The only tutorial you need for aoh2

In this guide I included all my knowledge and thoughts about this game, they are supported by my 800h experience. Sure, aoh2 is an extremely simple game, especially when compared to other strategy games like paradox. Still, I think it's worth reading this guide. There's bound to be something you didn't know. In addition, at the end I posted various ideas for interesting gameplay and my thoughts on what should be changed to make this game more meaningful.

INSTAGRAM: maciej_mokrzycki

ATTENTION

This tutorial is a translation of my tutorial. The original was written in the most beautiful language in the galaxy - Polish. After I translated it to English with Google Translate, HoloKnight cleaned up the grammatical mistakes it made (among others) to make it easier to read, but there still might be a bit of meaning lost.
Nevertheless, this should not be an obstacle to reading this guide.

Short Introduction

This guide is intended for people at any level of skill, although to play this game well you only need to play for 2 hours.

The guide consists of three parts:
In the first one, I give practical advice and show different ways to play.
In the second, I give interesting ideas to diversify the gameplay, a.k.a. what to do when aoh2 bores you.
In the third, I share my thoughts on age of history 2, which I really want to talk about.

To some, this guide may be too long, but I hope for many people that's better and not worse.

Some things may seem incomprehensible to you until you check them in the game, and dry reading alone may not be enough. That's why I recommended having Age of History 2 on while reading; you can check things as they're discussed here to better understand it.

Part One A.

The fastest, most effective, and easiest way to "conquer"

To do this strategy, you want to vassalize states and then annex them later.
- Step 1: Recruit a large army. The exact number depends on the strength of the country you want to send an ultimatum to; for weak countries ~30k soldiers is enough, for medium strength countries 50-100k should do it, and for the largest and strongest countries 200k should be enough, but it could be less.

- Step 2: Send an ultimatum to anyone you can and demand vassalization. Remember: to do this, you must have relations with the country at -10 or lower.

- Step 3: When they agree, you automatically have a truce with them for 30 turns. During this time, set their tax to 0% so that they don't rebel against you. When the peace ends, you obviously send them an ultimatum demanding annexation, after which you automatically take over all their territories.

At this point I could end this guide, but since you are reading this, I assume that you would rather play in more interesting and maybe more ambitious ways than mindlessly sending ultimatums and being happy that your country has a big inscription on the map. There is no point in simplifying an already trivial game.


So moving on, as in most strategy games, there are two styles of play. These are called Tall and Wide. Let me first share with you general tips that apply to both ways of playing.

Let's start by distributing budget spending and tech points at the start of the game:




At the beginning I always prefer this setting. Why? Taxes are as little as possible to increase people's satisfaction to almost 100%, because the population's satisfaction has a large impact on tax income. I've put my commodities and investments down to the lowest I can have without taking a loss. (I'll explain that in a moment, when I discuss playing tall.) However, in the research, I invested so much that the turn-based income was more or less zero. When it comes to technology, it always sets taxes at the maximum level, because it is from them that you always get the most money at the beginning. The rest is managed, because you can also save a lot of money on them. If you have a lot of influence from production, though, you might as well put those points into production instead of management. Also, as you may have noticed, I removed all of my starting army. If I didn't, I would lose 600 gold every round. Thanks to this, more money is spent on research, and it increases research progress per turn. Once you've done all that, click around 70 rounds so that your population's satisfaction is around 97%, as in the situation below. If you're playing aggressively, skip fewer turns. By the time you've passed 70 turns, a country would probably have declared war on you when you weren't ready. Of course, if you play as a small or very small country, increase the satisfaction of the population through festivals, since it will be faster than taxes. Instead of trying to get 97%, try to get 90%.



As you can see, after all of this my tax income increased by almost 5,000 and I gained 19 tech points.

Tall

- Characterized by the fact that you do not focus on conquests, but rather on developing the economy, technology, etc.
Playing tall in this game (in short) is that you set everything so that you get as much gold as possible every turn, click through 20 rounds and invest all the money collected in a province where you have a large population, e.g. in the capital, and when the economy number matches with the population you start investing in several other provinces with a large population. (When the number of the economy equals the number of population, stop investing in that province because then you would not make any more money. If there's not enough people to work all those jobs, then no money is made from the extra economy.) This is the fastest and easiest way to develop very quickly.

