Age of Empires Online Sage

The Booster Packs

2013-08-18T05:20:00.002-05:00

AoEO comes with four booster packs:

Skirmish.
Elite Meet at Crete.
Fertile Crescent.
Northern Hold.

Once loaded, these booster packs are available from all of your civs, being represented by specific regions on your map, which you visit to play the quests relevant to each pack.

Not only do the booster packs contain fun quests in their own right, but they can be useful in levelling up all of your civs, either by providing useful consumables and advisors, or by allowing you access to quests which are rich in XP.

I'll go through each of these, in no partiucular order.

The Skirmish Hall, centre of the map, is found on Cyprus

Open the book to find out more!

Skirmish

Skirmish is perhaps the more traditional form of Age of Empires, where you objective is either to conquer your opponent or build a wonder first.

The Skirmish Hall can be found on Cyprus, and there you will find a variety of options, including 22 different maps, eight different rulers, and other options.

You have a number of options in setting up your skirmish match.

At the start of each of your civs, if you have the Skirmish booster pack, defeating each of the eight rulers allows you to win eight different epic advisors.

You also have a number of milestones you can reach which can give you rewards, including decorations for your capital city and large cash prizes. If you reach 1,000 Skirmish victories, that's worth 50,000 coin.

At level 40, plenty of Alliance Points are there for the taking by beating unstoppable opponents.

Defeating 10 unstoppable opponents gets you 50 alliance points and six level 40 chests.

Elite Meet at Crete

The name of this booster pack actually applies to the level 40 quest in the booster pack, but leading up to that are a series of easier challenges at level 13, 26 and 39.

They all follow a similar formula where you protect a wonder against a series of 10, 20, 30 or 40 raids by the enemy.

You travel to Crete to play the quests in this booster pack.

The Minoan War Council on Crete, where you can set up your quests.

The rewards aren't overly generous, unless you're playing at level 40, but you can still earn alliance points and you can earn special materials to build decorations in your capital city.

One useful thing, if you happen to have a civ your building up, it can be useful winning that level 13 and level 26 gear to transfer to that civ which might be around that level.

Temple of Minos, one of the prizes from playing Crete

Fertile Crescent

This booster pack comprises a series of quests which are located around Babylon, in fact, that is the region you travel to.

The Fertile Crescent quests are found in Babylon

One thing I can say about the Fertile Crescent is that there are a lot of fun quests here, so it's worthwhile for that alone.

If you are levelling up a civ, it's useful to throw in a few Fertile Crescent quests to quicken the pace a bit.

The Ambrosia Obsession is a series of six small quests with a reward of 5,000 coin at the end of it.

I won't spoil the surprise, but the arrival of King Tut is one of the funniest moments on AoEO.

The Ambrosia Obsession gives a good financial reward.

Northern Hold

You visit the region of the same name to play the Northern Hold quests.

Northern Hold

A unique aspect about Northern Hold is the series of quests have a capture the flag type of objective (which is not my cup of team I have to admit).

The key thing I recommend about Northern Hold is that there are a few consumables which are worth winning. The best ones increase your XP from quests by 50% for a 24 hour period - you want to have that one for each of the civs you are levelling up.

Another good one increases the coin you earn from quests for a 24 hour period.

Wisdom of the Empire consumable, increases XP by 50% for 24 hour period

All in all, the four booster packs all offer something different, and are useful in helping you level up your civs.

Brawny Polecat

Celtic Build Orders

2013-08-07T17:47:00.001-05:00

2 Rax Spear Rush into Fast TC

3 villagers on food
5 villagers on wood
@200 wood, build rax #1
Next 7-9 villagers on food (depending on hunts/distance from tc)
@200 wood, build rax #2
Build houses as needed
Train spearmen constantly until @300 food
Redistribute workers (8 on food, 5-6 on wood, 5-6 on stone)
Age up
@300 wood/@300 stone, build TC

See more inside the book!

2 Rax Spear Rush into Double Dock
(Viable on Mountain Crossing, Big Island, Treasure Island)

3 villagers on food
5 villagers on wood
@200 wood, build rax #1
Next 7-9 villagers on food (depending on hunts/distance from tc)
@200 wood, build rax #2
Build houses as needed
@150 wood, build dock #1
Train spearmen constantly until @300 food
Redistribute workers (8 on food, 10 on wood, 2 on gold)
@150 wood, build dock #2
Age up
Train fishing boats as needed
Make warship if opponent goes sea

2 Rax Swordsmen against 2 Rax Spear Rush (Celtic Mirror)

3 villagers on food
4 villagers on wood
@200 wood, build rax #1
3 villagers on food
Build 3 houses
1 villagers on gold
@300 food, age up
Train 2-3 spears
@200 wood, build rax #2
Place more villagers on food, gold as needed
Constantly train longswords until threat is over
Start gathering stone once threat is over and opponent is going for fast tc
@300 wood/@300 stone, build a defensive TC

Fast Fortress into Bowmen/Druid ball

(Continuation of 2 Rax Spear Rush into Fast TC) (Only against another Fast TC player)

@Bronze Age, pressure opponent with spearmen, longsword mass
Once 2^nd TC is complete, redistribute workers so that you will get @400 food/@400 gold quickly (~15 on food, ~10 on gold)
Upgrade gold and stone tech as resources come in (you will need the stone conservation and gold tech is safe to get)
As you approach @350 food/@350 gold, redistribute workers again (9-10 on food, 9-10 on wood, 6-7 on gold, 8-10 on stone)
Age up
@200 wood, build rax #3
@300 wood/@400 stone, build fortress that is close to your TCs and protects a new goldmine
Train woad raiders and harass
Build 4-5 archery ranges, sacred grove, and armory as wood comes in and rally bowmen behind fortress
Focus on pierce attack upgrades
Make 1 auger for sacrifices
Build 2-3 stables if you’re against lancers, elephants, or a high sari count

Anti-Babylon Spear Rush

3 villagers on food
3 villagers on wood next to hunt
@200 wood, build rax within range of TC
@50 wood, build wood storehouse on forest
Next few villagers on berries if Babs gathered extra gold. If not, make a storehouse on another hunt patch
Build houses earlier than normal due to extremely early spearmen
Depending on situation, continue with 1 rax TC or counter with 2 rax spears

Late-Game Strategies

Champion Woad Raiders and Champion Carpentoms

Speed rite raids

Siege rite TC snipes

+Damage rite 200 pop push

Counter-attacking a slow, but powerful ballista/catapult/war wagon composition

-Adapted with permission from http://forums.ageofempiresonline.com/forums/thread/345897.aspx by thread author OrkTastic.

The Bandit Leaders

2013-08-04T01:52:00.000-05:00

The Bandit Leaders is an example of what is known in AoEO as a Global Quest. This means that you complete it by doing other quests and accumulating whatever the objective is asking of you. These are found frequently throughout all the civs and booster packs.

An example in the Greek civ is one which counts the wolves you have killed. An equivalent with the Eggies is one which counts elephants killed.

In the case of The Bandit Leaders, you have to kill the three bandit chieftains: Draco, Clutus and Homer, by completing three separate quests:

Draco's Legion
Clitus Attacks
Homer Run.

The Bandit Leaders is a global quest

Open the book to find out more!

Draco's Legion

In Draco's Legion, the map is split straight down the middle by water, forests and rock, with only a narrow passage connecting your side of the map with that of the enemy. Plonk a few troops near the passage, and that will provide some protection while you build your economy up.

Once you have a decent army, and a few rams, you can take Draco and his town centre in one hit.

There are two sets of bandits providing chests.

Draco in front of the TC, my rams have commenced the attack, I'm about to bring my army in, bottom right

Clitus Attacks

Clitus Attacks is a bit different to the first quest. You are smack bang in the middle of the map, surrounded by three enemy town centres. You start with some resources within your city walls, but you will soon have to send out villies to collect wood.

Most of the attacks appear to come from the left, which is also where you will find Clitus. An early guard tower, and concentration of your forces there will bring a swift end to this quest.

Homer run

In the final one in the series, you are surrounded by four allied town centres, which you can ignore, they have no bearing on this quest. Homer and his guards are to be found in the bottom corner, and it's simply a matter of collecting your forces and attacking.

Two sets of bandits are found either side of the enemy town centre.

Brawny Polecat

We Found Them

2013-08-03T02:55:00.004-05:00

We Found Them is a capital city quest which appears with your Village Elder at around Level 7.

The objective is to defeat the enemy, requiring to go round the map in a circle as you destroy successive enemy camps, walls, buildings and soldiers.

The Village Elder is the quest giver, centre

Open the book to find out more!

Start game

You begin this quest provisioned with 8 Hetairoi. These are cavalry units which are normally produced in your fort with the correct advisor. They are quite good against siege and buildings.

You start with 8 Hetairoi and 4 farms ready to go

The enemy camps are in a circle, starting to the immediate left of your Town Centre. You can start attacking those almost immediately with your Hetairoi. The main warning is to note that you will be attacked from your right, so you need a small unit deployed to the right of your Town Centre.

Middle game

I quickly produced a few hypaspists and started the attack to the left almost from the very start.

The Hetairoi will make quick work of guard towers and walls, you'll have to break through at least two walls before you get to the first Town Centre.

My Hetairoi attack the 2nd wall, beyond that guard tower is the first Town Centre

I immediately set my Hetairoi against the enemy Town Centre, destroyed it quickly, but a very large enemy force came out and wiped them out - there are no replacements! so I had to slow down the attack a bit, build up my forces and go again.

End game

Once your forces are built up again, it becomes a simple matter of completing the loop and finishing up where you started, once again, make sure you've left a few troops behind to guard against attacks on your town centre from the right.

Along the way there are two sets of bandits to win chests.

My army returns triumphantly, bottom left you will see the small force a left behind to guard the TC

At this early stage, you may not have too many advisors to choose from. I only had Apprentice Mason Philon, which is as good as any at this point (quick building).

This quest leads to Helping Out a Neighbor, and the scout quest giver swings into action with The Bandit Leaders.

