Chapter 1: The First Two Minutes

Introduction
This is the first of a series of chapters to help players new to AoK get over the initial hurdles, to the point of being an advanced intermediate player. These articles are not written for the experts, they’re designed to get you to the point where you can win at least as many games as you lose when playing on the Zone, or to consistently beat computer opponents on the hard setting.
With that in mind, the focus will be on simple, general strategies, rather than highly optimized strategies that are easy to mess up. For example, Gutter Rat’s Fast Feudal Rush (Flush, see ) is an excellent expert strategy, but likely to be an unmitigated disaster if a newbie were to attempt it, since there are so many opportunities to make crucial mistakes.

When practical, I will include sample games to illustrate the points. The games are not "the ultimate" in perfection, you’ll usually see me make some mistakes or minor blunders, but they will show how the general strategy can work.

So, who qualifies as a newbie? For the purposes of these guides, here's the "newbie test". Play a random game on a continental map against one computer opponent on easiest difficulty at normal speed. Try to get to castle age as quickly as you can, ignoring any military buildup. If it takes you more than 22 minutes to reach castle age, these guides are for you. If you're in the 20-22 range, you'll probably still learn something. If you're able to castle in under 20 minutes, you're out of the newbie class and into the intermediate range.

Since Age of Kings was released, I’ve helped clan-mates and strangers alike get over some of the starting hurdles. Sometimes I’ll play as an ally, sometimes co-op on the same civ, and often I’ll review a replay file and email comments and suggestions. Through this experience, I’ve noticed quite a few things that newer players tend to do that keep them from being competitive. This first chapter is aimed at addressing some of these mistakes.

The Deadly Sins
1) Too few villagers

As a general rule of thumb, your first order of business is to get your population up to 30 (1 scout, and 29 villagers and/or fishing boats) as quickly as possible, before building a military, buying many upgrades, or advancing to the feudal age. And, once you reach castle age, expand to at least 40 and to at least ½ the pop limit in imperial. That’s a lot of villagers, but if you’re trying to compete against a 100-villager economy with your 25 villagers, the game is already over.

These numbers are rules of thumb. Sometimes, it will make sense to go feudal with fewer villagers, to build a military very early, or other changes, but try to stick with these guidelines until you’ve got it down cold…then play with the variants.

2) Forgetting the most important thing: food, food, and food

The number two mistake is to use your first 8 villagers for anything other than getting food or making the initially required buildings. (There are special cases where using your 7th and/or 8th villagers for wood is a good move, but in general, keep the first 8 on food no matter what, right into castle age.)

Your success in a game is going to depend heavily on getting ahead of your opponent’s economic power. Nothing is more important in that respect than the number of villagers. If your opponent makes his 15th villager when you make your 12th, you’re going to be in a world of hurt, and a minute behind in everything from that point forward. The key to making many villagers quickly is to get enough food in the first two minutes to allow your TC to create new villagers literally non-stop from the first seconds of the game. To do this without interruptions, you’ll need at least 6, preferably 8 villagers working on food from the very beginning, or you won’t keep up. I like 8 because, if things don’t go smoothly, it gives you some breathing room, while running with 6-7 on food may cause gaps in villager production.

3) Doing things that aren’t needed yet

If you’re not going to build a military force very early, you have no need for gold in the dark ages, especially before beginning your upgrade to the feudal age. (I refer to this as "hitting the feudal button".) If you’re mining gold this early, you’ve wasted 100 wood on the mining camp, and you have several villagers that could be getting food (and speeding your feudal time) instead of gathering gold that you can’t use. Some very good players will tell you to put 3 villagers on gold very early. This is simple, it is easy, but I find that it hurts your speed enough to make it worth putting off until later.

4) Scouting deep before scouting near

Unless you’re planning an early surprise attack (a feudal rush), it’s usually a mistake to send your scout deep before the eight-minute mark. Again, some good players will disagree, but I find that it takes about eight minutes to thoroughly map your home area, and to find all your resources before going on offense. If you miss four sheep, or don’t find your second gold pile, you could be in a world of hurt later on. Until you’ve mastered the game, keep the scout local until you’ve covered your whole "zone", then go exploring.

5) Using the wrong food

This is a fairly deep topic and deserves its own chapter, so let me just summarize with a few "rules" that are really more like guidelines. They are:

Sheep first, if you possibly can. Period.
Berries next until you’ve mastered the game. Reliable, easy, low management.
Nearby hunting and shore fish next. Boar luring once you’re good at it. Do not run more that a screen or two across the map for hunting, the wasted walk time ins't worth it.
Fish boats are usually a good idea, after you have a food baseline established with sheep and berries. (Requires a map with significant water, of course.) Go for deep-sea fish, ignore the shore fish because boats harvest them slowly.
Farms next. I used to advise people to never, ever farm in the dark age, because of the huge up-front wood costs for farming. After testing repeatedly, however, there are some civs that can do quite well with farming in the dark ages, for supplemental food above the initial baseline provided by sheep and/or berries. Although the farms require a lot of wood and don't produce food at a terribly fast rate, they do have the advantage of requiring no initial walk time. As a result, the net production is competitive with the other food sources. Teutons, Chinese and Franks can make especially good use of farms. Farms should never be your first food source. On water maps, though, I still don't recommend farming until you've really fished out the local seas.
Fish traps? Never. Too slow, a waste of a population unit. Delete the fish boats and add villagers.
As with everything, some experts will argue each of these points, especially when it comes to hunting vs. farms vs. fish boats. Stick with these rules until you’ve mastered the game, then selectively throw them out as you see fit. They may not always be optimal, but they’ll never be too far from the mark.
6) Failing to learn the hotkeys

I’m guilty here, too. I haven’t memorized the hotkeys for military stances and formations yet. (Maybe I should do that today, it would only take a few minutes!) It’s dull, it takes an effort, but it makes a huge difference in how much time you have available to think. Seriously. If you can cut down the time it takes to micromanage your economy by half, and it was taking 80% of your time, you’ll now have three times as much thinking time as before (60% vs. 20%). And that makes a huge difference in how likely you are to make silly mistakes under pressure. Believe me, I’ve been there.

The most important hotkeys are the ones for selecting buildings (H for Town Center, etc.), the ones for building (farms, mills, etc.), and the ones for producing common units in the buildings. In addition, learn the grouping commands for making numbered groups, adding units to them, and selecting them.

The First Two Minutes
In future chapters, I’ll cover the strategy choices you need to make with regard to land vs. water maps, feudal and castle rushing, booming, and so on. Each of these strategy choices will profoundly change your strategy beyond the first five minutes, but the first two minutes should almost always follow the same script.