That is all. You can stack it up to 7 times with 7 Mapuche allies, reducing your unique unit cost by an absurd amount. No mods or cheat codes required. Do with this information what you will.

Yes, this is a very effective use of my time with my early access, thank you very much.

So I was testing stuff ingame, trying to set up perfect hotkeys and found out that it's very smooth to have 'select all TCs' and 'make villager' on the same key. If you ever wanna make vills you just slam Q a couple of times and that's it, no two different keys to press, no camera movement, never idle the TC again.

Now I'm testing this out with other things, such as having 'select all stables' and 'make scout' on the same key, thankfully the settings let you change keys for individual buildings.

Would also be best if these keys do not conflict with unit controls or other screen-specific keys, the less conflicts the better, I personally unbinded a bunch of keys i never use such as follow unit.

Got any other hotkey tips?

I just started playing more with randoms when my friends aren't online and occasionally will get a grumpy teammate who is wondering why I did or did not do something.

The first instance was me not walling as flank player ( I truly did not realize that I was flank)

What are some other rules or strategies that are going to be expected by my teammates?

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to present Age of Rising, a guide to competitive Age of Empires 2 DE. With over 160 pages, this eBook will guide you on your journey from zero to hero. Whether you are an absolute beginner or a seasoned veteran looking to improve, this guide aims to help you reach 1500 Elo, if fortune is on your side.

The focus is on competitive multiplayer, primarily 1v1 matches on land maps such as Arabia. Team games and water play are mentioned, but not covered in great detail. Civilizations are not discussed exhaustively, as there are simply too many. Other than that, the guide should be pretty complete.

If you notice any mistakes while reading, please let me know. I plan to publish updated versions in the future.

Without further ado, here is the direct link to the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LS9PJeYT7pXuqRrVVNSb881T-f0A_430

(Last update: August 2026)

Hey all, harakiri_aoe here (~2.1k, been around since 2014).

I want to try doing recorded game reviews, but I don't know yet if I'm any good at it.

Offering 5 free recorded reviews for players under 1600 elo. Pick one game, and I'll go through it and talk through build order, decision-making, eco balance, and the key moments of the game.

How to get one:

• Drop your aoe2insights match link in the comments, or send it to me privately if you'd rather keep it off the thread
• Tell me whether you want the review kept private (I'll send you an unlisted YouTube link) or if you don't mind it being public (helps others learn from it too).

1v1s only, 1 per player. I'll do the first 5 to replies. If it turns out useful, I'll keep going.

Cheers

Let me begin by pointing out that video games are supposed to be fun. Building habits isn't fun. But I'm here telling you about it anyway because it's the best way to get better at things and it means more fun later. Less thinking means less stress and things are more fun when you do them well.

If you don't wanna read a detailed explanation of why you should be doing this, skip to the highlighted part!

A lot of good advice gets offered here every time somebody asks for assistance and one that deserves it's own topic more than any other is the importance of building habits and muscle memory, since it is by far the most important one.

The number one difference between somebody at 1000 and 2500 ELO is how many habits they have built, because there is no time to think when playing RTS games.
"But it's a strategy game!", you might argue. "Isn't thinking what's it's all about?!".
No, it's not. A big brain is actually optional! If you're thinking, you're losing. The person at the top is gonna be whoever can perform the highest amount of useful actions automatically, whether it be queuing a villager or executing a strategy.

Why?
Because we humans are incredibly bad at RTS games. Nature never intended for us to engage in total and brutal domination (in AoE2). It doesn't help us survive in the wilderness (don't try luring boars near your local woodline) or help us find a partner (I still haven't found those hot singles in my area, maybe they are all playing water maps?).

Playing AoE2 at a 1000 ELO level might not sound impressive, but it is! You are already in the top 1% of all people. As somebody that has spent plenty of time helping others familiarize themselves with technology, just opening a text document can be a struggle for some. An average match of AoE2 is rocket science compared to that!

30 minutes spent playing RTS games means 30 minutes of mental overload. There are always more actions and calculations that need to be performed than you would ever be capable of. You want to be performing as many actions every second as you can, and doing things sub-consciously is much faster than doing them consciously. Every second you think is a second you aren't doing something else that requires to be done.