Brawny Polecat

Persian Build Orders

2013-07-31T01:02:00.000-05:00

Standard Age1 Barracks into TC

Take one of the initial 3 villagers to make a storehouse at the nearest hunt patch while killing it with your scout, rally the villagers to the trees next to the storehouse, make sure you don’t let the wood-gathering villagers bring their wood back to drop off to your town center, once they have 8-9 wood in their “bag” assign them to help build the storehouse.
Keep 3 villagers on food and rest on wood, once you have 4 on wood rally the next villager to make the barracks.
After you start the barracks, rally the next villager to make the woodline storehouse and then reassign the initial wood gathering villagers to help make the wood storehouse and then keep 4-5 on wood.
Rally the next villagers from the town center to food, until you have 6 on food.
@50 wood make a house. Use the same villager who builds the house to make a storehouse on stone.
Rally to stone until you have 3-4 on stone. Then depending on whether or not you commit hard to your Sparabara rush, move the next villagers to wood or food.
When you start your age up, keep 4 on food and then reassign the other 2 food gathering villagers to wood.
@50wood 50food get aid tent and try to micro your Sparabara so that they remain alive so that you can heal them, and when they get back to your base spread them among your storehouses so they get healed faster than they normally would if you left them near 1 storehouse, so that they can contribute more to defense against the inevitable counter attack by your opponent.
@300wood 300stone make your second town center (Personally I make my 2^nd town center outside the range of the first one against Greeks, Persians, Babylonians and sometimes Egypt. But against Norse and Celts, I would recommend that you build your 2^nd town center in the range of the first otherwise you would probably regret it. I learned it the hard way recently)

Open the book to read more!

From here you can follow up with either an archery range or a stable depending on your strategy and the matchup.

Fast Age2 for Archery Range/Stable (recommended only on semi-large maps) with no early stone.

Take one of the initial 3 villagers to make a hunt storehouse, rally the first villager trained from the town center to make the woodline storehouse. Rally the next 2 villagers to hunts until you have 5 on food.
Rally the next villagers to wood until you are at 12/20 population, by this time you should have enough resources to go to age2.
Once you hit the age2 button, keep 4 on food (if you want to get aid tent, 3 otherwise) and move the rest of the food gathering villagers to wood.
Once you reach age2, make your military building with one of the wood gathering villagers while you rally the next villager to gold. If your plan is to get double stables, You need to have 11 on food, 6 on gold to keep constant production for 2 stables and 1 town center, so keep that in mind when you redistribute your villagers once you get your 2 stables up. For each archery range, you need 3 on wood and 2 on gold to keep constant production of bowmen.

Keep in mind this is not an economical build at all so if you go for it, you need to do something with your early units or you would be simply behind against an opponent that makes an early town center.

Fast Age3 for 3TC Paid Labour (recommended only on Arabia/Big Island and against Egyptians who also go fast age3, or Greeks)

Take one of the initial 3 villagers to make a storehouse at the nearest hunt patch while killing it with your scout, rally the villagers to the trees next to the storehouse, make sure you don’t let the wood-gathering villagers bring their wood back to drop off to your town center, once they have 8-9 wood in their “bag” assign them to help build the storehouse.
Keep 3 villagers on food and rest on wood, once you have 4 on wood rally the next villager to make the barracks.
After you start the barracks, rally the next villager to make the woodline storehouse and then reassign the initial wood gathering villagers to help make the wood storehouse and then keep 4-5 on wood.
Rally the next villagers from the town center to food, until you have 6 on food.
@50 wood make a house. Use the same villager who builds the house to make a storehouse on stone.
When you start your age up, keep 4 on food and then reassign the other 2 food gathering villagers to wood.
@50wood 50food get aid tent.
@300wood 300stone make your second town center. Then redistribute your villagers so that you have 5 on gold, 12 on wood, 12 on wood and 4 on stone.
@300wood make a war academy, preferably somewhere sneaky where your opponent can’t see it, or at least have a hard time finding it.
@50stone start walling off choke points near your base so that you can buy yourself some extra time in case of some early raids or harasses.
300wood 300food 300gold hit the age3 button. Redistribute your villagers so that you have 15 on gold and 3 on food. Let the wood gatherers continue gathering wood but you can send 1-2 of them to stone if you feel that you won’t have enough stone for a 3^rd town center immediately after you age up to age3.
Once you age up, try to get your 3^rd town center near a gold mine since you will be needing a huge amount of gold to sustain constant villager production with paid labor.
Immediately get the 3^rd age gold gathering upgrade, it is essential for this strategy to work.
Start making Magi and spread them behind walls but don’t put them too close so that they can be sniped by ranged units. Remember, Magi have 22 range while most ranged units have less than 18. Try to get a feeling for how much 22 range means and then position the Magi behind the walls just close enough so that they can convert any melee unit attacking the wall.
@300wood 400stone make a fort somewhere near your base so that it protects some valuable resources, preferably another gold mine.

You can follow up this build by making Immortal Camps (against Greeks) and stables (stables only against Egypt). And start making Asabara and Mounted Archers, and Immortals if you made some Immortal Camps.

-Adapted with permission from http://forums.ageofempiresonline.com/forums/thread/367469.aspx by thread author PF2K.

Fishing Our Waters

2013-07-26T22:41:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had started doing the Greek quests from scratch on another server. Every now and then I'll pull up one of those early Greek quests for a bit of a look.

The quest Fishing Our Waters can be found with the Port Master around level 6.

I was curious when this quest came up because a few weeks earlier, on the official AoEO forum, a poster mentioned that he had had trouble completing it because he ran out of enemy fishing boats to destroy. This didn't happen to me.

The Port Master is the quest giver for Fishing Our Waters

Open the book to find out more!

Start Game

In this quest, you start on a smallish island, and you are required to destroy 15 enemy fishing boats and their two docks to complete the quest. Enemy triremes are scattered across the water to add that extra challenge.

Early game

As usual, you start off by quickly building up your economy and aging up.

This is a good time to remind new players of the most common error they are likely to make:

not producing enough villies; and
not using storehouses.

Both of these are false economies. Look at both as investments to shore up your middle and end game. Invest early. From the very start, have villies queued up at all times. Use storehouses at all times (unless you build a new town centre alongside a resource).

In the picture above, it's exactly 3 minutes in, and I already have 14 villies collecting food and wood, and I have three queued which will go directly to the gold you see at the bottom the screen. I have already built my dock, two fishing boats out, and within a minute or so I will build a second dock.

Aim to have a minimum of two docks, but you can easily aim for three or more.

Middle Game

Once you have your two docks, it becomes a matter of piling up the ships. In this example, I've stayed level II, and will just start accumulating triremes.

As soon as you get three ships together, start marauding.

The enemy triremes are scattered and stand alone, so with 3 vs 1 trireme, it's not a contest. As you go marauding, looking for fishing boats, and taking care of enemy triremes, keep producing and adding to your stocks - before soon - nothing can stand in your way.

End Game

With the 15 fishing boats destroyed, a handy fleet built up, I make a bee line for the enemy island and go directly for the docks. If there's a guard tower in the way, destroy it first, with a fleet of 6+ ships, all guard towers are history.

My fleet heads towards dock no. 1

Remember what I said about investing in villies and storehouses early on? Take a look at the screen shot above, the resources I've collected. If, by chance, a large enemy fleet and/or army were about to appear, I could quickly build 20 ships if need be. Invest early, relax at the end. My gear hall score is only 3, I have no special gear or advisers, so that was done through just getting the fundamentals right.

Now an interesting thing happened just before I took the above screenshot, I went from level 6 to level 7 mid game. This meant that all of a sudden I was able to go to Age III, and I was allowed to build fireships, which I did from this point - I didn't need a special invite.

If you have fireships available to you for this quest, then run with them, you'll finish even quicker - triremes are no match for fireships.

On this particular map, there were bandits on my island, and two bandits on the enemy island. Once I completed the quest objectives, I quickly built a small army, mopped up the ones closest to me, and then put the army on a merchant ship to get the chests on the enemy island.

I've known new players to ignore the bandits - do not ignore them - for just a few minutes more effort, you never know what you might pick up, especially when you have so many empty slots in your gear hall early in your AoEO questing.

This quest leads to the Portmasters' Children, where you will come across a bit more resistance from the enemy - the same principles apply as you will practice in this quest - be ready to build plenty of ships!

As you reach level 8, you will get access to the Advisor Hall, something new to start playing around with.

Brawny Polecat

The Bandit Armada (Elite)

2013-07-25T06:31:00.002-05:00

This is the final of a three part series of posts on the Greek capital city repeatable quests which you can do in Elite mode.

This is the bigger and grander of the three repeatables, but it's not any more difficult. Once again, there's a smart way to complete it efficiently, including the second objective, which requires you to produce no military units. The quest can be, and should be, completed by focusing on ships.

Start Game

Let's remind ourselves of what the quest looks like from the start.

I've just started aging up to Age III, I have one dock ready to go

Open the book to find out more!

You start on an island with plenty of resources. The idea is to get up to Age IV as quickly as possible because you will use the ballista triremes to destroy the bandit fortress. In the meantime, start pushing out a few fireships. The dock in this bay will get attacked, and you'll need at least three fireships to fight them off.

After that initial attack, there will be no more attacks on your base - it's smooth sailing from here on in.

My fireships have just fought off the first and last attack on my base

Middle Game

I find two docks are enough, but obviously you can build as many as you want, the more you have, the quicker you complete the quest.

Generally I'll aim to get around 10 ships out quickly, mostly fireships, I might include some triremes amongst them.

Gathering my fleet to attack the enemy ships

Once I've gathered around 10 ships, I'll start at the far right and sweep across to the left in an arc and destroy all the enemy ships which are out and about.

While I'm doing that, I'll gather 3 or 4 ballista triremes near the entrance to the harbour, and they will destroy the two guard towers to be found either side of the entrance.

I've conducted my sweep with my fireships, and I'm just bringing in my ballista triremes

End game

With the guard towers destroyed, my fleet of fireships enters the harbour to attack the mother ship and destroy the docks.

I've just sunk the champion trireme - resistance is futile

Everything mopped up, I take my fireships out, and allow my ballista triremes to enter the harbour unimpeded, where they will destroy the bandit fortress and wreak havoc on the rest of the enemy base.

My ballista triremes enter the harbour, the bandit fotress will be destroyed within 10 seconds

Once all the objectives of the quest are achieved, you are free to do whatever you need to do to get the chests from the bandits.

Generally, I'll soften up the bandits nearest to the entrance to the harbour with my ships, bring over a group of villagers, and build some military buildings to attack the three groups of bandits found on the enemy island, two to the right and one to the left.

Just killed off the first lot of bandits with my ships, my villies come to collect

Advisers

Given this quest is all about ships, you want to focus on those advisers.

Ship related advisers are the obvious choices for this quest

Age I: Closet Organizer Irene (storehouse upgrades) or Apprentice Mason Philon (quicker building)
Age II: Seafarer Horus (ships trains quicker, better health)
Age III: Councilman Onesiphoros (costs less to get to Age IV)
Age IV: Ship Engineer Tryphon (ships have more damage)

If you have the Norse civ, and have seafarers as one of your milestones, useful having that one ticked for all ship related quests because of 10% extra damage.

