1. Never leave your Town Center idle.
This step is so critically important to becoming a better player and probably one of the easiest things to change in the way that you play. Your Town Center should never stop working, villagers should be in constant production unless you’re doing a research and that’s the only time villager production should stop (until you reach ~120 villagers). Every second that your town center is idle is precious time wasted in getting the next villager out, it may not be such a big problem at first but as the game goes on a lack of villagers can ruin any chance of staying competitive.
Example: If you have 5 seconds of idle time between each villager that you create then every 2 minutes and 30 seconds your opponent will have a new extra villager compared to you. Over the course of the game this can add up to a lot of lost resources and gathering time!
Tips: An easy way to prevent your town center from going idle is to press the “H” key on your keyboard whenever you hear the villager creation sound, this will jump you to your town center where you may queue a new villager or research an upgrade very quickly. Once you have multiple town centers keep pressing “H” and checking each town center whenever you hear the villager creation sound.
2. Don’t over-queue buildings.
A typical mistake that I see a lot of newer players make is to queue too many units inside of a building at once. There’s a few reasons why this is bad and it’s something that a lot of players don’t even consider. Whenever you queue a unit inside of a building the resources for that unit are taken away from your stockpiles, meaning that the number of resources you see at the top of your screen is not actually a true value of the total resources you could have if all building production was stopped. So why is this a big deal? Well firstly there’s the issue of time, it takes a long while to create 15 units from a building and the resources you spend adding those units to the queue could be better spent dealing with a more immediate problem. You may only need 200 more food to advance to the next age, but because you’ve got 10 villagers queued up in each Town Center you don’t realize that you could advance straight away and instead lose time waiting for that food to stockpile up.
The second issue is efficiency and how effectively you’re able to spend your resources. Player A with 3 archery ranges with 1 archer queued in each will be much more effective than player B with 1 archery range and 3 archers queued inside. Even though both players have the required resources to make the units player A will get the advantage in a 3 vs 1 fight.
Tips: As a general rule, if you’re about to queue the 4th unit inside of a building then consider adding a new building of that type instead of continuing to add more units to the queue. This will force you to distribute resources between your military production buildings and also increase your efficiency when building an army.
3. Scout like you’ve never scouted before.
Good map visibility, knowledge and information is a huge game-changer and can help you to feel more in control and aware of what’s happening in the game. You may hear me talk about map control a lot in my videos and it’s a really crucial element in the game, scouting well and keeping good map visibility is the main building block to taking map control. Even though Age of Empires 2 has quite a strong meta-game it’s very good to know exactly what your opponent is up to behind the fog of war, knowing what’s up gives you more time to react and respond to a situation than being caught off guard and being thrown into panic mode.
If you have better visibility and knowledge of what your opponent is up to then you’ll even be able to catch them off guard too by being able to build the counter units to whatever they are making.
Tips: Control group your scout cavalry at the very start of the game by pressing Ctrl+1 when you have him selected. Make sure that you never leave your scout idle and keep checking that he is moving by double tapping “1” to jump to him. At the start of the game you should scout in concentric circles around your base and then head out to your opponent to keep a close eye on their every move.
4. Learn a build order and perfect it.
Practice makes perfect and in order to improve you’ll need to practice… a lot! The reason I would recommend learning a build order is to give you a solid guide and starting block that is proven to work. There’s many many aspects to Age of Empires 2 that can be overwhelming for a new player, so using a tried and tested build order will help you to establish game-play basics which you can then experiment with later down the line once you have it perfected. Start by getting a piece of paper and writing down the step by step instructions for a build order of your choice, you can find a list of build orders here: Build Orders (if you have a 2nd monitor then just leave the build order open on your 2nd monitor instead). Then, start a single player game and follow the build order you’ve copied down making sure to follow each individual step… don’t worry about speed just make sure that you do it right every time. If you fall too far behind just hit restart and do it again until you eventually learn the build order inside-out and can do it without the list of instructions.
Perfect the build order with practice and try it out against human players online, once you’ve learnt a solid build order you can progress to learn more and as you do so your entire understanding of the game will broaden.
5. Learn to use modular game-play
This tip is a little more advanced than the others, but even if you’re completely new to the game read this tip and keep it in mind whilst you are playing. Modular game-play is a very interesting idea and can really help to shift your focus when you’re playing and give you the power to plan ahead much more easily. In essence modular game-play is looking at each production building as a module and knowing what that building requires in order to sustain constant production. For instance, if you want to keep villagers producing from one Town Center then you need 50 food every 25 seconds which is the same as 6 villagers gathering from farms. So if you add a new Town Center you now know that you need to have 12 farms in order to keep villager production going at all time. This way of thinking and this level of understanding of the game is what helps define a top player from an expert, it helps players to figure out exactly how many villagers they need on each resource at any time in order to achieve what they want to do. I will write an entire article about modular game-play so make sure to keep updated with the website to be sure not to miss it!
I hope these tips are helpful and will improve your chances of winning at Age of Empires 2! I tried to write tips that you can easily put into practice so that you’ll see results very quickly, so good luck and may the wololo be with you!
