Age of Empires II :HD Guide

Overview

This is to help Noobs in the early game economy by getting past the dark age competitivley.Also more detail on the mid and late game to make use of the start and keep a competitive edge, will be coming in the future.

Hotkeys

Selecting useful units/buildings

Select town center: H
Idle villagers: .
idle military: ,
Mill: Ctrl + w

Build hotkeys

House: B -> Q
Farm: B -> A
Resead farm (Mill): F
Create Villager (TC): A

Dark Age

This is mostl;y aimed at inexperience or new players to quickly get started into the game.
Follow these steps to get through the Dark age quickly with a strong economy, and you can refine it through practice to become a competitive player.

I may update this guide inthe future to include how to move through the feudel and castle ages quickly.

Note: This settup is not for Drushing, unless you want to fail.

1. Use all villagers to build a house each ( important so you don’t poulation lock yourself while spamming villagers).

2. Use town center to que as many vilaggers as possible.

3. Set villagers to gathering wood from trees until you have sheep ( so as to not waste time collecting resources).

4. Use scout and press CTRL 1 to set a hotkey, use this to move your scout around the map by clicking on the minimap to save time.

5. If you don’t have enough food to keep training villagers use the chance to research loom.
NB: Loom is a technology in the town center that improves villager hitpoints so they can fight wolves and enemy scouts.

6.Next villager should lure boar. This is done by attacking boar with villgaer then sending them back to town center. the boar will follow then your villagers working on the sheep can kill it quickly and safely.

7. After you have 7 villagers collecting food from sheep, send the next 3 to building a lumber camp, and collecting wood.
NB: contol your villagers so as to only be gatheirng from one sheep at a time, as the food a dead sheep has dectreases with time (decay), this way you’re not wasting any food.

8. The next 3 villgaers should build a mill near berry bushes and start collecting berries.

9. After this you should be able to advance to the feuldal age.

This should help you newer players or those who are strugggling to get started to improve your early gameplay.

Tip: If you want to practice this guide or similar dark age and feudal age guides then use the Wander Race game mode, so you can focus building a strong economy at the start and not warry about being rushed.

Feudal Age

For the Feudal age there are two main stragergies I adopt. One being to upgrade to man at arms folowing a dark age rush and try to overwhelm an oponent early. The second being to move to the castle age quickly to avoid being rushed.

To upgrade men at arms and rush an oponent or follow up on a drush, you will need gold and food. To this aim you should continuously build villagers and place several on gold and the rest on food or wood to build farms. Do not forget to use the blacksmith upgrades. if don early you will have a significant advantage.

To get to the castle age fast you should stay in the dark age longer and acquire at least 20 villagers. If you have the opportunity waitng a little longer tll you get 27 villagers will give you a big boost when you reach castle age. Two feudal age buildings are required to age up. So you will need enough floating wood to build a market and a blacksmith. You can swithc out the market for a archery range/stable if you wish. You should gather the wood 325 before you reach the feudal age so you can place them and then age up strait away.

Castle Age

Imperial Age