Complete noob to AoE 2, tips?

[Banafrit™]

What are some quick pointers I should know, trying to get into multiplayer? Played a few games, but have a lot of room for improvement.

[Dayve]

Originally posted by Banafrit™:

What are some quick pointers I should know, trying to get into multiplayer? Played a few games, but have a lot of room for improvement.

Watch some videos on Youtube, there's tons of them. The most important thing you can do is learn how to start the game the right way. The first 10 minutes of a game are the most important. You want your town centre to be working 100% of the time, either making villagers or advancing to the next age.

Or if you want you can play a game against a single hard AI opponent, record it, then watch it back and see how the AI does it. The AI is really good in this game on hard.

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Play the Single Player campaigns first.

You will learn lots of tricks to play later and get a lot more for your money. The Campaigns are designed to make you try different styles of play and you learn to counter different enemies.

There are many more SP players than new players realise. We find we don't need to play MP much if at all.

[WindBlownLeaf]

A build order can work wonders.

[Xautos]

learning unit counters.

learning to advance from the dark age to the feudal age in 5 minutes .

Rushing out early forces of archers and militia men before the first 8 minutes to avoid players who may attempt rush tactics and stop your progress altogether.

Learning the do's and don't's about where to build and what to produce to avoid wasting resources and your time because your enemies have gotten around them or have a hard counter to them.

a lot of things you can learn anywhere, but experience can't be taught and that's something you'll have to gain as you play matches. take each loss as a learning opportunity and think about what you did right and wrong and eventually that experience will kick in and you'll know what to do and how to do it by default after a while.

[Lotor13]

There are Art of War missions (in AoE3 & AoE4 are too),

play it, complete it and try to get silver medail at least

[Percussigant]

In no particular order, and assuming you are talking about 1v1 ranked multiplayer :

-Build orders : practice a basic scout rush and/or an archer rush build order at least up until the point where you start attacking your opponent, as boring as it may be. The more stuff you can commit to muscle memory, the more mental space you free up for decisionmaking. You don't have to execute it perfectly, just committing an hour (or even two) to learning it is enough to begin with. As others have said, there is an abundance of content available online or on discord servers or youtube.

-Civs : play one or two or three civs that you like more than the others and play only those for the time being. It helps a lot to feel comfortable with the civ you're playing, and you can always diversify once the basics feel more natural. Don't play Random Civs, the game will always give you something super weird that you won't know what to do with yet.

-Maps : keep in mind that most build orders you will find online are meant for Arabia (or sometimes Arena). If you're serious about getting better at the game, it might be a good idea to pick Arabia as your favorite map when queuing (it's the most played 1v1 map by a landslide). Alternatively, you could also choose to specialise in Arena or Nomad or even water maps, which are all pretty much always available in the map pool.

-Mindset : always say "gl hf" and "gg" and don't feel bad for losing. Avoid any form of toxicity, obviously (if you're the mischievous kind of player, laming or tower rushing does not count as toxicity btw, feel free to experiment with whacky strategies). If you set yourself up to believe that your opponent is worthless, winning will taste bland and losing will feel extra bad.

-Health : if you lose three games in a row, stop playing for the day or at least play some campaign missions to take a break. If it's just not your day, it's just not your day.

[D-Lusional]

- Play the Art of War campaigns to learn strategies commonly used online.
- Learn each unit's counters
- Most importantly play as each civ to get a taste of what they offer in terms of units and techs and pick the ones you like the best and practice with them in singleplayer vs hard/hardest AI. If you want to save time you can find Spirit of the Law on Youtube who does civ overviews outlaying every civ's strengths and weaknesses so it should be easy finding the civs you find interesting. He also rates each civ on their infantry/archer/cavalry/siege line, monastery, defences and naval capabilities.

[-SNiGS- JAM]

fight vs AI and spam your favorite unit until you get krumped on the head, then do the homework on why, and how to not next time.

usually people pay more attention to what they can learn when they're playing with their favorite pieces.

[WindBlownLeaf]

If you want to spam one unit, here's a list I made of units resistant to their conventional counters.

Cataphract (Heavy Cavalry)—Anti-Infantry, Resists Anti-Cavalry
Huskarl (Heavy Infantry)—Archer Resistant, Anti-Archer
Elephant Archer (Cavalry Archer)—Archer Resistant, Anti-Spearman (Bengalis only)
Rattan Archer (Foot Archer)—Archer Resistant
Konnik (Heavy Cavalry)—Resists Anti-Cavalry
Serjeant (Heavy Infantry)—High M/P Armor
Ghulam—Anti-Archer, Resists Archers
Condotierro—Anti-Gunpowder, Resists Anti-Infantry
War Wagon (Cavalry Archer) — Archer Resistant
Chu Ko Nu (Foot Archer) — Anti-Skirmisher, Anti-Siege

[Rhalius]

Spirit of the Law makes a lot of great videos about the game.

[kucsidaveee]

Originally posted by Rhalius:

Spirit of the Law makes a lot of great videos about the game.

Let me second that.
SotL is very helpful.

[Vemonia]

1) AoE 2 is an economy vs military game. Contrary to wacraft 3, where you are limited by the number of gold mines and the little importance of wood.
In aoe 2, you want to have 50% villagers and 50% army in the late game. Before, you (nearlt) always keep your villager production running, while making military. In castle age in particular, you decide how many TCs (greed) you should use for villagers and put the rest to army.

2) In aoe2, gold and stone are limited, wood and food are abundant. Whatever only cost wood and food can be spamed late game. Gold costing units must be taken care of in 1v1. In castle age you food is limited by farms (costing a lot of initial wood investment). Gold in team game in infinite via trade, so the units to spam are different than 1v1.

3) Counters: some units are strong against other. The most annoying part of aoe2 is the "hidden damage". In particular, pikemen and camel vs cavalry, skirmisher vs non siege/ship ranged units, and trebuchets/rams against buildings: in these case, do not brlieve the written numbers.

4) Upgrades: they are extremely important. I compare again to warcraft 3, where an upgrade give like +5% damage because the armor is like a percentage of damage blocked. In aoe 2, the damage is decreased by the armor, so taking armor upgrades may be the difference between taking 1 damage or 3 damage per hit. A unit may lose to the unit it is supposed to counter if it lacks upgrades. In castle age everyone get more or less the same upgrades, but in imperial age some units are really bad (very very situational) if you lack the upgrades.

5) Online players are pretty good, even though they call themselves noob due to nit being as good as they wish. If you jump into ranked, be prepared to lose a lot of games (10 maybe) until you get matched to players of your ELO. Do not get discouraged by that. If you go to lobbies, you can plsy against AI. Do not trust anyone in lobby calling himself a noob.

6) aoe2 has a lot of online material (build orders, forums, streamers, youtube tutorials) and ingame material (build order mods, art of war) to learn playing better.

[Quarantined_villager]

Watch SotL First 10 vills, then Survivalist videos on how the game works and how to handle your economy, after that ... the ladder
GL & HF

[FoxMcBrush]

Sort out your hotkeys so the controls make the game playable.

I've written a guide to simple Hotkeys for Noob players that make the game easy to play.

[Endeavor]

go to mods tab. there is a scenerio mod which explains meta starting builds with ranked timings. that should help you out.