Doing this for half a thousand or even just a few hundred turns will put you light years ahead compared to the whole world. A few hundred turns when you play tall is, contrary to appearances, very little, especially since you keep clicking the end turn button and invest in a few provinces from time to time. That's also the downside of playing this way; it can seem a bit boring because there's not much going on, but believe me, watching your income grow is really very satisfying. Just remember not to recruit troops in those provinces with the greatest economy, because it greatly weakens those provinces. It takes away not only people, but the economy and development itself. Later, when you're filthy rich, you can start budget spending by significantly increasing the amount of money you spend on goods, so you'll have some population. When this happens, you will be able to invest in the province again because there will be no problem with the economy exceeding the population. Repeat that over and over again to get even more economy. That's why I did not put money into goods and investments in the budget menu. (When you are getting very little money, you get practically nothing anyway, it's not worth playing like that) The money accumulates faster, therefore you can spend more of it on investments. (((As far as the investment process itself is concerned, of course you do it up there in map mode like in the picture, not click on each province individually. I hope that's obvious.))) During all this, don't forget to build such buildings as workshops and ports in the provinces you invest in. An interesting fact is that the price of individual buildings depends on how many of them you have, so if you want to build something, it's best to do it en masse. This means that you collect some gold and use all the money for the next 2 or so turns (depending on the building's construction time) to build e.g. workshops. This works because buildings that are under construction don't count as if you own them, so they don't increase the cost of building the next ones. Then you will pay a little less than if you did it separately. Remember that ports also increase production income, just like workshops. But in general, build buildings only after you invest a lot in provinces, with the exception of workshops and ports. Increasing the economy is simply much more profitable than building a library or a farm.




Of course, increase not only the province's economy, but also its development.

Part One B.

Wide

- Contrary to tall, playing wide focuses on gaining territory and ignores the economy, focuses more on the army, etc. This is even simpler than tall. You just collect a lot of gold and attack some weak countries around you. When you attack countries on a level similar to yours or even stronger, don't be afraid of loans if you see that it will allow you to conquer quickly and efficiently. In general, if you declare war on someone, the best strategy is to attack on the longest possible front in the first turn. This is a very effective strategy for a very simple reason: recruiting troops for that turn is twice as expensive as recruiting them for next turn. The AI ​​doesn't tend to keep troops along the entire border with you, and they usually don't have much in savings. You'll be able to capture the enemy's province in no time thanks to this, and when the enemy doesn't have their own provinces they'll earn much less and won't have any money to recruit troops. You can even win against a much stronger country doing this. Of course, make sure that there are no holes in your front, in the sense of provinces where your troops are not present and the enemy could attack there. Our whole plan could fail because of such negligence. Therefore, when the enemy breaks through and takes over a province, try to surround them and recapture territory as quickly as possible. You don't want them to break through recapture their territory or even take yours. In general, pay attention to the enemy's defense bonuses (or yours when you defend yourself) so you don't lose your army stupidly. Remember to develop technology because it can also give you a few percent advantage. Try not to attack provinces with castles directly, rather let the enemy send their troops from the castle to yours. You don't have to use this rule if you really care about taking over provinces quickly and dynamically. Generally, if you see that a big battle is about to take place, sometimes it's worth letting the enemy attack you. Then your soldiers will be stronger thanks to the defensive bonus. You may not get much out of it, but believe me, sometimes you can win the whole war by saving money. In general, when you know or suspect that a province controlled by an enemy is empty, take it over. It doesn't matter how many troops you send there. (It can be as little as 10, although it depends on the exact situation how much you want to send in.) This is another detail by which whole wars are won; if you take over an enemy province, even for a moment, the opponent does not get the gold that the province generates. (The provinces you occupy also generate income for you, but unfortunately it rarely exceeds 10 gold per turn). It also works the other way around, of course; if you recapture your province, you get money from it. In this simple way, you will significantly improve your economic balance in relation to the enemy, therefore you will be able to recruit more soldiers, therefore you can win against an opponent stronger than you. So what if your opponent has a bigger country than you? If you take over some of their provinces, so that they won't earn from those provinces, you can actually make him a country economically weaker than you. All doable even with a ridiculously small army - 10 soldiers or a bit more (~up to 50) (the minimum army you can send to capture a province is 10). Not only that, when the enemy wants to take back their provinces (which you brazenly took over with a pitifully small army) they will most likely send to you their army that was at the front with you. Of course, this will make it easier for you to attack/defend. Let me remind you that when an army occupies a province, it loses its economy and a bit of population. (How much exactly depends on the size of the army that attacks.) Once again, the course of the entire war may depend on the use of such clever tricks.