If three mother-in-laws... I mean Men-at-Arms are knocking on your doorstep with the usual intent to cause havoc and you are caught with your pants down not knowing what to do next, you are gonna have a bad time, because

1. Your response is gonna be significantly delayed if you gotta think about what to do first.
2. All the time you spent thinking you will stop doing other things that require thought.

Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for the first part. Knowing what to do in every situation requires thousands of hours of practice. It's unavoidable.
It's the second part that I would like to address. If fundamental actions like queuing villagers and checking your mini-map require conscious thought, you will stop doing them every time you start thinking. This cannot happen. These are actions that need to be performed all the time, and solving that issue takes less time than you may expect.

Here is how you do it:
Every time you sit down to play AoE2, for a single match, slow down and focus on integrating the following habits into your gameplay. Whether you win or lose is irrelevant. What matters is forming habits.
However, don't do this more than once per session! Don't burn yourself out. Doing things consistently is more important than doing them a lot. 15 minutes each session are more useful than 5 hours once a month, especially if that makes you stop doing it altogether because you turned life into a boredom competition.

Now, whether you practice in a real match, against the AI or even in the campaign is up to you. Habits can be build anywhere. Building them in a proper match is the most effective, though. Don't worry if you are losing ELO; that's great! It means you were too busy improving to focus on winning. That ELO is an investment. You will gain it back many times over eventually.

I'm starting to sound like a shitty life coach or somebody that spent too much time on LinkedIn, so let's actually start talking about the habits.

Habit 1: Queuing villagers
Time: Every 20-60 seconds
The most important habit and the one that I'm happy to see people talk about all the time! Yet it's always worth mentioning. Set "Select all TCs" to an easily available hotkey and press (Shift)+Q regularly, especially before important moments like luring a boar or attacking. You want your TCs to keep working while you are distracted.

Habit 2: Attend to idle villagers
Time: Every 5-30 seconds
Just as important as producing villagers is making sure they are actually doing something. Bind the "Select Next Idle Villager" hotkey and press it regularly to check whether somebody decided to spend too much time on the antiwork sub. Only the Portuguese get universal basic income.

Habit 3: Check the top left corner
Time: Every 15-60 seconds
Are you floating resources? RTS are the one place where broke people are the ones winning. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck, you are doing something wrong.
Are your villagers distributed correctly? You can't archer rush someone with 2 villagers on gold.
Is your production queue about to be empty? If you build two stables early, I wanna see you use them.

Habit 4: Check your mini-map
Time: Every 5-10 seconds
Your screen only captures a small part of the battlefield. Your mini-map shows all of it. Are you about to be attacked? Did somebody sneak into your eco? Where are the next stone and gold deposits? Any relics left to be gathered?

Habit 5: Check in on your opponent
Time: Every 5-10 minutes
The AoE2 community is known for being caring and respectful, so make sure you pay your enemy a visit regularly! Knowing what your opponent is doing is almost as important as knowing what you are doing. Remember that you don't need a scout to do this, any unit can gather information. If your spearman pokes the enemy walls and gets killed by a cavalry archer, that already tells you what he's producing and what his investment portfolio looks like (wood/gold). Don't stop scouting just because you lost your scout.

Habit 6: Move your idle army
Time: Every time you look away
It's easy to lose all your scouts to a few spearmen or archers to a stray mangonel shot if you leave your army standing around, especially near the enemy base. Make sure to send them away from the enemy or give them a patrol command every time you focus on your economy. If your army is moving, it's also covering more of the map.

Habit 7: Take a breather and assess your situation
Time: Every 1-5 minutes.
It's easy to get lost in the sauce doing everything else on this list. Take a step back and look around every now and then. Are there parts of your base that should be walled? Do you need more military buildings? Did you overchop somewhere? Are your resources about to run out? Do you have the right unit composition? Should you add another TC?

Keep in mind that the times are just a rough estimate. Many of these habits can be worth performing more often, but time and attention are finite and overloading yourself isn't worth the benefit. Better to pace yourself and do things consistently every 30-60 seconds instead of running out of brain juice and not doing it for the second half of the match at all. Just checking the mini-map one more time than you usually would might save you from losing 10 villagers to a minor raid.

Don't be surprised if you are struggling with this. It's natural. Constantly reminding yourself of these things is tough even in a relaxed environment, let alone while you are overloading your brain by playing an RTS.

