AOFE: Basic Strategy For Competitive Games

Age of empires 2 is perhaps one of the greatest strategy games ever made, many people still play it because of how great it is. The trouble is getting to the skill level of a pro takes a lot of work, hopefully this article will make it much easier to become great at the game.
The main strategy in aoe2 is to create as much villagers as possible to have economic advantage over your opponent, a better economy means it is easier to have huge armies. My main strategy is the feudal age rush but this start up is very versatile and can lead to a variety of strategies.
Please note that this is mostly for land based maps, water maps involve utilizing fishing boats.

The Start
The start is often the most important part of the game, it may determine whether you win or lose and you will find yourself practising this part of the game the most. Remember to get a villager to start building a house when your population is 2 less than your pop cap. You should build your houses next to each other to create a wall.

• The first thing you should do to begin with is to start spawning villagers at the town centre, at the same time you should also get 2 villagers to build a house near them and the other villager to do the same. You also need to use your scout to explore the area and find your sheep. If you are playing forgotten empires and use the incas get all 3 to build one house due to houses increasing the pop cap by more.

• Once you find the sheep send them to your town centre, then uses your villagers to get the food from them. If you don't find your sheep then you may have to use berry bushes. If you do find your sheep and they still aren't at your town centre yet get your villagers to chop wood while waiting, never have an idle villager. If you have lots of sheep you can use some to scout around your own base, but if you do this make sure that they don't go near the opponents base and they can make it back to your town centre when needed.

• When your population number is 8 you should get the next 3 villagers who spawn to chop wood,  build a lumber camp next to the wood to speed up how much wood you gain. After these villagers have spawned get the next one to start a boar lure( this is performed by getting one villager to attack a boar and lure it to your town centre for your other villagers to kill, if you have not got enough experience performing the boar lure or your signal is lagging get the loom upgrade).

• All villagers you spawn should be gathering food from foraging bushes ( Building a mill near the bushes is a good idea), boars and sheep until your population is 20. When the pop is 21, 1 villager should build a gold mine and start mining gold. The next load of villagers to spawn should be chopping wood until you can age up to the feudal age.

• In between going to the feudal age build a barracks. You should also get alot of your villagers who were gathering food to start gathering wood. Also get 1 villager to start building lots of houses.

The Feudal age

• As soon as you get to the feudal age you should get 1-2 villagers to build a couple of archery ranges, tables or even another barracks. Personally I use archery ranges. You should also spawn lots of villagers to get gold, although if you aren't using units that cost gold you don't need so much. I use archers to I get alot of gold.

• When you build the military buildings immediately start spawning units from them and send them near the enemy base. Make sure you have already used the scout to scout the enemy base.

• When foraging bushes are finished start building farms, 8 is a decent number but if you use military units that cost food you may want more. When you create military units use the resources that you can afford to spend, often I use a mixture of archers and skirmishers to save gold.

• The military units you use should attack and distract enemy villagers, but keep them away from the enemy town centre at all costs. You may want to build a blacksmith to upgrade your units, also if you're in a team you should get a market to get the cartography upgrade.

• You may want to start gathering stone now so you can build town centres and castles when you get to the castle age.

• Basically keep up the pressure with your military and keep creating villagers until you can go up to the castle age.

The Castle age

• As soon as you get to the castle age build a second town centre, build more later on and keep spawning villagers from each of them.

• Start using siege weapons and knights/eagle warriors, these are great units to use as they are very powerful.

• Now all you need to do is build a few castles to defend yourself or to attack the enemy, you also may want to use your unique unit.

From here on it is up to you to decide what to do, trebuchets in the imperial age are useful to take on castles, other than that there is nothing more you need to know.

Here is a video to help

Hope you found this useful, please comment