Multi Player Strategies

Omnivac Speaks!

Here's some tricks:

STONE AGE

• First thing, make a new villager.
• Villager 1 build a house. As soon as your new villager is done, you have reach your limit. You should never have the message You have reached your population limit! at all during the game, with the exception when you have 50 or more units. That's one of my golden rules.
• Villager 2 start cutting wood right away. The few trees next to the town center.
• Villager 3 look for berry bushes. After around 30 seconds, if not found go for the animals. If anything in sight, go for the first one you see.
• Important: The wood (170) you have now is for a granary. And make 3 more villagers as soon as you can. The 200 food you begin with will make you have 7 villagers. The seventh one build a new house so your max will now be 12 pop.
• By now, you should have explored with ONE villager around your town center, found berry bushes and built a granary right next to them. The few trees around your town center would have given you the wood necessary for a storage pit near a forest (size is not really important, a cluster of 10 trees or so will do fine for now, although it will usually be bigger, unless you're very not lucky).
• Be wise with your storage pit, taking in account stone and gold around you. Sometimes you're lucky and a storage pit will be used for the three resources.
• The 8th and 9th villager you make, one should stone mining, the other gold mining. If they walk a little at first, it's okay, until you can put a storage pit near. Use your judgement here. It should not be more than 20 tiles or so. Since you're new here, go in the scenario editor and press CTRL-B to know the distance.
• Basically, you now have 12 villagers, you have built your third house (max pop 16), 1 is mining stone, 1 is mining gold, 4 cut wood and 6 gather food. You have 1 granary, 1 or 2 storage pits, a barrack and 3 houses. If you can, have one villager make 2 or more other houses to be ready in the tool age. In the tool age, you should build all the houses necessary for 50 units.
• You should reach the tool age around 8-9 min, depending on your luck, it could be around 7 min-never. Slightly faster if you're Assyrian or Yamato, 1-1.5 minutes faster if Shang.

TOOL AGE

• Research walls ASAP in the granary, and build an archery range. Put walls and bowmen behind them. You should not fear any rushes from anyone. Again, use commom sense. The idea is to have effective walls with the less stone you can use, meaning use trees as wall. Keep elevations inside to place your bowmen and you can let an entrance there. Players have a tendancy to go for an opening instead of going through walls. This way, you can expect where the attacks will be and have a terrain advantage. Be warned that experienced players are not easily fooled by this. One time maybe, but that's all. Plan your walls early in the beginning of the game, as you explore during the stone age.
• Market should come next, and you should concentrate on woodcutting and farming after that. Research woodcutting ASAP. Depending on your civ and what you intent to use, research only the relevant things in the storage pit that you will use mostly. Research the rest when you have extra ressources. At this stage, only archer leather armor should suffice. They will make upgraded axeman look like porcupine, unless you let them near your bowmen but that shouldn't happens because of your walls.
• Stable is the next one if you want scouts for exploring faster. 100 food is a big cost (1/8 the value of bronze age) so I suggest only one and keep him out of harm way and explore the most you can.
• Villagers should be around 20, 3 mining stone, 3 mining gold, 5 cutting wood and 9 farming and finishing up the berry bushes, if any. You should have also around 10 bowmen, good walls and around 3-4 towers, again well placed and on elevations (elevation damage make a great difference).

BRONZE AGE and beyond

There's not much anything that's absolute. There's too much diffence depending on the number of players, FFA or coop game, what civ you play, what are the other civs, size of map, type of map, etc. Here's some basics anyway:

• Woodworking ASAP to increase archery units and towers range.
• Wheel so villagers are faster, and building chariots if you can. If you don't plan to use chariots as your tactic, build 5 of them anyway and use them defensively as priest killers, you don't want to be caught unprepared is someone start wo-lo-loing like crazy at you.
• Armor of units you plan to use most.
• Upgrade your walls and towers (Always do that if you use them.).
• You should have the necessary gold at beginning of the bronze age to go Iron age with your villager from the start, and adding 1-2 more along the way. You should need only the 1,000 food.
• Always use combined arms, so you'll have more options defensively as well as offensively.

Some Thoughts

• No mention of boats. Why, it's because it depend on your civ and the type of map. You should always have your city out of reach of enemy warships. With this the focus would go on land units so they're not necessary with the exception of small and large islands. Nonetheless, fishing boats are great in the beginning. Using wood to build units that gather food needed to go through the ages is a good strategy. The drawbacks is that they only gather food and you have to build a warfleet if you want to continue using them. I'll add that on an islands map, you have no choice to build boats (duh!?) especially if you can win with a wonder as a victory condition. If you cannot go to another island, it's very very bad.
• Try to lead the game and out-think the other(s). Do not react to events. It's a sign you're loosing ground.
• At first, don't let your army go to far from your town. Keep them together and try not to use them everywhere. Kill all the villagers you see (They're the most important units of the game). When villagers in the beginning come near you and try to flee, don't follow them too far. If it's an experienced player, it probably is a trap, or he try to lead you away from your town and his army is marching right now to destroy it.
• This is getting too long. Experience come with more game, try to play the same players, especially the ones that beat you. It may be hard for your ego, but it's the quickest way to gain experience.
• Practice your start on custom maps with one CP (only one house in a corner so you'll not get interrupted), and try different things. Go see your time when you get to new ages.