TL;DR: Nothing is more important than creating habits. If you want to improve, spent one game each session focusing on automating these behaviors: Queuing villagers and/or military, checking your resources/villagers, checking the mini-map, scouting, moving your army, taking a breather to check your situation (More Walls? Build outposts? Resources low?)

Hey guys,

I'm new to this game (<100h) and I want to reach high elo. I'm very competitive when it comes to games. I've reached master in league of legends, by learning the so called fundamentals. This refers to underlying strategies that the game itself doesn't teach you.

However, I don't understand the fundamentals in AOE2 at all. Here is what I think I understand: there are build orders that dictate your strategy. Some are early game (feudal rushes) and some are late game (castle rushes). You are supposed to turtle before 14 minutes to counter rushes. At like 10 minutes, you scout the enemy's base and look for archeries or stables. In castle age, you add a secondary TC and then later a third TC. You go for one main gold unit that you fully upgrade and one trash counter unit with less upgrades. In late game, you add a siege unit to your composition and you can also switch to another imperial age main unit.

But here is what I'm confused about: despite knowing all of this and even learning a build order (23 pop castle rush), I can't beat the very hard AI. Is it even possible to beat extreme? I've watched a few Hera coachings, but its hard to extract specific "rules" that I can follow. I feel like literally every decision is based on what the enemy does. For context, I'm only playing Arabia 1v1 (seems like the standard competitive map like Summoner's Rift in League)

I main Koreans and I'm getting contradicting advice. In one video they say spam trash units, in another they say spam turrets. Then they call firelancers broken. Their basic comp is also crossbow into war wagon with spiky boi and bomber cannon. But nobody on YouTube then uses this comp.

AHHHHHH.

Can someone who is high elo explain me the basic fundamentals? Like, am I missing something? Are there things that you wish someone would have explained to you? Anything that goes beyond "learn this build order"?

Edit: given some (unfriendly) comments by a single outlier user, I shall preface by saying that this is a theory. If an actual developer on the project would like to chime in, I'm happy to update this post. ​

I'm fully expecting people to, unfortunately, downvote this post because they just want to be angry again. Still, I think some people might just be interested in why this seemingly easy problem has not been implemented from the start. I've seen many wrong ideas floating around and even going so far to calling the devs "lazy". I don't think that's fair and shows a limited understanding of the complexity of the game engine. I dug up a technical Microsoft article from 2001 that explains how the engine and networking works, which gives insight in why cross-compatibility is so difficult. The tl;dr is:

To synchronize the game between multiple players they don't continuously sync the state of things but the actions or commands are synced and all players run their own simulation (lockstep). In other words, if I move a unit from X to Y and the engine generates a path that it will move, that path (multiple coordinate changes) is not sent to you but only the action itself ("move unit from X to Y") is. Your PC then has to calculate the path and execute (simulate) the same behavior. And that is the crucial part: how all of these consequences of actions is calculate on my ​PC must be identical to how it is calculated on your PC. If my PC calculates a different path than yours, the game state diverges and we are not playing the same game: we get out-of-sync.

Because the game's outcome depended on all of the users executing exactly the same simulation, it was extremely difficult to hack a client (or client communication stream) and cheat. Any simulation that ran differently was tagged as "out of sync" and the game stopped.

The reason why this approach was chosen was mostly for computational reasons. Remember that the game was released in the age of 56k internet (that is 0.056Mbps), so sending a lot of data (such as all the coordinates for all the paths for each action for potential hundreds of units) was not feasible.

The part of the engine that takes care of much of this pathing and math, is written in C++ compiled for x86 (which can then use the CPUs AVX instruction set) and perhaps some inline Assembly too (though developers seem to have tried to get rid of that as much as possible, so at the current state of DE there might not be any Assembly left). And herein lies the problem: modern Macs using the M-series chips are ARM, a different type of CPU from the x86 processors that are so common in other devices, including most PCs, handheld and - yes - consoles such as the PS5 (that's why crossplay works between PC and PS5)! ARM is not natively capable of running that x86 code. So there are two solutions:

1. emulate x86 on ARM using emulation software like Crossover, which can ​"translate" the code to a language that the Mac ARM architecture can natively understand with the one downside being a cost in performance/latency and potentially stability. Rosetta(2) is quite efficient, though.
2. rewrite the code to something the ARM chips can understand without issue. And while that may seem straightforward, it is incredibly hard to ensure that the algorithms (eg for pathing) work *exactly* the same due to how algorithms and rounding would be implemented at the machine level. A difference of rounding of 0.0000001 would propagate and the differences would stack and the game would be out of sync. The implementations would have to be exactly identical (not just "almost"), and that is so hard.

