Help a newby!

[AttilaTheHun]

Good evening allies!

How you are doing folks?! Great to see Age Of Empires II is still alive and kicking! I played this game years and years ago. Just after the release. I spend most hours with single player / campaigns. So to say I am not a good player. Recently my eyes felt on Age Of Empires II HD on Steam. Some weeks ago it was on sale. I got all expensions for a really cheap price. I did notice some new expansions in the latest years! Wow! I was not expecting new expansions!

After just enjoying the game in single player, I wanna try multiplayer. Guess what happened? In the words of Edison: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” I loose every single game. I was nowhere near a victory. My base was full of towers when I was still in the Dark Age and nowhere near to clicking up to the Feudal Age. And I had enemy knights around when I was still in the Feudal Age. This even happens in rooms with ‘Noobs only’ in the name. Those player were clearly no noobs at all… Maybe they are cheating?!

So I’m looking for help! There are lots of guides. All the information is overwhelming! The new question is ‘How to start?’ Just trying everything from every guide is no option. There are many maps, many civs, many strategies, many build order, … I feel lost in all the information. Is there some kind ofprioritization of all the subjects you need to learn? Just a simple list can be fine:
1. Focus on subject X
2. Focus on subject Y
3. …

And don’t bother with subject Z. It doesn’t matter at low level. It only matters for pros. Is there such list?

So, anyone can help me?

Thanks a lot!

 

[iViktorius]

In my opinion you first need to have a good eco before you focus on military matters, therefore I got these two subjects to work on:

1) Keep the Town Center working: make villagers or upgrades, until you have 100+ vills (the final amount greatly depends on the civ and strat you go for, but as a general rule you want 100-140 vills). Every second your TC is idle while enemy TC is working is making you get behind more and more.

2) Learn some build order: learn exactly what villager goes to what resource (for example: first 6 to sheep, next 3 to wood, 10th vill get boar etc. etc. etc. ) Three basic BO's: Fast Castle, Feudal Archers, Feudal Scouts.

 

[Deathcounter]

You might find some useful info there
https://www.aoezone.net/threads/a-guide-for-beginners.30587/

 

[dataidiot]

Welcome to AoE II community, Attila! I will try not toforget anything important, wish me luck:

Important things not regarding the game itself:


Voobly is the best place to play. Google it and join the magic world of Voobly. You should start by playing at the New Player Lobby, and then move on to Medieval Siege as soon as you feel you are beating others consistently;
Small Trees is a must to get competitive and improve your eco management. This mod makes the trees look smaller, so it's easier to place Lumbercamps, micro Vills gathering wood and so on;
Watch some nice streamers a few times a week. I'd go for Riverplantation(here) for Spanish casting or T90Official(here) for English casting. Both of them have a very good knowledge of the game and always bring small tips and explain the decision making of top players, so you always learn something new to apply to your own games;
You can also watch top players streaming, such as TheViper, Slam, DauT, Nicov and some others, but it's not that easy for a noob to follow their actions. Also, they don't go for the best choices in some situations, as many games are not really serious for them and they just want to chill and entertain the viewers.

General ideas:
Eco upgrades are key to set a healthy economy- and Wood upgrades are the best of them Try to manage your economy in a way you always have resources to get the wood upgrades;
Learn how much each, tech, building and unit costs;
Villagers take 25 seconds to be created and houses 25 seconds to be built;
Watch your Town Center constantly: avoiding idle TC provides you a greater economy in the long run;
Watch your Recorded Games and try to spot the obvious mistakes you made;

Build orders:
Don't try to learn all build orders at the same time. Start with 21/22 pop Scouts and 26+2/27+2 Fast Castle Knights;
Also, don't be scared to lure boars without loom or scout with Sheep. In order to succeed, you have to expose yourself to failure!

Lastly, don't loose your motivation when you feel you are failing. You will most likely have very bad games at first, but if you keep trying you will learn the basics and start having a good time playing competitively. Have fun, always have fun!

 

[Deathcounter]

@AttilaTheHun
First, focus on hotkeys, learn your hotkeys or set them like you would like them, maybe put maybe all miltary buildings next to each other, all dropsites (lumber/mining camp, mill), have hotkeys like palisade walls/gates and houses very close to your building hotkey - also try to play arabia and learn build orders, watch Pro's on stream and analyse what they do/not do

 

[iViktorius]

Hotkeys are really not the most important thing in this game.

First you need to understand how the game works.
Then you need to use that knowledge to make the right decisions.
Only after that comes being fast into play (which includes using hks).

