| Subject: Age of Kings 101 |
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Ldr
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Date Posted: 18:54:09 06/15/02 Sat
Age of Kings 101 is about the basics of playing the game.
1) Decent behavior in a game
a) Be polite. You'll receive more respect from other players and more of them will be willing to play with you.
b) Don't use taunts for the fun of it. It shows that you are a newbie and it annoys many players. Always ask for the game to be recorded. And don't forget to watch it afterwards from the point of view of the better players.
c) During the game, don't spend your time chatting with your teammates. Exchange only information concerning the game, and watch for the information they send you. If they ask for help, try to do what you can to help. Don't use taunts during the game.
2) Tricks to develop a decent economy
In dark :
Make at least 25 villagers before going feudal. Even a few more if you wish. But, learn to do them fast. Your TC should always be producing villagers, and that can be done only if food is readily available. In order to do that, you need many villagers on food.
I'll suggest the following, you can make small modifications, but anything that is close will work fine. This is for land maps.
The first 6 villagers should be on sheep. The next 3 villagers should go on berries. Now your population is 10. The next 9 vils chop wood. As soon as possible, a lumber camp is built close to the middle of a large forest. After that, at pop 19, the following 6 villagers go on food again (for a total of 15). Either you build farms with them, or you build a mill close to a group of deer, especially if there are some shore fish in the vicinity of the deer. Finally, you put the last 3 vils on gold. Total pop : 1 scout + 9 + 9 + 6 + 3 vils = 28
You should eat, at least your berries, 8 sheep and 2 boars with the first 9 vils on food. The next 6 hunt deer, go for shore fish or build farms. Don't forget to loom before hunting boars. Most of the food gatherers build farms when they are done. 2 or 3 of them can be transferred to some other duties according to your need. (Builders, miners, woodcutters). This transfer usually takes place in late feudal, not before.
After that, you should have more than 500 food in the bank and you are ready to go to feudal.
Always have enough houses built. Build them in advance. In particular, your first 3 vils build 2 houses before going on sheep. Usually two on one house and the other one on the next house. Thereafter, woodcutters are usually used to build houses.
Keep your scout busy, first finding the sheep, berries, forests, 2 boars, 2 gold mines, and 2 stone mines. Once your resources are found, explore the outer map, searching for the enemy. It is much more important to find your enemy than to pay a courtesy visit to your teammate. Use waypoints, 10 or 15 of them at a time, in order for your scout to be on his own while you concentrate on your economy at home.
At the end of dark, or during the transition, you can take 2 of your vils (say one forager and 1 woodcutter) to go close to the enemy town and start your forward base. The first building they should do is a barracks. You can decide whether you want a barracks at home first. You want the fights to occur in the enemy town, not in yours, therefore you need to do some early forward building in preparation for your attacks. Always be sure you have loomed before sending the forward builders, otherwise they'll be on the wolves menu.
In feudal :
When you get to feudal, you should be very close to having the 800 food and 200 gold necessary for going to castle. Therefore, you don't intend to stay long in feudal.
Here is what you have to do, as fast as you can : create 2 vils and send them to gold. Use 2 or 3 vils on food (foragers for instance) to build a feudal building and use 2 or 3 wood cutters, or your forward builders, to build another feudal building. Feudal buildings should be either blacksmith and market or blacksmith and a military building (stable or archery). If you build a military building, it can be done by the forward builders, and that can be part of your forward base.
All this should take one minute or so. When this is done, if your villagers are not idle and work well, you should be rich enough to go to castle.
Transition to castle :
Food, wood and gold should get in quite fast. It is time to start making some upgrades. First upgrades in the lumber camp, mining camp (gold) and mill should be done as soon as you can, in that order. Usually, they can be done before you reach castle.
Castle should always be reached before 19 minutes. With this opening, you'll be able to go under 18 minutes easily with just a little practice, even under 17 min with a fast civ (Britons, Persians...). With experience, you'll do even better.
During castle :
Build more TCs to control resources, in your zone, and also elsewhere on the map as you want to extend your territory. You'll need plenty of food, so make a few farms at each new TC. Keep all you TCs busy making new villagers, and spread them on different resources according to your need. Look at you bank account often to see what is missing, don't hesitate to switch some vils from a job to another if you need it. For instance, if you have 1500 wood and 50 food, you have too many woodcutters and not enough farms. This should never happen.
