AoE II: DE - I finally win a match against bots... in the second easiest difficulty

Channel:

arsnakeheart

Subscribers:

22

Published on August 11, 2021 6:59:51 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9URKfY_TAMY

Game:

BOTS!! (2006)

Duration: 30:36

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I dunno for you people who actually play the game skillfully, but this felt incredibly satisfactory.

I played a lot of Age 2 when I was a kid, but I always played it as kind of a city builder, with cheats, and in the easiest difficulty. Since starting to play AoE II HD, I almost always lost matches whenever I put it in the second to easiest difficulty, but this time, upon buying AoE II: DE, I decided to look up how to get good at the game and happened upon this video and its follow-ups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG255lCtNdM

Those four videos (well, I didn't watch much of the fourth one) were very insightful, going surprisingly (to me) in-depth into meta shit such as how much in resources you lose per second when your villages are idle, and other such stuff, and how important it is that your town centers are always producing villagers, and that you have parallel queues for military unit production. I had never had too much insight into all this before.

So, after watching the videos, I decided to try some of it out. I was kinda lucky that I was able to find the enemy town center around the middle of the map. I built three barracks in order to keep militia production parallel, and started producing them, and starting harassing the enemy villagers myself as soon as enemy units started clashing with me. I would guess at higher difficulties the bots (or a human player) would've tried to create an army and keep me at bay as they sent the villagers back to a safer position, but instead all the villagers got garrisoned into the enemy town center, which got very strong but ultimately hopeless as they couldn't do their jobs.

Before this, my newbie-ass strategy (coming also from years of playing AoE III at lower difficulties) would be to just amass a huge army and try to overwhelm the enemy "eventually", but this kind of only works in lower difficulties where enemies have no aggression and don't harass your home base. At higher difficulties, this strategy would often fail because 1) enemies would attack before you could amass an army without being harmed, and because 2) trying to attack the enemy home base would make sure my army died, because it'd face the enemy's own defense army along with their buildings and garrisons. I would fear losing units in such an attack.

But as it turns out, I figured it's worthwhile to send units to die so long as it erodes the enemy's focus. Of course I'm writing this wall of text based on experience from a single match with a single bot in a low difficulty, but it's still a lesson learned.

Another thing mentioned by the guy in the "how to improve at Age 2" video is the usage of walls early on. In an earlier match, I got destroyed because the enemy started coming in from two fronts, so to speak, and my slowly building defenses were never in the right place quick enough and never in large enough numbers. Regardless of how my defense _units_ are doing, I can use walls to my advantage; not necessarily to make my home base _impenetrable,_ but to give me control over possible invasion routes. To create my own little Thermopylae such that the defense of my base can be done in my own terms, so to speak, lol.

Anyway, I've written too much about what may be an insignificant little match to most people. :D
I'll try to get better at Age II from here on out.

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