It’s nowhere near as simple as saying that you lost 180 food and 60 gold whereas they lost 50 food (the cost of a Villager), that’s for sure. If you went on an early attack with 3 Militia and manage to take out one Villager, but your 3 Militia die, how much did you lose compared to your opponent? It costs 180 food and 60 gold to create 3 Militia - the most basic infantry unit. It’s surprisingly easy to damage your opponent’s Eco in a way that is profitable. You should use your resources to earn more resources, or use them to damage the Eco of your opponent and force them into an early resignation. Later in the game, you should have so much food income that the cost of a Villager is virtually nothing, relatively speaking. This way, you can grow the biggest economy and amass a bigger army faster than they can.Īt the start of the game you have 200 food (with most Civilizations, or Civs for short) but you have no food income, therefore it costs 25% of your total food resource to produce a single Villager. You have to spend resources to accumulate them faster than your opponent does. You don’t ever want to be “floating” resources, or stockpiling them, because money in the bank doesn’t earn you anything. Relatively speaking, resources continuously decrease in value - until the whole map has ran out of them - and this means that you need to be continually investing your resources. Spend them as an investment on Villagers to grow your own economy, and on an army to damage your opponent’s economy. The best use of resources is to spend them. This means that whilst you want a rapidly increasing income of resources, you don’t ever want to accumulate a bank balance. Later in games, you’ll be earning 200 wood multiple times over every minute. OK, they don’t get less valuable in a literal sense, they get less valuable relative to the game - relative to your economy and your opponents economy.Ģ00 wood is a lot of wood at the start of a game. However, resources get less valuable over time. You must grow your own eco as quickly as you can whilst trying your hardest to prevent your opponent from growing their’s.

The game is won and lost on economy how you build it and how you use it. In its most basic form, Age of Empires has always been a numbers game. Useful Resources Fundamentals Game of Math

It contains all of the information you need to eventually become a consistent, above-average player. You’ll find this guide useful whether you’re a total noob to the game or even if you already possess intermediate-level skill.

We’re going to focus on winning Ranked multiplayer matches as that’s the truest test of skill in my opinion, but you can take everything I say and apply it to beating the AI if that’s your jam. We also hired top-200 ranked 1v1 player and Twitch streamer Survivalist to fact check and provide additional expert insight. Instead, every bit of information included here is a mix of mathematically-proven strategies, along with effective tactics utilized by the top pros playing the game today, such as The Viper, Hera and Daut. I’m fairly confident what you’re reading is the most detailed strategy guide to Age of Empires 2 ever created in one place. This guide is going to teach you a huge amount about Age of Empires 2 strategy and includes hundreds of tips throughout.

It’s much more complicated, however, to figure out the right move at the right time and be able to remember the really fine details when the pressure is on. Like chess, it’s easy to learn what the pieces do. The beautiful thing about Age of Empires 2 - other than the fact that it was first released in 1999 and is still going strong - is that the basics of the game are extremely simple.

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