This step is so critically important to becoming a better player and probably one of the easiest things to change in the way that you play. Your Town Center should never stop working, villagers should be in constant production unless you’re doing a research and that’s the only time villager production should stop (until you reach ~120 villagers). Every second that your town center is idle is precious time wasted in getting the next villager out, it may not be such a big problem at first but as the game goes on a lack of villagers can ruin any chance of staying competitive.
Example: If you have 5 seconds of idle time between each villager that you create then every 2 minutes and 30 seconds your opponent will have a new extra villager compared to you. Over the course of the game this can add up to a lot of lost resources and gathering time!
Tips: An easy way to prevent your town center from going idle is to press the “H” key on your keyboard whenever you hear the villager creation sound, this will jump you to your town center where you may queue a new villager or research an upgrade very quickly. Once you have multiple town centers keep pressing “H” and checking each town center whenever you hear the villager creation sound.
2. Don’t over-queue buildings.
A typical mistake that I see a lot of newer players make is to queue too many units inside of a building at once. There’s a few reasons why this is bad and it’s something that a lot of players don’t even consider. Whenever you queue a unit inside of a building the resources for that unit are taken away from your stockpiles, meaning that the number of resources you see at the top of your screen is not actually a true value of the total resources you could have if all building production was stopped. So why is this a big deal? Well firstly there’s the issue of time, it takes a long while to create 15 units from a building and the resources you spend adding those units to the queue could be better spent dealing with a more immediate problem. You may only need 200 more food to advance to the next age, but because you’ve got 10 villagers queued up in each Town Center you don’t realize that you could advance straight away and instead lose time waiting for that food to stockpile up.
The second issue is efficiency and how effectively you’re able to spend your resources. Player A with 3 archery ranges with 1 archer queued in each will be much more effective than player B with 1 archery range and 3 archers queued inside. Even though both players have the required resources to make the units player A will get the advantage in a 3 vs 1 fight.
Tips: As a general rule, if you’re about to queue the 4th unit inside of a building then consider adding a new building of that type instead of continuing to add more units to the queue. This will force you to distribute resources between your military production buildings and also increase your efficiency when building an army.
3. Scout like you’ve never scouted before.
Good map visibility, knowledge and information is a huge game-changer and can help you to feel more in control and aware of what’s happening in the game. You may hear me talk about map control a lot in my videos and it’s a really crucial element in the game, scouting well and keeping good map visibility is the main building block to taking map control. Even though Age of Empires 2 has quite a strong meta-game it’s very good to know exactly what your opponent is up to behind the fog of war, knowing what’s up gives you more time to react and respond to a situation than being caught off guard and being thrown into panic mode.
If you have better visibility and knowledge of what your opponent is up to then you’ll even be able to catch them off guard too by being able to build the counter units to whatever they are making.
Tips: Control group your scout cavalry at the very start of the game by pressing Ctrl+1 when you have him selected. Make sure that you never leave your scout idle and keep checking that he is moving by double tapping “1” to jump to him. At the start of the game you should scout in concentric circles around your base and then head out to your opponent to keep a close eye on their every move.
4. Learn a build order and perfect it.
Practice makes perfect and in order to improve you’ll need to practice… a lot! The reason I would recommend learning a build order is to give you a solid guide and starting block that is proven to work. There’s many many aspects to Age of Empires 2 that can be overwhelming for a new player, so using a tried and tested build order will help you to establish game-play basics which you can then experiment with later down the line once you have it perfected. Start by getting a piece of paper and writing down the step by step instructions for a build order of your choice, you can find a list of build orders here: Build Orders (if you have a 2nd monitor then just leave the build order open on your 2nd monitor instead). Then, start a single player game and follow the build order you’ve copied down making sure to follow each individual step… don’t worry about speed just make sure that you do it right every time. If you fall too far behind just hit restart and do it again until you eventually learn the build order inside-out and can do it without the list of instructions.
Perfect the build order with practice and try it out against human players online, once you’ve learnt a solid build order you can progress to learn more and as you do so your entire understanding of the game will broaden.
5. Learn to use modular game-play
This tip is a little more advanced than the others, but even if you’re completely new to the game read this tip and keep it in mind whilst you are playing. Modular game-play is a very interesting idea and can really help to shift your focus when you’re playing and give you the power to plan ahead much more easily. In essence modular game-play is looking at each production building as a module and knowing what that building requires in order to sustain constant production. For instance, if you want to keep villagers producing from one Town Center then you need 50 food every 25 seconds which is the same as 6 villagers gathering from farms. So if you add a new Town Center you now know that you need to have 12 farms in order to keep villager production going at all time. This way of thinking and this level of understanding of the game is what helps define a top player from an expert, it helps players to figure out exactly how many villagers they need on each resource at any time in order to achieve what they want to do. I will write an entire article about modular game-play so make sure to keep updated with the website to be sure not to miss it!
I hope these tips are helpful and will improve your chances of winning at Age of Empires 2! I tried to write tips that you can easily put into practice so that you’ll see results very quickly, so good luck and may the wololo be with you!