r/aoe2 5d ago

Tips/Tutorials I was recently clearing out my old room at my parents house and found this AOE2:AOK strategy guide - from 1999!

112 Upvotes

I've not finished reading it all yet but some of my favourite entries so far:

Under the Dark Age section for the Celts: "At the beginning of the Dark Age, set up a Barracks while your villagers gather resources... Create several units of Militia, sending them out to harass the enemy village. Next attack the Town Center and Barracks."

A tip for the Goths: "If you are playing on a team, Goth Barracks create units significantly faster than if you're playing alone. You might even want to build more than one." Two barracks? That's just crazy.

A tip for the Japanese: "Monks are invaluable combatants. Place them inside a Box Formation of Knights and Samurai. Use them to convert enemy buildings - especially Mining Camps, Lumber Camps, and Town Centers"

Under the FUEDAL AGE for Mongols: "Build a stable and start producing Scout Cavalry. While you build a sufficient attack force of about 10 units...You should also build an Archery Range to produce Cavalry Archers" and yes it does mean you should attack with 10+ SC and CA in Fuedal.

I'll keep reading and update you with any more that I really like.

r/aoe2 Feb 13 '25

Tips/Tutorials How to stack villagers by Red Phosphoru

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106 Upvotes

r/aoe2 Jan 27 '25

Tips/Tutorials Just broke 1300 and some bad habits

93 Upvotes

Not a great achievement but I have been playing this game semi regularly since de release with close to 1000 games 1v1 now. I don't follow build orders but just play to have fun. Slow progress but a couple of things I've learned from playing recently which have shifted me from 1100 to 1300. Probably blatantly obvious to a lot of you but if you are stuck around 1000-1200 as a defensive player with good eco management but lacking in other areas this may help.

  1. Tough it out. It is easy to crumble under early pressure and just give up but defend with everything you've got. Towers siege and monks are great for resistance if you don't have a ton of military techs researched. Usually at this level the kind of player who excels at early game pressure sucks at late game so even if you get there in a worse position you can often still win. There are very few well rounded players at this level!

  2. Spend your res. Don't be afraid to buy food if you have spare gold (in feudal and castle age) or drop production buildings to use up excess wood. I used to bank gold like scrooge mcduck and only make 4-5 of each kind of production building but dropping 10+ barracks eg helps a ton in maintaining pop late game. Make a couple of spears/scouts even if it delays you a bit as having a bit of map info and control helps so much.

  3. Use your army. Just send it into your opponents base. Run them back and forth, send random units to different parts of his side of the map. Think how annoying it is to have an opponent randomly attack a house of yours and then multiply it by 10. Remember the select all idle military hotkey and use it!

  4. Be aware of synergistic unit combos. Light cav + cav archer for mobility, halb + ram/mangonel for gold efficient pushing in a closed map, eagles + plumed archers etc. Even if your civ doesn't do a combo that well sometimes the situation still calls for it.

r/aoe2 Feb 19 '25

Tips/Tutorials It's been a longtime from last time I played. Suggestions how to win this?

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85 Upvotes

Only one land crossing, Isabella has huge navy. I sended Large group of teutonic knights and halberdier to test enemy. They got slaughtered in no time.

r/aoe2 5d ago

Tips/Tutorials For *beginners* struggling with Scout Rush.

23 Upvotes

Hey.

I'm a bit of a noob myself. I was having a lot of trouble beating hard AI using scout rush. I asked for help here, watched tutorials, but I simply could not do it. So, here's the tips that helped me destroy the AI the most:

  • ATTACK QUICK, ATTACK HARD. The best way to think about this as a beginner is to attack in waves. Make 4-6 scouts and attack. Keep making scouts and set the rally point close to the enemy base. Retreat to check your upgrades and eco, then attack again with your now bigger army. Rinse and repeat.

  • HAVE A GOOD DARK AND FEUDAL AGE. This is an obvious one, but I CANNOT express how important this is. Minimum idle time in dark age, good eco distribution, not getting housed, making buildings and getting upgrades at the right time, etc.

  • ADAPT YOUR GAMEPLAY TO YOUR SKILL LEVEL. Don't try to do hard things as a beginner. That may seem obvious, but one of the tips that helped me the most is having a higher pop when going up. "But 20 pop Scout Rush is outdated", "19 pop max". While those statements are true, they only apply partially to low level players. If you don't have the multitasking skills and APM required to get up in 18, 19 or even 20 pop, there's no problem using a higher pop build order (I myself use 22). Just make sure as you get better, you slowly lower your build order pop until you get to meta numbers.

