Begun Playing Age of Empires II For the Initial Time. Pondering Military Strategies
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I’m a newbie to RTS games, so I’m trying to learn the ropes.
I’m playing on Xbox with Gamepass and I’m confused about why people don’t just build up their military.
Is it really beneficial to have only 20% of your population in the military and the rest as villagers?
It seems like if you have a large army, you can easily defeat any other civilization.
I’ve only played against the AI so far, and every time I just keep cranking out military units until I have a lot, even if it’s more than half my population, and then I just steamroll the enemy.
Can anyone explain this to me?
Notice, you said you “wait until I have a bunch.” That will never work against humans who don’t do that.
Say you have 150 military and 50 vils.
You go up against someone with 50 military and 150 vils.
You will win for a while.
But since not all 150 units can fight at once, your opponent will lose units a little faster than you do, but eventually, they’ll be able to replenish much faster than you can, so you’ll start to run out of steam.
Additionally, your ability to create more military and afford upgrades will be heavily affected by how much economy you have.
Having said that, heavy military investment and aggressive play will often work very well.
But it has to be *early*.
If it’s not, you’ll fall behind heavily.
You can’t wait until you have a bunch of military if that’s your route.
Lastly, stone walls are really hard to break unless you have a late game army.
When you see stone walls, you usually have to stop making military and focus on advancing through the ages.
40 military to 160 villagers is at about the maximum for villager to military ratio.
Normally you want somewhere from 100 to 140 villagers (but sometimes more).
And like others have said, the reason for so many vills is so that you have enough economy to replenish your losses.
And if someone raids you and kills 30 vills, you don’t insta-lose the game because you still have 100+ left.
Another advantage is you can devote maybe 20 or so to going forward and building aggressive forward buildings like castles or military production buildings.
So yeah, make lots of vills!
But you don’t need 160 most of the time.
As many other said, economy in aoe is really important, but your playstile is really important too.
For example, if you are really agressive and you know how to be agressive, so you have better unit production and unit control compared to the enemy, you can (A) focus more in military units in feudal age, maybe delaying your castle age, or (B) go all-in in castle age, using only one town centre and making units non stop from there.
But if you are not able to get the control of the game, because you dont know how and when attack and you can’t damage the enemy eco, he can get castle age faster than you, obtaining the access of better units like knights in the (A) case, or expand with more town center than you, securing a better resource flow and then more army than you in the (B) case.
The most important fact is that you should never stop producing vills to save resources for army, otherwise the enemy will produce get more resources and, then, make more army than you
20% is a bit low imo.
I’d say 25 to 50%.
More if you’ve stockpiled a lot of res.
So 2 things about mass militar build up.
What happens if youre attacked before the buildup finishes?
What happens if your attack fails against strong defenses, a decentralized eco and mass production (many many production buildings instead of a couple).
What do you do then?
You send in your 200 warriors and they all die.
Now you have no resources to send in the second wave.
Opponent has a 125 villager economy behind them that is constantly spamming units out of production buildings, that instantly replace the units that died.
You only had 200, but your opponent has infinite.
Until the resources run out but by then you are already long dead.
sidenote: 20% is too small. 125 villagers and 75 military is the default.
The strategy comes from bending that according to the situation.
Because you need resources to make military.
If you use 50 vils and 150 military, the time taken is long and you’re very likely dead before you can attack.
And even if you do attack, opponent with 130 vils has the economy to constantly create new units much faster than you, so eventually you will die.
AoE2 is a bit more complex than a simple arithmetical exercise as that.
If you want to overwhelm the enemy with 100% military population then the only viable way is by the Burgundian unique tech flemish revolution.
Otherwise, i would really advise against the (categorical) thinking of ‘my military number higher than enemy military number, therefore I win’.
It won’t matter at all if your 30 units are eg.
karambits and the 15 enemy units are eg.
teutonic knights.
