How to win in Age of Empires
Step 1: Build an academy
Step 2: Build 10 hoplites
Step 3: Win the game.

How to win in Age of Empires 2
Step 1: Play as the Britons
Step 2: Produce 15 longbowmen and a few infantry
Step 3: Win the game.

There are way more ways to win than just that

want to play some multiplayer?

Obviously. These seem to be the most fool-proof to me, though. Especially the first one. A single phalanx can take on 20 sword wielding legion guys at the same time and will kill them all because of how ridiculous its armor is. And they only cost 5 or 6 times as much as the sword dudes.

Maybe tomorrow. I just played AoE2 for the first time in years, and remembered how simplistic it was. Got steam? I'm kravixon610, my nick is set to ultimatepotato. If so and I ever see you on, it's on.

There is always a counter unit though, and the CPU sucks

I played them both about a month ago. Yeah I got steam

Im so down for it, or look at my sig.
I love petards so much.

Play on IGZ... I've played 5 or 6 games and haven't won one.. they're effing crazy.

Well those guys are probably l33t pr0s, they have been doing this for years straight.

Yeha.. i haven't played for like 5 years and they "pwn" me.. :(.

The day is mine!

AoE 3 is where its at boys...

Are you playing against AI or what? You would die horribly against a real player if that was your only tactic. I mean, out side of getting rushed, there are stronger Castle age unit combos. What are your feudal and castle times?

I've had some great AoE and Clone Campaigns multiplayer games. One in particular went for about 15-16 hours.

In AoE 2 my brother pressed exit right before I killed that little king guy (about a 15 minute game) and where I last saved was a bit before that. I went back into the game and it ended up being 11 hours of pure strategy against the computer. >_< I think it learned...

If you know what you're doing, the chinese or the britons have more than enough to lead you to victory.

My brother and a friend got me started on AoE 3, but it doesn't like my computer too much :\ Aside from the choppiness, every now and then the sound hangs, and then rushes through.

AoE 3 + Ottomans = Game Over.

I always found the maps on AOE 3 annoyingly small.

A sizable group of longbowmen do a great job of raping basically everything from across the screen. Same with the mongol unique, plus the mongols have the advantage of running away really fast.

I played my first game in years against the AI yesterday. I didn't check the times.

Totally, I would always eat up all the resources. And the fact you can be lazy about it makes it too easy to gather them

"legionnaire"

after a certain point it becomes too expensive to maintain your civilization. farms cost wood, and if wood is gone you have to buy it with gold, which you get from selling food.

then we all out attack and it takes hours

Factories are your friend. You only get two, so you have to guard them like holy sweet baby jeebus.

I think the large maps in AoE3 are great, not too small at all. The normal maps do seem a bit cramped with more than 3 people though.

That can be countered with knights/paladins, or overwhelmingly by Huskarls. Skirms can do ok in Castle, but are less useful once large numbers are on the field. That's not to say I haven't seen them used effectively, but they won't do everything.

are factories something in aoe3? i never played that, i was talking about 2

If you want large maps, go play an 80 by 80 Supreme Commander map.

I'm pretty sure I've never ran out of wood in a game of AoK

When my dad and I used to play, we deforested entire maps in less than a night. HOURS AND HOURS of nothing but stalemate battles, to run resources down to nothing.

Usually you run out of memory addressing space if you do that.

There's nothing like cutting a path through the forest behind your enemie's stronghold.

YES!

I would always play as the Mongols and build those siege weapons that can tear down forests. "Tunneling"

That tactic was made a lot easier in Galactic Battlegrounds, artillery pieces could plow through forests pretty quick.

If you're playing as the Britons, you should probably be archer-rushing and not even bothering with longbowmen.

My favorite strategies in AoE2 were always nontraditional ones like the monk rush and TC rush. Possibly not the most effective and definitely not the easiest to pull off, but the reactions you get when you delete your town center and rebuild it in the middle of the enemy's town are totally worth it.

The war elephant in AoE 2 was the best...I would always play the Persians for the sole reason of not getting my town raped by elephants. >_<

Elephants fail hard against hand cannoners. Every unit has something that kills it easy; that's sort of the point.

Monks can wreak havoc on any attacking force.

The Monks taunt gets really irritating when you're waging a full-scale battle and six of them come out of nowhere and start converting your ****.

"Woolooloo."

Once there are enough elephants, plus paladins, it's hard for them reliably hold the elephants off, and they get murdered if you try to counter attack counter attack. If there are enough, it's going to take time to kill them all, and hand cannoners have such low health that if any thing makes it through to them they're screwed. For elephants the best thing to do is attack food production, rather than trying to take them head on. If you're playing a map like Black Forrest and that's not an option, the only single unit that will do well against them is the Mameluke. Other than that, I personally love massed heavy scorpions with a meat shield like Teutonic knights or halberds.

For lower number (<20) halberds can be pretty effective, but you'll have to make a *bunch*. Persians are definitely one of the best civs in the game. They can be countered, but with great difficulty.

If you can get support from another player, Mongols have a tech. that allows their siege units to move stupidly fast. There's nothing funnier than seeing a horde of forty siege rams rush into an opponent's base.

Against the Persians I just tend to produce a bunch of monks. The elephants move slow enough that they usually just get converted and fight each other. I've also found that knights (not paladins )fall pretty quickly to massed longbowmen fire.

I'm going to play against the AI some more tonight and tomorrow, and then maybe we can get a game going with 4+ players from massassi. Our computers ought to be able to handle it

I can dig out my discs maybe.

Yeah, monks can be pretty good vs. elephants as well.

Longbowmen are especially powerful Castle Age units. During the Castle age you can use counters such as elite skirmishers and the fact they they can't effectively take out buildings against them. Another one of their weakness is that Castle age uniques must be built at a castles, which are expensive to get up in numbers soon enough to be effective, and are severely limited in flexibility.

Still, get 20+ of them out early enough, and your enemy will be hurting. I haven't played the Britons much, but I'm guessing that an earlyish longbow attack supported by rams could be pretty awesome.

I'd defiantly be up for a game.

My tactic was to have some fast horsemen (usually 6) and then a horde of elephants. The horses were fast enough to run up to kill the monks or cannon...but not usually a combo of both v_v I would have needed more horses for that