Your total villager population should be above 50% of your total population, 60% is nice and sometimes even more is correct, especially if you play 3 vs. 3 and are in the middle, away from the fights. In that case, just boom your economy like a madman. Later in imperial you'll be able to delete some villagers in order to increase the size of your army. But always keep a large number of vils, your economy operations should never stop. And frequently watch for idle vils. ALL your vils should be working ALL the time.
Finally, use your market to trade with your teammates (build a few trading carts) and find relics. This will help you having a steady flow of gold even after the mines will be depleted. Also don't hesitate to use the market to buy whatever you need, specially when you are in a hurry. To do that before other players means that you have the best prices.
Water maps :
All the above refers to land maps (Arabia, black forest, highlands...). If you play on a water map (islands, archipelago...) or on an hybrid map (continental, coastal) you should go for a boat boom. (Experts now disagree on that and the galley rush is dangerous for the boat boom. But, in most games, the boat boom is still efficient).
The main difference is this : Only the first 7 vils go on food. (Sheep and boars first, berries later). The next 15 at least (even up to 20) go to wood. Use 2 lumber camps, located close to 2 different forests. Before going feudal, put 3 or 4 vils on gold.
You want to build a dock as fast as you can, and then a second one and a third one. Use one of your first fishing boat from dock 1 to explore, and build the following docks where there is plenty of fish. The location of dock 1 is often a guess, but on some maps the guess is easy : on a continental map, built it close to a corner of the map, there is usually tons of fish there. During the transition to feudal your population of villagers (read fishing boats) continue to increase. It is like having extra TCs, and this boat booming provides an extremely strong economy. Instead of trying to reach castle with 28 to 30 vils, you'll have more than 40 of them including the fishing boats. (Good players can have way more than 40 before feudal, half of which are fishing boats).
Now a remark : fishing boats work faster on deep fish than on shore fish. It's better to work on shore fish with vils if some are close to a mill.
3) Military Basics
In this last section, I'll just indicate some general ideas in order to develop your army. Military operations are usually more complex than economical operations. The way you develop your economy is not deeply modified by the civ you play, or by the civ you play against. The above economical description works well with just any civs. With the military operations, it is a lot different.
For instance, playing Persians, you will not think too much about your infantry, you'll go for cavalry, elephants and hand cannoneers. On the other hand, Vikes have a poor cavalry and no hand cannoneers. Playing them you'll do a large infantry force, a few cavs only and use arbalests for support.
Facing franks, you'll do a lot of pikes, expecting cavalry attacks, but facing Britons, you'll make skirmishers and cavs expecting archers.
OK, now that you understand why the military decisions are more complex than the economy decisions, here are some hints to help you.
Early defense at home :
One tower close to your wood, or gold operation, helps a lot. Specially if the tower is between the economy operation and the TC, and is covered by TC fire. 2 towers, covering each other, are also good, even far from the TC. Some skirmishers, or some spearmen, close to your wood, gold or stone operation, will usually be sufficient to deter early attacks. Spearmen or skirmishers according to what kind of attacks you expect. Your scout should always be busy, in particular trying to find what kind of army the opponent is making. For instance, if you find an enemy forward stable, build spearmen.
Once you have reached castle age and build many TCs in your zone, most of your defense will be provided by those buildings, with the help of a castle. Some well located walls can help as well, but some maps are hard to wall (Arabia and coastal, or islands). Keep some knights at home, they provide a strong and fast task force, ready to slow down attacks while you improve your defense if needed.
Forward building :
It is almost essential to forward build, especially on any land map, or on any hybrid map. You want to attack, you don't want to be attacked. In AOK, quite often the richest player wins, and the richest player is usually the one with the highest number of villagers. Therefore kill the opponent's vils before he kills yours.
Your forward base should start early with a barracks and/or stable or archery. Later, more buildings should be made to increase the production (second, third stable, siege workshop, castle...). Have your military buildings close to the action, instead of traveling the whole map with your units. Fighting units are much more useful than walking units.
Start your attack as soon as you have a few military ready. Your scout should inform you of the weak points in the enemy town, and where the economy operations are taking place. Attack woodcutters first, and then miners. Beware of TC fire. In particular, put your archers on stand ground position, out of TC range. They will shoot at all villagers in their range, but they will not follow them to the TC when the opponent rings the bell. As soon as you have rams, escorted by knights or infantry, destroy the TC and the towers or castle. Then destroy the military buildings. Gathering buildings can wait, kill the vils before those buildings.