Every little bit helps!

Brawny Polecat

Challenge: Kill the Docks (Elite)

2013-07-23T06:47:00.000-05:00

This is the second article in the series dealing with Greek capital city challenge quests on elite.

Early on in your AoEO career, you want to start having a crack at this quest on Elite, and even when you get to level 40, it's worth the occasional look at it because on Elite mode, you're receiving level 40 chests.

Plenty of people do this on co-op, which is fine, but try and get to the stage where you solo it. I wouldn't say it's a difficult quest (it's not), but there's a smart way to do it, and then there's, shall we say, the inefficient way to do it.

You should always (always) be aiming to get the second objective of finishing five minutes early.

Kill the Docks is one of two capital city quests available from the Port Master. The Bandit Armada is the other one, and I'll cover that one another time.

The Port Master is the Quest giver for Kill the Docks

Open the book to find out more!

Start Game

As you send your villies to nearby resources, you'll immediately get attacked by wolves, which you can kill with a combo of your scout and Town Centre. Most of them will be killed near a storehouse you've already built, and you can use them for additional food.

Start of Kill the Docks, I've set my waypoint at the bottom of the screen,
it's there where you should be able to kill wolves for food.

You only need to get to Age III in this quest, and as you do that, it's worth adding a couple of Hypapists to help protect your home base, keep you infantry close to your Town Centre, don't have them chasing enemies out of range (come back you idiots!).

In the early days, I used to try and complete this quest by building siege and a force to attack the enemy base. That's the inefficient way.

Later on I graduated to using triremes from a dock built near to our Town Centre - that's getting there.

The smart way is to avoid both of the above.

Middle Game

Get your scout to clear the way along the right perimeter of the map - kill the wolves along the way.

Send a villie to that far corner, and build your dock there - you only need one. Make sure you mark a path along the perimeter for the villie to follow - otherwise they will run directly into enemy fire - and give their life up for nothing.

I've built my dock at the top, got one trireme out, and have started queuing fire ships

At this point, you are probably aging up from II to III, so knock out one trireme, and attack the one closest to you. If you use the villie that's still there to repair your first ship, you will kill the one enemy trireme in that area.

After that, forget triremes. If you have not learned about the strength of fireships, you are about to learn that now.

Start pumping out fireships from that dock. Attack the first dock - even with only one fireship, that dock is history. By the time you're onto the second dock, you'll have three fireships in your fleet, and that dock will go down quickly.

I think you'll encounter one more enemy trireme, but by now you have four fireships, and they'll make short work of that trireme.

Kill the third dock quickly, keep moving around to where the bandits are, one more enemy tireme might be lurking there, kill it and wait there alongside the bandits.

Ok, three docks gone, five minutes early, easy as pie. From the moment my first ship came out, to when the three docks were destroyed, it took less than 90 seconds.

Once the docks are done, collect your ships around the bandits

End Game

Now at this point, the enemy still has a bit of a force, you now want to start focusing on building up your infantry to make sure of getting the chests. Build a second barracks or an archery range. You can even consider sending around a trireme or two to attack the enemy from the water (they have better range than the fireships, keep them tucked away for the moment).

Use this force to work its way through to the bandits where you've parked the fireships and that should be enough to gather those chests.

Bring the survivors back, keep assembling your force, then grab the chests in the middle of the map - by this stage - the enemy forces should have been diminished to not present you with any problems.

Final action, take the bandits in the middle of the map

Advisers

Once you make the decision to complete the task using fireships, you are likely to want to favour boat based advisers.

Possible advisers, a couple of choices for Age III

In Age III you can probably choose from Explorer Pytheas (reduces cost of ships) and Good Sailor Ammon (increases damage).

A quick, fun quest done and dusted!

Brawny Polecat

Improving Game Play - Hotkeys

2013-07-22T05:37:00.000-05:00

This is the second in a series of articles aimed at helping the newer player improve their game play.

I'll start this by showing you a cross-section of hot keys available. You will find these in the options menu in-game.

A selection of hot keys - the full range is available in the options menu

There are a large selection of hot keys available to you, and it is not my intention to go through all of them, and in any event, that would be a futile exercise.

Rather, I would like to encourage you to start practising some of them, and to get you started, here's a bit of a run down on how I introduced hot keys and how it helped me become a better player. Take a bit of a look, and then apply some of those lessons to your own game, introducing one or two hotkeys at at time, and gradually expanding your repertoire.

Open the book to find out more!

Home Keys

Looking at the above list, take a close look at the bottom section where it refers to the unit hotkeys. What do you notice about the keys mentioned: A - S - D - F?

In old fashioned touch typing terms, these were traditionally your "home" keys.

As it happens, I'm a touch typist from way back, meaning I naturally leave my fingers on those keys. So every game, I start with my four left fingers on the home keys, and if I'm able to use my left hand for anything without looking - that's a win - that's my focus in using home keys.

I use no hot key which would traditionally require my right hand, which I leave permanently on the mouse.

That's the first lesson - you do not have to use every single hot key to be a better player - but the more you can introduce, the quicker you get.

So what am I using with my left hand?

I use my little pinky to hit the shift key for a variety of functions (queuing instructions, making shapes with walls, etc). I'm able to do that without looking, but I can't use the control key without looking - so I limit the use of the control key - discussed below.

I can use the whole left side of the keyboard without looking.

This means I can use the following keys for building (that is, with villies selected, I press the following key and they are ready to build):

A - Archery Range

B - Barracks

C - Town Centre

D - Dock

E - Storehouse

F - Farm

G - Guard tower

Q - Fortress

S - Stable

T - Temple

W - Wall

X - Siege Workshop

If you combine cntrl with one of those letters, it will find it. I rarely use that, but have been known to use when desperate (there are other ways to do it, as I'll explain later)

Why is that beneficial? Each time you have to go looking for the item to build, you waste 2 or 3 seconds doing it and your taking your eyes off the main bit of the screen - use the letter and you save those seconds, being ready to go instantaneously with your build straight to the location where you want it, all in the one motion.

You won't use them immediately - I still don't. The idea is that you train yourself to use them one or two at a time, say, by making a special effort for each particular quest (this game, I'm building all farms with the F key).

The A-S-D-F keys can also be used to build units. For example, if you're in your Greek barracks, A refers to spearman, S to Hypaspist and D to Hoplite. The same pattern applies to all the civs.

Now, admittedly, using the shift key to build the same unit can be quicker (builds five at a time).

However, if you're building a couple at a time of something (say a palintonon), or a selection of more than one, it's actually quite quick using these keys - once you get in the habit of doing it.

Take this example, say you're doing Losing your Religion. You've got maybe 3 docks highlighted and you want to push out fireships and ballista triremes, it's very, very quick to go FGFG rather than go looking for the items to build them.

I might want an extra fireship or two, so I end with a quick FF - all done in a second - no looking away.

Hotkeying units and buildings

The cntrl key can also be used to hotkey specific units or buildings.

I find this useful when I'm maurauding with a mixture of siege and other units. As soon as you catch sight of guard towers or a fortress, you want to immediately instruct your siege to attack it without involving the rest of the your troops.

This is also useful for items such as the palintonon or the Celtic/Norse siege which have to be packed and unpacked, quicker to isolate all of them and issue the instruction if you have them hotkeyed.

Try and introduce hotkeys for specific purposes - and get used to doing it. As another example, you might want to immediately assign a hotkey to your scout at the start of every game.

You would hotkey a group of like military buildings where you quickly need to instruct three or more to continue production. Take the second objective of Legendary Renegades (spearmen only, a bit of pain in all honesty). You might have 10 barracks hotkeyed to 1, so it's a matter of pressing 1, three taps on A, and you have 30 spearmen queued in production, all within the space of a second in the heat of battle - without leaving the battlefield.

Here is something else I have done, once again, to suit my preferences.

Changing preferences

As I mentioned above, I'm a touch typist from way back, meaning using the spacebar with my thumb is second nature. So in options, I have changed the find Town Centre command to the space bar.

Once you're up and running, you get into a rythm of spacebar, issue commands, go somewhere else, spacebar, spacebar (scroll through your TCs issuing commands), go do something else - and within seconds you are effectively issuing commands all over the battle field.

As I mentioned in the first article on the mini-map, scrolling wastes lots of time, to be able to immediately get back to your TC, no matter where you are, and have more villies queued, all in a second, is a massive bonus in any quest taking up to 20 minutes - you'll shave 2 or 3 minutes off your game time - guaranteed.

Now I'm not quite there, because there are many hotkeys I just refuse to use - but I've incorporated a few handy ones which have improved my game, and that's my key message to you. Find the ones you're comfortable with, and use them over and over until they're second nature - then practice more - and on it goes.

Brawny Polecat

Starting Out - Part III

2013-07-15T20:51:00.002-05:00

I wasn't going to have a Part III for the starting out series of posts, but then I remembered something earlier today. A while back, I discovered that all the civs and booster packs you own, you actually own them across all servers, and you can play them from the start at each server. I suddenly recalled that I had started a Greek civ on the Athens server a while back, and had forgotten all about it.

Now this is good news, because it allows me to re-visit a few things, re-live some old times, but more importantly, have a bit more up-to-date hands on exposure to stuff which otherwise, I hadn't seen for a while.

And I have to say to you - it's a lot of fun starting all over and re-acquainting myself with some of these very early quests.

So I have gone back to the very start, and that has inspired me to write one more starting out post, while I aged up from Level 4 to Level 6.

To start off with, here is my very plain, bare, empty Greek city at level 6:

Open the book to find out more!

The Village Elder gives a lot of the early quests in the Greek civ, standing in front of the Palace. The Port Master begins as a quest giver in Level 6 with Fishing Our Waters.

These are the quests the Village Elder had for me at Level 5:

One other quest giver makes a brief appearance around this time, and that's the City Amabassador, who invites you to visit a friend's city, and from there, you are able to do the quest: Neighbor Favor.

This particular quest is available to each of the civs around this level, but you need to have a friend on your friend's list to visit before you can do this quest, that is, a friend on the same server.

Being relatively new to Athens, I had no friends on this server, so I left a message saying precisely that - and two guys responded within seconds inviting me as friends, and I was then able to do the quest.

I mention that because I encourage all new players to take a similar approach, get out there, let people know you're new to the game, and people will try and help you out.

