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 6
Sheep Stylin' 6
Lumber Metrics 9
Where's My Dock 13
It's Scouting Time 15
The Boar Mysteries 17
Boar Havoc 21
Loom2 24
Half Trained Lookouts 25
FoOoooOOooD 26
He Built A Fence 28
Score! 29
BO and Main Strategy Overview Section 30
Galley Rush (Grush) 31
Feudal Rush (Flush) on Water Map 36
Feudal Rush (Flush) on Land Map 39
Dark Age Rush (Drush) 40
Fast Castle (FC) 49
Scout Rush (Scrush) 51
Feudal Age Fury Fun 54
The Scout Bump 54
Towers of Power 55
Farm Shooting 57
Wolf Whispering Bait 57
Feudal Age Economy 119 57
Army Upgrades 59
Feudal Military Micromanagement 62
Scouts versus Spearmen 63
Scouts versus Villagers 64
Scouts versus Scouts 65
Scouts on Water 66
Archers versus Skirmishers, Archers versus Archers, Skirmishers versus Skirmishers 66
Archers versus Scouts 68
Common Miscellaneous Feudal Battleground 68
Galley Micromanagement 71
Military Buildings 77
Feudal Age Land Military Tools 78
StoneWallin' 80
Crazy Combative Castle Age 82
Castle Age Military Upgrades 82
(YOSNCMO) Your Other Shiny New Castle Age Military Options 86
Castle Age Military Buildings 90
Town Center Placement 92
Economy 339 93
Castle Age Military Micromanagement 94
Game Theory 100
Imperial Age Madness 103
TFEUFIA (Econ Upgrades) 103
Soon It Will Be An ARMY 105
The Murderous Mystery Section 112
Death By Imperial Army 114
The War Preparation Section 116
Hotkeys 116
Mouse 117
Customized Interface 117
The Generally Good Habits Miscellaneous Section 119
You Are Here 122
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
Secondary Goals:
possible)
- 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
- 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
- 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
lumber camp to make it so you have 8 to 10 wood chopping villagers there
- When you have the wood take another 8 to 10 to build a 2nd wood pit
- 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
Secondary Goals:
possible)
- Your enemy was a lot closer than you guessed and is doing an aggressive or standard
grush where he can outnumber your galleys
- 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

- 8 - 10 wood
- 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
- After you click feudal, put all your sheep/boar eaters on straggler wood
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 8 - 10 wood
- 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
lumber camp to make it so u have 8 to 10 wood chopping villagers there
- Send 4 forward villagers
- 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:
- 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
- His map is easy to defend and he uses all his units on your economy
- 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!
Here is the approximate build order for an aggressive flush on a land map:
- 1 - 6 sheep

- 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
- 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
- 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!
Here is the approximate build order for an aggressive drush:
- 1 - 6 sheep
- 8 - 10 wood
- 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)
- 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)
Type: Standard (Feudal Fighting)
Objective: Disrupt the enemy more than it costs to drush. Feudal in time to prepare for enemy
attacking.
Primary Goals:
points
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 8 - 10 wood
- 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
- 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
- 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 build-
up, 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

- 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
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:
points
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.

- 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
- 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
- 8 - 10 wood
- 12 sheep
- 13 - 16 berries
- 17 - 20 wood (build barracks around this time, also start walling with 1 or 2 extra
villagers)
- 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
Type: Standard (Fast Castling without walling)
Objective: Keep your enemy busy enough so that you can make it to castle age.
Primary Goals:
points
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.
- 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)
- 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
- 8 - 10 wood
- 12 sheep
- 13 - 16 berries
- 17 - 20 wood (build barracks around this time)
- Build an extra 2 farms with your sheep/boar eaters
- 25 - 26 farms
- 27 - 29 gold plus send a sheep/boar eater to gold
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
- Your opponent does too much damage to your economy
- 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
- 8 - 10 wood
- 12-13 sheep
- 14 - 17 berries
- Villager 19 or 20 can build second lumber camp (depends how efficient the first one is)
- 23 farm
- 24 - 26 gold
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
- Your opponent does too much damage to your economy
- 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
- 8 - 10 wood
- 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
- 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:
- Try to prevent your enemy from walling in
- 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
- 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
- 8 - 9 wood
- 11 sheep
- 12 - 15 berries (lure your second boar to arrive in time)
- 16 - 18 sheep/boar
- 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 C
GG
GG
GG
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 C
GG
GG
GG
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 non-
overwhelming 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 monk-
killing 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

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Keys To 1vs1 Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors World Domination

By: Chris "L_Clan_Chris" Bourque

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

4. The Fast Castle

- Fight enemy ships when you have more

- Kill their fishing ships

- Keep your fishing ships alive

- Watch for landings or forward villagers

- Get to the Castle Age

Key Strategic Risks:

- You don't find your enemy fast enough

Here is the approximate build order for the aggressive grush:

- Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters (dump sheep food first)

- Put the rest immediately on stragglers

Galley Rush (Grush)

- 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

- Watch for landings or forward villagers

- Get to the Castle Age

Key Strategic Risks:

Here is the approximate build order for the standard grush:

- 7 lumber camp then wood

- Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters

- Put the rest immediately on stragglers

Galley Rush (Grush)

- 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

- Watch for landings or forward villagers

- Get to the Castle Age

Key Strategic Risks:

Here is the approximate build order for the defensive grush:

- 7 lumber camp then wood

- Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters

- Forward build near your enemy (try not to be seen!)

- Build units to attack your enemy, use them strategically

- Maintain a foot-hold near their base

- Maintain positional advantage

Key Strategic Risks:

- 7 lumber camp then wood

- Lure boar with 1 of sheep eaters

- Send 4 forward villagers

- Put the rest immediately on stragglers

- 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

- Maintain positional advantage

Key Strategic Risks:

- 7 lumber camp then wood

- 10 house then lure boar

- 12 - 15 berries (lure boar so that it lines up with first boar ending)

- 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)

- Fight when you can cost effectively kill villagers

- Run back if a horde of villagers is going to attack your militia

- Maintain positional advantage

Key Strategic Risks:

- You lose too many militia before you upgrade them