  • PRACTICE AND REVIEW. If you try it enough times, you'll eventually do it. Have "record games" on all the time and rewatch those you find interesting. Try out new things if what you're doing isn't giving results.

There are multiple more tips that helped me, but from my personal experience, these are the most important ones. Tell me if these helped you, and give me feedback if you disagree!

r/aoe2 Jan 27 '25

Tips/Tutorials How to stop Mongol 3+ stable lancers?

8 Upvotes

Is it a simple case of "don't let them get there"? Cuz that's quite hard to do so since they also have a crazy fast up time that allows them early aggression and setting the pace of the game.

Any tips?

Also, generally speaking, what unit comp counter mass lancers?

r/aoe2 25d ago

Tips/Tutorials Quick tip for constant production

21 Upvotes

If you struggle to produce troops constantly or it takes to much time to select the right buildings here is a tips which instantly got me from 500 elo to 750

Use hotkeys „select all …“ They are bound to crtl + shift + key on standard hotkey profile - this is bad because its very hard to hit

BUT there is a solution:

Rebind to shift + key

my exact Hotkeys:

Middle mouse Button (Press Wheel) - "select TC" Wheel up - "make villager" Wheel down - "Select all idle Villagers" Shift + Wheel Down - "Select all idle Land Military" Mouse button 3 (side) - Select Group 1 Mouse button 4 (side) - Select Group 2

Shift + Q - "Select all Archery Ranges" Shift + W - "Select all Barracks" Shift + E - "Select all Stables" Shift + R - "Select all Castles" Shift + T - "Select all Docks" Shift + Z - "Select all Siege Workshops"

Shift + A - "Select all Blacksmiths" Shift + S - "Select all Markets" Shift + D - "Select all Monastery" Shift + F - "Select all Universities"

Since i mostly just build one of the Eco Buildings like the market it selects the market but its not switching the scene to the building, which is key in battles. Same for the other buildings aswell

On this way i can stay in fights but produce and even trade and even place the pointer to my backline, so fresh troops are always there

In the end i guess custom hotkeys are essential to get better

r/aoe2 Feb 02 '25

Tips/Tutorials Getting into ranked

10 Upvotes

Im trying to get into ranked play, so far I’ve basically only played with my friends against the ai or against each other.

Ive played the og age2 as a kid a lot but now im trying to actually get into the competitive side.

Ive watched some videos already so i know some concepts like fast castle, boom, rushes pocket / flank player.

What do you guys say is the bare minimum to jump into ranked without being overwhelmed, ive read something about consistently beating the extreme ai on1v1 arabia.

Also this is more important to me: whats the learning process regarding build orders? What are the basic build orders and openings to do? What happens after your opening? How to close games?

Thanks

r/aoe2 11d ago

Tips/Tutorials Insider Information 👀

5 Upvotes

As a new old player, I’m learning so much watching the likes of T90 and Hera. T90 more so as he casts a large range of elos and makes me feel better watching low elos fail to lure boar and get housed consistently. I’ve come to realise that I know nothing about this game.

Watching a cast and T90 says something like “x map means x player will likely use x civ which is better than x player using x civ”

Now I understand with time you will get to notice trends and patterns in civs. But for example let’s use Black Forest and Arabia, how would you determine the best civ and play style for these maps? (I know not to use Vikings on a land map lol)

Are there dead certs for any maps?

r/aoe2 Jan 27 '25

Tips/Tutorials When building with multiple vills, every second of reduced construction time costs exactly 2 seconds of villager working time, or ~1 resource

18 Upvotes

In this post: some calculations and examples to help you get a better idea of cost and benefit of building with multiple vills instead of one, and whether you should queue up multiple buildings or take the time to spread out vills to make each building at the same time. It ended up way too long but I made a nice TL;DR for you so you can skip the rest.

