Age of Empires 2 [AoE2] - Tips #1

These first tips for AoE2 will be useful for unexperienced players, but should come as no surprise to successful AoE kings.

When you start a game with your civilization @ the dark age, you have two options: gather loads [500] of food, as fast as you can, and progress to the next age; or try a more balanced approach, where you are more worried with having regular strong supplies of the available resources, not worrying too much with the always running clock.

Of course that "plenty, but slowly" might sound better than "not much, but fast", but then you should be aware that these civilizations are kind of barbarians and will raid you constantly, with or without warning, as soon as they feel prepared to do it! Your resources are vital to their growth, meaning that you must prepare some defences.

The big problem is finding the right balance between defence and civilization progress. Because any troops need gold and wood, or gold and stone, or just wood, they will void your reserves, if you build them in large quantities... and the fact is that only a large army is effective - if you build small armies, at best, you will be strong enough to stop a first wave of invaders, but nothing more than that!

So, you need a large army, and you are willing to support its cost... but how will you grow from the dark age? Don't forget that having just one town centre implies that when progressing, it won't be possible to build more humans for resources gathering... And there is another problem: dark age troops are very weak against more recent units... in fact, they are so much weaker, that it might not be wise to build your large army when living in the dark age; it might be wiser to evolve and then worry about defence.

My first tips are in the direction to put you past dark age, with enough resources to build a good army, immediately after the progress:

- start by building one extra house.

- queue human production, to some 5 extra units.

- put most people on food gathering, or IF you have water resources, build a shore and many fishing boats, then shifting your work force towards wood, as it is wood you will really need for the boats...

- as soon as you have a steady wood and food growth, and 500 food, evolve to the next age.

- its defence time. If you have stone, build some walls and watch towers. Beware that these towers require loads of stone and should be built on the best spots, to maximize their efficacy.

When the first attackers arrive, make sure your large army is NOT defending the town center. If that happens, the attacker will kill the villagers and you will loose your precious gatherers! The best defence is NOT the attack, but your troops should really protect the outside of your territory and not its insides.

Diplomacy allows you to become neutral to all players, but then you are expected to offer them resources [tributes], and I couldn't deslike that more...

Good luck! Advanced tips, soon...

Real life Driver + Driver replays

Ok, the "real life driver" thing is just the picture that shows my 537 km with 32 liters of gasoline :)

Now here are some spectacular Driver replays. The replays and my current game saves are provided in a single small ZIP file [43 K ZIP file], that you must unzip to your \Driver\Saves folder. These files might overwrite your own, so just copy your stuff to somewhere else, check my performance, then restore the folder's original status. Enjoy!