How to Play Age of Empires
Understand the difference of micro and macro, and be able to identify the three most basic strategies., Prepare for the game by adjusting some settings in the User Interface.
Step-by-Step Guide
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Step 1: Understand the difference of micro and macro
The Rush is one of the simplest strategies around, but there is quite a lot of risk involved with it.
With the rush the player sacrifices the economy in order to build an army before the enemy has any way to counter it.
Because the rushing player sacrifices so much of his economy for an early attack, a failed rush often results in the victory for the other player.
The most famous is perhaps the Zergling Rush from Starcraft.
Rushing in AoE3 is very hard because the defending player can garrison all his villagers inside the town center and build some anti-rush forces for a small fee.
The Boom is quite hard to do, as it require the player to balance economic growth and military investments.
The idea is to keep military investments at a minimum through the first parts of the game, building up the economy until the point where you can overpower your opponent with superior forces through upgrades.
A single misstep, though, and your forces might be outnumbered and defeated in the early parts of the game.
The Turtle, or Turtling as it's called is a defensive strategy as the name suggests.
The player invests only in a small force and builds more static defense like towers.
When turtling you focus on economy and defense, not building an attacking force.
Macro is the term given to any gameplay that benefits the player in the long term.
Expanding your base or taking map control are examples of macro.
Macro is to micro as strategy is to tactics.
With good macro you will always have a good army and plenty of resources.
Micro is the opposite of macro, and refers to moving individual units.
It is most often used about military units.
Good micro is an essential skill, and it can make your troops a lot more effective.
It is a skill that must be practiced, but there is a good amount of techniques that can be learned.
One example is "dancing"
where a player takes a ranged unit, fires at a melee one, moves away and fires again.
Repeating this process, the melee unit won't be able to land a single hit on the ranged unit. , You should choose to have the list of players enabled, which allows you to see which age your enemy is in and how many trading posts he has.
The game score also indicates how well you're doing compared to the enemy.
In addition, make sure you can see additional information about how you distribute your villagers.
This way you can see how many villagers are working on gathering resources at any time.
Start a normal Skirmish game and select one computer opponent.
You should be able to beat the computer on the difficulty Hard without too much trouble if you're familiar with the interface and the game.
It does not matter what civilization you choose; what you read in this guide applies to the whole game.
The map you choose is of great importance.
Avoid water maps because it complicates the road for victory.
Also, to keep things as straight-forward as possible avoid maps with choke points.
You may want to select "Record Game" and thus be able to review your own game and figure out what went wrong in case you should lose. -
Step 2: and be able to identify the three most basic strategies.
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Step 3: Prepare for the game by adjusting some settings in the User Interface.
Detailed Guide
The Rush is one of the simplest strategies around, but there is quite a lot of risk involved with it.
With the rush the player sacrifices the economy in order to build an army before the enemy has any way to counter it.
Because the rushing player sacrifices so much of his economy for an early attack, a failed rush often results in the victory for the other player.
The most famous is perhaps the Zergling Rush from Starcraft.
Rushing in AoE3 is very hard because the defending player can garrison all his villagers inside the town center and build some anti-rush forces for a small fee.
The Boom is quite hard to do, as it require the player to balance economic growth and military investments.
The idea is to keep military investments at a minimum through the first parts of the game, building up the economy until the point where you can overpower your opponent with superior forces through upgrades.
A single misstep, though, and your forces might be outnumbered and defeated in the early parts of the game.
The Turtle, or Turtling as it's called is a defensive strategy as the name suggests.
The player invests only in a small force and builds more static defense like towers.
When turtling you focus on economy and defense, not building an attacking force.
Macro is the term given to any gameplay that benefits the player in the long term.
Expanding your base or taking map control are examples of macro.
Macro is to micro as strategy is to tactics.
With good macro you will always have a good army and plenty of resources.
Micro is the opposite of macro, and refers to moving individual units.
It is most often used about military units.
Good micro is an essential skill, and it can make your troops a lot more effective.
It is a skill that must be practiced, but there is a good amount of techniques that can be learned.
One example is "dancing"
where a player takes a ranged unit, fires at a melee one, moves away and fires again.
Repeating this process, the melee unit won't be able to land a single hit on the ranged unit. , You should choose to have the list of players enabled, which allows you to see which age your enemy is in and how many trading posts he has.
The game score also indicates how well you're doing compared to the enemy.
In addition, make sure you can see additional information about how you distribute your villagers.
This way you can see how many villagers are working on gathering resources at any time.
Start a normal Skirmish game and select one computer opponent.
You should be able to beat the computer on the difficulty Hard without too much trouble if you're familiar with the interface and the game.
It does not matter what civilization you choose; what you read in this guide applies to the whole game.
The map you choose is of great importance.
Avoid water maps because it complicates the road for victory.
Also, to keep things as straight-forward as possible avoid maps with choke points.
You may want to select "Record Game" and thus be able to review your own game and figure out what went wrong in case you should lose.
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Kyle Shaw
Brings years of experience writing about organization and related subjects.
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