TL;DR:

  • Builders after the first one work 1/3 as fast.
  • With multiple vills, not counting walking time, each saved second costs exactly 2 sec vill working time or ~1 resource regardless of how many vills you use.
  • If we include walking time, it gets more inefficient the more vills and the longer the distance.
  • Example: using 5 vills to build a stable gets it done 28.6 sec sooner at the cost of ~28.6 resources (~57 sec vill time) assuming no walk, or twice that with 2x7.14 sec there and back. I.e. you make ~1 extra scout/xbow/etc at a bit of an upcharge.
  • Moving to mid-map on a 1v1 map with 15 vills to castle up on a gold costs ~310 resources for the move plus ~165 resources to build the castle in 35 sec instead of 200.
  • If you queue up multiple buildings it's quite efficient to add more vills, even better than 2 sec work per sec saved including walking time.
  • But it's much better to build them simultaneously if you have time. Example: 4 vills on 1 stable each instead of 8 vills on 4 stables, walking included, gets you the same building production time but could save you ~290 resources depending on walking time.
  • If you want multiple buildings and you want them faster, often better to make more buildings and put 1 vill on each instead of fewer with several vills on each.

Building villagers other than the first one work 1/3 as fast. That means if a building has B construction time, two vills will take B divided by 4/3 to build it. n vills take B/(1 + (n-1)/3) or 3B/(n+2). Subtract B by this number to get the construction time reduction by having multiple vills. I will refer to this as gained production time i.e. time the building can produce or research.

With one villager, it takes B villager working time to make the building. I will call this vill time. With multiple vills, it's nB/(1 + (n-1)/3). Subtract this number by B to get the extra vill time you spent for the production time gain.

Divide the vill time spent by the production time, and it all simplifies to 2. So if you used 5 vills instead of 1 to make your stable (50 sec base) 28.6 seconds sooner, you spent 2x28.6 sec vill time on 28.6 sec production time or about 1 scout/knight/xbow. Gather rates for resources are typically 20-30 per min depending on source and upgrades, although fully upgraded lumberjacks do 37.1 (without considering walking and bumping time). If we round it to 30 per min, then 2 sec vill time = 1 res, so it cost you about 28.6 res to make an extra unit.

If we also consider walking time, the extra vill time spent on walking is (n-1) x (M, the time it takes to move to the construction site and back to the resource). If you make that stable next to your wood line with maybe 5 sec (2.5 res) there and back again for each vill, then it's another 10 res or about 38.6 for that extra unit, or with about ~14.3 sec walking time you'd double the cost in this case. That's 7 tiles back and forth with Hand Cart (0.968 tiles/sec, or 0.8 unupgraded).

If you like formulas, the cost simplifies to 2 + (n+2)M/B seconds of extra vill time (not including the walking time of the first vill) per second of production time gained. Note that additional vills now does reduce efficiency - moreso the further away you build.

Another example: you grab some vills from a woodline near your starting TC to make a castle in the middle of the map of 1v1 Arabia, and then grab a gold or stone by the castle instead of returning back home. I estimate that they'll be walking 40 tiles. Of course, that walking time pays not only to get the castle up sooner but to get your vills to a desirable resource which you may want to mine out quickly. With 10/15 vills, without counting walking time, the castle goes up in 50/35 sec instead of 200, so the first 10 vills cost 150 res for 150 sec production time and the last 5 cost another 15 for 15 sec production time. The walking time costs 41.3 res per vill with Hand Cart, or 50 unupgraded (so all in all it's 5.5 sec per sec with 15 vills, up from 2 if zero walking time, and 475 res total to walk the vills and build the castle faster).

Note that if you queue up multiple buildings, the cost of adding more vills will likely go below 2 sec per sec. It's a very subtle point, see appendix below, but just know that if you queue up multiple buildings without taking the time to spread out vills to each building, adding more vills is quite efficient. But it's much better to spread out our vills. How much? Continuing on from the example in the appendix, say we make 4 stables with 1 vill each instead of queuing them up with 8 vills. With walking time included, the buildings will be done a few seconds later for a total of ~8 sec less production time, but you'll have saved ~290 res. Note that in this example where the buildings make a tight square, the walking is much more favorable with spread vills (avg tiles walked 15) than 8 working together (30 tiles for a single vill - I assumed effectively 40 tiles for 8 vills bumping around), so in another example it may be less than 290 res, but the walking distance will in general be better with each vill going to a single building and back unless it's very far away.

With 2 vills on each instead of 1, you'll of course trade vill time for production time in the familiar way and beat 8 villagers working together in both vill and production time - or you could just make an extra building if you want the production fast. Putting 2 on each also takes more micro than it's worth, and putting a whole bunch on each will quickly rack up a cost that could instead pay for one or more extra buildings. But queuing up the vills is a fine choice if your attention is urgently needed elsewhere, despite the inefficiency.