When you recruit a very large army, it is of course worth building an armory somewhere first. (Wherever you have a large population and not a large economy, that way you don't lose any economy.) After the war, of course, you take over the enemy's territories and assimilate them. If you can't take over all the enemy's provinces and still want all their land, you can make them your vassal and then demand annexation with an ultimatum later. However, do this only when you are sure that your opponent will accept your demands. Generally, when you enter an enemy-controlled province with a very large army, that province loses a lot of economy and some population, so be careful not to damage provinces that will be yours too much in the future. And if you want to further harm the country you're fighting with, you can destroy all the buildings that are theirs after the war, and if you want, you can plunder them a bit more.
Since I have already touched on the issue of loans here, an interesting fact is that how much money you receive depends on your income per turn, so if you want to get the largest loan, set taxes to the highest first and everything else - goods, investments, research to the lowest - take loans and set taxes etc back as you had at the beginning. You can do this all in a single turn.



Let me skip the subject of diplomacy. If you want, you can improve relations with everyone, create alliances and then form unions with allies, etc. I'm not particularly attracted to it; this game is simple enough not to have to deal with the bot. If you are a very small country and you take an alliance with a country at your level, or you want to do some roleplaying, it's still ok. However, I consider it too much of a simplification. At most, it might be a nice idea to send some insults to all the strong countries in the area so that something interesting happens.

Part One C.

Now I will share with you some general tricks/exploits/trivia

- When someone sends you a request for military access and you want to grant them military access, always decline the request. Next turn, they will always send you a second offer, only this time they will offer you some gold as well. The more money they have to spare, the more money they will give you, so you can get thousands of dollars for free if major powers want military access.

- When you send a country a trade offer for that country to declare war on someone, it always agrees, even if you don't give anything in return. Do not use it too often, and preferably not at all, otherwise you will lose the satisfaction of playing. Maybe I'm repeating myself, but this game is simple enough anyway, there's no need to make it any easier. If you need to force peace with a nation much bigger than you, however, getting a few other nations to war with them usually gets you off the hook.

- When a disease spreads in your country, increase your spending on technology for that time. That way, less of your people will die. In general, it is the level of technology that affects the spread of diseases.

-If you are playing and would like to switch to another country, all you have to do is save the game, go back to the start menu, enter the editor menu, go back and click "games" and then click new game. Then you will see your map on which you have just played, and you will be able to choose any country to play. Helpful if a bot doesn't want to work with you on something; just play it and make a decision for it, and then go back to yourself after.

- If you are playing a scenario (e.g. 1440) where some part of the Earth is hidden from you because those provinces are set as undiscovered, you can preview them. Just go to the main menu (you don't even have to save) and look at the map on the left. It shows the current state of the map you are playing on, but there is no division into discovered and undiscovered - you see those civilizations that are in undiscovered areas.

- If you are at war with someone that might try to attack by sea, and you don't have any watchtowers in provinces bordering the water, you can simply send one soldier to sea. Then, when the enemy enters his army on the field where this one unit is standing, a battle will take place. (Of course, they will destroy this one poor soldier.) This will let you know that the enemy is approaching.

- If a war you are fighting (e.g. defensive) is not convenient for you, then often send a request for peace. Eventually, the bot will agree to it. They are more likely to agree to it if the front lines haven't moved in a long time, if they are fighting many other enemies, or if you are stronger than them.