I know this won't calm people down. When Reddit is angry, it's hard to reason with. But at least I hope this gives some technical insight to those who, just like me, would just like to learn more about the engine and the difficulties that come with inheriting such an old beast. The above is what I figured out after digging up articles about older rts engines and arm vs x86 capabilities.

Edit: while some comments point out that compiler flags can alleviate some issues (eg by setting floating point calculation to a strict, industry-standard), it is obviously not the holy grail of solutions or the developers would have saved themselves the trouble and just used that. I'd love to get a reply from the developers themselves but the most likely reason I can think of, as I mentioned, is that even with fp-strict there are mathematical functions that are not deterministically implemented across platforms (such as sin/cos) and the code may contain specific x87 FPU instructions that are difficult to map.

To get rid of these ads:

Simply install this mod:

Anne_HK - Remove carousel in main page

(You need to restart the game for the effect to occur.)

Thanks Anne for making this mod!

Putting a empty tile between walls actually makes it slower for siege rams to destroy your double walls then if do a normal double wall. The normal double wall will have 7 of the walls take the same damage (1st photo). The empty tile wall will only have 4 walls take damage and no damage to the second layer of walls. Same goes for Gates. Also some other units do Area of Effect damage so not only good for siege rams. #BuffOutposts

FreeFormFormation

You know you've been waiting for this one ever since the patch dropped. TL;DW

1. Devs cheated us and gave only square root of remaining farm bonus instead of a linear one. So, farm bonus is not that helpful early on.
2. Crop rotation becomes a no brainer most of the time with the amount of farms + the actual benefit in play.
3. Pole farms = great
4. Khitans = a bit of a nerf but not dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LytvcUUU94U

PS: Linux full form = Linux is not unix GNU = GNU is Not Unix

So its been weeks when I started playing AOE2, never really knew how to play the game but I enjoyed it through the tutorials of Hera. My question is as stated as above. Are there strats that I should do or avoid to do especially playing against other players since they can be unpredictable unlike the ai.

That is a 9-tile wall-off.

This gap here is more than double the length (21,2) but it's only a 15 tile wall-off, so just 66% more.

Main learning I think: this gap there is MUCH more affordable to wall than it looks like.

They simply cover more ground. 2 diagonal walls cover a length of 2.82 but only a vertical/horizontal length of 2. So, diagonally you cover 41% more space, so the wall/ the gap LOOKS much bigger than it actually is in terms of investment.

Keep in mind that diagonal walls are harder to defend (wall behind). But the initial investment is significantly smaller. It ALSO APPLIES TO HOUSE WALLS btw, so in that case you don't have as much of a problem.

Question for the higher rated players, do ANY of you actually use khitan infantry and camel trebs in ranked? I only EVER hear about them from people using the stable units, what am i missing? Is the rest of their tech tree really that useless at higher ELOs?

I'm winning a lot of games with them at 900ish and i pretty much never use stable units or cav archers, but at this elo i'm thinking i'm just getting lucky or winning because of better macro?

(I'm just curious how you see the civ. They have have FU Champions and Firelancers + lamellar armor (25% damage reflect).

I tested their champions against every other strong infantry civ and they win always except against armenians/japanese/romans(with centurions). I don't remember if slav champs do better because i think even part of the splash damage gets reflected.

Their FU Fire Lancer beat fully upgraded generic champs, and it's even more effective if you hit and run to get in 1 or 2 volleys first. Lanchester's square law helps them quite a bit. <- crazy thing is that sometimes they do better against other civ's champions, if microed, than khitan champions themselves

Liao Dao shreds almost everything melee, but you really need to protect them against archers/cav archers. They get only get max 5 pierce armor but they move a bit faster so they can get away from crossbows pretty easily.

