E S T R A T É G I A S - N E W B I E S / R O O K I E S G U I D E

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Extraído do Site MrFixtOnline

Introduction

This is the first of a series of chapters to help players new to AoK get over the initial hurdles, to the point of being an advanced intermediate player. These articles are not written for the experts, they’re designed to get you to the point where you can win at least as many games as you lose when playing on the Zone, or to consistently beat computer opponents on the hard setting.

With that in mind, the focus will be on simple, general strategies, rather than highly optimized strategies that are easy to mess up. For example, Gutter Rat’s Fast Feudal Rush is an excellent expert strategy, but likely to be an unmitigated disaster if a newbie were to attempt it, since there are so many opportunities to make crucial mistakes.

When practical, I will include sample games to illustrate the points. The games are not "the ultimate" in perfection, you’ll usually see me make some mistakes or minor blunders, but they will show how the general strategy can work.

So, who qualifies as a newbie?

For the purposes of these guides, here's the "newbie test". Play a random game on a continental map against one computer opponent on easiest difficulty at normal speed. Try to get to castle age as quickly as you can, ignoring any military buildup. If it takes you more than 22 minutes to reach castle age, these guides are for you. If you're in the 20-22 range, you'll probably still learn something. If you're able to castle in under 20 minutes, you're out of the newbie class and into the intermediate range.

Since Age of Kings was released, I’ve helped clan-mates and strangers alike get over some of the starting hurdles. Sometimes I’ll play as an ally, sometimes co-op on the same civ, and often I’ll review a replay file and email comments and suggestions. Through this experience, I’ve noticed quite a few things that newer players tend to do that keep them from being competitive. This first chapter is aimed at addressing some of these mistakes.

The Seven Deadly Sins

1) Too few villagers

As a general rule of thumb, your first order of business is to get your population up to 30 (1 scout, and 29 villagers and/or fishing boats) as quickly as possible, before building a military, buying many upgrades, or advancing to the feudal age. And, once you reach castle age, expand to at least 40 and to at least ½ the pop limit in imperial. That’s a lot of villagers, but if you’re trying to compete against a 100-villager economy with your 25 villagers, the game is already over.

These numbers are rules of thumb. Sometimes, it will make sense to go feudal with fewer villagers, to build a military very early, or other changes, but try to stick with these guidelines until you’ve got it down cold…then play with the variants.

2) Forgetting the most important thing: food, food, and food

The number two mistake is to use your first 8 villagers for anything other than getting food or making the initially required buildings. (There are special cases where using your 7^th and/or 8^th villagers for wood is a good move, but in general, keep the first 8 on food no matter what, right into castle age.)

Your success in a game is going to depend heavily on getting ahead of your opponent’s economic power. Nothing is more important in that respect than the number of villagers. If your opponent makes his 15^th villager when you make your 12^th, you’re going to be in a world of hurt, and a minute behind in everything from that point forward. The key to making many villagers quickly is to get enough food in the first two minutes to allow your TC to create new villagers literally non-stop from the first seconds of the game. To do this without interruptions, you’ll need at least 6, preferably 8 villagers working on food from the very beginning, or you won’t keep up. I like 8 because, if things don’t go smoothly, it gives you some breathing room, while running with 6-7 on food may cause gaps in villager production.

3) Doing things that aren’t needed yet

If you’re not going to build a military force very early, you have no need for gold in the dark ages, especially before beginning your upgrade to the feudal age. (I refer to this as "hitting the feudal button".) If you’re mining gold this early, you’ve wasted 100 wood on the mining camp, and you have several villagers that could be getting food (and speeding your feudal time) instead of gathering gold that you can’t use. Some very good players will tell you to put 3 villagers on gold very early. This is simple, it is easy, but I find that it hurts your speed enough to make it worth putting off until later.

4) Scouting deep before scouting near

Unless you’re planning an early surprise attack (a feudal rush), it’s usually a mistake to send your scout deep before the eight-minute mark. Again, some good players will disagree, but I find that it takes about eight minutes to thoroughly map your home area, and to find all your resources before going on offense. If you miss four sheep, or don’t find your second gold pile, you could be in a world of hurt later on. Until you’ve mastered the game, keep the scout local until you’ve covered your whole "zone", then go exploring.

