Begun Playing Age of Empires II For the Initial Time. Pondering Military Strategies
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In really simple terms, Town Centers and Castles can counteract your numerical advantage.
If your opponent protects his resources, he can better replace any of his military that you’ve killed and, worse, Age Up and upgrade his military units.
Economy is key in AoE.
You always need more resources to refill your ranks, research technologies and build / expand.
Military is important, yes, but if you can’t sustain production you have a problem because more =/= better.
Most of the time its more important what type of military units you have then how many.
The different unit types are like a big rock, paper, scissors game where one unit counters the other and is almost always the best choice to answer.
The most basic breakdown is:
Infantry beats cavalry, cavalry beats archers and archers beat infantry.
I’ll explain the 3 most basic counter units that lay the foundation of this below:
Spearmen are weak, fast-build trash units (“trash” is an AoE term simply meaning “costs no gold”, not that the unit is bad) and will always lose in a 1 on 1 engagement with another foot soldier.
But that’s not what they’re intended for.
They have a huge invisible / hidden attack bonus that makes them steamroll knights and other cavalry units.
If you have to fight cavalry, you should always counter / engage them with spearmen, if possible.
Light cavalry (also called scout) is a decent, fast-build, fast traveling trash unit that has moderate HP, Attack and Pierce Armor that can raid your unprotected villagers to destroy your economy, is highly resistant to a monk’s conversion while dealing bonus damage against them (the go-to counter against monks) and outspeed and therefore counter any non-cavalry archers.
Because they only cost food, they are the counter to archers in a long, drawn-out game when gold is sparce and knights and other unique units are expensive to build.
Lastly there are the skirmishers, a spear throwing, shield wielding archer that excels at dealing with other archers and Infantry.
They are also considered trash units that have high pierce armor (pierce armor protects against most but not all ranged attacks while regular armor protects agains all melee attacks).
They have hidden attack bonus against other archers as well as spearmen and can kite / hit’n’run infantry very effectively but due to their minimum range they can’t defend themselves against cavalry or other units that can close the distance.
You can totally do that, its just very unlikely to work.
If you send in loads of military with little to no economy, the attack has to be successful because the follow up attack will take ages to put together.
Also, the AI is notoriously bad at handling being attacked early on, try harder levels or playing Vs humans!
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