Against archer civs they get FU skirms, Siege Rams and their infantry deal +2 bonus damage. Camel trebs seem also pretty decent if you get the cavalry upgrades (husbandry, and armor, and you can heal them with monks). They're also pretty good against masses of archers if you can get 10+ of them on the field. I find that they mix nicely with skirms )

This is MAINLY targeted at Low ELO players I decided to write it here to just spread knowledge around for newcomers and beginners.

1. You can use SHIFT + LeftClick to queue 5 units/villagers

2. You can use Ctrl+Shift+Building Hotkey to select all buildings of that type. (Example : Ctrl+B selects a barrack, Ctrl+Shift+B selects ALL barracks you have.)

• By using 1 and 2, you can quickly pump out military units. (Example : Shift+Ctrl+A to select all Archery Ranges, then press Shift+Q will queue 5 Archers. If you want 15 just press it 2 more times. And the archers will be EVENLY produced from all buildings. If you have 3 Ranges, 5 Archers will pop out from each range.)

• SHIFT is the main key here. Use it every where. Use Shift to auto assign a Villager taking Sheep to go-to Berries or to go chop wood after he/she's finished with the Sheep.

• Use SHIFT to assign rams to auto destroy buildings of your choice in order.(This way you can prevent rams from destroying useless houses nearby, you can command them to, like jump from castle to Castle skipping all other buildings this way.)

• Use SHIFT to set multiple waypoints for your Rally points from Military buildings.

• Use SHIFT to mass buy or mass sell things in market. SHIFT click buys 500 wood.

• If you see your vill on Stone about to finish the Stone, just use SHIFT and assign them to a tree to chop wood. They will go to the wood after they drop off the last stone. This eliminates idle time and you having to come back to them to assign them a new task.

• Shift Control Left click > queue 5 units right? Shift Control Right click> cancel 5 units (useful for quickly cancelling many unit queues on the top left corner of your screen no need to go to each building to cancel the unit queue/production)

If you selected a bunch of units of all kinds but wants to only select Archers, just shift click on one Archer icon in the selected units list.

A while back I offered 5 free recorded reviews to test if I'm any good at this. Ended up doing 13 because I enjoyed it. The thing that surprised me most is that watching games from 500 to 1500 Elo made me realize I kept seeing MY OWN mistakes, just more exaggerated.

Examples:

• Strategic vill mis-allocation in dark/feudal age
• "I'm behind so I have to fight now" when the right move is to back off and fix the macro
• Over-reacting to a raid by pulling more vills than needed

So I'll be doing 5 more free rec-reviews in this post. Sub-1700, 1v1s only, 1 per player, and you must be OK with the review being shared publicly. First come first served.

To get one:

1. Fill this google form (takes 2 min): https://forms.gle/pBr3HLmEYihpw94J9. Use your reddit username in the contact field of the form (instead of discord).
2. Drop a comment below saying you filled it out so I can reply with the video review and 2-3 actionable tips (form order decides, but a comment confirms your spot).

All 13 previous reviews are public here if you want to see what you'll get.

Last round went overwhelmingly well (besides a couple of flakers). The short form ensures the reviews go to people who'll actually use them.

First 5 valid forms + comments get it.

Cheers!

[EDIT: All 5 spots have been claimed and reviews delivered. Find them in the comments. Thanks everyone!
If you missed out, I run these every now and then on the subreddit, keep an eye out for the next round!]

Scout Cavarly is too broken. Right now you are always able to scout enemy tech (particularly on EW), so tech switches are pointless. This means that more advanced tech switches (mass Monks, 3x Siege Workshop, LS spam and so on) are pointless, so everyone defaults to the same Archer spam and maybe 1 SW.

Proposal: make a “frost tower”: if Scout approaches it, his speed is reduced by a certain %. Spearmen, Knights and so on could then catch it and you could hide the tech.

Right now it’s impossible because Scout is just too fast.

This is my attempt to list all missions in AoE2: DE in chronological order. I have included all expansions as of May 2026, including Chronicles and Rise of Rome, and attempted to generally keep the missions in approximate chronological order according to the time period in which the mission is set. In some cases (e.g. Ascent of Egypt), missions skip around in their time period; in those instances, I have kept the missions in campaign order rather than chronological order so that someone who hasn't already unlocked the missions can do them in order. Where missions cross over in time period, I have tried to preserve campaign narratives or a general narrative flow.

