about to scout fight.

Man-At-Arms: This upgrade is researched slightly more often than it should be in 1vs1 (and it

isn't used very commonly!). It is researched at the barracks and it turns any existing militia and future militia into man at arms that have 45 hit points and 6 attack versus militia with 40 hit points and 4 attack. It costs 100 food and 40 gold which is incredibly close to the cost of building 2 more militia for 120 food and 40 gold. You should research the man at arms upgrade when you have 5 or 6 militia (if lots of them are badly injured you might want to wait until you have at least 220 hit points worth of militia). If you are going to fight far from your barracks it is better to research man at arms if you have 5 undamaged militia but if you are defending, it can actually be better to build 2 more militia as long as you are not fighting in a confined space (pond forests). Unlike bloodlines, the swordsmen line is almost never used in 1vs1 unless you are one of the civilizations with infantry specific bonuses.

Archer Armor: This technology is researched at the blacksmith and it gives your archers and skirmishers an additional 1 hack and 1 pierce armor. Since you usually try to keep the majority of your ranged units at the back of the fighting (if they aren't a standalone army), this upgrade is much less useful than fletching. The most important use of archer armor is when you are surprised by enemy archers that have fletching researched and you need to build army to defend it ASAP. On flat ground skirmishers with archer armor take 50% less damage (1 damage per hit) from archers that have fletching so even if you are fighting cost inefficiently it is much better for 6 surprise archers to be attacking your fully armored skirmisher than your villagers. In skirmisher versus skirmisher wars archer armor makes no difference in feudal age but the other main use for archer armor is when you have about 10 to 15 archers or if you plan on having skirmishers and archers fighting underneath tower fire.

Cavalry Armor: You research cavalry armor at the blacksmith and it gives your cavalry (only scouts in feudal age) an additional 1 hack and 1 pierce armor. In purely scout vs scout wars this makes enemy scouts do 20% less damage and should be researched when you have about 9 or 10 scouts. If you have a mixed army of archers and scouts and your enemy has the same, since it reduces archer attack by 33% (on flat ground), you should research it when you have about 8 scouts (get bloodlines first!).

Cavalry and Infantry Attack: Another upgrade at the blacksmith that is almost always used to buff scouts in the feudal age giving them 1 additional attack. In scout wars this can offset cavalry armor but if there are archers in the mix you would definitely prefer taking 33% less damage from

archers from cavalry armor than doing 20% more damage with this upgrade. In scout vs scout wars you should research this when you have 9 or 10 scouts (after cavalry armor) and when you have about 10 scouts in scout and archer wars. The only time you should get attack before armor is if your enemy is if your enemy is only making spears and scouts and you know you won't be fighting near any ranged fire.

Infantry Armor: This is the last blacksmith upgrade researchable in the feudal age and gives your swordsmen and spearmen line an additional pierce and hack armor. In almost all games this isn't researched in feudal. This is because patch 1.0C gave skirmishers an attack bonus against spearmen and archers are already tough against spearmen. Spearmen are usually used in small numbers to stop enemy scout raiding or to kill enemy scouts in head-on fighting. Since they are weak versus the exodus of ranged units in feudal and they aren't effective at attacking your enemy you usually won't ever build enough to consider getting the infantry armor upgrade in 1vs1 (unless your opponent does double stables and really masses scouts).

Tracking: This is probably the most useless technology in AoC, or at least it's pretty high up there. The main time you would research tracking is if you have a lot of barracks units but, ironically, when you have lots of barracks units most of the map is usually scouted. In the early game one extra unit, even if it was used solely for the purpose of scouting, would be more efficient than researching this technology. It is researched at the barracks for a cost of 75 food to give your infantry units an extra 2 line of sight. You can forget it exists.

Town Watch: Town watch is a 75 food technology researched at your town center in 25 seconds to give all of your buildings an addition 4 tiles of line of sight. This technology is one that definitely has the possibility of having some use but it is tough to reasonably estimate when that will be. If it allows one of your buildings to see an enemy army or find forward enemy villagers towering a key resource it could be worth multiples of its cost, but on the other hand there are times when it helps you next to nil and makes it so you are a villager behind your opponent. Other good times to research it are when you need to see enemy units in advance so that you will save your villagers by running or garrisoning them (if you are going to lose more than 1 villager because of your lack of sight then it will justify its cost in saved villagers). You should research it more commonly on water maps where your spread out houses will detect enemy landings after you are reasonably confident you are

ahead on water.

Feudal Military Micromanagement During this section I want you to keep in mind that every fight is a trade. You are giving up something in order to get something, usually with both in the form of dead or injured units, but it also applies to taking down towers or walling in enemy buildings. You do not have unlimited resources and a large part of this game is about using them wisely.

You do have to remember though that there is no shame in running. Some people call it bravery when you try to fight against terrible odds but it is usually borderline crazy. It is even crazier in AoC because the winners of fights are determined methodically so that the ones with bigger army, better upgrades, and better micromanagement will win the fights. If you know you are going to get schooled in a fight, run away and fight when the odds are more in your favor! This is especially true when your units run at the same speed or faster than the enemy units. If you will lose more by running than fighting then by all means stand your ground but that is usually pretty rare in AoC. If you micromanage very well you might be able to turn some of the closer fights into victories.

This section will be about the common matchups in the feudal age and what you should consider before fighting. You also have to remember that you are trying to avoid situations where you have to fight inefficiently but also that it is the sum of all the fights you win and lose that is one of the major indicators about whether you will win a game or not. There are also a few situations where you can sacrifice some army to kill enemy villagers even if it is not directly cost efficient but because you are well defended enough that he won't be able to use his army to return the favor. All the matchups presented ahead will be viewed from the perspectives of both units (for example: when we say 5 scouts lose from a cost perspective to 2 spearmen, what we mean is that if you have 2 spearmen you would like to fight those 5 scouts, but if you have 5 scouts you want to run from those 2 spearmen).

Scouts versus Spearmen

The start to most scout rush strategies brings us to an age old question: How many scouts do you need to be cost effective against a spearman? Of course we have to consider hills and upgrades but because upgrades are so uncommon in the early game we will try to focus more on early game

skirmishes since they typically are very important.

Obviously spearmen are a natural counter to scouts so when you have only 1 scout, you want to keep that scout as far away from spearmen as possible. Same goes for 2 scouts, unless you have bloodlines researched and both your scouts are attacking downhill. 3 scouts against 1 spearman is where you will probably lose a scout and kill the spearman which is slightly cost inefficient. If the spearman is attacking uphill you will probably just take a lot of damage to 1 scout. If you were the player with the spearman you would micromanage it so that it attacks horizontally or downhill if possible. On flat land, 4 scouts against 1 spearmen is roughly the cost efficiency breakeven point. Once you have 5 scouts you can kill individual spearmen cost effectively.

The main type of micromanagement involved in these skirmishes for the person with scouts is to: lure the spearmen to a spot where he is downhill, pull back the scout that is targeted, or run if you are outnumbered. For the person with spearman you are trying to: make sure the spearmen fights and doesn't get "stuck", run a little bit to keep the spearmen uphill or on flat land, and target a different scout if your enemy pulls the targeted one back. One other thing you should be aware of is that if you are targeting scouts in a big fight, use the stand ground stance and try to quickly target several different scouts with different spearmen. This will prevent any other unit who hits your spearman from making your spearman target that unit who is directly attacking him.

Scouts versus Villagers

The second or third most common unit you will be attacking with scouts (although you are hoping it is the first!) are villagers. The main goal of scouts as a military force is to find and eliminate enemy villagers. If you get the opportunity to fight a villager 1vs1 with a full hitpoint feudal scout where you are pretty confident there won't be any other units to save the villager, go for it! When you attack a villager with a scout, if the player with the villager hasn't told it to attack the scout, it will run away in the opposite direction. As the scout player you can use this to your advantage by attacking outwards from safe havens.

If you are attacking the enemy berry villagers, attack the small enough group (or even

individual) where you can force the villager to run the opposite direction and not be able to (or barely be able to) make it back to the town center to survive. If you are the one being attacked and you can anticipate this by sending your villager a few tiles towards your town center at that moment you might spare your villager. Do the same when you are attacking enemy lumberjacks (attack the ones on the outside of the pack). This will let you focus fire one unit, make it run away from the pack, and also give you more time to run your scouts away if too many angry villagers are going to fight your scouts. If you are the one who is having your outside villager targeted at your lumber camp, right before it is hit or as it is hit either attack the scouts with all your closest villagers or attack the scouts with all your closest villagers except the one villager being hit where that one villager runs towards the inside of your pack.

If you are fighting unupgraded scouts with 2 villagers to 1 scout it is slightly cost effective provided you can do something soon after so that the lost villager time from your dead villagers versus the lost resources of their dead scout is equalized by you either hurting their economy or gaining a solid military edge. If you can't retaliate well within a couple minutes then the lost resources of your dead villagers will not offset the cost of the enemy scouts.

Scouts versus Scouts

Okay, obviously this is pretty intuitive as you should fight when you have more scouts! Watch the upgrades though just to be safe. There will be lots of times if you are both scout rushing where you have a very similar amount of scouts. It can be tough to micro these guys properly but there are a few things you can do to gain an edge. If the fights are with a small number of scouts it is usually better to focus fire one of the enemy scouts. If your enemy is doing this too then the next step for micro is to run that scout back about 4 to 6 tiles (if you do it further that scout will probably be out of the fight but closer and your enemy might chase it). If they do that then target the next scout while bringing back the one you had run away earlier. Use hills to your advantage. If more than half your scouts are uphill to the scouts they are fighting you will win handily.

Once the fights are a little bigger you don't bother with focus firing enemy scouts because there isn't enough time for it. It is better to just look at any situations where 2 or more enemy scouts are attacking 1 of your scouts. Run those ones away from the fight so that the enemy scouts will follow. If

they don't notice quickly the fight might have just turned from 7vs7 to 5vs4. You have to watch that runaway scout too just in case he runs the other 2 scouts back soon after so that you aren't the one outnumbered.

Scouts on Water

Okay, okay, of course we don't mean actually on water but when you are galley rushing you often want to scout for enemy units while at the same time not get killed by galleys. The best way to do both is to go to the end of one long stretch of land that you want to keep scouted and patrol to the other side. You also want to put your scout on "no attack stance" so that he won't engage enemy galleys if they are near. If you are having a galley fight near water the scout can also run beside the fight so that some ships will waste their shots running at a perpendicular scout.

Archers versus Skirmishers, Archers versus Archers, Skirmishers versus Skirmishers

The archers versus skirmishers matchup is very common on water maps where one player is surprise landing or forwarding the other player and hoping to use archers to kill villagers and deny resources as quickly as possible. The player playing defense usually tries to tower, wall, or build skirmishers quickly to defend. The attacking player usually tries to get fletching before the first fight to make the archers very effective against villagers and twice as effective against unupgraded skirmishers. The player on defense might have fletching researched for galleys earlier as well. Skirmishers shoot slower than archers and have a minimum range of 1 (they cannot attack units on the tile next to them). On flat ground the approximate economic breakeven point for archers with fletching against skirmishers with fletching (and no other upgrades) is about 2.3 archers per skirmisher. This means that from a cost perspective skirmishers do great against archers. 2 archers will still kill 1 skirmisher with those upgrades so if you are intent on winning the fight because you can do some damage after, you will. If you are on flat ground you will win when your skirmishers are in a 2 to 3 ratio to archers in a no micro fight.

If you want to add a little bit of value to the fight then focus firing is a good idea, as well as moving the unit being shot perpendicularly. It is a very good skill to have to be able to move your army closer to your enemy, shoot, move closer, and repeat if you are going to win the fight cost

effectively. This will allow you to kill a lot more of their army if they decide to run, make sure you focus fire, and they probably still should run because they are going to lose the fight. If it is going to be a close fight in a small ranged unit fight it is even better to move perpendicular to the fight, shoot, move perpendicular, shoot, and keep repeating that. When you do this you may dodge almost all of the enemy shots. Your goal is to dodge their shots and immediately shoot after so you hit them right before their units move again. Once you start winning by a few units you should move your units perpendicularly and diagonally so that they are getting closer to your enemy but still dodging most shots.