One bit of advice about this quest: Neighbor Favor (it's very hard for an aussie to use that spelling). It's a relatively easy quest, but by the same token, it's a bit of pot luck as to what range of troops you start with. And some mixes are better than others. Here are some examples:

Mix of spearmen, priests and one elephant

Mix of axemen, archers, a few priests and one boat..

Mix of chariots, cavalry, priests and one catapult trireme.

Mix of axemen, hyps and priestesses of Ra - the latter aren't very useful in this quest

Other times you'll also get rams, which are only good for bashing down the gate impeding your way and for attacking the guard towers - but the gate and guard towers only appear when you get the rams - with the mixes I mention above, the gate and guard towers don't make an appearance.

My experience is that when you get the rams, it's very hard to complete this quest. If it happens to you, don't sweat it, just restart and see what you get the next time.

When you defeat the first lot of invaders, another lot will come in 60 seconds. If you have ranged units and priests, and other military units, I like to jam them in between two buildings, as seen below, where they are able to hold out against a larger force.

Around this level, the Village Elder also gives you the blueprints to the Crafting Hall and the Recipe Store.

Ahh...the memories....it's all coming back now.

Brawny Polecat

Improving Game Play - the Mini Map

2013-07-13T21:02:00.001-05:00

I would like to dedicate a couple of articles to helping the newer, below average player improve their game play. The overiding message I want to give is that absolutely anyone can improve playing this game.

Speaking from personal experience, many players starting out may start to plateau and notice all of a sudden that they are hitting a brick wall in terms of improving and getting to the next level.

More often than not, there will be two key things which will be holding you back:

the use, or otherwise, of the Mini Map; and
the use, or otherwise, of Hot Keys.

Let's talk about the Mini Map today, and I'll cover Hot Keys another time (although with practice, you will use them seamlessly as you improve your game play).

Take a look at this shot of the mini map from Relentless Canyon from Delos, part of the Alliance quests:

Relentless Canyon - it's a long, long, long map

Open the book to find out more.

If you were anything like me, you originally started playing for a bit of fun and relaxation, slouch back after work or study, while away a few hours, try and escape the nagging of wives and girlfriends, etc, etc.

You've cruised through to level 40, a few challenges, co-opped a few to ease the pain, and then you join the Alliance quests, and you have a go at something like Relentless Canyon - and around the 12 minute mark, before you know what's going on - you are getting absolutely pulverised by a rampaging enemy. Sound familiar?

Now I've picked out Relentless Canyon because if you play it without using the Mini Map, then there is absolutely no way you are going to get anywhere.

Take a close look at the shot above. Relentless Canyon is looooong, baby, it's looooooong man, it's soooooo loooooong.

It's over a minute in, and my villagers are just crossing the river, about half way there. You can just see my spearmen and scout to the far left of the screen.

Just scrolling up and down will take up to 10 seconds! You think you can waste 10 seconds scrolling up and down doing this quest? No - of course not!! During those 10 seconds of scrolling, you are NOT issuing instructions.

So the very first thing you need to do, you must send what ever units you want to use up the top and you use the Mini Map to send them there, and look - you're still there next to your TC while you keep on issuing orders. You've just saved 10 seconds, the first of many, and you've made a big step towards faster game play.

Here's another good example.

1 vs 2 Skirmish - use mini map to guide scout and villies to desired location

I've just started playing 1 vs 2 Skirmish, the top enemy TC is unstoppable, and the bottom one is Strong. In the first 10 seconds I want to guide the scout and villies to an approximate spot to build the barracks (must get close to the unstoppable enemy because I need to take them out first) - I'll use the mini map to do that, then immediately issue instructions back at my TC. When done, I'll jump to where my scout is on the mini map. I'll use the mini map to see if either the scout or villies has run past any cattle and go back and collect - using the mini map.

The mini map is way more efficient - don't scroll backwards and forwards! Life is far too precious to waste that sort of time.

In fact what I mention above for the scout applies to most quests. Don't waste time scrolling around to mark the course - in the majority of cases, it's unnecessary - mark out the scout's course on the Mini Map. Issue other instructions, take quick glances at the Mini Map to see if any red shows up, if need be, click the Mini Map to save your scout from an awful, premature death.

One last example - A New Pharoah's Challenge is a popular quest from Delos.

Start of New Pharoah's Challenge

I've just sent my two ships out, West and North, via the Mini Map, I'll do a couple of quick things back at the camp, and then shoot straight back to the ships via the Mini Map - the efficient way. No scrolling, no sitting back and watching, it's all go, go go.

Now all of this will sound obvious, and yes, it is - but many of us don't do it, or don't do it enough, or get lazy, or fall asleep at the wheel, our mind starts wandering, and we forget these basics.

If you want to be a better player - do not forget these basics - keep them in mind - practice them over and over and over - keep reminding yourself, if necessary, repeat out loud: mini map....mini map....must....use....mini map....

Click here for part two of the Improving game play series.

Brawny Polecat

Challenge: Not Without a Bomb

2013-07-11T01:12:00.003-05:00

Let's cut to the chase - this challenge is insanely difficult - outrageously difficult.

In my early AoEO playing career, I can remember the following challenge quests which initially had me stumped:

Final Farmdown
Size Matters
Defence of Arsinoe
Not Without a Bomb

...and it's this one which takes the cake - top of the pops - no question about it.

Full marks to the developers for showing some humour with the title of the quest.

I became obsessed with this quest, and after at least 10 goes, maybe more, I finally soloed it with only seconds to spare - it was a damn relief!

So that's the first point, it is possible to solo it, but if it finally gets to you, it's also available for co-op, and don't worry, I've helped out some very good players in co-op on this quest over the journey.

The engineer from Mycenae is the quest giver for this challenge.

If you are soloing, you should aim to get out at least 6 rams, probably need 8.

Open the book to find out more.

One good bit of advice: don't bank on trying to get to Age IV, the time is too tight, and at most, you will have a couple of ballistas, for one minute - not enough time to destroy everything. Going to Age IV also takes far too many resources away, and diverts the villagers from where you need them - on wood and gold.

It's a case of sticking to Age III, doing it with rams, and getting your villagers working the food, wood and gold resources as quickly as possible.

While you build and age up, get a trickle of spearmen out as well, collect them in the plain just out of range of the enemy guard towers, these will be useful to defeat the hippikon guards who will try to slow down your rams.

Spearmen are handy to deal with the hippikons, and then use what's left over to attack buildings.

Churning out spearmen also helps you in balancing the use of your food and wood, a smart approach when time is so tight.

As you keep pushing villies out, they can spill out into the plain, and there they can build the siege workshop so that rams don't have too far to go. If you have the wood (and that's a big if), you can consider a second siege workshop.

Keep an eye on your houses so that you don't unnecessarily impede your production of rams, you can't afford to lose 20 seconds mucking around.

Once you assemble a few rams and start the attack, make sure you keep up ram production till the end. Keep producing wood - squeezing in one more ram might make the difference between success and failure.

As for advisers:
Age I: Lumberjack Thutmose for improved wood gathering; also consider Apprentice Mason Philon for faster building.
Age II: Trainer Toth - all units cost less food or Infantry Sergeant Herakleides for faster training of infantry.
Age III: Engineer Ligeia - quicker production of siege units - I reckon this one might be the most important one you can have.

Recommended advisers

Soloing this quest is about efficiency and synchronisation. Once your familiar with the map (assuming you failed the first couple of times), work out what you need to do and stick to it to the letter. This quest is a good test of where you are at as a player.

There's no time for think music!

Brawny Polecat

Milestones

2013-07-10T20:23:00.002-05:00

I encourage all new AoEO players to get themselves acquainted with the official AoEO forum, where you'll come across people with similar issues, and plenty of peers willing to help out.

A couple of recent threads have focused on Milestones, inspiring me for today's topic. Rather than go over some of the better posts, here's a link to a page on the forum worth having a look at.

Milestones are a relatively new addition to AoEO and they appear as a tab in the Palace, as part of the techonology tree.

Each time you age up, you earn an additional notch in your technology tree, and there are three separate tabs which coincide with a different group of technologies.

Another tab corresponds to Milestones which are a further leap in technology and which apply to all of your quests in that civ. They open up at levels 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40.

Milestones: the top line represents the civ you are currently playing.
The lines underneath are your other civs. The blue circle on each line
represents the milestone I have chosen from each of the other civs.
Question marks are empty slots, I haven't reached that level in those civs.

Open the book to find out more.

At each one of those "milestones", you are offered a choice of two technology improvements (and each pairing differs across all of the civs).

You must choose wisely! Once you lock in your choice, that's it - there is no going back!

Now here is the more interesting bit, about which players may not be familiar..

While the five milestones for the civ you are playing in are fixed forever, all the milestones in any civ you have started show up, and you can choose one of those from each civ. So if you have 6 civs, you effectively have 10 milestones available to you at all times, in each of your civs.

Furthermore, you can actually change these depending on the quest you're playing.

Admittedly, even I forget about this, but every now and then it's worthwhile remembering it and double checking whatever you currently have toggled on.

Another thing, now that you have learned this (in case you weren't aware), you can see the incentive you have to start up more civs - the more civs - the more technology boosts available.

This is the other interesting thing, even if you have a new civ at level 5, some of the milestones which are immediately available are pretty darn good. It's almost worthwhile starting up a new civ just to get access to the milestone!

Since pro civs start at level 20, that immediately gives you 3 new milestones to choose from.

Going back to the choices available, well, as you can see from some of the discussion in the page I linked - it's one of those areas where people can have quite divergent views.

There's a good reason for that - much of it is a matter of personal preference. If you like using priests - choose the milestone which involves priests, etc, etc.

Having said all that, I believe there are 2 or 3 absolute must-haves, and 2 or 3 others where you'd have to ask yourself: when would you ever need that?

It's all a bit daunting starting out, so the very best advice I can give is: lock in the must-haves, and then go with your gut for the rest. The milestones won't make you a champion, but if you can get a bit of a boost with an aspect of the game you use regularly, well, just go for it, full stop.

My Must-haves

In the AoEO economy, there are a number of attributes which attract premium prices, and top of these are:

building time;
damage; and
line of sight (LOS).

This helps inform us about the better milestones. Following the above rule of thumb, we end up with:

Talatat construction (Egypt) - decrease building time by 8%. That applies across absolutely everything you build. That's a pretty good advantage. Worthwhile starting up Egyptians just to have access to this milestone across all of your civs.
Pankrationing (Greek) - increases infantry damage by 8%; Parapets (Greek) - increases building damage by 10%; Munitions (Persian) - increases ranged damage by 5 %.
Overwatch (Egyptian) - increases ranged LOS by 20%; Town Patrol (Persian) - increases building LOS by 15%.