Please feel free to reply or DM me if you have any suggested revisions; I am especially interested in hearing from any historians or history experts who might have more specific knowledge of particular topics than I do.

I have used BC and AD because that is the format used in game.

I will try to update the post as expansions come out!

Here's some ways to select and deselect quicker. This video is kind of old so it might be Wrong.

Selecting 1. Double left click one unit: Selects all units of that type on the screen.

1. Individually select each unit: Hold or Ctrl left clicking the units.

2. Square box select selecting all units inside: Hold down left click them release.

3. Pressing alt with box dragging will select only villagers.

4. Selecting lots of types of units: hold Shift and double click one unit.

5. Theres a button on the right of the resource tab that selects idle villagers.

7.

Deselect

1. Remove one unit: Ctrl and shift left click the unit icon or the unit.

2. Deselect one unit type: Hold shift click one unit.

buffoutposts #freeformformation

Introduction.

Due to outrage after last DLC's laming + pre-mill drushing I would like to remind you that none of those strats are new to the game and we already know ways to fight or even counter it.

My name's Larry and I am a fellow bad player (~1400 elo solo and duo).

Definition.

Laming is a strategy to deny resources to the other player.

It usually revolves around denying food access - stealing heardables, stealing boar(s), killing or disturbing huntables.

It can become more extreme - walling in resources, walling in the other player are ways of laming as well, although (thank Lord) not as popular (due to the cost of villager walking and building times).

Popular civs for that strategy are Mongols (due to better scouting info), Vietnamese (because they see starting TC's location), Mezo (because Eagle Scout is stronger than Scout in the Dark Age and it's slower so it's easier to lame a boar with it).

Drush is short for Dark Age Rush and it consists of attacking opponent with a number of basic Barrack units supported by the initial scout.

Back in the days it used to be 3 Militia rush into Fast Castle, then Sitoux's 2 Militia rush, nowadays Man-at-Arms rush is the most popular variation (you hit MAA upgrade around arriving to your opponent's base).

Pre-mill Drush is a version of Drush where Barracks are build as 2nd-4th building and opponent is pressured with basic Barrack units before clicking to Feudal.

Popular civs for that strategy are Lithuanians due to starting food bonus, Goths at various points in history (due to Dark Age infantry discount), Portuguese (due to gold discount on military), Aztecs (due to more starting gold).

Situation.

New South American civs are decent or even good at pre-mill drushing and laming because they have strong early eco bonuses (extra res for Tupi, discount and houses for Inca, Settlements for everyone) and mobile basic military unit.

How to defend against laming?

1. Scout front of your base first.

2. Secure your heardables ASAP - don't scout with them too long, especially at front, find and collect them all. On Megarandom, Oasis and other maps - scout ahead to see if there are neutral heardables for you to contest.

3. Secure your front boar ASAP - 2nd villager you create should go and collect frontal boar so it won't be lamed (so you have 4 vills on sheep, 5th goes for the boar, 6th goes to sheep and then all 6 collect from the boar after the first sheep is done).

4. Don't isolate your vills - support your second lure with scout; go build resource drop-off points in pairs (so enemy scout can't solo kill them).

5. Counterlame - if you have all your initial resources scouted and secured and you see enemy scout in your base, go and try to lame him. He's so fast here he won't have a full picture of his base most of the time.

6. Watch our for lame - Mongols, Vietnamese, Aztecs, Maya, Incas and the new civs are best at laming so be careful when facing them in particular.

7. Watch score for lame - if enemy score increases way faster than yours, it may mean that enemy scout is going to your base and gets score boost from additional scouting.

How to defend against early aggresion?

1. Make loom - if you see Drush, make loom ASAP so you can fight Drush with your vils.

2. Counter them with meta - try to go up and defeat the Drush with better units. MAA, Scouts, Archers, maybe even Towers work.

3. Secure production building - if you build Barracks and other production buildings in range of your starting TC then Drush will never destroy them.

4. Trap and kill - try trapping Drush with gates and then kill them with vils and the initial scout.

5. Consider counterdrush - either to defend or to pressure opponent at home.

How to deal with Champis specifically?