If it is a bigger fight where you both patrolled to attack or are just attacking regularly it is very effective to run any unit about 1 tile in front of the fight but perpendicular through it. As long as you are 3 or 4 tiles away lots of the fire will be directed at and will miss this unit. If you are too close most of the units will still hit it. Scouts are the best for this but any unit will do.

When you run away from someone who is using the shoot and chase style discussed above, try to move your units at an angle away right when their units are about to take a shot (you aren't running in the same line they are). This will cause it to take substantially less or no damage if you time it right and still make it away.

If you are having a skirmisher archer fight with a few scouts thrown in on both sides, it is better to have your skirmishers in front of your archers. They will absorb enemy ranged fire better and let your archers live longer and keep dishing out their higher damage per second.

If you are having a small skirmish where you have a skirmisher/archer mix and your enemy does too, it is better to have your archers target their archers and your skirmishers target their skirmishers for maximum damage efficiency.

Archers versus Scouts

Having straight archers against scouts is a relatively rare occurrence in 1vs1 AoC, but there a

lot of things that make this fight interesting and can apply to ranged units against cavalry throughout the rest of the game. Cost for cost and pound for pound archers are naturally countered by scouts. If you have 8 archers against 7 scouts (or even 6) in a flat open field you are going to take a heavy beating. Most AoC maps are not the Serengeti and AoC archers have a special talent that real life archers lack, so don't just let them sit there and die! Archers in AoC have the ability to reload while they walk at the exact same speed as they would reload if they were standing still. This means that at the very least you should shoot and run and shoot and run, focus firing one unit until he dies or your opponent retreats him. Where do you want to run to? You want to run to defensive locations such as your town center or towers, or into tight spots or corners (so all the scouts can't attack your archers at once), or up hills so you can shoot downwards for extra damage. As the person using scouts you want to anticipate where your enemy will run and have some of your scouts go a tile or two ahead of the archers before attacking. When the archers are going to enter a tight spot you either want to have few scouts trapped in the mix of things by surrounding the archers on all sides, or you want to avoid fighting in those tight spots.

Common Miscellaneous Feudal Battleground

One common fight is when you do a standard feudal rush against your enemy and he decides to fight it straight on with villagers, spearmen, his scout, and some skirmishers. You have virtually the same army and you have to worry about managing your economy, building new units, and micromanaging the ones you have. If you plan on getting into this situation a lot you should memorize how to use your army and always try to retreat to an advantageous place for you to fight (right next to your military buildings on top of a hill is the norm). Your first skirmishers should shoot spearmen or enemy skirmishers. Your spearmen should kill the enemy scout when he is around or attack enemy villagers. Villagers should attack other villagers or skirmishers and your scout should try to pick off stray skirmishers or retreating villagers. Of course if the unit you should be attacking isn't in its immediate vicinity then attack whatever moves!

Another common fight is where one player has a skirmisher/spear mix while the other has a mix of scouts/skirmishers/archers. For the skirmisher/spear player, since skirmishers have a minimum range of 1 and they start moving back if the unit they target is closer than that it is a good idea to keep them on stand ground. This will improve the skirmishers in two ways: they will not shoot scouts that

are directly attacking them and they will not retreat needlessly. With those skirmishers you should target enemy archers first because archers do the most damage to spearmen and they take less shots than skirmishers to kill. After the archers are dead try to keep all your skirmishers shooting enemy skirmishers because they would do very little damage to enemy scouts. Your spearmen should move up if scouts are going to attack the front of the skirmisher line but it is more important to make sure you keep enough to kill enemy scouts (so you might have to let the scouts hit for a few seconds while you kill ranged units with your skirmishers) because a pure skirmisher army (all your spears die) gets utterly destroyed by scouts. While you are waiting to use your spearmen you should keep them moving back and forth just behind your skirmishers so that enemy ranged units miss most of their shots if they choose to focus the spearmen. From the other side of the fight as the scout/skirmisher/archer player you have a bit more flexibility and strategy than your enemy. Your army has the speed advantage and can freely run away without sustaining major losses while the same is not true once you get a bit of advantage on the skirmisher/spear player. Your units are much more effective villager killing machines so if you get the chance go for a base trade (you can watch where their enemy is too with your scouts!). The downside is that in the early game before you have at least enough ranged units to kill spearmen with one shot you are at a bit of a disadvantage in terms of cost and building time. When you are in a mid feudal fight with scouts/skirmishers/archers how you fight will depend on what your unit composition is. In general you should let your skirmishers just keep shooting at anything, pull your archers back a tile or two if you notice he is focusing them, and micromanage your scouts. You always want to at least keep your scouts in the middle zone. At the start of the fight always target the front skirmishers with your scouts. This will force your enemy to start to bring in a few spearmen or face losses. Then you have to make a judgment call based on your army mix and their army mix. If your mix is 7 scouts, 4 archers, and 6 skirmishers and you are facing 5 spearmen and 15 skirmishers, you would definitely keep your scouts attacking, maybe even focus firing spearmen so you could eliminate all 5 and then just retreat any remaining ranged units you have while letting your scouts take out the rest of the army. If your mix is 12 skirmishers, 3 archers, and 3 scouts against the same 15 skirmishers and 5 spearmen you should probably do completely the opposite. Your ranged units will dish out most of the damage while your scouts are mostly there to absorb enemy fire. You might not even attack with your scouts just run them back and forth and make sure they are at least 1 tile in front of most skirmishers so they will be targeted.

This paragraph was more relevant in the old days when skirmishers dominated the feudal age and knights were the principal unit used in the castle age but there are still some situations you should

consider doing this. In this situation you are castling and you are aware that your enemy is too, but you have some feudal army yet that won't be too useful to you for the immediate future. A good example is when you made 20 skirmishers and you utterly destroyed an archer attack. Your enemy is mostly palisaded in and has a tower or two defending his economy. You know he is going knights or at least not ranged units because you presume that he is not stupid and remembers that you have 20 skirmishers. Skirmishers are next to worthless against the group of knights you will be facing in several minutes, so how should you use them? Your best bet is probably to still attack with them even if they are going to inefficiently die. You are choosing the better of two evils by thinking that it will cost your enemy more villager time and economy to fight your skirmishers while you are both upgrading to castle age than it would be worth to keep them alive and defending against knights (usually you would be right). Your enemy might even think (and depending on the situation be right) it is better to build a couple scouts to deal with those skirmishers than let them fight underneath town center and tower fire and potentially kill a few villagers and keep a lot of villagers idle.

Galley Micromanagement

This section should be written by some of the other top water players from the days of old. For years and years my water map expertise was based on having a great start and focusing on managing my economy as good as possible. However, through some help from top player friends (you know who you are!), they have taught me almost half of this section (maybe inadvertently more through some friendly battles against them prior). It is much appreciated!

Let's start with what I knew beforehand since it laid a solid foundation for everything after. Two of the most simple concepts about galley fighting is about the number of ships and how you want them to fire. Very simply you should fight when you have more ships and you should run when you have less. You should also focus fire enemy ships because it gives you a mathematical advantage (after you kill their first ship they have 1 less ship firing, so on and so forth).

Galleys have a long build time in AoC at 1 minute of game time but it can also take a long time to walk (or sail?) across some maps. This means the key variables are time, number of docks, and resources to determine the most ships your enemy can have. In practice you never have to calculate this out but it is useful to know roughly how long it will take for your enemy to attack you. We

discussed the implications of this previously by choosing whether to do an aggressive, standard, or defensive grush.

This is the rest of the stuff that formed the premise of my galley micro prior to some very useful help. When you have a galley that is being focus fired in an early fight run him back or perpendicular and then micromanage him to re-attack once your enemy changes which ship they are firing at. Try to remember and kill low enemy hit point ships when they are in the fight. Using patrol when your ships are on defense by selecting a group and clicking 0 to 2 tiles away makes them move in a more packed way than standing there idly and allows them to fight better in an unmicromanaged fight (remember that it takes a few seconds for patrol to kick in). Hunting down galleys is similar to hunting down other units with archers and skirmishers, you want to chase and shoot when they are nearby and in a straight trajectory with your arrows. After you shoot make sure you keep moving in their general direction immediately so you can try for more kills. You can repair your boats but it is generally not advisable unless you are on a map like highland where you are both grushing and you are doing everything in your power to win water. Once you have a few more ships you want to move your ships back and forth while trying to shoot at your enemy the second before he shoots at you and then dodge his shots. If you are too close with your ships you will both hit with your arrows. If you are in a mid to far distance fight without ballistics it is extremely helpful to run ships through the middle zone (directly perpendicular to the fight) so that they will be heavily shot at and will dodge most of the shots. Your enemy can either do the same to you, move closer and kill that ship, run away, or refocus his galleys (screwing up patrol on them). My general recommendation would be to do the same if you have a few more galleys, move closer if you have a lot more galleys, and run away if it is about even and if you don't have time to do the same.

Now let's discuss some other key factors you need to know to improve your water warfare. Galley micromanagement changed a lot with The Conquerors expansion because ships no longer took up a tile of space. They can move over top of one another and this allows them to be packed a lot tighter. It was a good change too because late game galley wars back in the day were a real mess where you could be royally screwed over if you fought in a narrow passage where your enemy could fit more ships (example if he was in the lake attacking you in a small river). With how well they are packed in AoC they also move differently. The packed formation is almost always the best formation for galleys because it allows your fire to be concentrated and it makes it difficult for the enemy to determine how many ships you have. When you move galleys in a packed formation there are two

different ways they move depending how far ahead you click. This is extremely important because if you click too far and your units change their lineup while you are trying to run you might lose an additional 1 to 6 ships, which can sometimes be the difference between a win and a loss. Let's show a rough diagram to clarify (G's are Galleys and C is where you Click your mouse): 1. Setup GG GG GG GG GG GG GG

C

Will do this: 2. In motion GG GG GG GG GG GG GG

And then get there like this: 3. End location GG GG GG GG GG GG GG

Which is absolutely perfect. Exactly what you wanted. Your ships can focus fire at any time along the way and they aren't doing anything weird or psychotic. Now take that exact same situation

and just click a few tiles further (tough to tell on water maps exactly how many tiles this difference is but pretty sure it is 8 tiles, could be 7 or 9) so that you are clicking more than 7 to 9 tiles away. GG, you have just asked for it! Now they will go from being packed sideways to being packed in a straight line (which is usually where you take heavy losses) and will ALSO turn back into the sideways lineup when they get 7 to 9 tiles away, for 2 "formation" (not technically formation) changes. It looks something like this: 1. Setup GG GG GG GG GG GG GG

C

Will do this: 2. In motion

GGGGGGG GGGGGGG

3. In motion GG GG GG GG GG GG GG

4. End location GG

GG GG GG GG GG GG

The two lineup changes will cause your units to move slower and get more confused than someone who only clicked within that range. This is what will cost you a few ships (sometimes a lot if it isn't laggy and they have ballistics) and sometimes the game.

Another way to prevent this from happening is to change stances from packed when you are planning on running away. The flank or staggered position are recommended because the box formation sometimes has some units move towards the enemy when they are forming their box.

Patrol is another thing you need to get comfortable with using in galley wars. Patrol makes units target enemy's more quickly and effectively (units stand around after killing a unit similar to the way sheep eaters stand around when a sheep is done if they are not patrolled). Patrol takes a few seconds to kick in where your units won't be attacking so you want to make sure you patrol ahead of a fight. In the early fights you will use micromanagement, focus fire, and dodging. Once your army hits a certain size (estimate of 10 to 20 galleys) it is usually more effective to use patrol than try to micromanage every move. If your enemy patrols and you are forced to fight without having time to patrol make sure you send ships perpendicularly through the center or close side to the fight so that the patrolled units target it without being able to hit it which should force your enemy to retarget your ships negating the patrol or to run away.