- If a country extremely stronger than you has just declared war on you and you know that you literally have no chance, open your country's diplomacy tab (at the top) and click "release vassal." Then select (right) any civilization, then select all your provinces and mark (top left) that you want to play as that vassal. Your new state will not be at war with this strong state, but you will be a vassal of your previous waltz - just declare independence, and when your lord declares war on you, just win with him, you will likely do it without any problem. In general, it is impossible to give your capital to a vassal, so if you care about your capital (because, for example, it brings a lot of income,) just move the capital to some least developed province. (If you can't afford it, take a loan; all these activities must be done in one turn, as soon as war is declared on you.)

- in general, when you play on very high aggressiveness, it means that after several hundred, maybe a thousand turns, most countries (especially large ones) have very high war exhaustion, maybe even around 100%. Then the maintenance of the army is extremely high (more than 1 gold per soldier), thanks to which you can easily conquer countries. Not thanks to the strength of your army, but the economy. Of course, all provided that you do not have very high war exhaustion yourself, and instead you are economically well developed.

- If you click on a given province, you will see four interactions in the lower left corner, each of which has a shortcut assigned to it. For example, to recruit an army you don't need to click on the recruit button, just click "W". This allows you to save some time, and it is useful when you are recruiting a lot of soldiers. It's also a lot less clicking, which is often more healthy for your hands. To learn other keyboard shortcuts, just hover over the button and see what it says.

- In general, in the upper right corner you have written the turn and the exact date in the game. However, if you click on this date, a bar will begin to fill. When it gets to the end, it automatically ends your turn. The plus and minus buttons on the side let you can change the speed with which this bar fills up. However, even at the highest level, it's slower than manually spamming the button from the end of the round. This automatic round end skip can be useful when you're in spectator mode and want to keep an eye on things (e.g. some war) but don't want to click the turn end button or spam the spacebar.
Interestingly, when you play and you have this option enabled, when another country declares war on you, it is automatically stopped. Unfortunately, when you play more than one country at the same time, this option is unavailable.

- in the game settings at the very bottom you can choose a custom cursor, maybe it will be more attractive to you than a regular mouse icon.

- Never get upset if something goes wrong, there are always random elements. Sometimes they will be in your favor and sometimes very much not in your favor. It happens.

Part Two

Interesting game ideas

The main problem with this game is that it can get boring quickly. The gameplay is quite monotonous, as for an average player it is not a challenge. That's why I've prepared a list of ideas for the game in this section to make it as interesting as possible if you want more of a challenge, in no particular order:


1. Download some nice mod like addon+, Bloody Europe II or project alpha.

2. Download or create an interesting scenario, play with the wizard, and create some interesting events.

3. Play on a map other than the standard Earth 4269 province. It can be, for example, Kepler-22B or Earth 364 of the province. Asia itself or Europe itself can also be interesting, since the provinces on these maps are smaller (one province on the Earth map is usually split into 2 or 3 provinces on the map of Asia or Europe), thanks to which you can play as an even smaller country while also playing scenarios you haven't played before.

4. I don't know about you, but when I was playing I was very curious about all the statistics and how they change (under the F5 key you can see various statistics that are not found anywhere else). That's why you can, for example, set the aggressiveness high, play very tall, collect a lot of money and send it to countries that are at war with each other, to both sides. You can watch how they destroy themselves, what are the losses in their war, etc. (When you press F5, you will find a tab on the right where all the wars in the world are shown at the moment.) Your goal may be for the world population to fall below, for example, 5 million. There's also a "map modes" tab on the top, which allows you to look at the entire map's population, economy, development level, growth rate, and more on a province level.

5. In general, if you are interested in large numbers, you can increase the starting population and economy and their growth in the scenario editor at the very bottom. You can play around with those different sliders in the editor, just don't overdo it with disease mortality, because after the first disease, the provinces affected by it will have a population close to zero.