Talatat Construction - decreases building
time by 8% - highly recommended.

Now I don't want to say that any of the above is written in stone, there will be good reasons to choose something else, depending on your own playing style. If I were to say that absolutely everyone must have one thing, no question about it, then you can't go past the first one above.

On reflection, I didn't take enough care and made some mistakes in my early selections, but as they say in the classics, c'est la vie!

Brawny Polecat

The Civilisations - Persian

2013-07-10T04:26:00.000-05:00

This is the third of my posts on the six AoEO Civilisations.

The Persians are a pro civ, meaning that you start at level 20 with a decent selection of level 20 uncommon gear.

The Persian shield in AoEO.

You have a few home city quests, including the standard repeatable craftsmen quests (good for getting used to the Persian military at a leisurely pace), and you have immediate access to the Argos quests.

The various Cyprus quests open up to you at some point, perhaps after completing Defence of Arsinoe which is one of those milestone quests which pop up in the home cities of each civ at a certain level (around high level 20s, can't remember exactly).

The key feature of a pro civ - you don't have any additional cities with other unique quests, what I mention above is pretty much it.

Just open the book to read more.

My Persian City - Kardashian

However, all civs have access to any booster packs you've bought.

For this reason it's a good idea to start with at least one premium civ first, and then start collecting booster packs before you head off to the pro civs - not entirely essential, but I would recommend that course to newish players.

This has two advantages:

you have the skills to jump into level 20 quests; and
given the smaller range of quests in the pro civs, the booster packs are invaluable in earning you Experience Points (XP) in jumping through the levels.

This a personal matter, but I think Skirmish is an essential booster pack to have early on. You play it from Cyprus, it's useful for accumulating Empire Points for your level 40 civs, and it's also useful for gaining XP for your other civs below level 40.

Starting at level 20, as you do with all pro civs, there are some useful epic advisers to collect in Skirmish, and each time, you are also earning decent XP.

The other one to consider is Fertile Crescent, a booster pack closely aligned with Babylon. It features a lot of fun quests, which you can start doing from this level, and once again, you are also earning valuable XP.

There are also a few repeatables at level 40 which are good for earning Empire Points.

I'll cover all the booster packs in another article.

Points of Difference

These are the key unique features of the Persians:

Sparabara: are an infantry unit, produced from Age I in your Barracks. The are a form of what is commonly referred to as a "tank unit", that is, they can take the front line because they can absorb a lot of punishment, allowing your ranged and siege units to inflict damage from behind the "meat shield". An interesting aspect of the Sparabara is that since they are the Age I infantry unit, Spearmen are promoted to Age II in Persians, which might force you to reconsider your usual Skirmish tactics, although they are very good at attacking other units in range of the enemy TC.

Persian Sparabara - make an excellent meat shield.

Immortals: these are a unique military unit which are produced out of their own camp. They are capable of both ranged attack from distance, and melee abilities at close quarters. They are the only unit in all of the AoEO game which has this unique quality. Their equipment slots in the Gear Hall allow both arrow and sword upgrades. They can be upgraded to a Champion at the cost of 1,200 gold. The Persian Barracks and Archery Range both carry only two units, so the Immortal is effectively the combined equivlent of a Greek Hoplite and Gastraphete, but available in Age III.

Persian Immortal - adept at both ranged and melee combat - a powerful unit

War Wagon: the Persians lack the mobile long-range siege strength of both the Greeks and Egyptians (Ballistas and Catapults respectively), and in their place, you can produce the War Wagon (see picture below) in the Siege Workshop in Age IV. This device shoots out multiple arrows over a medium distance. It is effective against other units but really need to be massed to have an effect on buildings, and even then, it's well short of the damage imparted by siege machines mentioned. Persians also have the Palintonon available from the Fortress, and that is of an equivalent strength to the Greek and Egyptian one.

Persian War Wagon - good at close to medium range combat, but not so good with buildings

The Persians also have a few interesting technologies. One is the Aid Tent. Available from the storehouse, this upgrade allows units to regain health when stationed near a storehouse - a worthwhile tech to have.

Other technologies are available from the War Academy, from which you also produce the Magus (equivalent to a Priest). Some of these technologies have a toggle switch, allowing you to temporarily forego one benefit for a bigger advantage in another area. For example, some units might cost more, but you get more health or damage out of them, or they produce quicker - this can be useful in the end game where you have plentiful resources, so you can afford to pay more for greater effect.

Quests

As mentioned earlier, there are no additional cities as part of your Persian civ, but you do get two unique quests in your capital city:

Under Pressure - get to a population of 200 in 25 minutes, with enemy attacks from 3 directions - 2nd objective of producing 100 villagers within time limit ; and
Gate of All Nations - build a Wonder in 25 minutes with enemy attacks from 3 directions - 2nd objective of taking out two enemy fortresses before the Wonder is built.

Very end of Gate of All Nations, with Persian wonder.

Both of these quests are repeatable and even if you struggle early on, as you get to know the topography, as you gear up and get to know your new units, you will be completing the 2nd objectives as well. They are both available in Elite mode, which will present you with a good challenge.

Even with the limitation in siege (my personal view), I was able to complete Defence of Arsinoe with no problem, and at the time my Gear Hall score was around the 400 mark.

I only reached Level 40 very recently, so I am still learning to play with the Persians and I'm looking forward to the recapturing quests in Cyprus, even if I have to battle on without my favourite siege units!

Click here for part one of the Civilisations series - Greeks.
Click here for part two of the Civilisations series - Egypt.

Brawny Polecat

Challenge: Keep Them Under Our Wing (Elite)

2013-07-08T22:49:00.004-05:00

Your Greek city has a few repeatable quests which are worth doing in Elite mode as you gear up and start to improve your game play.

One of these is Keep Them Under Our Wing.

Keep Them Under Our Wing with the Scout Quest giver next to the Adviser Hall

Even once you've reached level 40, playing this quest in Elite mode gives you three level 40 chests, not too bad for a 10 minute quest.

On top of that, it's a good game for practicing a few basic skills, micro-managing your villies, etc.

Open the book to discover how to crack this quest!

In this quest, you start off with 15 villagers and you are meant to protect the Advisor Hall at the very top by building guard towers (you can only build guard towers and storehouses).

There are a myriad of different ways to complete this quest, but one thing is for sure, if you don't have a plan, those Elite thugs will knock out your 15 villagers in no time at all, and make short work of any guard towers you've managed to build.

There is one small trick to this quest, and it involves making use of a smallish plateau just south of where your 15 villagers start.

If you're quick enough, you can have 6 or 7 towers built before the first enemy thugs come running at you.

I like to get a couple of villies chopping wood to the East, where there's already a storehouse, and where they are rarely touched.

I like to get about 5 villies working the first lot of rock that you get to, and then I try and get the rest tucked away on the plateau, see picture below.

Get 8 villies onto this plateau, block off with towers, mine the rock and take out the bandits.
To the top right you can see I have another storehouse mining that rock.

With towers cutting off the entrance, the villies can then mine additional rock. The other benefit, you can actually take out the bandits, claim the chests, and then free up a heap of space for more tower building - all of them out of reach of the thugs - you can squeeze 10 towers on to here if you try hard enough..

There are more chests to the right of the map, get these at the end of the quest, 3 towers are enough

Once the quest is completed, delete the towers, and take your villies East where you'll find more bandits and chests to claim - but watch out - every now and then the thugs seem to return!

The best advisers are Apprentice Mason Philon (quicker building) and Stalwart Lieutenant Panhsj (increases damage of your guard towers). Rockhound Erastos in Age I is also useful for producing more rock.

Brawny Polecat

Challenge: It's the Final Farm Down

2013-07-08T02:15:00.000-05:00

The Helice Merchant, to left of the Palace, is the quest giver for the farm quests.

All of the three premium civs offer a series of challenge quests which are often as much about improving your game play as anything else. The Final Farm Down in the Greek civ is a good example of this. In this series of challenge quests you have to build 10 farms in 10 minutes, and a minute is knocked off each subsequent quest, until finally you have a bare 5 minutes to build your 10 farms.

If you're anything like me, you were relieved to build your 10 farms in 6 minutes and were completely dismayed that you had to do it all again with one minute less.

I struggled a couple of times with the Final Farm down until I cottoned on to something really stupid which I
was doing.

Open the book to read more!

Before we get to that, let's remind ourselves of what you're faced with in the opening seconds.

You will start with your usual 5 villagers and a scout, along with 3 spearmen. In this quest, they throw in the occasional wolf to try and slow you down. Position your 3 spearmen in a triangle around your TC to keep them at bay, don't forget that within range, your TC is also effective at killing wolves (but you have to issue the command to do it).

Make sure you quickly send your scout around to grab the nearest pair of cows, this will help you in pumping out villagers early on. Wolves killed close to your TC are also a good source of food.

Do not make the mistake of relying on the farms you're about to build to make your early food. By the time you start building farms, you won't need the food, and you are only building them to get the numbers up - if you have a farmer on the farm - you're wasting a valuable building resource.

In short, that's the mistake I made early on - I actually left the farmers on the farm - little wonder I struggled to build my 10 farms!

Once you have that wood count ticking over, grab your food producers and start queuing farms. As the farms are built, grab the farmers and keep queuing farms. (Note: if you don't yet know how to queue using the shift key - learn how to do it now!)

End game of Final Farmdown - note no villies are farming the farms

As you near the magic number, if you have sufficient wood, start putting the wood cutters to farm building.

There are a few Age I advisers which will help here:

Apprentice Mason Philon (improves building times)
Lumberjack Thutmose (improves wood gathering)
Net Maker Aapep (improves food gathering)
Survivalist Agathon (villagers cost less food to produce)

Whichever adviser you have to the highest level - throw it in, doesn't matter too much which one it is.

In Age II the adviser is an easy one to choose: Seed-master Agape -reduces the cost of farms. This adviser at any level will help a lot. The epic version (shown right ) reduces the cost of farms by 50%. It's a long shot you will have this adviser so early on, but even if you can get a 20% reduction (with the common version), that's certainly worth it.

Brawny Polecat

Consumables and the Crafting Hall

2013-07-05T19:37:00.000-05:00

Consumables are items which you can use while on a quest. They can be dropped automatically into a quest without the need to use the resources you have gathered during the quest.

The Craftsman school symbol

I have to admit I'm not a big user of consumables myself. Not because I'm opposed or anything like that, but as a general rule, once I'm up and about in a quest, focusing on the game, I just don't think about whatever conusmables I have.