The best time to start using patrol is when you are camping your galleys in front of your fish ships facing your enemy. If they are going to attack you at your front, take your packed group of galleys and patrol one or two tiles to either side. This will make all your galleys move back and forth between two or three tiles and they will be closer together than ships in a packed formation and they will fire immediately on any enemy units within range.

Patrol is also very useful when you are attacking with your ships because it makes your units fight more effectively. If you use patrol across the map instead of just moving your army you automatically start to shoot anything in your route. The downside to patrolling across the map is that if you are busy micromanaging something else your units might turn back. In general you should patrol once you are near your enemy and you expect to be fighting. If your enemy has the upper hand, run! If you already engaged your enemy with your patrolled galleys sometimes a few will keep attacking even after you tell them to retreat similar to how villagers hunting boars turn back because you clicked on another resource. If that happens your best bet is to change the stance of your ships to "no attack stance" or "stand ground" and then click again. Don't forget them on those stances or they will get owned!

Another thing you have to watch out for is when there are weird shaped land masses that confuse some of your units so they aren't within range of the enemy while the enemy has all of his units within range of some of yours. It's tough to describe this type of situation but you will notice it occasionally when you are fighting around peninsulas. Just make sure you move back a few tiles if you are on the wrong side of this trade and fight as long as you possibly can if you are the one gaining the edge. While we are on the topic of landscape, there are a few of the non-standard maps that have hills on water. If that is the case make sure you take the hills and abuse their power!

Some players use a slightly different style for dodging in early galley wars by switching to the flanked position and then back to packed. It sounds like a lot of micromanagement but it is easy if you know those two hotkeys. In terms of the cool factor, yes it looks a lot cooler. In terms of effectiveness it can be slightly more effective than dodging by moving perpendicularly but it is susceptible to your enemy waiting for the moment when you switch back to packed and shooting in a direct line at a galley. For both styles it is definitely more about timing, distance and clicking quickly to shoot and dodge than it is about which one you choose.

Military Buildings If you are an experienced player you might want to skip this short section because you already have a solid foundation on where to place your military buildings and why. In the early game if you are playing defensively then you should typically build them in front of key resources (especially if your main gold mine is in front), or if there are no key resources up front, as a side-wall to your town center. Your buildings have decent line of sight so they can see enemy units coming, they have a lot more life than palisade walls, and you want to be able to garrison your units, attack, or defend without your opponent being able to force you to do something. It is also helpful in some situations to have them where you would be able to build a defensive tower before your enemy built an offensive one next to your buildings if he tried.

If you are on offense there are a lot of variables you need to consider when deciding where to forward build. If you build too close to your enemy there you are always at risk of him fighting you before you even have a chance to finish your buildings to make units. If you build too far away your units are vulnerable as they walk and they take a lot longer to be part of the attack. The general guideline is that you should forward build about a 25 to 40 tiles away from your enemy town center, preferably on a hill, and preferably buildings spread out far enough that they are used as natural outposts to see the enemy army if it walks to your base too. If you killed his scout in dark age it can be a lot more effective to rush closer and right behind wood, berries, gold, or stone. This will allow you to tower those key resources, still get your buildings up and a decent army up, and will be perfect if he starts to send his army to your base so you can quickly full on attack.

Another useful tool is to number your military buildings. You can number them individually so that you can build units from them without going to them and you can easily change their gather points. Grouping all your common military buildings together in a big group with one number assigned to it is extremely helpful when you want to change your gather points (especially so in the later stages of the game when you might have 10 of one building!). If you select your constructed buildings and include several unconstructed buildings when you number them and then you assign a gather point, the buildings that are still under construction won't have their gather point set there. The most effective way to make sure the new buildings have the right gather point is to press your previously assigned number after those buildings are built and then re-assign the gather point.

Another thing to consider is when your enemy builds his military buildings in an open area. If you are fighting heavily by them and you are using villagers too, once you cause him to retreat far enough away or you are winning the fight, you can palisade wall his buildings in. This is especially useful if you wall his barracks in while you are massing scouts or if you wall in a couple archery ranges to make them almost useless. This also leads into a weird bug (or joke) from one of the AoC developers. If you take certain buildings (haven't tested which ones) and right click a unit or anything immediately adjacent to it, that unit or building will slowly get hurt. If you get your buildings walled in you can use this to slowly kill a tile so that you might be able to use that building later in the game.

Feudal Age Land Military Tools There are a lot of tools available for your military units in AoC that can help your army fight more effectively. On land maps in the feudal age you won't need to use many of them because only using the left click button to move and attack on your mouse, as well as using numbers or your mouse to select your units, is almost all you need. Most fights in the feudal age are small army fights where it is much more important to retreat units, focus fire, and dodge than it is to use a defensive stance where your units are patrolled and in a scattered position. In fact the second part of that would commonly not help you at all and may even hinder you. However, there are still some tricks and tools that will help you to make sure your units are doing what you think they should be.

One of the first tricks is when you are trying to focus fire an enemy unit with scouts. Since units collide with each other in AoC the game developers thought it would be a good idea if units on aggressive stance would go after other units if they couldn't hit their intended target quickly enough. This is a problem, especially if you are trying to kill a single unit and then run away. In order to make sure your scouts only attack the unit you clicked on, put them on "stand ground" attack stance. This will cause them to only go for the targeted unit and to stand there like idiots when the deed is done so make sure you micromanage them after and change their attack stance (especially if you want them to keep fighting). Another related problem is when your scouts on the "aggressive" attack stance start wandering to the enemy town center. In order to prevent them from wandering far away from where they started it is a good idea to put them on the "defensive" attack stance. This won't necessarily prevent them from following a unit to the town center but it will stop your scouts from acquiring targets that are far away, which makes them easier to manage.

One other weird thing the game developers did was introduced a problem when you take more than 1 unit and you want to move them both to a specific location. The game calculates the middle point for your units and moves their middle point towards where you told them to go. This means that you might even have some of your units moving in the wrong direction that you wanted them to! This is usually a problem when you have scouts in different parts of the map but they are part of the same group. You can get around this by selecting each of the units individually and sending them to that spot.

The other main tool is when you are using ranged units. You don't want them to wander around too much because they are vulnerable when they are alone. They are also much more powerful when they are uphill so it is a great idea to put them on stand ground on top of hills or in any situation where they might wander to their death.

StoneWallin' Stone walls cost 5 stone and take about 9 seconds for 1 villager to build. They are much stronger than palisades and can even keep large armies out (absent siege) for quite a while. If you stone wall yourself in there is very little an enemy can do to attack you. Stone walling takes up a decent amount of villager time and not all maps can be fully walled with your initial 200 stone which means that it isn't a light decision to stone wall yourself in unless the map is very easy to wall. When you wall in using any sort of walls, make sure you check you are fully walled in by trying to send a unit to the other side. If it can't make it there then you know you are walled in but if there is a hole your unit will walk there to go out. You can also use stone walls to wall your enemy in or wall your towers in. Another rare use but extremely effective in certain situations is when you wall in the enemy army (especially in pond forests or edges of the map). In the same way as palisade walls, you can just tap wall the foundation to create a wall quickly that won't have full hit points if you need to keep the enemy out right away. Another good use is to use 3 walls to keep a villager safe from melee units while he constructs a building. If you are desperately need to wall quickly and have extra stone it is a good idea to use buildings and gates in addition to stone walls.

Gates cost 30 stone for 4 tiles as opposed to stone walling which are 20 stone for 4 tiles but they will allow your units to go in or out after and you might not have time to tap build 3 more tiles. It can be difficult to quickly place a gate facing the direction you want. The only way to change the way a gate faces is to re-direct it around a piece of wall (stone, palisade, or other gate) so if you need to build the gate quickly just drop a single tile of stone wall first (you don't have to build it at all). Then you place your gate 1 tile away (remember 0 tiles is immediately next to the wall tile) so that it will re-direct that direction. If you are 0 tiles away with your mouse pointer the gate will not change direction. You will lose the 5 stone if you build overtop of the foundation but it is definitely worth it if you are keeping an army out. If you have slightly more time use a palisade tile foundation instead so you lose 2 wood instead of 5 stone.

Another time you should consider using stone walls is to wall in enemy gold or stone piles. One villager and 60 stone might be the difference between a win and a loss if you are both playing a defensive game and you manage to stone wall a side gold pile in.

When you know an enemy is probably going to put a castle somewhere that you couldn't stop its construction, put single stone walls so that there isn't a 4x4 space for them to drop the castle. If you need to build there just delete the walls.

Crazy Combative Castle Age The castle age is definitely what sets AoC apart from almost all other real time strategy games. It has every single element you would want in an RTS: heavy scale go for broke attacks, booming, raiding, defensive buildings, a wide mix of effective units, and controlling key resources. This makes games where players go into castle age on equal ground very enjoyable for the players and their spectators.

There are lots of things to do when you first reach castle age, but first and foremost you usually are going to decide what to do with everything you have left over from feudal age, so let's start with the key military upgrades in castle age and when you should get them.

Castle Age Military Upgrades If you have any units left over from feudal age in terms of my estimated probability of what they are from most common to least common in 1vs1: archers, skirmishers, galleys, scouts, spearmen, towers, and then men at arms.

First let's talk about archers. For archer upgrades there is the crossbowmen upgrade, bodkin arrow, the second archer armor, thumb ring, and ballistics. The crossbowmen upgrade (archery range) costs 125 food and 75 gold and gives your archers 5 more hit points, 1 more attack, and 1 more range which makes them much deadlier. In general you should get this any time you have more than 6 archers. The bodkin arrow upgrade (blacksmith) costs 200 food and 100 gold and gives your archers 1 more attack and 1 more range. You should get this (if you are only getting for the purpose of your archers) anytime you have more than 8 archers. The second archer armor (blacksmith) costs 150 food and 150 gold, gives your archers an extra 1 pierce and 1 hack armor, and is almost never useful unless you are being shot by enemy ranged units. You would be safe not researching it for your archers in most situations in the castle age, but since it does make melee units sometimes take an extra hit to kill an archer, generally you should research this when you have about 20 to 30 archers. Ballistics and thumb rings are interesting technologies. Ballistics is researched at the university (and quite often it is the only technology you research at the university in 1vs1) at a cost of 300 wood and 175 gold. For the steep price your archers will be able to hit moving targets. This is a great technology when you are in a fight with more units than your enemy because you will be able to kill lots of units when your enemy tries to run away. You should get this technology when you have more than 20 archers and you think it is likely you will be able to catch some stray units with your army or run into their main army when they have less units. One thing that is ridiculously awesome is pairing thumb ring with ballistics as a surprise when you attack and it is an archer war. Thumb ring costs 300 food and 250 wood and makes your archers fire about 19% equivalent faster (game says it makes them more accurate, this test was done with 40 archers attacking a stone wall tile from about 5 tiles away, so it could have been increased accuracy that caused the stone wall to die in 84.2% of the time). In terms of raw approximate statistics this would mean that you should research thumb ring when you have about 40 archers if they staggered their shots and didn't all fire at the closest target, but since groups of archers all over-kill their closest target (it might take 7 shots to kill the nearest enemy crossbow but your group might fire 30 arrows at it), it is usually a good idea to get thumb ring when you have 23 to 35 archers.

Since cavalry archers have a lot of the same applicable upgrades let's discuss them here too. All of the upgrades (except the crossbow upgrade) are also applicable to cavalry archers. For some of the attack upgrades (bodkin arrow, ballistics) you can use the general guideline that you should get them when you have the same number of cavalry archers as you had archers in the paragraph above. The armor upgrade is also similar except you can delay it even later if you are only trying to shoot and run against melee units and siege. Thumb ring helps cavalry archers less than regular archers. From a single test it seems that thumb ring makes cavalry archers attack about 12% faster. In the same way as archers above from an approximate statistics standpoint you should get thumb ring when you have approximately 50 cavalry archers, but from a practical standpoint because of focus fire overkill you should research it when you have 25 to 38 cavalry archers. Bloodlines is also applicable to cavalry archers and it gives them a whopping 40% extra hit points. If you are only hunting villagers this upgrade doesn't particularly help you but against everything else this is a great upgrade. Often you build a stable just to get this upgrade for your cavalry archers. You should generally research this upgrade when you have about 10 to 15 cavalry archers (on the higher end when you don't have a stable pre-built). Husbandry also affects cavalry archers by making them run faster which is helpful if you are doing a lot of hit and run with large armies or you have ballistics and are trying to take out as much of a smaller enemy army as possible, but in most games you won't research husbandry for your cavalry archers. If you anticipate one of those scenarios you can research husbandry when you have as few as 20 cavalry archers but in general you should wait until you have 35 to 45.