6. Take a country similar in size to Romania or Nigeria, set taxes as high as possible, and don't change them. The point is that the population's satisfaction drops to 0%. When rebellions start to break out, fight them and see how long you can stand.

7. Play multiplayer with friends, for example via steam remote play.

8. You can do all the achievements if you want. They can be cheesed with custom scenarios, but are more fun to do legitimately.

9. If the gameplay is not enough of a challenge for you, listen to this. In the Year 5 scenario, significantly strengthen the Roman Empire (mainly technology - increase it by at least 0.25). Also, buff the Han Dynasty as much as you can, and set the Aggressiveness to 200% or more. Take a European civilization yourself, not too strong, not too weak, and so that you are away from Rome and have a lot of room for development (in the sense of a lot of surrounding countries to conquer). Prussia is a cool country of this type. The plan for the game is this: you progress quickly, and once you are able to conquer Rome (it won't be easy) you head east where you will want to conquer the Han Dynasty. There's no way they won't have taken over at least most of Asia by then. It will definitely not be an easy opponent for you. If you manage to conquer both of these countries, know that you are truly an expert.
There may be a problem with the Han Dynasty going to war with Rome, so set their relationship to +99 in the scenario. Unfortunately, these friendly relations may not last long, so you can also strengthen the Parthian Kingdom to sort of separate Europe and Asia with a country that will be a sort of wall. Thanks to this, the clash between Rome and the Han Dynasty will be significantly delayed, or even not happen, which we would like very much; it will make it more interesting and a bit harder.

10. Find a country and scenario yourself as in point 9. The general rule is: there must always be someone stronger than you in your area, and at the same time you must have some room for meaningful development. Strengthen a strong and large country that is close to you, but not too close, in the scenario editor. In addition, strengthen as much as possible one more large and strong country, this time let them be very far from you and the first country that you also strengthened. Choose a small, weak country, which at the same time has some room for reasonable development. I mean, they have a lot of countries to conquer around here. At the same time (to make it more interesting) choose a civilization that is one of the weakest in its region, but without exaggeration so that you can do anything meaningful. And before starting the game, of course, set the aggressiveness and legendary level to high.
You have a perfect example of such a selection of countries and scenario in point 9.

11. Create a scenario where you divided the entire Earth between several civilizations more or less equally. Then run this scenario, set the aggressiveness to 400% and turn on the spectator mode. Watch what happens, look at various interesting statistics, and enjoy.

12. Play as a tribe. It usually takes a while for tribes to get going, which will naturally give you large and strong AI to fight against once you finally do.

13. Play with Forever War enabled. As a scenario, he proposes the modern world, and for that I suggest choosing a small country from Central Europe, e.g. the Czech Republic or Poland.

In general, always play on Legendary difficulty and at least 120% Aggression. I don't know what these difficulty levels change, but I do know that they are all fairly trivial and even an inexperienced player can handle them with little difficulty. And if not, at least you will have some interesting challenge and learn something.

Part Three

My subjective thoughts and opinion on this game.

Age of history 2 is a game created entirely by one man, hence its simplicity. Łukasz Jakowski (creator of aoh2) has not been working on his production for a long time, as I'm sure you have noticed. Two years ago, there were rumors about a sequel to this game [aoc3] and interestingly it would be rts. I don't know how true that is. You can say that the creator has an alibi and that he doesn't care about aoh2. Well, it's not just this game that I wanted to talk about.