It is fair to say that the elite player (that doesn't include me) will generally shun consumables, because:

they don't need them; and
well.... they don't need them.

Having said all that, I believe they do have their place in AoEO so it's worthwhile getting to know them a bit better.

Open the book to learn about consumables!

I decided to make this article also about the Crafting Hall because that will be a primary source of your consumables. The other sources include the stores, quest rewards, chests and of course you can buy them from other players via the trade channel.

Crafting Hall, centre of screen

To make your own consumables, you need the following:

Select a school from the Crafting Hall. You can have two selected at all times. Once you have selected your first two, to change any of them costs you $1,000 - but good to know that you are not stuck with the first two that you choose.
You need a recipe. Each time you select a school from the Crafting Hall it comes with one basic consumable recipe - I describe each of these below. After that, you need to either buy recipes from the in-game stores, or with the really good ones, either win them in quests or buy them from other players on the trade channel.
Each recipe will require you to have in your inventory 2 or 3 different materials (wood, grain, copper, etc). The most efficient way of getting materials is to have a workshop. The purchase of a workshop allows you to produce a common material, but after that, you need to win or buy higher value recipes to make the more valuable materials. There are five different basic workshops, and you can have a maximum of eight in total. There are a further five advanced workshops, but you can only have two of these.

Early on in your AoEO playing career, it's actually quite hard to decide which crafting school to learn. It's not just a matter of deciding what consumables you like, it's also worth remembering that you can produce new technologies to improve your gear.

Here are a few pointers, although this is entirely a matter of personal preference:

Greeks - you are going to be using your ranged troops, so the Archery School is useful. Not only will you have the opportunity of producing new belly-bows for your gastras, but you'll find recipes to produce better arrows, which are useful with some buildings and ships. On top of that, the bandit archers (the basic consumable) are one consumable that are worthwhile early on while your're finding your feet.
Egyptians - priests are big in Egypt, and so the Religion school is a worthwhile addition. You'll be able to improve the powers of your different priests, plus you can make gold deposits as your basic consumable and these can always be handy. Rogue priests are the other consumable if you can find the recipe.
Celtic - this one is easy - they have their own crafting school called Metalwork. A wide range of different recipes are available for this school, including a myriad of elixir which give your troops a bit of a boost while questing.
Norse - they have a strong infantry, so the infantry school might be the go here. The basic consumable is the bandit spearman.

Towers are useful consumables

The other schools not mentioned above are:

Cavalry - basic consumable = bandit cavalry.Could consider for Persian.
Construction - basic consumable = bandit tower. Good for all civs.
Engineering - basic consumable = stone quarry pit. Good for all civs.
Craftsman - basic consumable = cattle. Good for all civs.

The military consumables mentioned above can only be used from Age II.

As you quest, you will pick up more valuable consumables, such as the bandit fortress. This is probably one of the more useful consumables but they can only be used from Age III. Others can only be used in Age IV (and to be honest, it's rare you need to use something by the time you reach Age IV).

The storehouse is another very useful consumable early in a quest, allowing your villagers to start work immediately without wasting time building one. Each time you use these consumables, there is a cool down period before you're able to do it again.

In juggling which school you think might be useful, there's no harm in trying a few, and blowing a $1,000 if you have to. Ultimately, be guided by:

What you find useful.
Whatever recipes you have picked up. Once you pick up a rare or epic recipe, you may as well have the school to produce it.
Whatever rare or epic materials you're able to produce in your workshops.

One further point of clarification, there's a category of consumable I haven't mentioned, and they're the ones which you can buy with empire points from the Empire Store. I'm usually tight with empire points, so I have rarely dabbled in these, but there are some very powerful ones here.

One such powerful consumable is the Strength of the Empire: increases health and damage by 150% and speed by 75% for around 90 seconds. I've used this once, and I can vouch for its potency, but it's such an extreme jump that I would only recommend it in cases when you are absolutely desperate (hanging by a thread in a legendary quest, and a dozen legendary military units appear on the horizon).

There is a wide range of such consumables in the Empire Store and occasionally they are on sale at half price, so it's worth taking an occasional look.

Last bit of advice. Don't sweat it - as you collect all the civs, you can plug gaps. By the time you've added your sixth civ, you'll have absolutely everything well and truly covered, and with an empire vault, it's a simple matter to shift stuff where it's needed most.

My personal preferences?

Bandit fortress

I have the recipe for the Bandit Fortress (unfortunately, only uncommon), and produce enough of them to make sure all my civs are well provisioned. If I'm feeling the stress of a particularly difficult quest (something like You Complete Me or an Elite Cyprus quest), and I've reached Age III without building up my army well enough, I might pull out the fortress to to give me a bit of breathing space - if I can remember to do it!

Brawny Polecat

Starting Out - Part II

2013-07-04T22:09:00.002-05:00

This is a follow up article to my first one aimed at those just starting out on the great AoEO adventure.

Today, I'll try to explain a few more bits and pieces about the AoEO screen.

Some items are visible in the identical positions in both your capital city (ie when you're not on a quest), and while you are on a quest, although their use might vary slightly in each case.

Below I have grabbed a screenshot of my one of my capital cities.

A shot from my Greek capital city.

Click Open the book below to find out more.

While this is a non-quest shot, the items I'm about to explain are all visible while questing.

Co-op

Let's start with what you will see when co-opping.

Firstly, there are a number of ways to organise or get invited to a co-op.

If you have a friends list (generally organised via your Microsoft Live account), you can invite one of them to form a party. In the top right hand corner, both your name and your friend's name will show up, and they will continue to show up until you kick them off, or one of you log off. In that situation, the host (the one who invited the other), will pick a quest, tick the co-op box (if co-op is allowed), and your friend will automatically be invited to play that game.

The small twin box you can see between the two players' names is utilised whenever you have used a consumable which impacts the value of your questing over a certain time period. There are some consumables which increse your coin or experience points for a 24 hour period, and that will show up here if you have played that card.

The other way to form a co-op party is to simply tick the co-op box, and that will invite all players who are currently online to join you. This is a typical quest map, and you can see that I have ticked Elite mode and the co-op box:

Players on the LFG channel will see it show up here....

Ticker box

The ticker box is that box in the bottom left hand corner. It is generally divided into four tabs: General, LFG, Ticker, and Trade.

If you have advertised for a co-op partner, it will show up in the LFG tab (Looking for game). Anyone online at the time can click the game and they will automatically get invited to your party. In the shot above, I have just completed a trade, and you can see the LFG tab is highlighted, and someone is advertising a co-op game.

The Trade tab is used to buy and sell items, and generally speaking you will get better deals here than if you try and sell via other means.

It's a good idea to keep an eye on the trade channel, but do not get too excited early on in your AoEO playing career. Get a feel for what stuff is worth, and don't be afraid to ask for advice from those on there - the majority are helpful and will give you honest feedback. As for the minority....

To trade, you right click the name, select trade and then wait for the other person to accept.

If you left click a name, you can whisper him a comment, ie a comment that only he can read.

In party mode, everything you write can only be seen by your co-op partner, and this is useful while questing (if you have time to write notes in the middle of a raging battle that is!)

Mini Map

The mini map is at the top right hand corner. It provides a view of the whole map, and during questing, as your scout uncovers the terrain, you'll see more of the map opened up here.

Outside of quests, the four tabs around the diamond work as follows:

Small map, bottom left - allows you to pick different regions to visit. If a quest is already open, you can initiate play from this screen.
Chest, top left - your empire vault is located here. You can buy storage space using your empire points, and the benefit is that all of your civs share the same vault, so you can move things around quite easily.
Cog, top right - opens up the general menu for settings, to log out or to exit.
Box, bottom right - your storage for the civ you are currently playing.

During quests, these four tabs become the following:

The map still opens up, but you'll either only go there at the end of the quest to complete and get your goodies, or during the quest if you want to start again (made a fatal error, got run over, etc).
This becomes your alert button. During a co-op quest, click and then click the mini map, and alert your co-op partner of something (like if you're getting pummelled by the enemy and need help).
General menu works the same.
Your civ specific storage works the same - you might come here if you want to activate a consumable, an item which can be used during a quest and which materialises automatically either around the town centre, or wherever you choose, depending on the item.

This is what the empire vault looks like - I can store up to 240 items and share across all my civs

Other

Finally, you have the display at the top middle of the screen.

If you look carefully, there are a series of four slots under the coins - from your capital city, you can populate these slots with consumables (say four most often used ones), and while on a quest, you can click one of these slots to get access to your consumable rather than go looking for it in your inventory. Do not underestimate the value of saving a couple of seconds during a quest!

On the other side of that display, during a quest you can see another four slots which will show you the four advisers you selected for the quest, just for info.

These slots, plus the ticker box can all be toggled on and off, meaning you can get them out of the way if you think they are distracting you from your real purpose - destroying the enemy!

Ok, that's it for starting out. I hope to dedicate future articles to actually playing the game, doing quests, little tricks, traps to avoid, and just enjoying the game generally.

May you age with speed, good grace and plenty of resources to crush the enemy!

Click here for part three of the Starting Out series.

Brawny Polecat

The Civilisations - Egypt

2013-07-04T09:18:00.000-05:00

This is the second of a series of articles in which I go through each of the six civs.

Egyption shield used in AoEO

Many of you may have begun your AoEO gaming experience with Greeks, and naturally gravitated to the next civ in the series: Egypt.

I did this by earning Empire Points after reaching level 40 on Greek - I was able to buy Egypt (Eggies).

My knowledge of the Eggies isn't as detailed as the Greeks.

I can say this though, despite my obvious bias for the Greeks, almost every day I’m discovering something new with my Eggies, being pleasantly surprised by what you can achieve, and this leads me to believe that if I had come to Egypt first – it probably would have been my favourite civ!

Click Open the book below to read more.

Naxos - my Egyptian city

Points of Difference

When you come to Egypt from the Greeks, you immediately notice a few differences:

there are three different temples and three different types of priests – this is a civ which puts a bit more of a focus on priests and temples;
you start all quests with a priest as part of the package;
you do not age up in your Town Centre when you have reached the right amount of resources, rather, you build the next temple, meaning you need to use villagers to do that, but it also means you keep producing villagers while aging up – which translates as an economic advantage;
you do not have an archery school in Egypt, your three ranged units are spread across your barracks (slinger); stables (chariot archer) and fortress (elephant archer); and
from Age III you can produce elephants from you fortress – and that’s quite handy! The Egyptian elephant would just about be the strongest military unit which can be produced in Age III.