Skirmishers are the next unit that you often have a few of leftover from feudal age. They don't get much stronger in castle age but they are still great for countering ranged units. The elite skirmisher upgrade (archery range) gives skirmishers 1 extra attack, 5 extra hit points, and 1 extra pierce armor for a cost of 250 wood and 160 gold. You should get this if you have at least 10 skirmishers and are going to be facing heavy ranged units from your enemy. If you are facing enemy ranged units (except skirmishers) on flat land the second archer armor upgrade (blacksmith) is more useful than bodkin arrow. Thumb ring has no effect on skirmishers. Ballistics is useful when hunting down stray ranged units but if you are only upgrading it for skirmishers than you probably shouldn't get it unless you have at least 30.

The 3rd unit that is commonly left over from the feudal age are galleys (of course not on land

maps you silly...!). Anytime you have more than 10 of these when you castle you should get the war galley upgrade if you are still planning on fighting to take water (same goes for other ship upgrades). It costs 230 food and 100 gold and gives your galleys 1 more attack, 15 more hit points, and 1 extra range. Bodkin arrow also gives your ships 1 more attack and 1 more range. You should get bodkin arrow when you have 10 to 12 ships. Careening costs 250 food and 150 gold and it gives your ships an additional pierce armor. If you are getting careening for galley wars then you should wait until you have 25 to 35 ships. You should get ballistics when you have 16 to 25 galleys. The wide range for ballistics is because it costs 300 wood and 175 gold and if someone were to micro 19 galleys against 16 galleys they would probably win even with the group of 16 galleys moved some horizontally to dodge shots. The same goes for if the guy with ballistics and less ships moves to close to enemy docks and more ships are ungarrisoned from the docks and it isn't practical to run because the losses would be even worse.

Scouts left over are more uncommon now than they were in the past. There was a time when scouts were added after ranged units in feudal because spearmen wouldn't stand a chance against ranged units, but now players wall more and control their ranged units well which means scouts are usually used more for early raiding purposes instead of being "the army". There are some open maps where this is the exception. However let's talk about what you can do with leftover scouts from the feudal age. Scouts have the light cavalry upgrade (stable) that gives them 15 more hit points and 2 more attack for a cost of 150 food and 50 gold. When you have more than 7 scouts and you are planning to use them for battle it is a good idea to get the light cavalry upgrade. The second armor upgrade reduces upgraded crossbow damage by 25% and upgraded cavalry archer damage by 20%. It also reduces unupgraded town center fire by 50%. So when you get the second cavalry armor upgrade really depends on what you are fighting, but as a general guideline you should get it when you have 10 to 15 light cavalry (lower end when you are only fighting unupgraded town centers). In most situations you shouldn't bother with the second attack upgrade (costing 220 food and 120 gold at the blacksmith) until you have about 20 light cavalry. Since we are on the subject of cavalry let's talk about knights and camels too. For the above numbers, multiply the number of light cavalry by 2/3 to get the approximate equivalent number of camels or knights (just don't use camels under town center fire!). Husbandry (stable) costs 250 food is another technology that affects cavalry units by making them run 10% faster. In most 1vs1 games you won't even need husbandry. The main uses for it are when you mass camels and are waiting for an incoming knight attack or it is late game and you want your units to run a bit faster (few minor uses like running up to ranged units or hunting enemy villagers

quicker). As a general rule of thumb if you are getting this upgrade for cavalry don't bother with husbandry until you have at least 40 cavalry.

Quite often you will have leftover spearmen in feudal if the enemy made scouts. The pikemen upgrade costs 215 food and 90 gold and gives your spearmen 10 more hit points, 1 more attack against all units, and an extra 7 attack against cavalry. If you are fighting cavalry with your spearmen then you should get this upgrade once you have 10 spearmen, but if you are fighting almost anything else you should wait until you have about 15 spearmen. The squires upgrade (barracks) costs 200 food and gives your infantry 10% extra speed so, similar to husbandry, you won't bother with it in most games. If you have 40 infantry it is probably worth researching but don't bother until then. The infantry armor upgrade (blacksmith) costs 200 food and 100 gold and gives your infantry 1 extra hack and 1 extra pierce armor. You should get this when you have about 20 to 25 infantry units. The second attack upgrade (blacksmith) for infantry costs 220 food and 120 gold and you should typically get it when you have about 25 to 30 infantry units (it helps cavalry too so, like all technologies that overlap between units, you can use an approximated weighted average).

The only military unit you could left from the feudal age are man at arms. Since they are almost always not your most effective option we are going to exclude them from this discussion (unless you are caught with your pants down when a meso civilization fast imperials and is making eagles).

(YOSNCMO) Your Other Shiny New Castle Age Military Options Your other military half of the reason (or in some cases, the whole reason) for going to the castle age is because you get access to so many new units: fire ships, demolition ships, knights, camels, monks, rams, scorpions, mangonels, unique units, cavalry archers, petards, and in some cases eagle warriors.

Fireships cost 75 wood and 45 gold and are your go-to unit when killing small groups of enemy feudal galleys or you are building lots of them because the enemy won water in feudal age and is doing a large fish boom without a large galley defense. The main way for feudal galleys to defend is by shooting and running against fireships. Winning water with fireships is one of those things where you may have control of the water, but your fireships really can't help for much else because they only have a range of 1. When galleys are massed fireships lose their effectiveness.

Demolition ships cost 70 wood and 50 gold and are even rarer than fire ships. Demo ships blow themselves up and do substantial damage to whatever is in their vicinity. Galleys kill demolition ships very quickly so their main use is when you are facing a pack of fire ships. If your enemy is killing your docks by surrounding them with galleys then a couple of demolition ships can be very cost effective in that situation too. The last main use for demolition ships is when you are using them to kill land units in a shallows crossing. This is truly where they shine as 2 or 3 well placed demolition ships can wipe out an army.

Knights are very often one of your go-to units when you hit castle age. They are great for raiding and their speed allows you to choose your fights. Their main counter, spearmen, when unupgraded cost effectively beat unupgraded knights when you fight knights in a 2 to 1 ratio (which is approximately the cost ratio too since spearmen cost 60 resources a piece while knights cost 135 resources), but this also means that if you are fighting knights versus spearmen in a 1 to 1 ratio, it is approximately breakeven. This means if you find an area with a knight where there is only 1 spearmen protecting villagers, don't be afraid to kill it and then go to town!

Camels are usually created as a counter to enemy knights. Camels cost 55 food and 60 gold, beat knights in 1vs1 fights and run slightly faster. They are not too strong in most other situations due to their low pierce armor and attack for their cost.

Monks are a really interesting unit. These slow moving old age men yelling gibberish are surprisingly effective when they are used properly. In most cases they are used in defensive situations but on certain maps they can be used very offensively. For 100 gold you get a 30 hit point unit that has the ability to convert a unit within 15 seconds, can heal your units, and can pick up relics. They can garrison in towers, town centers, and castles which makes them absolutely great for dealing with nonoverwhelming knight raids by trying to convert a unit and then garrisoning if they are unsuccessful to await a safe time to try again. That is their main military use in most 1vs1 settings, although gathering relics is sometimes their primary use and healing is usually just an added benefit. They have a range of 9 for converting and a range of 2 for healing. It seems that monks heal a bit quicker than 2 hit points per second. When you convert an enemy unit you are essentially killing that unit for your enemy and creating it for yourself so try to take the most expensive units (and with the highest hit points) you can. If your monk is trying to convert a unit and then you change targets without ordering your monk to do something else, the time spent converting the first unit will be used on the second unit so the second unit will be converted a lot faster. If you are building monks mostly for the relics you should try to build your monastery in a safe place. There are a lot of monk specific upgrades but in 9 times out of 10 games (unless you are an arena map only player) you won't even research one so we won't discuss the upgrades in this guide.

Rams are slow lumbering siege units that cost 160 wood and 75 gold. They are meant for leveling buildings at close range and they are susceptible to melee attacks. Since they are expensive it is usually a good idea not to build rams lightly, you should always make sure you have enough units to defend them while you storm an enemy base. The other main use for rams is to tank when you and your enemy both have large ranged armies. Rams have 175 hit points and only take 1 damage per arrow they receive so if you have a choice of having 4 rams in front of 40 cavalry archers or 7 knights (approximately the same cost), it is probably slightly advantageous to go with rams despite them not doing any damage. Rams also have the ability to garrison units. This is not used very often but it is useful when you are trying to stop melee units from destroying your rams but your units are very vulnerable to tower, castle, or town center fire. If you have infantry units garrisoned they will also add a small amount of attack damage for the ram. The two most common situations to garrison

units are when you are pushing as a meso civilization and you are garrisoning eagles or you are pushing with any other civilization and you are garrisoning pikemen to protect your rams. By default rams are built with the defensive stance enabled. This means that after they kill a building unless there is another fairly close they will stand around and have a coffee break, so make sure you put them on aggressive stance! They only autotarget buildings but they do a lot of damage when they ram other siege units too so definitely use them for that purpose if you can get them up close.

Mangonels are expensive fragile siege units that have decent pierce armor and are effective at doing lots of damage to units that are packed close together. They have 1 more range than town centers and get an attack bonus against buildings so they are great for slow pushes. They are extremely vulnerable to melee attacks so you want to make sure you have a way of keeping them safe. Their other main use is to defend your base against any type of ranged unit. In open fields ranged units can still destroy them (sometimes cost effectively) but their real power is when you are using them behind walls. They are also very strong at kill rams (although rams can kill mangonels if they get close enough to ram them!).

Castle age scorpions are extremely rare in 1vs1. They cost 75 wood and 75 gold and do 12 damage per shot that carries through any units it passes (not doing full damage though). They have 40 hit points so they are also very fragile. The main situation you would use them would be if you had a siege shop and knights and you were trying to push someone who was just massing pikemen. Another use would be if your enemy sent a few archers to attack you but it would be overkill to build a mangonel.

Unique units, as their name suggests, are a single unit that are unique to each civilization and can be built from a castle. Their uses vary greatly so we won't discuss them here.

Petards are another type of self destructing explosive unit that are built from a castle and cost 80 food and 20 gold. There are only 3 realistic uses for these guys (except for a few very rare one-off scenarios). Their main use is to destroy enemy walls quickly as 2 petards will kill a stone wall. The other use is when your castle is being attacked by rams. 2 petards will kill a ram and they cost 160 food and 40 gold versus 160 wood and 75 gold for a ram, so they are slightly cost effective but very

helpful if you need to try to keep a castle alive. The third use is when your enemy has a forward castle and you know he is fast imperialing with a crappy economy to build trebuchets while you are doing a big castle boom. It is very expensive to take out a castle with petards (more than the castle costs!) but it may be slightly cheaper and safer in some circumstances than trying to build enough siege and fighting under castle fire long enough to bring it down.

Eagle warriors cost 20 food and 50 gold and are only available for the Aztecs and the Mayans. They are essentially a cross between knights and light cavalry from a raiding, scouting, and a monkkilling point of view. They are pretty decent against the archer line and they rip spearmen and skirmishers to shreds. Interestingly, they are strongly countered by the swordsmen line but even then swordsmen are almost never used to counter eagles. When they are unupgraded they have 50 hit points, 7 attack, 0 hack armor, and 2 pierce armor. You should get the first armor upgrade when you have 7 to 10 eagles and the second armor upgrade when you have 13 to 20. The first attack upgrade is good to get when you have 15 to 25 eagles with the second attack upgrade when you have 30 to 40 eagles. These numbers are very rough guidelines because it makes a huge difference what you are fighting with eagles to determine when to get the blacksmith upgrades. For example if you are fighting enemy eagles in the open you should definitely get the first attack upgrade before you get the second armor upgrade, but if you are fighting under town center fire the second armor upgrade helps a lot more.