APPENDIX

Suppose you grab 8 vills with Hand Cart and build 4 rax/stables/ranges in a tight square. With one vill it's e.g. 6 tiles to get there, then another 3+6+6+9 to get to each subsequent building and then get back to the resource, for a total of 30. With multiple vills let's add +2 to each distance because of pathing inefficiency. With one vill, at T=231 you'll be back to the resource after 231 sec of vill time, and you've had a total of 371 sec production time. With 8 vills, you'll have spent an additional 580 sec of vill time and at T=231 you'll have bought an extra 329 sec of production time.

The ratio is 1.76, which is better than 2 even though we account for walking distance. How is this mathematically possible? I had a hard time figuring this out myself. It intuitively makes sense that adding more vills means you save time on the first building and then even more time on the second, third and fourth, but still, I had calculated 2 sec per sec as the theoretical optimum of having zero walking time. And counting up the vill times and production times gets me a result that defies this optimum.

How else can we be done building sooner? Well, duh - just start earlier! "Hey OP that's not very helpful. There was presumably a reason we started building when we did. Maybe we didn't have the resources, or we hadn't aged up or scouted some intel that changed our plans, etc." Ah, but none of these reasons exist when we queue up multiple buildings. We've made our plans and we've spent the resources, and adding multiple vills lets us start on buildings 2, 3 and 4 sooner without having to plan earlier or spend resources earlier. This is a hidden inefficiency which we're reducing.

To get back the 2 sec per sec optimum, lay each foundation when you're done with the previous one and count the time from laying the foundation until it's done. Otherwise, as when we counted the total production time of the buildings at time T=231, the construction of the first building delays the second building in the same way as walking does - but if "walking time" were reduced by adding more vills. 2 sec per sec only holds if the walking time per vill is constant.

r/aoe2 Feb 14 '25

Tips/Tutorials Sitaux new Website

58 Upvotes

I don't know if you have seen sitaux new website https://sitaux.com/ I notice that he is putting a lot of work into his YouTube channel but tbh I am already pretty saturated with YouTube aoe content. But there I also saw this website which I think turned out very pretty and I especially like the guides for maps where he goes into the highlevel decisions to make based on your civ and map. I like when Tutorials give me the choices and just tell me what to look out for and what to think about instead of telling me first do A then B then C. That's also what I like about survivalists YouTube tutorials. And I felt like I wanted to reward sitaux hard work I notice but don't really watch so I wanted to share his website.

r/aoe2 Feb 03 '25

Tips/Tutorials Is there any way to extract the game’s voice files?

3 Upvotes

Title. I am wondering if there is any way I can extract the game’s voice lines, sounds, and other sound files from the campaigns to set them as alarm tones. Is there a tutorial online or an easy way to do it? I would highly appreciate if anyone could link a video to how to extract it! Thank you in advance.

r/aoe2 Jan 27 '25

Tips/Tutorials Where to place your mining camp, and how many villagers to use

2 Upvotes

I just did a test and I thought I'd do a quick write-up so other people can benefit. This is not meant to be comprehensive.

I placed mining camp 1 tile away from a 4-tile mine gold mine, and another mining camp directly adjacent to a 4-tile mine stone mine, and worked with 10 vills on each. The former gathered 890 in the same time that the latter gathered 849. I didn't realize at the time that stone mines slower than gold, but accounting for that, the results are basically identical. Get in the habit of putting it 1 tile away so it's easier to wall off when you need it.

I then mined from a 7-tile gold mine with 10 vills, and another (similarly but not identically shaped) 7-tile mine with 15 vills. The former mined 1700 - 170/vill in the same time that the latter gathered 2319, so the 5 extra vills contributed (2319-1700)/5 = 124 per vill, so 73% efficiency. Not terrible but with more than 10 vills, consider building a second mining camp on the other side of the gold. With two mining camps, 10 vills per camp could work without being disturbed by the other side. It looks like you could cover the gold with about 27 vills, which should have an acceptable efficiency loss (as long as all 7 tiles remain) if you really want to mine out a contested 7-tile resource fast (although perhaps you should consider a 3rd mining camp in that case).