It took me a long time to get my head around the different priests, and I’m still learning more about them today, but in basic terms, on top of healing (all of them) and converting (Priest of Ptah), the Priestess of Ra can:

increase drop-off rates at storehouses and town centres of resources gathered by villagers;
improve unit production rates (villagers reduce from 14 to 13 seconds on the Priestess of Ra alone, while spearmen get down to 7 seconds, which is very quick); and
improve building rates.

The other one, Priest of Set, also imparts insanity on enemy units – not something I use unless I’m a bit desperate and have been caught out with an early attack.

All in all, it makes for an improved economy, and on some of the bigger quests (e.g. You Complete Me in Argos) , it’s quite noticeable how much quicker you can build up your economy and resources in comparison to Greeks.

However, you are a bit susceptible early on, with the Eggie spearman being weaker than the Greek version, although it can be produced at a much faster rate.

Try a spearman rush on Skirmish, and you notice that with the Eggies, with the help of the Priestess of Ra, you can complete the lower levels extremely quickly (lightning quick), but at the higher levels, the spearmen get killed off quicker, and you are relying on the quicker replenishment to stay in the game. All in all, it takes a little longer than the Greeks.

Where you get an early chance to build up, you’ll get to your population cap quite quickly with Egypt.

Egypt also has decent siege (catapults, catapult triremes and pallintonons).

But the big sell for Egypt has to be the elephants. From Age III, the war elephant can be produced, and in some quests, that’s more than enough to go rampaging.

From Age IV you can produce Elephant Archers. These are resource intensive but also potent. A specific advisor card is available to reduce their cost.

My War Elephants make mince meat of the catapults in Elite Rogues

The advantage of the elephants shows up in some popular quests. On Elite Rogues, in Greek, you need to get to Age IV to start producing hippikons, but in Egypt, start producing elephants straight away! Don’t even worry about aging up, it’s not necessary. And let me tell you, the elephants smash the elite catapults like match sticks (see above).

The elephants are also quite good in Persian Coercion, having them available in Age III while still having access to rams (in Egypt, they’re siege towers, and quite good too).

In a milestone quest such as Defense of Arsinoe, it seemed easier and quicker with Egypt, once again, getting your economy up and running early on is the key.

Nubia - a region in the Egyptian civ

There are a good range of campaign quests which progressively take you through the unique aspects of Egypt, including some challenging quests such as Sandstorm!:

...and the King of the Hill series of challenge quests, culminating in storming the Nubian citadel in 11 minutes:

The series of camel races is entertaining enough, although I draw the line at the sleep-walking prince, I found that just a little bit too silly and irritating.

In short, priests and elephants make for a fair bit of difference from the Greeks, and my experience so far is that you can achieve it all with the Egyptians, often with greater efficiency, and it’s hard not to fall in love with the mass trumpeting of elephants as you mow down and crush your enemies!

Click here for part one of the Civilisations series - Greeks.
Click here for part three of the Civilisations series - Persians.

Brawny Polecat

The Civilisations - Greek

2013-07-02T00:03:00.001-05:00

Greek coat of arms used in AoEO

This is the first of a series of articles in which I go through each of the six civs.

Many begin their AoEO experience with the Greeks, and I’m no different in this regard. The Greeks were my first civ, the ones I first took to level 40, the ones I first managed to gear right up to the rafters, the ones with which I first completed alliance and legendary quests, and they remain my one true love.

It’s probably natural that you might come to favour your first civ, primarily because you will become so familiar with it, get used to the bits and pieces you like most, get used to the various build orders, how to make your economy hum each and every quest, build a massive army, etc, etc.

So what do I like the most about the Greeks?

Click Open the book below to find out!

My Greek city - Dhakar

I think it can be boiled down to two main things:

Siege; and
Gastraphetes.

With siege, I’m talking primarily about the ballistas and their watery cousin, the ballista trireme.

The Greek ballista

You only need five or six upgraded ballistas to demolish most things thrown at you in AoEO (as a general rule, there are exceptions of course). They come into their own in reaching fixed targets over distance, in particular, the Cyprus quests which ask you to destroy enemy forts, or getting rid of the troublesome catapults which sometimes lurk at distance and wreak havoc on your army.

The ballista trireme are invaluable for the various water quests in Argos and Cyprus, especially where targets lie far inland.

But they both share a weakness – they do not like combat at close quarters.

With the ballista, you want your destructive babies sitting behind either a wall or what we commonly call a meat shield when roving the countryside, something to keep the enemy at arms length, to stop them reducing your prized weapons to kindling.

In the case of your ballista triremes, as a general rule, you will want to get your fireships out nice and early, mop up enemy ships, destroy their docks, repel all attempts to rebuild, and then unleash a long distance barrage from your big ships unimpeded. Soften the enemy up for a landing. In many cases, you can almost eliminate your enemy without the need to land at all. Now that’s firepower!

The gastraphetes can almost be viewed as a smaller version of the ballista, especially when massed (30+). The benefit they bring when mixed with your ballistas is that they can hit a moving target. As the opposing army comes towards you, if you have a mix of gastras and ballistas, they can act as a virtual meat shield while mowing the enemy down before they get to you (but if they come in sufficient numbers, especially with cavalry, they will reach your front line troops, and casualties will be inevitable).

Greek gastraphete

The Greek civ comes with an Academy which provides military improvements, and one of the most potent is Greek fire (available in Age IV), which will improve the damage of both the gastras’ arrows as well as arrows from guard towers, forts and the town centre.

On top of the increased damage, seeing streams of lit arrows flying at the enemy, especially en masse, sends a surge of pride through you, it’s wonderful to behold. The moans and groans of the enemy being struck down is a constant reminder of a job well done.

On top of the siege and gastras, the Greek military capability is quite balanced and well rounded, with a good range of infantry and cavalry, as well as priests.

On the downside, some of the build times and unit creation times are a bit slower than the other civs, and the very best stuff is not available until Age IV, which can be an issue in PvP and various quests which can put you in two minds as to whether you should go for one final age up, or whether you should struggle on with whatever is available to you in Age III.

In fact, if skirmish rush is your thing, the Greek spearmen fit the bill quite well, and the Greek spearmen hold their own in Legendary Renegades.

With the old favourite: Elite Rogues, with a second objective of cavalry only, the hippikons get the job done, or with the right advisor, you can use the Hetairoi, created in your fort.

My hippikons and hetaroi gather for the coming battle with the elite rogues.

The Greek fort also produces the pallintonon, a slow-moving siege engine which needs to be unpacked before it can attack. Coupled with the right advisor, and you are talking some serious range here.

As for the range of quests, one thing that stands out (from memory) is that the Greeks include the Troy series of quests, which contains some fun and challenging quests. One of the final tests in Troy is being able to reach a population of 200 in 15 minutes - a good milestone quest for all aspiring AoEO players.

Troy - a region in your Greek civ with a good series of quests

The toughest pre-level 40 challenge I can recall was Not Without a Bomb. This is the last of a series of 3 or 4 time-limited quests in which you have to reach Age III and churn out around half a dozen rams to destroy two forts, two town centres and 10 houses in around 12 minutes.

I reckon that one took me at least 10 goes before I got it (only just), and I was almost ready to throw it in as a bad joke.

This is a list of the Greek military units, and which other unit they best counter.

In the tougher quests which demand good siege – you are in good hands with the Greek civ – just don’t forget that meat shield!

Click here for part two of the Civilisations series - Egypt.
Click here for part three of the Civilisations series - Persians.

Brawny Polecat

Age of Empires Online – Starting out

2013-06-29T20:00:00.000-05:00

Starting out

We have had an idea kicking around for a while about commencing a series of articles aimed at assisting the newcomer to Age of Empires Online (AoEO): navigating the various maps you will encounter, learning the myriad of points systems, and overall, learning how to get more out of the game.

I'm guessing that as we head down this route, gamers will start to make suggestions about what they want to see, what they are having trouble understanding, and the like, and over time we might build up a volume of useful reference material that will provide a range of assistance to gamers.

Obviously this series of articles is not aimed at the more experienced player, but if any of you have any comments to make (which are publishable) they will be gratefully received.

On the whole, I have come to like the AoEO community, have had a lot of good times co-opping with other players from around the world, and with a bit of practice, all newcomers should be able to get the same enjoyment out of the game in no time at all.

Starting out, this is one of the very first screens you will come to:

Click Open the book below to read the rest of this article.

Here you will be asked to select your civilisation (your civ).

These are the options.

The full civs start from level 1:
• Greek
• Eygptian
• Celtic

The Pro civs start from level 20:
• Persia
• Babylon
• Norse

I prefer not to recommend which civ you should get (I like Greek), but as a general rule, if you are starting out, you are better off starting at level one with one of the top 3 civs, and trying the other civs at a later time. I’ll dedicate future articles to the pros and cons of each civ.

By the way, in case you're wondering why I like Greek, it comes down to having some very nice siege units and top end archers (whose name I can't pronounce) capable of decimating everything else, and let's be honest, decimation is fun. This is primarily why we play AoEO.

With time, as you level one civ up to level 40, you’ll earn sufficient empire points to purchase all the other civs and booster packs for free – so don’t be too worried about which one you pick.

I currently have all the civs and booster packs: Greeks and Egyptians (or Eggies) at level 40, with the others ranging from level 20 to 37. Premium means that they have been paid for. I bought Greek, but I was able get the rest using Empire points earned in-game. More of that later!

Ok, so you've selected your civ and you've given it a name, within a few seconds you will be dumped into your capital city, which will appear a bit barren early on, but as you level up, you will build it up. I'll focus the rest of this article on explaining the Capital City concept, the various buildings you will encounter early on, and other related concepts like the menu and chat box which will help you navigate things early on.

Your capital city, as a Greek civ, will look something like this early on:

The first thing to explain about the capital city is that it's sort of part of the game, and then again, it isn't.

You will not be playing quests which feature your capital city in the map, you will not be defending your capital city, or anything like that, rather, you will be collecting various buildings which over time will give you access to more technology, more materials, more gear, and in this way, you develop your military capability to undertake quests, which get more difficult as you level up.

It is in your capital city that you will come across your first quest givers, who will offer you quests which enable you to win a variety of rewards, all of which will allow you to expand both your capital city and your military capability. This is where it all starts.

Some aspects of your capital city are simply for show, like the dock you can see at the bottom right of the snapshot, although as you level up, a quest giver will appear at your dock.

On the far left, you can just make out the Empire Bazaar, which is where you can buy more AoEO content.

I'll explain other parts of the screen, common to all parts of the game, like the mini-map and ticker box in later articles.