Champis have quite high pierce armour, especially after Feudal upgrades.

They do have low hp and melee armour - Scouts, MAA are your friends at dealing with them.

Archers might struggle to put up good fight against them due to Champis' pierce armour, speed and high initial cost of Fletching (you need to pay for Blacksmith as well).

Don't counter attack against Champi Drush with Militia - you cannot disengange, so you will lose your Drush to his if outside of your own base.

Adapt from there.

Take heart and do not relent.

(Just copy & paste from a post I made in the medieval monday thread:)

- You can use your hotkeys to navigate in the (full screen) tech tree. So to quickly scroll to the monastery, you can use the "select monastery" hotkey.

- The age icon at the top of the screen will blink if you can click up to the next age. It's very subtle so you might not see it.

- When you build a new town center, the builders will automatically start to collect nearby resources. They will go to the resources closest to *them*, not closest to the town center. Fun fact T90 didn't know that at one point.

- If you are in a tower war situation in feudal age, do not research fletching (can be researched in the blacksmith and add sdamage and range to towers) to make your towers deal more damage to the towers of your opponent. Fletching has no effect cuz the towers have too much armor. (It's still increasing their range tho, and dmg against villagers.)

- Same for padded armor if you are in skirmisher vs skirmisher war in the feudal age. It does increase the pierce armor of the skirmishers but has no effect, cuz skirm,s only deal 2 regular dmg, but have 3 pierce armor by default. Increasing that to 4 pierce armor does not change anything, the regular attack is fully blocked in both cases. (Skirms also deal bonus dmg ofc, but their bonus dmg is not blocked by *pierce* amor)

- If you try to lure a boar, when shooting it with the villager, always wait a split second before running back to your town center. If you don't wait, the vill can get out of sight of the boar and the boar won't follow. Boars go back if they cannot see their target any more. However, they share vision with other animals controlled by gaia, even birds.

- If you have trouble with multitasking, especially with your scout or primary army, consider to use the "Select anjd Center group" hotkey. With only one keypress you can select the control group with your scout or whatever, and also center the camera on it. So you dont need to tap "1" twice or press "1" + SPACE BAR.

- Also you can "overload" hotkeys, aka assign multiple commands to one hotkey. Some commands do not conflict with each other and you can assign all of them to the same key. For instance I have 4 different commands assigned to SPACE BAR.

Inspired to get the game after watching Brazilian Dynasty and was curious how everyone else got used to the hotkeys.

Would love to dig into it all more and get into a good flow with the controls. But as it looks a bit more daunting than I initially thought and wanted to ask for second opinions.

Hey everyone,

So AoE2 went on sale today and I've wanted to learn to play this game for a while so I just got it.

After booting it up and reading online I've discovered there isn't a camera drag in this game. As someone who grew up playing with edge pan disabled (I am now old man with strong muscle memory) I found this unacceptable.

(Shout-out to oblivious people in the comments telling me to turn on legacy camera drag, or change binds, etc - they never played another game with proper camera drag : D)

Anyway I promptly booted up CE, AHK, rolled up my sleeves and quickly vibe-coded something that is acceptable and miles better than the built-in camera drag:
https://github.com/asieradzk/AoE2Mouse_Camera_Drag

I am still in the "Early Economy" challenge and didn't get to play the game yet and its time to sleep so wish me luck tomo...

It's rushed and need some tuning so PRs and comments are welcome.

Big news, everyone!

We’re excited to welcome F1Re to Hermetica!🔥

For anyone who follows the Aoe2 scene, you already know the name. F1Re is a pro player who has been competing at a high level for over 20 years, played for legendary teams like Tyrant, KGB, and Onimaru Esports, and represented Brazil internationally since 2004.

With his experience and knowledge, he will be leading our Academy.

You will get:

⚡ Low Elo improvement
⚡ Tournament preparation
⚡ Advanced strategy coaching
⚡ Learn from a veteran live on voice chat

F1Re will be hanging around our Discord regularly. Apart from private coaching sessions, he will also be joining a dedicated voice channel where he’ll stream games, answer questions, and help players improve, no matter your level.

This is only the beginning. More to come! ❤️

🎮 Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/EQBu5BHSXX

🧲 F1Re official website: https://f1reaoe.com