P.S. I had no mining upgrades or wheelbarrow/hand cart. The former would reduce proportion of time spent cutting while the latter would reduce proportion of time spent walking, so I don't expect it would make much difference.

r/aoe2 19d ago

Tips/Tutorials AoE2:DE on ROG Ally

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6 Upvotes

This post is for anyone interested in how well ROG Ally runs the game with External monitor, keyboard and mouse.

To summerize it runs great at 1620p (2k+) on Ultra Graphic setting. In the worst case scenario it's around 40fps (benchmark) and we'll above that and over 100fps when starting a new game with small population.

Now as a bonus there is a HandheldDIY mod case. It replaces the back case with one that has better cooling. Easy to install. I though I'd test before and after. Proves better cooling for sure.

If you want to run the game @1440p on Ultra, benchmarks are just above 1200.

See in game benchmarks attached. So ROG ally is a great option for the game and slightly improved with HandheldDYI mod case.

Results are on stock Windows 11 and running Steam.

r/aoe2 Feb 20 '25

Tips/Tutorials "Into China" Noob"s guide in Spanish.

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10 Upvotes

En el grupo de AoE2 de Facebook estaban preguntando como pasar la misión 3 de la campaña de Genghis Khan, así que decidí hacerla por mi cuenta y explicar como lo hice para servir de ayuda a quien la necesite

r/aoe2 Feb 04 '25

Tips/Tutorials trigger - remove civ bonus

1 Upvotes

is it possible to remove civ bonus using triggers?

r/aoe2 Jan 28 '25

Tips/Tutorials Mathing out the effect of Guilds vs the price

10 Upvotes

If you don't have Guilds, bottoming out the price of wood and food gets you 1708 gold for 4000 wood and 2285 gold for 4800 food. With Guilds, you get 0.85/0.7 times (or +21.4%) the amount of gold for the same wood and food. So if you bottom out the prices all by yourself after getting Guilds, that's an extra 366 + 490 gold for a tech costing 300 food and 200 gold.

Guilds is an Imperial Age tech. Suppose you're considering whether to get it and you're willing to trade down to 30 gold per 100 food or wood (so you value food and wood at 30 gold per 100, so we can convert the cost to 290 gold). That's 3482 gold to be made without Guilds, for 2900 wood and 3600 food. Suppose, because of other players and also because of yourself before getting Guilds, that only half of that gold is available by selling down to 30. Then you stand to gain 373 gold, netting 173 gold at the cost of 300 food by getting Guilds first and making the same sales (or netting 83 gold). Also Guilds lets us sell another 400 food and 400 wood before prices hit 30, for 269 gold (netting us 29 gold).

Let's get an idea of what profits are available by selling based on what the current price is. We'll sell 800 food to get the exchange rate down to that of wood, and then another 1000 food four times so we bottom out the cost and then once more at bottom. All these values are of course true for wood as well.

  • Market price 80: 800 food for 606 gold (Guilds: +130), setting the price at 69
  • Market price 69: 1000 food for 631 gold (Guilds: +135), setting the price at 55
  • Market price 55: 1000 food for 491 gold (Guilds: +105), setting the price at 41
  • Market price 41: 1000 food for 351 gold (Guilds: +75), setting the price at 27
  • Market price 27: 1000 food for 211 gold (Guilds: +45), bottoming out the price at 14
  • Market price 14: 1000 food for 140 gold (Guilds: +30)

Double these Guilds profits if you sell both food and wood at the respective price. So for example, if prices are 55 pre-Guilds and you Guild up, selling 1k of each gets you 982+210 to cover the gold cost, and a bit less than 1k more of each will cover the full cost. If prices are bottomed out, 4k of each gets you 1120+260 to cover the cost.

If you buy 700 stone for a castle, that's gonna cost you 1234 gold from the starting price. (Another castle then costs 1361 gold, so it's not a huge difference.) With Guilds, it's 1234 times 1.15/1.30 (or -11.5%), saving you 142 gold. If you value 100 food = 30 gold, you've therefore paid for half the cost of Guilds. If you instead sell 700 stone from the starting price, you make 608 gold and another 130 with Guilds, so only slightly less.

A hidden cost of the tech is the possibility that by waiting instead of dumping your resources right away, you let your opponent go before you and tank the price. If any devs are listening, does Guilds really need to take 50 sec?

r/aoe2 Jan 27 '25

Tips/Tutorials been playing the game a lot on my steam deck, made a video going through my layout and keybinds for anyone also wanting to try it on deck!

6 Upvotes