Famous pro players that are slow and/or use little to no hotkeys: terror (slowest of all), Tim (I heard he barely uses hks). Yet they still can beat some of the best other players, because they excel in the first two parts,

I myself have beaten players who use almost all hotkeys while I use maybe a quarter of them. Purely because I have better map/game reading skills.

tl;dr: hotkeys is for later importance, focus on other stuff first.

 

[CounterForce]

Maps:
- Choose either Arabia (open map) or Arena/Black Forest (closed map) to practice. Take a look in the steam lobby which ones are played regularly. If you already get in trouble in dark age, a closed map might be the better start.

Build Orders:
- I agree with iViktorius and andreskbr. Archer and scout rush is better suited for open maps, fast castle for closed maps.

Civs:
- If one usually plays with picked civs on Steam, you may want to focus on one specific civ first. Saracens are kind of a generic civ (no real eco bonus), so all build orders work without modifications. On the other hand, other civs might give you an edge. In my opinion, civs are not that important in noob games.

Voobly:
- Yes, it is the best place to play, but if you already get crushed on Steam, you won't have much fun on Voobly. That's more like Step 10 or so.

AI:
- If you want to practice some more in SP mode, you can use some of the user AIs like The Horde or Barbarian. Once you beat Barbarian on hard without exploits (tower rush or Persian douche), you are more than ready for MP.

 

[Henkdesupernerd]

for me the first step to get a bit decent in the game and start wining my first games on Blackforest when I was still rated 1100 on NPL, was by learning how to boom.

The boom (or eco-boom) is a strategy that aims for optimal economic growth which allows you to afford a lot of units later on in the game. This eco-heavy strategy requires a closed map, where you are protected from early attacks (early attacks would interupt you from booming, and you won't have any defensive units)

The idea is to fully commit to building economy, while delaying any other upgrades, buildings or army.

The core of a succesfull boom is to create as many villagers as quick as possible. To do so you need multiple Town Centers (TCs), which will become available in castle age. Also you need to have a steady food income to keep building vilagers. You need wood to spend on farms, on houses and additional TC's. stone and gold are of less importance. you might want to mine some additional stone for extra TCs, altough the 200 starting stone will be enough to build 2 additional TCs. You need 200 gold to afford the castle agee upgrade (800food, 200gold).

Minimizing the time your towncenter is idle (not producing villagers) is crucial. It is highly recommended to learn the hotkeys to train villagers and the hotkey to take you to a town center (go-to-towncenter).

so priority 1 is to keep making villagers.
priority 2 is to go to castle age as fast as possible (without neglecting villager production)
Once in castle age your next task is to make additional Towncenters and build plenty of farms to get a steady food income to be able to afford villager production from multiple towncenters. Keep making villagers. You should spend food and wood on ecoomy upgrades to make your villagers work faster. Only around the 30th minute mark you think about going to imperial age and upgrading and massing your military units.

In games where you are safe (for example on the map black forest where you can build walls to be safe from enemy attacks) you can safely boom for the first 30 minutes of the game. within these 30 minutes you can max out on the amount of villagers you need for lategame (in 200pop games roughly 100 villagers, or if you have teammates you want to have a mix of tradecart and villagers). Shorter booms are also possible, and are more common on maps like arena, where it is a bit easier to break into the enemy base, and where you also want to contest the relics.

So now that you have a excellent economy you want to invest in army. you could spend all your hard earned resources on a variety of upgrades and military units, but that is not ideal. Preferably you choose one or two unit types that are good for your civilization and focus on upgrading them fully and massing large numbers of those to overwhelm your opponent, build many military production buildings (stables, barracks etc.) Do not forget to send in siege once you have killed the enemy army, to press the advanatge and to completely destroy your opponents.

Other maps such as arabia are much more open than blackforest or lack the walls of arena, which makes it extremely risky to go for the eco-boom strategy as described above. For these maps you need to know a wide number of other build orders that prioritse army earlier in the game, since army can easily prevent an opponent from safely doing a more eco-heavy build.

You could try and learn the (pretty complex and precise) build orders for arabia right away, or start with some more defensive maps like Black Forest or Arena where you can practice on getting a good economy first and then fight with your strong imperial age army, that's up to you.

