Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition | Starting Guide

It is safe to say that Age of Empires II: DE has stood the test of time. A perfect combination of strategy and action, the game has seen quite a few iterations and is still going strong. Much of its fanbase has remained with it throughout the years and is extremely good at the game. Others, more casual fans, are still decent and passable.

The game might feel daunting for the new players and prove a difficult learning curve. While the game’s tutorial is a good starter, it takes much more to become decent at the game. This guide will teach you the basics and what to do in a multiplayer game in a beginner-friendly manner and help you improve as a casual player.

General Overview

Age of Empires II: DE is a relatively balanced game with many pieces at work. Most of your game plan usually depends on the maps you play. Even amongst similar map types, there are a few nuances that will change how you plan things out.

For the purposes of this guide, we will assume the map being played is an open map. An open map is any map where you do not start off with a closed-off base with walls. This makes getting attacked and committing to attacks in the early game easier.

The most important thing to note is that whatever you do, do not waste time. This mostly pertains to your Town Center [henceforth, TC]. You will always want a few villagers queued up on your TC. If you don’t have food to recruit villagers at any stage, research one of the technologies available at the TC.

Always defensively place buildings. This means you should place your houses, markets, blacksmiths, and military buildings as if you were building walls. They are a great way to save wood or stone on building a wall. So, place them relatively far out and in a manner that sets up a barrier to prevent enemies from getting to your TC.

Don’t be afraid to move villagers around. Suppose you see you’re slowing down food production or gold collection. In that case, you can always shift a few villagers from other resources to those resources. Additionally, play it safe when it concerns your villagers. This really matters in the first two Ages. Losing villagers quickly starts to add up as you lose out on the 50 food the villagers cost and any resources they would’ve gathered or buildings they would’ve built.

Dark Age

As soon as your game starts, queue 4 villagers in your TC. This is the maximum amount you can queue since you start with 200 food. Next, send two villages to build a house and one of your villagers to build a second house. While they’re doing that, scout around in a circle around your TC to find the sheep, berries, boars, and mines.

When you find your sheep, move them to your TC, select your villagers, press SHIFT, and right-click on one of the sheep. The villagers will immediately move to gather food from the sheep after they are done building the houses. When a new villager spawns, send them to gather from the same sheep. Do this until you have 6 villagers gathering from sheep. Once you have the 6 villagers, select all of them and then SHIFT and right-click on the ship they are currently gathering and all the other sheep one by one. This will set them to gather all the sheep one after another.

You should have more food by now, so queue up more villagers and send the 7th one to gather goods in the nearby tree line. Make him build a Lumberjack near the tree line. Send the 8th, 9th, and 10th villagers on wood as well.

Afterward, using your 11th villager, build two to three more houses near your wood line and then send him to gather wood afterward. Send another villager to gather wood, and use your 13th villager to lure your first boar. If you feel too inexperienced to lure the boar without a loom or have been in too many games where your villager dies to the boar, research the loom while sending your 13th villager to gather wood, and then use the 14th to lure the boar. Remember to draw the boar into the area in the TC to eliminate the walking distance the villagers take to deliver food.

Using your 15th villager, you should build a mill near your berries. Send the next 3 villagers to gather berries while your scout herds the deer on the map. Some maps have other animals but are always passive and run away when attacked. If you move a scout behind them, they will run away in the opposite direction. Use this to move them closer to either your TC or Mill. Move the 4 villagers to gather from the deer while sending your 19th and 20th villagers to gather berries.

We also try to get the deer because gathering food from animals is faster than gathering from berries and significantly faster than farming. By now, you should have saved up enough food to age up. So, click on the feudal age button and keep gathering resources. It is fine if you don’t have enough food; in that case, don’t wait for more food, but queue up one or two villagers individually as they get trained. By the end of the Dark Age, you should have around 20-23 villagers.

Once you click on the feudal age, you should immediately set some of your villagers to building 2 more houses and a barracks. You should also send some of your villagers on boar/sheep to gather wood from the stragglers. Straggler trees are the lone trees placed around your TC.

Feudal Age

At the start of Feudal Age, you should queue up a few more villagers, send one to build two more houses, and start researching the food and wood upgrades found in the mill and lumberjack, respectively. Use the next three of your villages to start mining gold and the two after those to start mining stone.

If you do not plan on building a castle as soon as you reach the Castle Age, don’t bother with gathering stone. Instead, send the majority of your next villagers on wood. The exact plan will most likely vary now, as you should look for a general range instead of specifics.

Look to have 12-14 villagers on food. Building farms once you exhaust all the other food options. Try to have around 16-18 villagers on wood, 4-6 on gold, and 3-4 on stone. As previously mentioned, the latter is not explicitly necessary.

While doing that, use two villagers to start building a few buildings. Start off with a blacksmith and an archery range/stable. You should also make a second barracks or archery range/stable, a market, and a few houses.

Place them in a manner as to where you are effectively using them as walls. Place palisade gates where you want to be able to enter/exit from, and use palisade walls to plug any holes. This is also the time you should start training a few military units, mostly to defend yourself in case of an attack from the enemy.

Castle Age and Beyond

Once you have 200 gold and 800 food, you should immediately advance to the castle age and build a castle as quickly as you can. The game plan will deviate a lot from now on, and as a beginner, you are less likely to remember a strict build order. Adapt to what the enemy is doing and their civilization and build units that complement each other.

This usually means that you have 2-3 different types of units in your army, and they counter the units that counter each other. This means if you have an army mainly composed of archers, they should be supplemented by spearmen and camels. If it’s mostly melee infantry, support them with skirmishers.

Remember to keep researching economic and military technologies and be on the lookout for idle villagers. You should also build additional TCs when you have sufficient resources and use them to train even more villagers. In a game of 200 population, you should have 100-120 villagers and 80 military units.

If the game goes onto the Imperial Age, you should slowly try to transition into using Trash Units. These are essentially units that cost no gold. So, for most civs, these are the spear and scout lines. You will also want to build a few trebuchets or other siege units to help you bring down enemy fortifications.

Remember, the easiest way to get rid of your enemy is to eliminate his resources, so your goal should be to kill enemy villagers. You should have found many strewn out on the map by the Imperial Age. Often, you will be able to find weak spots in the enemy defenses, rushing your army through the gaps formed to wreak havoc on the enemy base. Castles and TCs are your primary targets.