Age of Empires II: Age of Kings
A real-time strategy game that really does require strategy
For a lot of computer strategy game enthusiasts, real-time strategy (RTS) games are more about mouse gymnastics and click-fests, and less about strategy and tactics. In fact, most RTS games could have a strategy guide that simply says, “build a lot of the [tank, grenadier, elephants, etc.] then rush your opponent.” Fortunately for those of us who prefer thinking to carpal tunnel, Age of Empires II: Age of Kings is not like most RTS games. Although it is possible to get lucky and have a rush work, even a mediocre player will quickly learn how to punish anyone who attempts it. It works much better to plan out your battles in order to maximize their effectiveness.
The Dark Ages
When you begin play, you will have some villagers and a scout. Immediately put everyone to work. Order one villager to build a house, another to start chopping the nearest tree, and the third to start building a mill near your forage bushes. If you cannot see the bushes, hold off on giving the third villager orders until you find it. Next, order your town center to build more villagers. You want to get to about fifteen villagers as fast as you can. There will be a small pause after the first villager is created since this will put you at your population limit until your first house is completed. Finally, order your scout to circle the village using waypoints (hold SHIFT while right clicking all but the final point of the path). This will expose the nearby resources, including the forage bushes if you couldn’t see them initially. After the scout finishes circling, have him run all over the map to expose as much as possible before your enemies can put up towers and walls which make exploration much more difficult and dangerous.
Your first four villagers should all be set to food collection. This will let your build more villagers faster. After that, you want to build another house or two, and then get to where you have about eight villagers collecting food, five collecting wood, one collecting gold, and one building stuff. Have one of your lumberjacks build a lumber yard near a forest, and have the gold miner build his own mining camp. Your builder should get the barracks built as soon as possible. This will come in very handy in the event someone tries to rush you in the Dark Ages.
Although it is a bad idea, it is possible to pull off a rush against a single enemy at the start of the game if they are nearby. Once you have a decent income of food and wood, you can start building a bunch of militia. Then, order them to attack the town center of the enemy, not the villagers or any other structure. If you attack the villagers, your enemy will likely order them to garrison in the town center where they will start shooting arrows at your militia. Once the town center is heavily damaged, attack and kill off all the villagers. If you can pull this off, you can surprise your enemy and eliminate them before they have any defense in place. You can also just send a few units to torment an enemy and attempt to panic him into a full defensive response that will slow his advance.
There are two reasons early rushing is generally a bad tactic. First, if you have more than one enemy, the rest of the civilizations will be able to advance faster than you because you spent your resources on a large army. Second, it is very easy to counter this if you built your barracks and react as soon as the attack starts. Simply hit ‘H’ which is the hotkey for your town center and then ‘B’ which sounds the alarm bell (this is probably the most useful hotkey combo to remember). Your villagers will hide inside the town center and start shooting and the attackers. Then go to your barracks and set a gather point inside the barracks and start building units. You only need one militia per two attackers since your men will have help from the villagers. Once you have enough, launch your counter-attack. This is a good strategy to use any time you are attacked and do not yet have defenses in place.
Provided you aren’t rushed and don’t want to risk rushing yourself, it shouldn’t take long at all after you hit 15 villagers to collect the 500 food needed to advance. As soon as you can, do it.
The Feudal Age
As soon as you advance, improve your farming. This helps reduce the amount of micromanagement for food gathering and makes it easier to build up your wood stockpile. Next, build five more villagers and have two of them help with gold, two on stone mining, and the last one on food. This will give you nine farmers, three gold miners, two stone miners, five lumberjacks, and the builder. This is a very good balance of labor until you decide which resources you need to boost your particular civilization the most.
Your builder’s first responsibility should be getting the two buildings needed to advance again done. You always want these completed as quickly as possible so you can advance as soon as you have enough resources. It is a good idea to build the blacksmith and archery range first. Building the blacksmith will let you start improving your military, and the archery range will give you ranged units to hide inside of the towers that are now available. Once your builder completes those buildings, have them build a wall around your town (except for the Goths who cannot), including the gold, stone, and forest you are collecting. If possible, use terrain features like water and cliffs as much as possible since unlike walls, terrain cannot be broken down.
It is generally not a good idea to bother with too many advances until you start moving into the Castle Age. Once you begin that advance though, you should probably improve your archery attack at the blacksmith since this also improves tower range.
The Castle Age
Once you reach this age, your civilization can begin to work on adding lots of technologies. You will have access to almost all of the defenses (except keep and bombard tower), and your enemies will not have access to the more powerful siege engines that are needed to break in until the Imperial Age. This means you don’t need to rush to advance and can instead focus on improving things, especially resource gathering. Also, if things go really wrong and your town center is destroyed, you will now be able to rebuild it.
You should research the wheelbarrow and handcart at the town center followed by the resource improvements at the collection points (i.e. double axe and bow saw at lumberyard, stone mining at mining camp). You need to speed up resource collections because it is likely that you are going to be forced to seek out resources outside your walls. The faster you can collect those resources, the less time you need to worry about the hard-to-defend villagers getting killed.