The problem about waiting till you have a bunch is that any opponent worth their salt isn’t really going to leave you alone in peace to wait around until you have a bunch.
just play at a harder difficulty or against humans and see how that “Imma just mass military and then attack after an hour or so”-strategy works out
A few reasons why:
1) Massing military leaves your economy and defense weak in early and mid game, meaning any fast paced rush can easily break your economy.You can stop the rush with your military, but a well managed rush will position itself at your most vulnerable position, and that means you’ll be losing a few villagers before the rush goes down.
And a few lost villagers will give the enemy a huge lead.
2) If you do manage to launch an attack with a fairly large army, it’s still gonna be a gamble.If the enemy is well defended, you’ll be losing your units to castle and tower fire.
Now if you had a great economy, you can easily replace the lost units with more units, but you can’t do that now.
3) Remember that your units need to be upgraded to keep up with the age advancement, and upgrades can get really expensive.If you don’t have the economy to back up your unit with upgrades, you’re gonna have a quantity over quality army, and a smaller but better upgraded army and defense can easily beat you.
In a match between a player who has 120 military and 80 vils, and a player who has 120 vils and 80 military, the latter will usually win.
Both sides will take casualties during the fight, but the player with 120 vils will have a strong enough economy to be constantly churning out reinforcements as the battle goes, and maintain their 80 unit army.
However the player with only 80 vils will have a hard time keeping reinforcements coming to maintain a 120 unit army.
So the player with the stronger eco can usually outlast the player who goes for the all military approach.
That being said, at the entry level point, there are definitely situations where you can sacrifice eco for one big push and get a win.
Play the game however you have the most fun for now, you’ll learn this stuff as you go.
Better economy means you can reinforce your troops much faster, that’s why people suggest that depending on your civ, your villager count should be 100-120 (considering you play with the standard 200 population setting)
I feel like a lot of the comments, while being true, don’t quite address what I think is the main flaw in your current logic.
If you had unlimited time and resources, bigger army is absolutely better, but those are two impossible conditions to have.
The main thing is that if you wait until you have a massive army before attacking, especially neglecting your economy, your enemy has the opportunity to attack you long before you are ready.
A lot of people mentioning going all in.
If you go all in (focus on army not economy) you are still attacking really early and continually creating more units when you can.
This is not the same as massing 100 fully upgraded war elephants and then attacking.
When playing a low level AI, or a weak human opponent, they might not attack you early, but a stronger AI or a decent human opponent will attack you in feudal or early Castle age, destroying you because you don’t have enough army (you can’t possibly have a big army at this point with a bad economy) and win before you get going.
The more villagers you have, the faster you can train up your army and the faster you can age up.
Castle age units walk all over feudal age units, and so on.
Also, once you have built your “first army”, you are not done.
Even if you win the fight against their army, you now need to produce more, and to do so you need the villagers at home to be working all the time so you can keep up constant production of army until the game ends.
If you do that, you underinvest in economy which means you have to do a lot of damage or even basically kill your opponent right away.
Or never lose army bc you can’t replace them.
And you’re on a timer because your opponent has better eco, so he will be able to catch up in army numbers quicker than you can produce.
And he is supported by defensive structures.
It can work though and I think it’s an under-utilised approach.
I like a full Knight-Ram-push in later Castle Age.
The player Hoang is famous for an extremely all-in playstyle with lots of Siege in early Castle Age and he beats the top players with it.
I think it’s unpopular because it’s so all-in and therefore it feels more random.
If you drag the game and make eco, there will be again and again situations where you can grab a decisive advantage.
If you just go military, it usually either wins or loses you the game right away. 1 chance only.
Instead of many small chances.
> Like 30+ military against someone who only has 15, it would just be game over right?
In theory it could be, sure.
At those numbers you would (probably) kill their army and have a sizable army left to rampage through their base.
Having a military lead is definitely useful.
The problems are that your opponent still has a base that can partially defend itself (castles, TC’s can be tough for one army to handle) and if you can’t fully kill them they might just make more units to deal with your army.
And if they have a sizable villager advantage, they can afford to replace their losses much more easily than you can afford to replace yours.
Side note: Only 20% military seems a bit extreme, usually it’s more about 40% (~80 military / ~120 villagers to replace any losses).
Maybe a bit more or less, depends on how expensive the army / how effective the economy is.
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