5) Using the wrong food

This is a fairly deep topic and deserves its own chapter, so let me just summarize with a few "rules" that are really more like guidelines. They are:

Sheep first, if you possibly can. Period.
Berries next until you’ve mastered the game. Reliable, easy, low management.
Nearby hunting and shore fish next. Boar luring once you’re good at it. Do not run more that a screen or two across the map for hunting, the wasted walk time ins't worth it.
Fish boats are usually a good idea, after you have a food baseline established with sheep and berries. (Requires a map with significant water, of course.) Go for deep-sea fish, ignore the shore fish because boats harvest them slowly.
Farms next. I used to advise people to never, ever farm in the dark age, because of the huge up-front wood costs for farming. After testing repeatedly, however, there are some civs that can do quite well with farming in the dark ages, for supplemental food above the initial baseline provided by sheep and/or berries. Although the farms require a lot of wood and don't produce food at a terribly fast rate, they do have the advantage of requiring no initial walk time. As a result, the net production is competitive with the other food sources. Teutons, Chinese and Franks can make especially good use of farms. Farms should never be your first food source. On water maps, though, I still don't recommend farming until you've really fished out the local seas.
Fish traps? Never. Too slow, a waste of a population unit. Delete the fish boats and add villagers.

As with everything, some experts will argue each of these points, especially when it comes to hunting vs. farms vs. fish boats. Stick with these rules until you’ve mastered the game, then selectively throw them out as you see fit. They may not always be optimal, but they’ll never be too far from the mark.

6) Failing to record and review games

Unless you have an opponent who absolutely refuses, record all your games. For the first few games, go back and review no matter what…you’ll be surprised what you see the second time through. Turn fog off to reveal what your scouting patterns missed. After that, if you lose badly, or your opponent surprises you, view the replay to understand what happened.

7) Failing to learn the hotkeys

I’m guilty here, too. I haven’t memorized the hotkeys for military stances and formations yet. (Maybe I should do that today, it would only take a few minutes!) It’s dull, it takes an effort, but it makes a huge difference in how much time you have available to think. Seriously. If you can cut down the time it takes to micromanage your economy by half, and it was taking 80% of your time, you’ll now have three times as much thinking time as before (60% vs. 20%). And that makes a huge difference in how likely you are to make silly mistakes under pressure. Believe me, I’ve been there.

The most important hotkeys are the ones for selecting buildings (H for Town Center, etc.), the ones for building (farms, mills, etc.), and the ones for producing common units in the buildings. In addition, learn the grouping commands for making numbered groups, adding units to them, and selecting them.

The First Two Minutes

In future chapters, I’ll cover the strategy choices you need to make with regard to land vs. water maps, feudal and castle rushing, booming, and so on. Each of these strategy choices will profoundly change your strategy beyond the first five minutes, but the first two minutes should almost always follow the same script.

Start with the Vikings

OK, take it or leave it on this one. I think the Vikings are a good learning civ (and still my favorite) for a number of reasons. They have a good economic bonus (free wheelbarrow and hand cart), so your feudal age and castle age economies get a fast boost. They have excellent infantry, perhaps the easiest type of army to use in battle. They get all archery units and upgrades, for excellent garrisoning and infantry support. Their berserk unique unit (UU) heals itself, largely eliminating the need for monks. Their elite longboats can hold their own against almost anything, with the single exception of masses of fast fire ships. The Vikings are a great learning civ because you can try almost any strategy with them, and you’ve always got a couple of alternatives on any map. Many civs require a different opening strategy (Chinese in particular), but the Viking opening here will be a good template for most civs and is a good place to start.

The two-minute drill

No, I’m not talking about the Minnesota Vikings. (Sorry, American football humor, probably lost on non-US readers. The Minnesota Vikings are a US football team, and the two-minute drill refers to special tactics used in the final two minutes of the game.) I suggest that, as boring as it sounds, you should play offline random map games up to the two-minute mark, then quit, and repeat until you’ve really got this down automatically. It may take 30 tries before it’s really automatic, but it’s crucial to mastering the game. Once you have it down pat, you’ll be glad you put an hour or two into it.

You start with 200 food and three villagers. The TC (Town Center) can produce a new villager every 25 seconds, so it takes 100 seconds to use up your initial food supply. That means that the TC will be idle at 1:40 (1:45 or so with multiplayer command lag) unless you’re able to get your first 50 food before then. That’s the first challenge: to get 50 food in the first 100 seconds.