Capital City Buildings

The Palace: This is where your technology tree resides. Each time you level up (from Level 1 to level 40) you earn an extra notch in the technology tree, in other words, something new that you can now do. It might the ability to upgrade your walls or towers, or something similar. Early on, there might be some quests you cannot do until you tick that item in your tech tree. More on levelling up later. Your milestones also appear here, and that will require its own article at another time. Your technology tree will look like this:

The tech tree from my Celtic Civ, at level 19, the greyed out bits are items I don't have access to you yet.

Gear Hall: Each unit and building that you can produce while in a quest is represented in the gear hall, against which are 2, 3 or 4 slots where you can accumulate gear upgrades. For example, work tools that enable your villagers to collect more materials, or weapons which have more damage, etc. Over the course of levelling up, the differences in gear you collect, and their attributes, can be substantial. The items that you slot into your gear hall benefit your units and buildings in all quests that you undertake. The minute you put an item of gear in your gear hall, it is no longer tradeable, but you can sell it within your capital city at a nominal value. It is in collecting gear and materials that you will come across the categories of common, uncommon, rare, epic and legendary, but note, FTP players can only go as high as uncommon. Your gear upgrade slots look something like this:

Gear hall from my Greek civ, each slot represents a tech improvement for each unit or building

Warehouse(s): In your main menu, you have an icon which includes your inventory, that is, various items which you have collected in your quests for future use, and which have not been attached to your gear hall. The inventory in your main menu is spread across one or more boxes, each of which correspond with a warehouse in your capital city. As you level up, you will get opportunities to build more and bigger warehouses in your capital city, which allows you to increase your carrying capacity in inventory.

Advisor Hall: This will not be immediately available from level one, and it's not available to FTP players at all. As you progress through the levels, completing quests, you will collect these advisor cards which you can slot into your advisor hall against Ages I to IV. You can pick one advisor per age each time you do a quest, and these advisors improve your ability to do specific things, like collect more gold, more wood, allow your cavalry to be quicker, to build certain buildings quicker, etc.

Advisor Hall opens up to show four slots for each age, you can choose from a variety of options for each slot

Workshops: At some point you will be able to buy workshops which produce basic materials like wood, grain, copper, etc. As you complete quests, you will get the opportunity to pick up higher level recipes which allow your workshops to produce more valuable commodities (rare and epic). These materials can be sold and/or can be used to craft useful things. Premium players can have up to 10 workshops, but FTP players can have only a maximum of 2.

Crafting Hall: The Crafting Hall in your capital city has a selection of 8 or so crafting schools. You are allowed to choose two of these, build two crafting shools, and these then allow you to use the materials you are collecting from quests or are producing in your workshops to craft new items. For example, if you have an archery school, you will be able to craft bandit archers and various archery upgrades. The former is an example of a consumable, that is, an item you can use in a quest which doesn't have to get built under the normal quest conditions, rather, they appear automatically at no cost to you during the quest. The latter are items which you can add to your gear hall which then improve the attributes of your units during quests.

Embassy: Your embassy building is basically an alternative form of communicating with other players by sending notes, which can include attachments of materials.

Shops: Various shops will be available early on in your capital city while others will be added as you collect blueprints in your questing. These will generally require the use of either coin or empire points, which brings us to the next section.

Coin and points

One confusing aspect about AoEO for newcomers is the different array of money and points you collect to do different things. I describe each type below.

Experience points: These are earned by doing quests. Each and every quest is worth so many experience points and these are earned each time you complete a quest. The experience points are used specifically for going up in the levels. That's their only use. Once you reach level 40, they are no longer accumulated.

Empire points: These are earned a number of ways, but early on in your AoEO career they will be earned predominantly by doing quests, especially one-off quests (as opposed to repeatable quests).
Empire points are a form of in-game currency which can be used for two main purposes:
1. purchasing consumables to use in quests or decorative items that can be used in your capital city; and
2. purchasing new civs or AoEO booster packs.
The pro civs cost 900 empire points while the booster packs cost 450 points. The booster packs include Fertile Crescent, Elite meet at Crete, Skirmish and Northern Hold. You can also purchase things like the empire vault, which allows you to expand your inventory and share items between civs. So it's definitely worthwhile accumulating empire points.

Coin: This is another form of in-game currency which can be used to purchase various items in the shops in your capital city, and in other cities, and even from other players in the trade channel, which I will describe later.

This is what a typical initial quest screen looks like. On the left hand side, you can see the rewards:
12,000 XP (experience points)
70 coin
100x stone blocks
6 empire points

Each quest that you did will commence with a similar screen that provides a description of the quest, the quest's objectives and what you will win if you are successful.

When you complete a quest, click the small map icon at the top right of the screen, and you will see an option to return to the town where the quest was originally given (in the early days, this will usually be your capital city). There will be a question mark floating over the quest giver, go back to him or her, highlight the quest you’ve just finished and click complete – and this is the final step in ensuring you get all rewards from completing the quest: experience points; coin; empire points and other goodies which will appear immediately in your storage.

If you killed any bandits during the quest (they appear as orange question marks on the map), the chests claimed will already be sitting there for you in your storage and it’s simply a matter of right clicking to open them.

Alliance Points: This is what you start earning when you reach level 40 and you are asked to join one of the three alliances. The alliance points translate to Empire points which you will receive on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Each month, you can earn enough alliance points to purchase a new civ for free – and that’s when things start getting serious.

Anyway, that’s enough of a primer for now. In coming weeks, I’ll focus on these different bits and pieces, suggest what is worthwhile, what isn’t, give you pointers on what you should focus on, but above all, I’ll just be encouraging you to explore and enjoy this great game.

Click here for part two of the Starting Out series.

Brawny Polecat

Strategy

2011-09-04T18:18:00.002-05:00

A new Strategy section has been added to the site. Uncover the secrets of the sage's teachings by learning the strategies and applying them to your PvP game. Enemies will cower in fear as you execute your plan to perfection. First up is a very popular build in the current metagame.

Villager Rush

Put all villagers on food
Rally your Town Center to food sources
Continue pumping out villagers
Put two-three on wood
Build houses as necessary
Once you have about 15-20 villagers, attack

Alternative: Leave a few villagers behind to gather resources in case it fails

Civilization: Any

How to Execute it:
Scout around the map as soon as possible to know the location of your enemy and figure out if a villager rush is viable. Enemies who decide to advance up the tech tree will be very susceptible to this rush as they would have invested little in an army or static defense. Additionally, you should employ the villager rush only when you're certain that the opponent is not going to rush. Rushers will focus on an army so your villagers will be met with much opposition.

Proper scouting is key to your success. Constantly check the enemy's base with your scout to ensure that your rush will be successful. Right before you attack, ensure that the enemy isn't mass mining stone to repair and build towers.

If he looks weak to the attack, send your scary villager army directly to the opponent's Town Center. Do not try to take down anything else. With everything done right, you will be at an advantage since he'll have nothing to take down your villagers fast enough and not enough stone to repair. By the way, your villagers do bonus damage to buildings.

How to Counter it: The best way to counter this all-in rush is proper scouting. You should have a scout hanging around your opponent's base. You should also build watch towers as they are very effective "set it and forget it" scouters. If you see that the enemy is focusing heavily on resources like food and wood, and foregoing an early army, then you should suspect a villager rush. If the enemy continues with his villager rush, then build your buildings next to your town hall, put more villagers on stone and wood, and build one guard tower. That is all that is needed to thwart a villager rush.

The Maps Revealed

2011-09-02T05:34:00.001-05:00

As promised, I have posted the maps for the first 12 Egyptian quests. They show the terrain layout and more importantly, general treasure chest locations. Click on Quest Maps at the top or just click here. I will be uploading more maps as time allows. I will also start posting optimum builds to succeed in PvP. Check back soon!

Oh, and here's a preview:

Exotic Egyptians Versus the Great Greeks: Just Who Should You Choose?

2011-08-31T02:00:00.005-05:00

If you're having a hard time deciding between which civilization to dominate with, have no fear. I am here to help you make your decision. I'll provide a list of reasons why one might choose either civilization. My ~~personal bias~~ verdict will be at the end.

Greek Civilization

Very cool culture if you like knights, swordsmen, archers and bar wenches.
There's a smooth transition throughout all ages.
Units are generally very sturdy. (e.g: Compare the Spearman and Toxotes to their Egyptian counterparts.)
They have access to freakin' Socrates. Need I say more?
Greeks have a very formidable navy capable of steamrolling your opponent's vessels. Literally!

Egyptian Civilization

Very exotic culture; the Egyptian setting is vibrant and filled with amusing things like camels, sand and elephants
Remember those camels and elephants you saw in town? You command them in the battlefield.
A unit, called the Priestess of Set, heals your units and gives whichever building that she molests a buff to production and collection.

My verdict:

Do you like the traditional, the tried and true, the orthodox? You would like the Greeks. Their architecture and units scream I'M AVERAGE in every way possible. Nothing really stands out about them, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. People who might like Greeks include jocks, historians, Greeks, and your average joe.

If you're the type of person who likes exotic things like pet snakes or pet humans, then you'll like the Egyptians. Everything from what they wear to their building decorations make them pretty unique. Add in War Elephants that smash things and you have a pretty good recipe for something different. The types of people who might appreciate this civilization include artists, minorities, animal lovers, and exotic pet owners.

I hope that helped you make your decision, even if it was just a slight sway. If it didn't then I apologize. Maybe my next post will suit your fancy. What will it be? You'll have to check back to find out. I'll give you one hint, though: maps. Lots of them. =D

Why The Age of Empires Handbook is Useless

2011-08-28T11:12:00.004-05:00

If you don't know how to click on a unit, consult the Empire Handbook. If you don't know what the term "rushing" means, consult the Empire Handbook. If you don't know how to hover over buttons ingame to see what their functions are, then consult the Empire Handbook. Finally, if you're wanting to read something that's about 1/4th the size of your screen, while doing all sorts of awkward navigational tricks to try and read what's actually written, please consult the Empire Handbook.

If my thoughts on the Empire Handbook aren't completely clear by now, I'll spell it out for you. The Empire Handbook blows! I wouldn't use it for toilet paper if it was in printed form. Seriously. It is touted as being "your one stop spot for all thing Age of Empires Online!" but, in reality, that's far from the truth. In fact, I find myself needing to consult another source after visiting my "one stop spot." This handbook should swiftly be renamed "Facebook Mom's Easy Transition Guide to Real Games."

See this image below.

Next time, the Sage will advise you on Greek versus Egypt: Which civilization should you choose?