Have your builder get the university up, and research fortified walls (again, except for the Goths). They are significantly stronger and without heavy siege engines, it is unlikely anyone will be able to attack you without giving you plenty of time to build a defensive force from scratch. Fortified walls also give your towers extra time to fire at enemies as they try and break through.
The only building necessary to advance to the next age is the castle. However, you are almost certainly going to want to build both the monastery and the university. The university gives you access to technologies that allow you to speed up building and make those buildings stronger as well as improving ranged units via ballistics and chemistry. The monastery lets you build monks who can heal your units and capture relics. Once you have these buildings in place, researched all the resource gathering technologies, and built a castle, advance to the Imperial Age.
The Imperial Age
Finally, it is time to put all your hard work to use. First, you need to set-up a small defensive force that can hunt down siege engines outside your walls. Light cavalry is excellent for this. Build five or six light cavalry units and set them to a hotkey by selecting them all and then hitting ‘CTRL+3’ (any number will work). Anytime you spot siege engines outside your walls, all you will need to do is hit ‘3’ and then right click the bad guys. Your cavalry will race to the engine and kill it.
Next, you need to decide if you want to attempt to conquer the world or build a wonder (capturing all the relics is almost always a side effect of trying to conquer the world, and is virtually impossible to do without a lot of fighting). If you decide to build a wonder, you need to beef up your defenses first. As soon as you start building, everyone will know it, and they’ll come quickly to stop you (even the AI players are smart enough to do this).
Your best bet is to improve your archers as much as possible, and have towers full of them all around your city. If you have access to bombard towers, alternate them with regular towers. Bombard towers are not very effective against moving targets, but in order to break in, eventually the attackers have to stand still. You also will want to build a couple trebuchets so that you can fire at any enemy trebuchets that set up outside your walls. Finally, collect as much extra resources as you can before you start. You want to build the wonder fast which means moving all your villagers from resource gathering to building the wonder. If you have plenty of extra resources beyond the 1000 each you need for the wonder, you’ll be able to replace your defenders without slowing down construction.
If you decide to conquer the world, you will probably want to double up on any military buildings that produce units you know are going to see a lot of fighting. Usually, this means having an extra castle since your civilization’s best unit is produced there. You also want to build either trebuchets or bombard cannons in order to attack towers and castles without having to worry about them shooting back. Trebuchets do damage faster, but take time to move and set-up. They also cannot provide any help against mobile targets. Bombard cannons cannot fire as far nor do as much damage, but they can hit moving targets and can still fire outside the range of defensive buildings other than the bombard tower.
If you watch the computer attack a defensive position, it usually does a good job setting up the siege engines, but it then moves the rest of it’s units to join in the attack. Do not do this. Your siege engines are more than capable of breaking down defenses provided your enemy doesn’t kill them, and siege engines are easy to kill if you leave them undefended. Most other units (other than the unique units with bonuses against buildings) are not effective enough to make it worthwhile to have them beat on walls and towers. Even units that are good against buildings are much better used defending your siege engines while sitting outside the firing range of the defenders.
One of the easiest attack methods is the Cube O’ Doom. The Cube consists of ten to twenty ranged units, four or five bombard cannons or trebuchets, and three monks placed in the box formation and ordered to stand ground. Ranged units can always fire at any unit that gets near any side of the cube and will be able to protect each other, the monks, and the siege engines. The monks keep the ranged units healthy, and the siege engines do all the real work. Simply move the cube until your engines are in range, let them break stuff, and then move again. One of the nicest things about this formation is that it can usually hold its own without any supervision. Very convenient when your farms go fallow right as you start to fight.
Miscellaneous tips
- Remember the ‘H’ + ‘B’ hotkey combo to quickly get your defenseless villagers to safety when they are attacked.
- You can assign hotkey to buildings just like other units (CTRL+number). This is a great for sending reinforcements to a battle. Simply hit the number, set a way point to the battle, and then queue up the new units who will march to the sound of gunfire.
- Resource management is very important. Unlike a lot of RTS games, there is a limited amount of resources in the world. Only wood, and therefore food, tends to be in abundance.
- One of the best raiding party formations is spearmen/pikemen with skirmisher/elite skirmisher support in equal numbers. They are the cheapest units to build, and they work well together against just about any other units. Also, because they require only food and wood to build, it is unlikely you will ever run out of the necessary resources for them.
- Learn the weaknesses of the unit types. If infantry is attacking you, build archers to stop them. If archers are attacking you, send skirmishers or light cavalry to cut them down. Even the mighty war elephants aren’t that tough if you send pikemen to stop them (and pikemen cost so much less…)
- If you have enemies outside a military building, make sure you set the gather point inside the building before you start building units. Otherwise, they will get cut down before they can muster enough numbers for a decent counter-attack. Once you have a few units built, order them all out at once.
- Look for terrain choke points for building defenses. It is much easier (and less expensive) to defend the shallows of a river or the narrow gap between two forests than an open plain.
Age of Kings requires a lot more strategy than the average RTS game. Because of the number and strength of defensive structures as well as the ability to garrison units, rushes that are so effective in most RTS games don’t work as well. Also, the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the various units means you need to learn which units work well against which enemies. Finally, the fact that eventually you will run out of most resources makes learning to use units efficiently important.
--Xavori