On The Road to Expert: Day 1 VILLAGERS

This series is designed to improve your game by first building a foundation in economic skills then moving on to some strategies that aren't incredibly difficult to execute, but work. Currently there are 13 Parts. Though On the Road to expert is a series originally posted on Age of Kings Heaven, these strategies have been updated, rewritten and enhanced EXCLUSIVELY for MrFixitOnline.

Villagers:

The importance of having many many villagers can NOT be overstated in Age of Kings. Often the inferior military player can win by sheer volume of the same unit, which in order to happen, must occur with a superior economy. Now obviously a mixed and managed military will win given equal economies. But we'll leave that for a later strat.

Villagers. On the road to becoming an expert you'll find that you can NEVER, and i mean NEVER have enough villager. Just ask Maimin_Matty, who, if the game lasts long enough, will tend to have something like 150-170 villagers on a population 200 map. But how can we reach this lofty goal ??

Well lets just say it takes PRACTICE. But here's how we start. In EVERY Game from now on make this your goal: No big gaps in villagers before feudal, and then once you castle, make at LEAST 5 new villagers every THREE (3) Minutes, while attacking. This will mean that you have 100 villagers by ONE HOUR of game time. While this is a little slow it will be fine to start out. As you make more villagers you will find you have resources to research and do just about anything at once.

To do this obviously you're going to need more town centers. Every time you get 400 wood, peel off two villagers from woodchopping and have them build a new towncenter near a resource, preferably wood/gold or wood/stone, but near only one if you don't have a wood/mineral spot. Then have them each build a farm at your new Town Center. Also, if you've driven the enemy off his town, or just have a nice spot outside his town, definitely build there. Set your all your town center's gathering points on a resource (IE wood or stone or gold, but each tc at a different spot). That way you can queue villagers and not worry about assigning them a task anytime soon.

These are the kinds of places for TCs if possible

Concentrate on your military, but watch your wood, and every once in a while just tap h and hit c twice, and continue until you've gone through all your town centers. IE hit h then c-c then h-c-c-h-cc-h-cc-h-cc until you've got two villagers queued in each TC. You should be able to do this within 10 seconds with practice. Every once in a while when you get a break in the fighting, grab some villagers off wood or something and have them build farms so you don't run out of food. Idle vils, building farms and building buildings (including your new tcs) should be the only thing you need to micromanage in your economy. Finally, every chance you get click the idle villager button. With 100 or more villagers you'll get a lot going idle if you don't click occasionally. Make sure to always rebuild farms, and shift villagers if you've got way too much of one resource. The KEY is NEVER EVER EVER stop making villagers. EVER. (except when you are at pop limit)

The Kind of Numbers of Villagers you should end up with

EXAMPLES OF THIS STRATEGY RECORDED GAMES:
Me:
As i recall this game didn't last long enough to fully implement this strat, but take note of the tcs in conquered areas as well as the number of town centers. My military skills in this are fine early, mediocre later but i should've researched town patrol in late castle so i woulda stopped that castle from going up in my backyard.

Maimin_Matty shows you how to boom vs SDW. This is a better example cause theres very little going on militarily here. Sam shows us in good fashion why we don't let matty build tcs all over the map and boom like a madman.
Maimin_Matty