Things I Didn’t Know When I started Playing Ranked Games

Hi all, I started playing aoe2 in June and jumped into ranked games in September. I fell all the way down to an ELO of 167 by September 21st and have clawed my way up to around 750 today. I searched for a similar post and didn’t see it so here are all the basic, simple, obvious things I did not know when I started playing ranked games that I do now. I’m not talking strats or specific build orders or unique units, or tips for micro or macro. I’m talking basic things, things so obvious no guide mentions it because c’mon, who didn’t know THAT. Me, I didn’t know any of these things until I lost many, many, many games. Please share any similar things you didn’t know so we can laugh and learn together.

1. You can delete things after placing them.

2. When you delete things you get all the unused resources back. (Do you have any idea how much stone I needlessly gave away, and how many Vill lives were sacrificed because I thought I had to salvage the stone and build the castle anyway???)

3. Ringing the town bell gets all your villagers into the town center to attack a scout or rush. (also, If you don’t unring the bell or otherwise release the villagers, they will just stay inside).

4. Then I learned, the hard way, that all vills come back when town bell rung, even the ones way off on stone that were not in danger.

5. It was many weeks before I discovered that you can choose to garrison some villagers into your TC without ringing the bell, and I’m not going to say how long it took me to discover that you could garrison in castles.

6. When producing military, you can have them garrison in their production building! No one tells you this at the start. The siege ram rush became real and easily won me 100 ELO.

7. Auto-scout – no more straight line scouting. I can select and press G and away we go.

8. Waypoints and the power of right clicking in general – What’s better than auto scout? Being able to scout my own resources first and then the enemy and THEN auto scout.

9. Scouting with sheep, llamas, and people.

10. If/when rushed, you can rebuild your TC in dark age and feudal age if it gets destoryed. You don’t have to resign and cry. You can, and should, still cry, but you don’t have to wait until castle age to build a TC.

11. You don’t lose resources from queued up units when the castle or production building gets destroyed.

12. Hot keys are scary – but select all stables, barracks, etc are arguable the 3rd through 7th set of hot keys you should learn.

13. You can ban maps you don’t like. F U Enclosed.

14. Heated shot is Noob bait.