Castle Age Military Buildings Most often you should build your military buildings in the same manner and with the same considerations as the ones you built in the feudal age. The new buildings have slightly different characteristics so we will just discuss those ones here.

Both your siege workshop and monastery buildings build units that are more fragile and expensive than the other buildings. This means you want to put them in a spot that is either behind other buildings or near town centers, towers, castles, or your army so that you can defend the units as they are built (garrison them inside the building if you aren't using them yet or if they can't be defended). The only time you should place them aggressively is when you know you have a bigger army than your enemy and you are planning on attacking.

Castles are another building that are very important to know when and where you should build them. Since they cost 650 stone and take a while to build you have to plan far in advance of actually building one. Typically the best places to build are where they are either defending a significant amount of your economy or they are within range of the enemy economy. If you are building a defensive castle just for the unique units it is a good idea to put it in a spot to defend at least 2 resource gathering areas (especially if they are hilled) and a good chunk of your economy. Castles will do more damage to the enemy if they are uphill but because of how strong castle fire is your enemy will probably be smart enough to try not to fight under castle fire whether it is up or down hill. If you are castle pushing your enemy, you want to build it as close to enemy town centers, resource points, and military buildings as possible without jeopardizing the ability to construct it. If you don't have enough army to defend your castle builders then your enemy can just kill your villagers. If you both don't have army there is still a risk if your enemy notices your castle going up and builds a tower in a fraction of the time and then garrisons villagers and kills all your builders. If you are building a castle to try to retake water you want it as close to water as possible and you want it built as quickly as possible so you don't lose a lot of villagers to enemy ships. If you make it on the pinnacle of a peninsula that will give you maximum castle protection for building docks (with high risk while you are building it!). A good way to do that is to start building a castle where your enemy will see you are building it but you just start building it with a couple villagers. Once your enemy starts sending most of his ships there, cancel it and build your castle in the ideal spot with a tonne of villagers.

Another thing you should know about castles is that the first tap a villager uses to start the castle only gives it a minimal amount of hit points. If your enemy kills it at that point you will still lose all the stone you invested to build it. That is why it is a good idea to clear enemy units away (even if temporarily), especially mangonels, rams, trebuchets, bombard cannons, and bombard towers. Those are the most common units that kill a castle when you are only building it for a few seconds.

In the same way as other buildings you can wall in the foundation so that your enemy can't build it. This is very useful if it is in the early game where a castle could be a game changer and your enemy has it mostly built and you absolutely have to prevent it from being built.

Town Center Placement If you have your main gold on flat ground and you are thinking about building a town center by it, which side should you build your town center on? For some inexplicable reason most people naturally place their town center on the side closest to their base. That is just wrong! If you are attacked with archers or mangonels or monks, can they stop your villagers from mining gold? Yes! How do we get around this? We place our town centers on the side facing the enemy. They might still be able to stop a few farmers from working but they will be in a much more vulnerable position if they try to camp between your base and your new town center to try to stop you from mining gold. If you are in a situation where you are less concerned about defense, you should typically optimize your town center placements for gathering multiple resources and having ample farm space.

Another useful thing to know about town centers is that it doesn't cost stone to repair, but you do need to have at least 1 stone in your reserve or your villagers won't be allowed to repair them.

Economy 339 The second wood upgrade is always the most important castle age upgrade you can research. For the cost of 150 food and 100 wood at any lumber pit all of your villagers gather wood 20% faster. From a purely cost efficiency basis compared to building villagers you shouldn't research this upgrade until you have about 20 villagers gathering wood. However, you can't directly compare it to building villagers because your town center should already be working full time and for the added resources this still has a fairly quick payback time. More often than not you should research it immediately when you hit the castle age.

The second farm upgrade gives all new farms an extra 125 food before they run fallow, and allows your villagers the ability to carry 1 additional food when farming, for a cost of 125 food and 125 wood researched at a mill. If you have lots of extra resources when you hit the castle age you can research it but as a general guideline you should research it 20 seconds before all those farms you built near the beginning of the castle age start to go fallow. If you were straight booming this would usually be about 9 to 12 minutes after you hit the castle age. If you are planning on switching mostly to a wood and gold based army it can even be okay to skip this upgrade entirely.

Handcart is similar to the wheelbarrow upgrade. Your villagers move 10% faster and carry 50% more resources for a cost of 300 food and 200 wood researched at your town center. This upgrade disproportionately helps farmers and you should research it when you have about 70 to 90 villagers.

The 2nd mining upgrades for gold and stone should almost never be researched. They both improve villager mining efficiency by 15% at a cost of 200 food and 150 wood. You might research the gold upgrade if there is still a lot of gold left on the map and you have more than 20 miners in the late game, but in almost all circumstances during the mid game you would improve your efficiency dramatically more by adding 4 villagers to mine gold and by adding an extra mining camp. Another exception would be if you were using an extremely gold intensive army and you had more than 25 or 30 miners in the midgame.

Castle Age Military Micromanagement Let's start our discussion with archers. We've already discussed some aspects of their use in the feudal age which is similar to castle age such as hit & run and retreating to tight areas or to safe places. The main new micromanagement thing to be dealt with in the castle age are enemy mangonels. When AoC first came out most people would just put their archers in staggered form and attack the mangonel. Most people using mangonels would just right click the closest unit as their archers were approaching. In panic situations where you don't have time to do much else these are still two valid approaches. There are much more effective ways to handle this situation from both sides of the fight if you see your enemy before they are within range. Let's assume your archers are in packed form because that is how they are most effective against most other units they encounter. As the mangonel user you want to anticipate when the archers will be within range and use attack ground on their approach trajectory. If your enemy isn't micromanaging their archers this can do enormous amounts of damage and sometimes change a loss into a win. As the archer user you also want to have one hand ready to use different formations and the other ready to move your units towards or away the mangonel. There is a bit of guesswork as to what your enemy will do next as you don't know if he is going to use attack ground and where he is precisely going to shoot. You can tell approximately where the shot is going once the mangonel fires and although that doesn't give you a lot of time to move out of the way just seeing where it is facing can usually tell you enough.

If the mangonel is facing the middle of your group use the flank button while moving closer to usually dodge most of the shot. After that most people will take their second shot at one of the two groups created. If they wait until right before the mangonel is "reloaded" without targeting a particular group, grab each of your archer groups individually, press flank again and move towards the mangonel. Now you will have 4 groups of archers and you have likely dodged the second shot. If you know you won't have time to keep dodging shots the best way is to keep selecting individual groups of archers and flanking them again until a mangonel can only reasonably kill 1 or 2 archers with a shot because they are extremely spread out. Most people won't use attack ground on empty space so this style is extremely effective.

As the mangonel user, it is almost always a good idea to retreat after you take your first shot. If you can time it so that you wait a fraction of a second before you can take your second shot and your

enemy still decides to attack you with his archers, that is the perfect time to attack. Archers that are shooting can't move for a fraction of a second so if they get hit by a solid volley you will do a lot of damage. Mangonels also have a minimum range so in some cases your enemy will try to get in that space instead of trying to kill the mangonel beforehand. That is why it is good to retreat to other defensible areas (like a town center or your army). You can also repair mangonels with your villagers and that is definitely a good idea if your mangonel is the only thing preventing your enemy's archers from denying a key resource or having open season on your villagers.

Raiding is another very useful skill in the castle age. Raiding is when you are looking for stray villagers or units that you can cost effectively kill but you won't have as much time to micromanage your units as you would in the feudal age because you are managing a larger economy and possibly several groups of units as well. When we talk about raiding, most people immediately think of some form of cavalry or certain unique units that are amazing at raiding. We will also add archers to the list because there are a few common circumstances that arise where you can raid with them.

The best spots to raid are areas where there are lots of unprotected enemy villagers where your units aren't in any danger. Those are prime locations and you should usually attack those first. You should especially do so if you have a faster army or at least the same speed than your enemy and it is open enough to run away with minor losses.

Let's start with knights, the most common classical raiding unit that pops into most players' heads (except for relative newcomers who have been around for the cavalry archer era and stick to one of the most popular 1vs1 settings). There are quite a few situations where you will be focusing almost exclusively on raiding with knights as opposed to trying to take down town centers or fighting the enemy army. The main things you have to worry about when raiding with knights are town centers, pikemen, camels, monks, large groups of archers, and walls.

Using knights to raid villagers near town centers is as old as the game itself. When both knights and town center are unupgraded, villagers are working close to the town center (within 3 tiles), and with good players' garrisoning speed my bet would be on the garrisoner rather than the raider. This is because each arrow from the 6 range town center does 3 damage to a knight. This is substantial and at

3 or less range almost all the arrows will likely hit. Even if you go close to pretend to tap a villager, when you are at 4 tiles away they garrison and you micromanage well by turning perpendicular to avoid the shots you will still likely take more in damage than it costs for them to have idle villagers for a couple seconds - and that is if you are paying close attention. If you see a villager further from the town center at say, 5 or 6 tiles away, then you might be able to get away with cost effectively killing it by running a touch closer to their town center and attacking the villager outwards. From practical experience (and by checking a few enemy's and personal recorded games over the years), it seems that the approximate breakeven point for raiding villagers under enemy town centers is when you have the first armor upgrade on your knights and you are attacking in 2 spots simultaneously. This is well accomplished by numbering both groups of knights and patrolling them into their attack zones (where you are sure there aren't enemy units waiting for you!) and then retreating whichever group the enemy garrisons first and retreating the second group 4 or 5 seconds later. In important tournament matches with the best of the best there have still been times where the player thinks the warning attack bell was just for that one spot only to turn to another town center and see half their villagers are dead. When you are running away with your knights make sure that you don't run in a straight line outwards from the town center. You might have to for the first few steps but after that you want to change your trajectory to an angled escape so that the enemy town center shots miss your knights. Town centers also have a limit of 15 villagers garrisoning at a time. This gives you another approximate breakeven point when your enemy has more than 15 villagers in the area. If you don't have any armor upgrades researched it still probably isn't worth it but once you have the first armor upgrade and 4 or more knights with no enemy army nearby, it will be approximately cost effective to kill villagers while taking town center fire directly under the town center until you have less than 4 knights or most of the "stray" villagers are dead. This gets even better when you have both armor upgrades and your enemy still hasn't researched fletching. At that point it becomes cost effective to keep knights under town center fire solely to keep the villagers from working. It isn't cost effective by much if you only have 1 knight under a town center and he can only attack buildings but it is absolutely great if he is killing stray villagers. If you are the person defending against this, research fletching immediately. Fletching doubles the amount of damage each arrow will do to a knight and you will still have 10 arrows per town center because 15 villagers times 5 damage per villager divided by 6 damage per shot is still greater than the maximum arrows of 10 (keep in mind that AoC rounds downwards so if you had 7 villagers garrisoned times 5 per villager divided by 6 you would only have 5 arrows).

If you are the raiding player and it is pikemen you are fighting against you should only engage

them in battle when you have at least 2 knights for every pikemen. Most times it is better to just avoid them because they are slower than knights so you can attack for a few seconds and then run away. Another good tactic is to split your knights and run away any knights that are being chased by pikemen while leaving the ones that aren't in any immediate danger hacking away. If you do have to engage pikemen, especially if the enemy army is mostly pikemen, it is extremely effective to send in any noncavalry unit first, even villagers or rams. Since units in AoC typically attack the closest enemy unit or the one that is attacking them and since pikemen take eons to kill noncavalry units this could easily turn a cost inefficient fight into a cost efficient one.