Probably every person who played a little more and got to know some interesting mechanics will agree that this game is simply too easy and not very developed. If aoh2 is your first game of this type, it may seem different to you, but believe me, it is. There's a bigger problem than that, however. It's fun to play when the action takes place in a small area, but the problem arises when you play as a larger country, e.g. Russia, USA, etc. and you want to perform some action. I mean, for example, waging war with another great country. Look what you have to do then: recruit a lot of troops (often even several hundred thousand), place these troops on the border with the enemy, then once you declare war you have to move all these units (all manually!), then when you win, you have to assimilate dozens of provinces if not more. In short, it is extremely tiring and boring. For this reason, few people want to do world conquest. Besides, at some point, when you are the strongest in the world, the game loses its meaning, and it is no longer a challenge. It's as if you were to conquer Luxembourg with Germany. In short, there is no such thing as to be able to perform certain actions in many provinces at once, and instead you are limited to as many single actions as the movement points allow. I mean, for example, it'd be good if you could recruit troops in 10 provinces at the same time, and not have to click each one in turn. It's such a simple thing, and it would make the game so much better. A similar thing would come in handy with army management. I'm thinking of a mechanic like in hearts of iron 4; you assign unit data to some general, and you assign the general to a given section of the front. Anyone who has played hoi4 will surely understand what I mean. It's just that aoh2 lacks such automation. Also, I don't like the fact that this game is so underdeveloped. The military is simply limited to some numbers in the provinces, and war is about moving those numbers. There are some modifiers that make your troops a few percent stronger, however these are so small changes that few people notice or care about it. When it comes to economics and diplomacy, there is no madness either. I don't care about graphics issues. And besides, bots should be stronger and smarter. For example, they should form alliances with each other more often. I really regret that there is no multiplayer mode in this game, as it would greatly revive this game. It is true that you can play with friends via steam remote play, but what is the pleasure of playing like this? (Especially when playing with more than two people.) So if someone who creates some mods is reading this, they already know what could be added to make this game much more enjoyable.
Generally, aoh2 is a great game, but in my opinion for a maximum of about 150-250 hours (this is not much for a strategy game). If you have never or very little played games of this type, aoh2 can help you get used to strategy games a bit. Keep in mind, however, that it is at the level of kindergarten compared to games for big boys; for example, crusader kings 3 and hearts of iron 4 (and all other grand strategy games from paradox), although these also do not represent any outstanding level.
This is also my solution to all aoh2 problems - just change the game. Learn to play any of the strategy games from paradox. I personally recommend crusader kings 3 to you. It's the quickest one to learn how to play. It has (among other things) a very good tutorial. And besides, I also created a guide for ck3 similar to the one you are reading now, but it is much more extensive. You can see it here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2846475771

End

This is the end of the guide, and I hope it was helpful to you. Sorry if I explained something incomprehensibly. At the same time, I tried to cover all the topics as concisely and exhaustively as possible. If this guide was even longer, few people would probably want to read it. If you want to appreciate my work, you can leave a like, rate it, add it to your favorites, and even award a prize. Thank you very much in advance.
If you have any question, doubt or anything else, feel free to leave a comment. If you found any error, would like to add something, or are curious about something, please also leave a comment. If you disagree with something, I will be happy to discuss it with you in the comments.

HoloKnight here, just quickly wanna say thanks for reading and I hope I've done a good translation job! It's always an honor to help bridge the language barrier.

Regards

[therowdyref]

Thankfully, AoC3 is looking far better than Aoc2. I can only imagine how many bugs in AoC2 will be fixed in the next game, and how fun troop production will be. The battles will be strength instead of numbers. Lukasz posted a video of 300k tribal troops versus 10k WW1 troops, and the WW1 troops won.

[HoloKnight]

Well, drinker of water, it depends on what answer you're looking for. If you want to drink water in the game, that is impossible. However, many bodies of water (including freshwater lakes) are on the map, which means drinkable water is indeed present in the game. If that isn't a conclusive enough answer for you, then let me know what else may trouble you!

[WaterDrinker]

still wating for responds

[WaterDrinker]

does this game have drinkable water?

[xlaylowx]

bro advertising his guide, good guide b

[Avoidedferret51]

alright thanks. do you know what investing in development does?

[Panda BaoBao PL]

Unfortunately, aoh2 doesn't have a working workshop on steam, so you have to look for all mods on the internet. It's best to choose mods that came out recently, because older ones may not work. On youtube you will find various guides on how to unpack what you download.

Here you have a fresh version of addon + 2.0, maybe it will work
http://www.ageofcivilizationsgame.com/topic/228076-addon-20/

[Avoidedferret51]

like the addon+ mod mentioned in the guide

[Avoidedferret51]

How do you mod this game?

[Panda BaoBao PL]

no