Concentration:
In imperial, when you have, and presumably your opponent as well, a lot of resources, try to be in a position to bring MORE troops FASTER than your opponent on the battlefield. Besides bonuses (like fast Goth barracks), there is one way to do it : multiple military buildings. For instance, if you are Celts and want to make a large scale attack with trebs, champs, heavy scorpions and some paladin support, you might need 10 barracks, 5 siege workshop, 3 stables and 2 castles. Continue to create units during the battle and use way points to sent the fresh troops where you want them. Rebuild new military buildings if the battlefield moves away from your base. Have your military production center as close as you can from the action.
Second aspect of concentration : never face a large group of enemies with a small group of your own. Concentration of fire increases greatly the strength of an attack, especially by ranged units. 10 champs will fair better against 10 longbows than 30 champs will do against 30 longbows. And 10 champs will be killed by 30 longbows with probably 30 surviving longbows. Don't spread your army in small groups, you should have one large army, made of combined units, and a few additional groups for specialized tasks.
The purpose of your big army is attacking enemy large armies, or destroying enemy towns. Examples of small support groups are the following : 2-3 trebs with some protection to attack towers and castles, some cavs to attack enemy trebs, some light cavs to kill enemy monks, some onagers behind walls, ...
Combined arms:
In AOK, you cannot win the game with one kind of unit only. Even large army of Vike champs or of frank pals can be stopped with the appropriate counters. (Concentrated force of ranged unit against the champs, or mass of pikes and/or camels against the paladins).
Complex armies are much harder to stop. Frank paladins with strong throwing axemen support are very hard to stop as the axemen kill the pikes and camels with ease while the paladins kill everybody else. Siege weapons, usually under attack by cavalry, are well supported by pikes. Infantry (pikes and champs) also provide a good support for a massive group of archers. (50 longbows, with 10 champs, 10 pikes and 10 cavs will cause you a lot of problems). Infantry is cheap, but need to be supported to be fully efficient. There are a multitude of possible situations. Just try to stay informed on what kind of troops the enemy is using and react accordingly. Have all the military buildings ready, in Imperial you have enough wood for extra buildings just in case. (For instance, playing franks, you might want some hand cannoneers. Have a few archeries ready for when those will be needed. It's too late to build them when your scout tells you that 30 mamelukes are on their way to your town).
Team play:
Try to really cooperate with your partners, and try to choose complementary civs. (For instance franks and Britons). Keep an eye on everything that your partner tells you. If you don't lose your time chatting, your partner will read the few messages you send and try to provide help if needed. He will also keep you informed of his needs. If he is bored with your constant baffling, he will stop to read, and will not help when you REALLY need help. Finally, in team games, always research cartography.
Naval warfare:
Cannon galleons are not good to control the seas. Almost any other military ship can kill them easily. Use your galleons and fire ships to take control of the sea, or at least some part of it, and bring the cannon galleons, under protection by fire ships or galleons, once there is less danger for them. Those big beasts can be very useful, but they are expensive, so don't waste them fighting other ships. Use them to destroy whatever buildings your opponents has on their shore, in range of the cannon galleons.
Fire ships win against galleons, even in large groups when there is enough room to maneuver. When there is a choke point between the 2 fleets, the galleons will decimate the fire ships.
Even with the superiority of the fire ships in most situations, build galleons for two reasons : First, a few galleons mixed with a large group of fire ships will provide a longer line of sight. Fire ships alone are quite blind. Second, their range make them better ships to attack the enemy shores, in particular to kill the monks that try to convert your cannon galleons, or to stop the vils from using any resources close to the shore.
In a water map, as soon as you hit feudal, start to build galleys. Protect your fishing boats, attack the enemy fishing boats, patrol your shore to be informed on any enemy activity. Try to always keep control of the seas around your home.
Finally, a more advanced point, useful on any map :
When your partner asks for help, there are different things you can do. Bring some forces to his town to help him (defensive measure), or bring your force to an enemy town to attack him (offensive). In most cases, the offensive is better. The opponents, if they are badly hurt at home, might be unable to continue their attack, or might just reduce the pressure in such a way that your teammate can recover by himself. Just keep your partner informed of what you are doing. In some cases, he just needs a small push (a few fire ships, a few cavs) for a specific job. On those occasions, just supply what is needed with some troops, but still concentrate your forces on attacking one opponent.
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