Camels are a big problem for knight raiding especially if you are in enemy territory. They run slightly faster than knights and kill them in 1 to 1 ratio so if you try to run home you might not make it or you will but lose a lot of hit points. If you have more knights than they have camels in a 3 to 2 ratio you should fight them. If you fight 1vs1 while you are uphill you can do okay too. It is best if you have extra army nearby, especially if they are ranged units, and even if the enemy has ranged units too because knights against camels with crossbows shooting on both sides is more cost efficient for the knight/crossbow player due to camels low pierce armor.

Monks are the ultimate knight raiding defense unit. Not only will you almost always convert an enemy knight if you target him from more than 9 tiles away but you also get the added benefit of converting more than once, garrisoning if there is danger, collecting relics, and healing your units. If you are the knight raider you want to avoid micromanaged monks whenever possible. If you know where they are located sometimes a small distraction elsewhere can give you enough time to get close enough so you can kill the monks before they convert. One other thing you can do as a raider is to keep knights always close to where the monks spawn so that you can kill them before they get far away or get to a garrisoning spot. If you are using knights and the monk has been wololing for a few seconds, and you are about 4 to 6 tiles away, and this makes you pretty sure that even if you run or attack you will still be converted, it is better to delete your unit so that your enemy won't obtain possession.

Knights can take down palisade walls pretty quickly. As long as the wall isn't up against something else you can have 3 knights target it if you move your knights close and target the tile a few times. If you are unaware of where your enemy might have stray villagers because you haven't scouted

then it is a good idea to keep your knights in scattered formation so they cover more ground.

Raiding with archers and cavalry archers are very similar so we are going to discuss both of them at the same time. As we discussed in prior sections when you attack with archers you want to have an exit strategy most of the time. When you are raiding with archers the same deal applies, although you already realize that you might lose some of your army while you are running away but you are trying to more than offset that by doing damage to your opponent. The best way to do this is to have several groups of units. If your enemy sees 10 archers on approach from one side he is very likely to send his entire army to kill it. What you are trying to do is to immediately start running to a decent place to fight or just plain run while you rush in with your other group and try to kill as much as you can. Let's use an example to clarify our point. If your opponent has a ridiculously open map and you both have about 30 ranged units (let's just say 50-50 mix of archers and skirmishers). You are on the offense. You send 15 skirmishers and 10 archers to one side of his base where you know you can't do any immediate damage if his army is there so he sends his entire army to defend. Meanwhile you have 5 archers attack on the other side of his base wreaking havoc. Often when panicking people make mistakes so it is quite likely they will send too much army over there to compensate and then you can attack with your main crew. If they don't, you still might have killed a few villagers while you run away. Another effective ways to raid is to leave archers in every spot conceivable. It is usually cost effective to leave an archer behind the enemy wood pit or within range of farmers. If you see the enemy army coming in time you can just run away or lose a single unit. For the amount of harassment this does it is usually a good proposition on open maps.

One other thing that is very effective is if you have a low hit point scout that you won't need and you place it in such a way that you would see an enemy town center being built but your enemy wouldn't realize you are watching. Then you send an army there and pick off those stray builders.

Game Theory It was debatable whether to put this section in the "Ages" section or as a standalone article prior to it but it seems prudent to be discussed in a spot where it wouldn't discourage newer players from improving because of the complexity but it would still be something they would be eager to slowly learn because it is cool and necessary.

If you have never learned what game theory is, in a nutshell it is where you are trying to make optimal decisions for yourself while being aware that your competitors may be aware of what you are doing and trying to make optimal decisions for themselves.

Let's start with one complex recent example that puzzled me greatly and was of high importance to the top player 1vs1 arabia scene: Huns war 1vs1 with one player drushing and fast castling versus another player who is planning to do the standard feudal scouts build. If you can't see all the reasoning behind the major decisions here yet, that is not a problem, but hopefully this helps you understand how game theory applies to AoC. Let's call the drush-fast castle-ca player CAman and the standard feudal scouts player SCtime.

Both CAman and SCtime find their major resources early in the game and have decent economies in the dark age. CAman sees that he only has 3 spots to completely wall his valley base (at the bottom of a bunch of hills) in: 2 small 8 tile sections and a 25 tile section in front of his town center. CAman knows that all the hills around his base could be a real problem if he didn't prevent SCtime from getting any of them, but he has walled off all of them except the main hill in front of his base (it is still closed but the walls don't take the hill). He decides to drush, double palisade layer, and mass cavalry archers. He does this because of these things: - He can't be feudal rushed into oblivion because other than the main hill in front of his base he has hills inside that are easy to add walls or a tower to. - He knows he can't be attacked by anything without him first getting fair warning - He knows that no matter what his enemy does this will be a versatile decent decision

SCtime on the other hand realizes his map is not as good as CAman which is common on 1vs1 arabia and knows that if he drushed and fast castled, there could be a risk of CAman feudal rushing and cutting him off from wood or gold. He decides that the standard scout build is the safest for the time being because it can go toe to toe with any feudal strategies in the feudal game. As he clicks up to feudal at about 8 minutes game time, he finds out CAman is drushing and walling. From experience he knows that a 3 militia drush with double palisade walls typically means CAman will fast castle. He taps a few palisade walls down and groups villagers together to make sure the 3 militia can't do much damage. He builds 2 or 3 scouts to help deal with the 3 militia and then comes to a tough decision point. He knows that: - He can't effectively kill CAman in the feudal age because of his map layout - He could try to stone wall in the two side exists of CAman and tower and wall in the main hill in front of CAman's base, but because of how large it is and all the potential pitfalls such as what if CAman snuck a villager or some cavalry archers out SCtime would have an unprotected base, and even without that risk mangonels and cavalry archers could likely kill all forward towers before SCtime hit castle. - He can at least make his 3 scouts useful by banging on the side walls of CAman forcing him to repair the palisades or let the scouts in, they also serve the purpose of watching where CAman's first cavalry archers are going and potentially killing any stray ones - If he tried to fast castle right now he would be at least a minute or two slower than CAman who would have the speed advantage and map advantage So he is left with several realistic options to deal with the cavalry archers: - He can build enough overlapping towers to protect his economy - He can stone wall in his side of the map - He can build a couple archery ranges and build enough ranged units to defend against the cavalry archers while using towers/buildings/walls to keep them only attacking certain spots

The third option is normally the best option because it doesn't waste too much resources defending your base but keeps everything safe and affords you the possibility of going on the offense with your army later on. For this story let's assume SCtime closes off about half of his base and makes

it so that CAman can't hit his economy without passing by an area that SCtime can run to and defend in time (recall he still has 3 scouts watching where the CA are going).

Now CAman has to decide what to do next when he sees this. There are probably small things he can do with his cavalry archers like trying to pick off some ranged units if he gets fast bodkin arrow or spots he can try to break through of SCtime's walls, but SCtime will usually have a slightly larger army when SCtime upgrades his units after hitting castle age. CAman could send a couple forward villagers defended by cavalry archers to build a siege shop near SCtime's base, but with SCtime making army and having 3 scouts this is a risky proposition. It is more likely that CAman will decide build a second town center at home and try to get ahead in economy.

Then SCtime will have to decide whether to try to overtake CAman in booming or try to take the forward hill in front of CAman's base. That will depend on whether CAman makes a siege shop and lots of cavalry archers on the hill in front of his base. If CAman makes a lot of army and only 2 town centers worth of economy and SCtime already half walled and towered in, it might be better for SCtime to do a 3 town center boom while defending strategic spots. The point of this story isn't to illustrate which strategy is necessarily better (they both have their purposes) but to demonstrate that your decisions should be continuously influenced by what your enemy is doing.

Imperial Age Madness The transition from the late castle age to the early imperial age in 1vs1 is almost always just an extension of what you were up to before you clicked imperial. The imperial age upgrade itself is expensive and the extra upgrades for your units usually aren't worth it until you have at least 20 to 30 units. The economy upgrades are nowhere near as important as the castle age ones so my point is that you will be at a military or economy disadvantage if you upgrade prematurely. On the other hand, if you upgrade 30 seconds or a minute slower than your enemy and he is attacking a critical spot with newly upgraded units you could easily more than lose the advantage your slightly larger castle age economy and/or military was.

As a guideline for newer players you should typically upgrade when you have between 70 and 130 villagers and between 15 and 60 military units. The specific circumstances are usually based on how much fighting you will have in the near term and how effective it is to upgrade your units.

Your castle age setup will often dictate how your imperial age game will look like. Usually by the time you hit imperial, you have a decently sized army, you have either taken map control or conceded parts of it, and you have roughly planned what you are going to do.

TFEUFIA (Econ Upgrades) The more important ones are researched in the earlier ages but there are still a few situations where you might want to research The Final Economic Upgrades For Imperial age. Let's discuss when you should get these.

Let's try to get at when you should approximately research crop rotation, the last farm upgrade. Crop rotation costs 250 food and 250 wood and it gives your farms an extra 175 food before they run fallow. For estimation purposes let's estimate that you have between 30 and 50 farmers (if you are playing a water map or purely making a wood/gold army this might be too high of an estimation). Would you be better building more villagers or researching this upgrade? The upgrade allows your farms to last 40% longer, but it won't start to payback until your first farm built without the upgrade would have went fallow. Using the 30 second approximation this means that a farm without this upgrade (just with the heavy plow upgrade), will start to run fallow in about 18 minutes. So the two cases of maximum benefit you will see from the farm upgrade is 30 farms times 60 wood times 0.4 (40% longer lasting) or 720 resources per 18 minutes to 50 farms times 60 wood times 0.4 or 1200 resources per 18 minutes. The actual cost versus benefit curve looks a little bit different due to farms being lump sum investments and games not usually running for more than 1 or 2 imperial age farm cycles but it is a decent approximation. For approximately the same cost you can build 10 villagers which would gather a very large multiple of this return even without considering compounding effects. This means that you shouldn't bother researching the last farm upgrade, even if you are doing heavy farming, unless you are fully populated and you have extra resources in the bank.

The same is true for the last wood upgrade. The last wood upgrade costs 500 resources (300 food 200 wood) and makes your villagers chop wood 10% faster. It doesn't make them carry it 10% faster which is another area your villagers spend a bit of time so it makes your villagers gather wood approximately 8 to 9% faster. You would need at least 110 wood choppers for this to be as cost effective as building more wood chopping villagers. You would be better off only researching the last wood upgrade when you are at your maximum population and you have lots of excess resources.

The last economic upgrade that becomes available to you in is the Guilds upgrade at the market.

It costs 300 food and 200 gold and reduces the trading fee to 15%. You should almost never research this upgrade in 1vs1 on most maps. It takes 4000 resources being sold to get from the starting price of food or wood down to the minimum price (14 gold per 100 wood or food without guilds and 17 gold per 100 wood or food with guilds). With the guilds upgrade and selling 100% of either food or wood (until the minimum price) you will make 2076 gold. Without guilds you will make 1708 gold. First off you shouldn't have that much extra resources in 1vs1 (unless you are playing a very closed in map) and if you do, it is almost always better to spend those resources to try to secure one of the extra gold mines than researching guilds and selling down the market. Even if you do want to sell down the market you will probably have to sell at least 2500 resources for it to at least be effective from a gold perspective and more if you want to earn a decent return on your 500 resource investment. You are also hoping your opponent doesn't start to sell down the market at the higher prices while you are researching the upgrade.

Soon It Will Be An ARMY Cavalier: The cavalier upgrade gives your knights 20 more hit points and 2 more attack for a cost of 300 food and 300 gold at a stable. You should research this upgrade when you have about 12 to 20 knights.

Paladin: The paladin upgrade gives your cavaliers an additional 2 attack, 40 hit points, and 1 extra pierce armor for a cost of 1300 food and 750 gold. You should research this upgrade when you have about 22 to 28 cavaliers.

Hussar: The hussar upgrade costs 500 food and 600 gold and gives your light cavalry units an extra 15 hit points. You should research this upgrade when you have about 30 to 50 light cavalry.

Heavy Camel: The heavy camel upgrade costs 325 food and 360 gold and gives your camels an extra 20 hit points and 2 base attack. The heavy camel upgrade also increases the original camel bonus against cavalry from +10 to +18. If you are using heavy camels to fight cavalry (which you should be!), then you should research this upgrade when you have about 14 to 20 camels.