The immediate goal is to accomplish several things as quickly as possible. First, you need to have a house completed by 0:25, or your fifth villager will be delayed. Second, you’ve got to find the four sheep that are always somewhere near your TC. You should also find the nearby berry patch, and it probably won’t hurt to build your second house right away, too. So, I usually do the following, in this order:

Type "hcccc", to select the town center and queue up four villagers.
Double-click on a villager (to select all three) and have them build a house on the edge of your initial explored area. I do it on the edge so that, if the initial sheep are in that direction, the villagers will spot them.
While you have all three villagers selected, click on the one that is farthest away from the house you’re going to build. Have that one villager start another house on the edge of the explored area, in a slightly different direction from the first house. This causes that villager to also explore another bit of the "sheep hiding zone".
As soon as your villagers are moving, select the scout. Use waypoints to quickly define one loop around the explored area’s perimeter. Try to have the scout start next to the areas the villagers will explore to avoid overlap. For example, have the villagers build at the north and northwest edges of your explored area, and have the scout search counter-clockwise (that’s anti-clockwise for you Brits) from the west, around the south, then up to the northeast. I also assign my scout to hotkey #1.

These starting moves are illustrated in the diagram below.

The next step may vary depending on what you see when. In general, as soon as you spot sheep, send them to the TC, and have all villagers (except those still building, if any) attack the same sheep to get the food production started.

If you haven’t found the sheep by the time the first house is built, have those two builders walk in opposite directions to search for the sheep. (Have them go, at most, 1/2 the width of the screen.)
If your second house is done, and you’ve spotted berries but no sheep, have all your villagers build a mill next to the berries. This is your emergency fallback if you can’t find the sheep in time. If you spot the sheep, leave the mill half-built, and get the villagers on sheep immediately.
If your second house is done, and you haven’t spotted berries or sheep, have that last builder (and the new villager from the TC) join in the exploring for a few seconds, until you find sheep or berries.
If you still haven’t found the sheep when the mill is finished, assign all your initial villagers (probably 5 at this point) to gather berries. You can use villagers 6-8 to process the sheep when found, while 1-5 stay on berries. (It’s good to minimize unnecessary walks.)

By the one-minute mark, you will have five villagers, and they should all be working on food or at least en route to a food site. This is critical. Because it takes about 30 seconds for each villager to gather 10 food, and you need 50 food by 1:40, you must have your fifth villager gathering sheep or berries before 1:10.

To process sheep efficiently, put four villagers on each sheep. Set the TC’s gather point on a sheep, so new villagers automatically go right to work. (Move the
gathering point to a new sheep as needed.) Try to keep the two groups of shepherds inside the TC area, but well separated from each other. Try to keep one extra (live) sheep next to each group of shepherds, to minimize delays when they finish their current sheep.

OK, in the real world…

There will be times when it just isn’t possible. The sheep or berries are behind a forest, you miss one little black patch and the berries were in it, etc. (Although, to be honest, Ensemble Studios has done a fantastic job of getting rid of most of the frustrating hill and forest berries from Age of Empires random maps!) Don’t panic, 1:40 is a goal, not an absolute. Being 15 seconds behind is a minor disadvantage, don’t get flustered and make it a minute behind. Keep searching until you find berries or sheep, and get everyone working on them ASAP. Practice the opening, though, until you find that you can do it at least 2/3 of the time. Also, at the end of each drill, do not hit the "play again" button, because it puts you on the same map with the same resource locations, and you don’t learn efficient searching that way.

Wait a minute, what about the loom?

When you research the loom, your villagers get light armor and are bumped up from 25 to 40 hit points. This means that a lone villager can survive a wolf attack, which can be a big advantage in the early stages of the game. Many, many players will research the loom at 1:40, as soon as their seventh villager is produced. This is often a good habit. I suggest you don’t do this when you’re practicing, because it becomes an easy crutch to lean on (not needing 50 food until 2:05 or 2:10), and allows you to get sloppy in your opening. Get the opening down so that looming at 1:40 is an option, not a forced choice because you can’t start another villager.

Since wolves stay away from your initial TC, and their aggressiveness varies with the difficulty level, I suggest these guidelines for when to loom:

If you’re playing Chinese, research the loom at 0:25, when your one villager comes out.
If you don’t have enough food to make a villie right away, research the loom.
If you will be building a dock in the dark ages, research the loom at 1:40.
If you will be sending a builder forward in the dark ages (to build in the enemy area), research the loom at 1:40.
If the game is on the hardest setting (very aggressive wolves), get the loom at 1:40.
Otherwise, get the loom after you’ve made your last dark-age villager, unless you already have enough food to immediately hit the feudal button. In that case, delay loom research until the moment you reach the feudal age, while you’re building the two required feudal age buildings.