Unable to finish long games

[w0lt3n]

Hello everybody.

I am an old age of empires series fan. Played original AOE3 in its time and now I am back here to enjoy this nice game. However, Im used to find a problem when a game lasts too much, when you have 80 villagers, 30k gold 30k food etc. Your population is 200 and you attack the enemy, Both armies are destroyed, but in 1 min you have 200 population army again and the enemy too, the same happens. Yesterday I played a 3v3 (2 friends and I vs 3 hard AI). Game lasted 100 minutes and it was impossible to finish.

I know it´s very likely that we do something wrong, but I don´t know how to face this situation. I always though that 200 population cap was too low.

What do you thing? What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

[Catalytic]

So, in these games, this becomes a rate issue. You need to produce faster and you need to get those armies into combat faster. Winning involves reducing the rate of production your enemy can produce below what you can do.

1) Build a forward base with 6-8 production structures and at least one building that can receive shipments. Especially for artillery, you need to build them close to where you're going to need them because the walk time across a map sucks, even on the smallest maps.

2) You want lots of production buildings because you're going to train simultaneously out of all of them. Ideally, you want to remax your army within a single wave of production, and if not that, in 2 waves, including whatever you're using to over pop.

3) Make use of things that let you get more than 200 pop. Native units are extra. They're on their own counters. And shipments can overpop as well, so if you queue up 199/200 then send a shipment, in 40sec, you've got extra punch.

4) If you can't beat their production, destroy it. Here's where a massive artillery army, or better yet, petards are your best friend. You're aiming to destroy anything that lets them get more resources or train more units. They can have a 100K resource bank and it's useless if they have no production buildings. Also, remember the houses. Sure, they can get Immigrants to give them 100 pop intrinsically. That'll be for their villagers. Blow up the houses and you can restrict their maximum military side. And of course, you take out anything that passively gives free resources: factories, banks, shrines/torps, Portuguese TCs/feitorias. For Asian civs, take those wonders out. Especially with AI, bait their army out to attack in one direction, then send in the petards/artillery snipe squad from the other side.

These games are definitely winnable, but I totally feel your pain if you let an enemy build up to this state. These can be annoyingly long slugfests.