Elite Eagle: The elite eagle upgrade costs 800 food and 500 gold and gives your eagle warriors 10 more hit points, 2 more attack, and 2 more pierce armor. The additional 2 pierce armor is enormous when you are facing ranged units with eagles and the lower end of the range reflects fighting enemy castle age ranged units. You should research the elite eagle upgrade when you have between 12 and 40 eagle warriors. As a general rule you should research it when you have about 25 to 30 eagles.

Arbalest: The arbalest upgrade costs 350 food and 300 gold and gives your archers an additional 5 hit points and 1 attack. You should research this upgrade when you have about 17 to 23 archers.

Heavy Cavalry Archer: The heavy cavalry archer upgrade costs 900 food and 500 gold and gives your cavalry archers 10 more hit points, 1 more attack, and 1 more pierce armor. You should research this upgrade when you have about 35 to 45 cavalry archers.

Halberdier: The halberdier upgrade costs 300 food and 600 gold and gives your pikemen an additional 5 hit points, and 2 base attack. They also do an additional 32 damage against cavalry as opposed to pikemen's additional 22 damage against cavalry. You should research this upgrade whenever you have about 14 to 22 pikemen.

Two Handed Swordsmen: The two handed gives longswordsmen 2 more attack and 5 more hit points for a cost of 300 food and 100 gold. If you are fighting enemy melee units you should get the two-handed sword upgrade when you have about 9 to 15 longswordsmen. If you are fighting against ranged units it is more important for your units to make it to them and be able to attack so it would be preferable to have a few more swordsmen before you research this upgrade.

Champion: The champion upgrade gives two-handed swordsmen an additional 10 hit points, 2 attack, and 1 melee armor for a cost of 750 food and 350 gold. You should research this upgrade when you have about 25 to 35 two-handed swordsmen.

Heavy Scorpion: The heavy scorpion upgrade gives scorpions 4 more attack, 10 more hit points, and 1 more pierce armor for a cost of 1000 food and 1100 wood. This is one expensive upgrade and you should research it when you have about 25 to 35 scorpions. In 1vs1 scorpions usually aren't a great choice because they walk quite slow and in most closed in maps where they would be useful there are already onagers, rams, and trebuchets around.

Onager: The onager upgrade gives mangonels an additional 10 attack, 10 hit points, 1 range, and 1 pierce armor for a cost of 800 food and 500 gold. Provided you have enough army to defend your mangonels (what good is this upgrade if 5 cavalry are going to be fighting them at close range?), you should research this upgrade when you have about 5 to 10 of them.

Siege Onager: The siege onager upgrade gives onagers an additional 10 hit points, 25 attack and 1 pierce armor for a cost of 1450 food and 1000 gold. It also allows them to chop trees down. You should research this upgrade when you have about 8 to 12 onagers.

Capped Ram and Siege Ram: The capped ram upgrade gives your battering rams an additional 25 hit points, 1 attack, and 10 pierce armor for 300 food. Other than the hit points, the other two numbers don't mean a whole lot because their pierce armor is weird and their attack is almost meaningless since you won't be ramming most regular units to do a grand total of 3 damage. Rams take 1 damage per arrow from most ranged units and most melee units get an attack bonus against rams. The siege ram upgrade gives your capped rams an additional 70 hit points, 1 attack, 5 pierce armor, and additional garrisoning capacity of 2 for a cost of 1000 food. Rams do get an improvement as they are upgraded in the amount of bonus damage they get against other siege units. My data for capped rams and siege rams is just based on my past experience and heavy data testing isn't one of my strong suits so the numbers for when you should research capped rams and siege rams will be based solely on my past experience. Provided you have an army to defend your rams you should research capped rams when you have about 4 to 6 rams and you should research siege rams when you have about 7 to 12 capped rams.

Galleon: The galleon upgrade is an essential upgrade when you are massing ships. It gives your war galleys 1 more attack, 2 more pierce armor, 30 more hit points, and 1 more range all for the cheap cost of 400 food and 315 wood. You should research this anytime you have more than more than 15 war galleys.

Fast Fire Ship: This is definitely another upgrade that is far outside my circle of confidence. It is so rare to use fast fire ships so how many you should build before upgrading would just be a guess. Since the upgrade is pretty cheap my expectation would be that you should get this upgrade when you have about 8 to 14 fire ships.

Heavy Demolition Ship: One more upgrade that has been researched so rarely and is fairly

cheap so I am not sure when you should research it. My guess would be if you plan on detonating 6 to 10 of these guys.

Bracer: Bracer gives archers, cavalry archers, skirmishers, galleys, castles, and towers an additional 1 attack and 1 range. It also gives all town centers an additional 1 attack for a cost of 300 food and 200 gold. You should research bracer when you have more than 20 galleys (galleon upgrade first if you have to choose) or 25 ranged units (3rd archer armor first if you are using skirmishers against enemy ranged units, or if you are having ranged units fight enemy ranged units without any serious hit and run tactics). If you are using hand cannoneers don't bother with bracer as it doesn't affect their attack.

Chemistry: Chemistry gives archers, cavalry archers, skirmishers, galleys, castles, and towers an additional attack for a cost of 300 food and 200 gold. It also unlocks the cannon galleon upgrade, the bombard tower upgrade, enables you to build hand cannoneers from your archery range, and bombard cannons from your siege workshop. If you are researching chemistry solely to improve your galleys you should wait until you have 25 to 35 galleys. If you are building ranged units you should research it when you have at least 25 ranged units (after you research bracer).

3rd Archer Armor: The 3rd archer armor gives all your ranged land units an additional 1 melee armor and 2 pierce armor. This upgrade is most useful by far when your ranged units will take heavy fire from enemy ranged units. It doesn't help immensely against most melee units or siege so you can delay this one until you have 35 to 45 ranged units. As we discussed in the bracer section, if you are facing enemy ranged units straight up without any shooting and running, you are better off to research this before bracer.

Parthinian Tactics: Parthinian tactics is a technology that greatly helps cavalry archers kill pikemen by allowing them to do an additional 4 attack per shot to the pikemen. Parthinian tactics also gives cavalry archers an additional 1 melee armor and 2 pierce armor. It costs 200 food and 250 gold. If you are facing an opponent who is massing pikemen you should get this upgrade when you have about 10 to 15 cavalry archers. If you are not facing any pikemen you should get this upgrade at approximately the same time you would research the 3rd archer armor upgrade (slightly before as it is

10% cheaper).

3rd Cavalry Armor: The 3rd cavalry armor upgrade gives your cavalry an additional 1 melee armor and 2 pierce armor for a cost of 350 food and 200 gold. This makes your cavalry much more effective against ranged units and town center fire. Whenever you have an army that is a mix of ranged units and cavalry and your enemy has the same or you are heavily raiding it is much better to get the cavalry armor upgrade first. If you are going to be fighting against melee units the 3rd melee attack upgrade is more cost efficient. You should research this upgrade when you have about 18 to 33 light cavalry or 12 to 25 knights (the lower end is when you are fighting ranged units and the higher end when you are fighting melee units).

3rd Infantry Armor: The 3rd infantry armor upgrade is similar to the 3rd cavalry armor upgrade in its use. For a cost of 300 food and 150 gold all of your infantry units are given 1 extra melee armor and 2 extra pierce armor. This makes them much more resistant to enemy ranged fire but not nearly as proportionately stronger against enemy melee units. You should research this technology when you have about 20 to 35 infantry units (lower end versus ranged units and higher end versus melee).

3rd Melee Attack Upgrade: Blast furnace is the 3rd melee attack upgrade and it gives all of your cavalry and infantry class melee units an additional 2 attack for 275 food and 225 gold. This is the upgrade you should get first when your hand to hand units are going to be doing some heavy hand to hand combat without ranged unit influence. For infantry you should typically get it when you have between 20 and 30 units and for cavalry somewhere between 20 and 30 light cavalry (about 12 to 20 knights).

Cannon Galleon: The cannon galleon upgrade is expensive at 400 food and 500 wood. It allows you to build cannon galleons for 200 wood and 150 gold. You better make sure you can defend these expensive buggers if you build them! Never been a heavy user of cannon galleons either so my rough approximation is that they kill a castle at about half the speed of an unpacked trebuchet. They move slower than galleys too, but they have more range than a fully upgraded galley so try to keep these guys behind your hoard. You want to get some of these guys once you have more ships than your

enemy and you want to take down buildings quickly (especially castles, bombard towers, and regular towers that heated shot researched!).

Heavy Cannon Galleon: The heavy cannon galleon upgrade is another expensive one at 525 wood and 500 gold. From my rough approximation they seem about 20-40% stronger than regular cannon galleons so you should research this upgrade when you have about 5 to 8 cannon galleons.

Shipwright: Shipwright is a useful technology for games where you expect there to be lots of water fighting. It costs 1000 food and 300 gold but it reduces the wood cost of your ships by 20% and makes them build 35% faster. Building 20 more villagers on wood would likely gather more than the amount you would save by researching this technology (although you would run out quicker), but the faster build time cuts the number of docks you need by an additional third. It is quite common to need 10 to 15 docks without this upgrade so you can save 3 to 5 docks worth of resources which is an additional 450 to 750 wood for the quicker build time, making this upgrade great if you have the resources and you aren't in too intense of a fight to afford it.

Dry Dock: Dry dock is a technology similar to ballistics in what type of situations you should research it. For a cost of 600 food and 400 gold you get 2 things: ships moving 15% quicker and 20 transport space instead of 10. The 15% faster movement is definitely a much bigger reason to research dry dock. If you move 15% faster than your enemy you get the luxury of choosing your fights easier and chasing down small armies. If you imperial first and you have a feeling your enemy is planning on running his war galleys away for a minute or two before he imperials and you would like to force the fight or pick off a tonne of units during that time period you might want to research dry dock before chemistry and bracer. If you are aware that you won't be doing much running and he is going to force the fight by your (important) docks this upgrade doesn't give any tangible fighting benefit so you shouldn't bother researching it. This is one you should use your brain to feel out what the situation will likely be.

Conscription: Conscription is a relatively cheap technology at 150 food and 150 gold researched at your castle to allow all military units to be built 15% faster. Since most buildings cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 resources (when you include villager build time), you should

research this technology when you are going to have about 10 to 15 military buildings working. Sometimes you should get it slightly sooner if you don't have time to build those extra military buildings. As a general guideline, research it when you have a castle that doesn't need to be building unique units or trebuchets and you have 150+ population.

The Murderous Mystery Section How would you do it? Wrong topic, we are talking about the different ways to destroy and conquer your opponent. There are a tonne of different styles. We aren't talking about player styles, we are talking about killing styles. Very often in hindsight it is easy to pause a recorded game at the beginning of imperial age and see what you or others should have done. You will notice your 30 unprotected villagers and see where you should place your buildings and know if you should have attacked with your army camping on top of a hill right in the center of your enemy's economy, even though it would have cost you a couple units to get there. You will also know if you should have played a double offensive raiding game or focused entirely on walling the sides, castling to prevent raiding, and controlling the area just in front of your base. It's easier to tell what units you should have made and where you should have made them. It is very tough to articulately describe what you should do in all different kinds of situations in a few pages so instead of directly teaching you my personal guidelines and approximations (some which still need to be fixed!), we will just discuss one of the effective ways to learn.

This is also how I learned, although in my case it was completely by accident. When you go into the castle age, imagine that the imperial age doesn't exist. It is just like the AoK trial version where the imperial age actually doesn't exist. Poof, gone! From this point onward you are going to do everything you cost effectively can in the castle age to kill your opponent, and then some. You are going to test out: castle age pushes with rams, castle age pushes with mangonels, using units solely to kill your enemy, doing only one town center and 100% army, and doing 3 to 5 town centers and barely enough army to defend and then overwhelming your opponent. In every one of these games your goal is going to be to kill your opponent in the castle age. This is going to prevent you from every clicking the imperial button too soon because you will know whether or not you can destroy your opponent. You will be surprised how often you can kill your opponent while he is imperialing or at least kill enough so that it won't even be worth it for him to get certain upgrades because he won't have enough units for them to be cost effective.

After you do this for a little while (50 to 100 games), think about all the situations where you pushed too hard and lost (not because you got owned in the feudal age) because your opponent made slightly less army (might have been slightly more by the time you walked there), maintained great

defensive spots, and imperialed before you to get the upgrades cost effectively without taking more damage than you do. As a guideline, if you think you can prevent your enemy from fighting you in a way that they can use a larger castle age army to kill you, and you know your enemy can do the same (whether it is due to walls, or hills, or castles, or town centers, or just general army size) for the next 4 minutes, you should research the imperial age. In most situations this guideline will also include that you should make a decent sized economy before you click imperial, which on most typical random maps is between 75 and 135 villagers. These two things should help you find the upper and lower range for when you should upgrade to the imperial age and then you choose whether it is earlier or later based on your situation and your opponent's situation.

There are also some interesting situations where going to imperial earlier and just for trebuchets or fast elite eagles can be very effective. These are slightly different from your conventional expectations because the time to click the imperial age has been skewed from its normal larger economy versus only castle age upgraded units imaginary curve that tells you when to click imperial. For eagles this is because the elite eagle upgrade is quick and you don't need a huge economy to mass produce them, plus they become strong enough to destroy most castle age units cost effectively and render ranged unit and town center fire almost useless. For trebuchets it is often because you and your enemy have castles that are built close together and having castles down the road will be extremely important because the unique unit for your civilization is powerful. In both of these cases you will have to play a few in those situations to tell, but as a guideline if you play defensively and don't anticipate a huge castle age fight it is often good to click imperial when you have 60 to 90 villagers.

Death By Imperial Army Almost all of the imperial army fighting is similar to castle age army fighting except the armies are bigger and more epic. This is true for military micromanagement, raiding, and defending your economy. Everything just gets more attack, range, and hit points. There isn't too much more to say about fighting as most things are pretty obvious (don't run your archers right next to enemy melee units without shooting...!).

Trebuchets finally allow you to kill enemy castles effectively from a distance. These are expensive pieces of hardware that run you 200 wood and 200 gold for a unit that has to unpack to do about 450 damage per rock to enemy buildings. They are susceptible to enemy castle fire if unpacked and they are weak against rams and melee units. They also only have 150 hit points so it is still fairly cost effective for ranged units to attack trebuchets if they are not within castle fire. The more boring situation is the obvious one where you build trebuchets and defend them with a larger army while you siege stuff from afar. Strategy wise trebuchets get very interesting when you and your opponent both have several castles within range of each other and you both know that whoever wins the trebuchet war will likely win the game. On some maps this even means taking 80% of your farmers to wood, stone, or gold, to help you have the resources for the trebuchet war as much as possible. You will be repairing your trebuchets and castles with your villagers. This is where we get to an interesting question: what should we target with our trebuchets? To be perfectly honest at this point in time, even when I am sitting here not playing a game, it is tough to decide what the best answer is. The reason for the dilemma is that it usually takes 3 to 6 trebuchet hits to kill an enemy trebuchet and it takes about 10 to 12 hits to kill an enemy castle. If you repair a trebuchet and their shot misses, it is likely to kill 1 of your repairing villagers. If you kill an enemy castle and you have slightly more land army, you can rush in and slowly kill their trebuchet. Stone is a limited resource on the map and you might even be buying some. From this we gather that if stone was an unlimited resource, it would be smarter to shoot enemy trebuchets because it is more cost efficient. If you could kill the only castle defending trebuchets and then you could quickly out mass and overrun their land army, you should target their castles. If you have half kill something and then change targets, that gives your opponent extra firepower or building time. From these results, my recommendation would be to target enemy trebuchets for the first few minutes (especially if they just built one and it hasn't been unpacked as 1 hit will kill it!), and then to switch to focus firing their front castle when you know you have enough trebuchets to kill it without losing more than 2 from enemy fire. Once there are 5 or 6 trebuchets

around (and you are usually defending your castles with archer or cannoneer type unique units), rams are very effective at making it to enemy trebuchets and taking em down. If your enemy is trying to do that to you, even though your ranged units won't do much damage, put them just in front of your trebuchet in such a way that they force the ram to walk around them to attack. Another thing that comes out of this recent discussion is that if you don't have as much army as your enemy and he is trying to siege your castles with trebuchets, it might be better for you to build a couple defensive trebuchets and repair your castle while keeping your army nearby.

The War Preparation Section

Hotkeys In almost any real time strategy game where micromanagement is of paramount importance your left hand will almost be as busy as your right. Using hotkeys cuts down the time to micromanage small tasks dramatically and will give you a lot more time to focus on other things.

It is likely that most of you reading will already have hotkeys that you feel comfortable with. For myself there are only a handful of keys changed from defaults that were to speed certain things up and prevent me from pressing the wrong key all too often. My recommendation is that you keep most of the keys you are used to and just change the ones that are difficult to use, are not accessible enough, or are dangerous. How can a hotkey be dangerous, you ask? Try leaving the delete key where it is, right next to some keyboards' enter button, and sure as the sun comes up you will accidentally press it sometime when you are chatting with your enemy or your teammates. Maybe it won't register. Maybe it will delete your town center or your scout. My bet is that some of you have already learned this one the hard way.

There are a few other hotkeys you should probably change or add. The idle villager and military keys are extremely useful so you should put them in a spot where you press them often. Fortunately AoC lets you assign two keys to each of those. In my case tab is idle villager, scroll down on the mouse wheel is idle villager, scroll up on the mouse wheel is idle military, and "`" key (just above tab) is also idle military. You would use the keyboard buttons when you are moving units to a spot or checking villagers quickly and you would use the mouse buttons whenever you are going to use hotkeys for something that unit should do (common examples include building something with a villager or packing an idle trebuchet). Another extremely useful change was to change the button to select docks from two buttons (the default is ctrl d) to one button. This allows you to quickly build a single unit out of as many docks as you have while only using two keys instead of three. You can do this for other military buildings too if you are likely to use lots of them but you might clutter the main keyboard area (if only there was another row!). Some players also change the hotkeys of each building so that, for example, QWER would always build the four most common units from that building so that they don't have to remember the individual hotkeys to build each unit. If you don't have them ingrained in your head for years and years that is a great idea.

Mouse Your mouse is probably just as important as your keyboard. If you have ever played with a different mouse with foreign settings you will immediately notice the decline in your gameplay. You should find a mouse that you feel comfortable with. Then, you should slowly increase the speed (and have it increased for regular computer use too) so that you become used to the heightened sensitivity. This is subjective but it seems like most players find it easier to micromanage when they turn off mouse acceleration as well. Another thing that is useful is when mice have extra buttons that you can assign to hotkeys.

You should also turn the scroll rate up. This helps you move the screen quicker but you don't want it to be out of control. Play with it until you figure out what is right for you.

Customized Interface It feels strange recalling the earlier days of AoC where you would hope for a forest to be to the north of you so that you could better micromanage your tree choppers. In these days there are several patches that dramatically decrease the height of the trees or change their type so that you can select individual tiles with ease no matter where they are located. This was a change that improved fairness and you should definitely download one of them.

There is also a patch to make it so that you don't see snow or desert on your minimap. Your minimap is a valuable tool that lets you move around the map quickly. Some colors, such as blue on water, or grey on snow, or orange on desert, are difficult to consistently see so this helps out with some of those.

There are also 3 settings ingame settings for the resolution of your game. The largest default one helps you see more area and more units while still not making the units so small as to make unit micromanagement difficult. There are now several ways to increase your resolution dramatically. Some of the top players use a higher resolution and some don't. It is a good idea to experiment to see what you are most comfortable with.

The Generally Good Habits Miscellaneous Section There were a metric tonne of random ideas that floated to me (yes, that heavy!) while writing this that there just didn't feel a need to classify individually. These nuggets will hopefully show or remind you of a bunch of tricks and habits to help you conquer your enemies.

1. When you scout an area and find forests where your enemy isn't currently chopping wood, and they do start to chop wood there, if you look at that area when you don't have a unit there (the fog is there), you can still see the trees that are being cut. This will help you go clear out some villagers!

2. If you are trying to select a specific unit type in your army by double clicking one of them, but you accidentally double click a villager instead (highlighting half the villagers in your town), make sure you press escape before you move the unit!!! It is a real pain in the neck to get all your villagers back to work in a balanced and orderly fashion and you will lose a decent chunk of villager time and micromanagement time, so get it right the first time!

3. The town bell is fairly fickle in AoC. Sometimes it will garrison everything within a few screens and sometimes you will ring it a second time to get your villagers back to work but some will still be idle. Just garrison your villagers manually and with practice you can do it in pretty much the same time. You will also only be running the ones in immediate danger (or the ones to get in that town center to shoot at the enemy!) so your other villagers can happily slave away for you.

4. If you are going to camp with your army, camp a hill! Preferably on the direct route to a key resource in your base.

5. When you get housed, spend your resources on upgrades that are near their optimal time to be researched to minimize the damage.

6. Seriously, stop getting upgrades too soon or too late. Bad habits are harder to unlearn so fix

em before it's too late. Don't think even for a second that I won't be trying to heed my own advice!

7. When you build a resource dropoff spot (lumber camp, mill, mining camp) or a farm, all the villagers that were assigned to its production (as long as they are assigned before it is done construction) will be able to drop off whatever resources they are carrying when they get there. If you change their orders en route you will lose that ability.

8. Mind your mangonels and onagers. They are expensive units and when micromanaged properly they can do massive amounts of damage. This one is obvious but not to yours truly who used to let mangonels die as if they were single unupgraded skirmishers.

9. Mash those idle villager and idle military keys. Those will be the first buttons that die out on your keyboard just because of how often you press them. You almost press them even when you aren't playing AoC.

10. This one is for newer players. If you spam the build villager hotkey after pressing loom (provided you have 50 food) your town center will automatically build a villager after loom is complete (with no risk of idle town center time). The same can be done for researching any other technology at your town center (including ages) or at military buildings when you research things.

11. Having two villagers build a building does not make the construction effort take half as long. There is a formula or a curve that approximates how much quicker you will build things but the only number I am sure of is that 4 villagers finish a building in 50% of the time that 1 villager would.

12. If you cancel a building foundation after it is partially finished you will get the percentage incomplete of the building times the cost of the building refunded. This means that if a building is 60% complete and you cancel it you will get 40% of the cost back. This is not true for researching upgrades as you will get 100% of the cost back no matter when you cancel researching.

13. If you play an opponent who has been a complete jerk and you win the game quickly, use palisade walls to write a message across the map. You didn't get this idea from me!

14. If you lose water you can keep 1 unit garrisoned inside of your docks so that your enemy doesn't know if you are constantly building ships or have given up completely.

You Are Here There is so much information that didn't make the cut into this edition. At this point in time it doesn't look like there will be time to create the next two editions which were approximately planned out for teamgames and some advanced decision making (which is still very far from perfected in practice, even by the top players) as well as 5 or 6 random topics. There was also going to be a section on all the common maps and how to think about strategy on them. The civilizations were also going to get quite a bit of discussion but my promise to myself was that this eBook would only take a couple hundred hours and would be about 100 pages (and I denied myself almost 100% from playing nontournament related AoC until this was mostly complete). It turned out to be more than that on both fronts (especially the time front!) but lots of information and data has been roughly compiled on the other topics so hopefully there is enough time to publish information on them sometime in the future.

There has probably been dramatically more time spent creating this than it was worth purely from an earnings perspective but it is enjoyable sharing information and anything that encourages competition and improvement in this timeless game makes me happy. Some of the language structure throughout this guide would have probably given some of my english teachers cold shudders but the intent was to give as much information and knowledge as possible without worrying too much about that.

I hope you enjoyed everything in this eBook and put some of the devious tactics to use.

Chris