The start of a boom is the fast-castle build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrX7IDBcmic
(ZeroEmpires made an interactive fast-castle build order tutorial for steam, you ca find it i the steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=567576680)

A video on how to fully boom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owZ0YkF7t8w

to reach the speed in these videos, learn hotkeys ad practice a lot. The early game is very important (learn to lure boars without eeeding loom, and minimise the amount of time that the TC is idle)

 

[AttilaTheHun]

Thanks for all the answers. I will respond more in depth within the next days. Feel free to add more comments. I like all input from you. It helps a lot!

 

[guitarizt]

It's all about memorizing build orders until at least 1250 voobly / 1750 hd. St4rk, joro, and tatoh on youtube are good. Once you get those down well you can watch recs to see how other people do them. Then you can get through new player lobby on voobly with minimal strategy if you can do the builds efficiently.

 

[AttilaTheHun]

Such a nice community! Such many great answers! I’m still a bit confused. There are some contradictory answers. Some say learn hotkeys. Others say don’t use hotkeys. It is something for the future. Some say play on Voobly, others say don’t do it at the start. Move if you are ready. Isn’t Steam the place to be for Age of Empires II? Steam is a famous multiplayer platform. Why would you move to something else?

I think I have to start with maps like Black Forest to learn the basics about the economy. The game seems much more eco based! Most of you mentioned managing your economy more than how to fight! Keep making villagers. You guys mean really 100-140 villagers?! Then there isn’t much space for an army?! Use eco upgrades. I mostly ignore them. They cost some resources, so I can’t spend those to an army. Do you really prioritize eco upgrades over army?! After learning to boom it seems time to learn other strategies, like the scout rush and archer rush. It seems much harder to focus on eco and rushing in feudal age.

I am amazed most people didn’t talk about civs! Only CounterForce is talking about civs and it seems like he says civs don’t really matters. Not all strategies are suitable for all civs, isn’t it? I think a Fast Castle can be done with all civs and is never a bad strategy on closed maps. Things like archer rush and scout rush heavily depends on the civ. Am I wrong? That’s makes me wondering almost no-one mentioned civs.

Some of you also mentioned practicing against AI in SP mode. Not just the standard AI of the game, but user AIs like The Horde or Barbarian. Who are those? How do I get those? Is it really worthwhile to practice against the AI?

 

[chrummi]

Well Hotkeys are pretty important if you want to get faster, but you dont need to use every hotkey when you start to play. I think some basic ones you should really know (like jumping to tc, create villager, build house/farm), the others are very nice to know too but not really needed at the start.
Steam is okay for absolute beginners und some casual games, but all the pros are on voobly. Steams performance just isnt good enough, there is more lag (especially in team games, there are also dorps regularely) and there are many useful tools that are missing on steam (for example for specating games, on steam you can only specate a game if you are there at the start, and you block one player spot, and you dont have any tools. On voobly everyone can spectate a game, even if it already started, and theres a spec overlay that shows many useful information like villager numbers, military numbers, ressources collected, relics, castles etc.). Plus there are many useful little things like rotating gates with the mousewheel before placing them.

If you really want to boom, then 100 villagers is the absolute minimum, it also depends on the civ. If you have a civ that uses cheap units you need more space for military, if you plan to use many costly units you need more eco. You will lose army constantly when fighting against your opponent, so you need to be able to replace them immediately, so you need to be able to constantly produce units out of multiple buildings. If you notice youre floating ressources and are pop-capped you can start deleting villagers to get more space for army. And yes, eco upgrades are extremely important. Sure they cost ressources, but they pay back rather quickly. At least the wood upgrades, the farm upgrades and wheelbarrow/handcart you should get sometimes, the gold upgrade is also useful when youre mining gold with 10+ villagers. the stone upgrade isnt really needed, only when you go for your unique unit and need mulitple castles you really need to get it. Prioritizing eco upgrades over army is not always the right thing, it depends on the game situation. If youre playing BF and are safe behind some walls eco upgrades are a good thing to go for first, but if your opponent attacks you with his army you need to get out your own army first. Eco upgrades are not useful if you cant defend yourself from an attack and lose half your villagers because of that.

Sure, your strategy depends heavily on your civ. If we just look at scouts and archers there are some civs that are clearly better with one strat, and only a few which can perfom each of them equally good. there are civs with a bonus for one of those strategies (like franks extra scout hp, magyar extra attack on scouts, ethipoians faster firing archers, britons faster produced archers plus extra range in castle age etc.) or with a disadvantage in one strat (missing bloodlines, missing crossbow upgrade etc.). Also some eco bonuses benefit one or the other strategy. But for learning the basics of the game civs dont matter too much, but you need to keep the different eco bonuses in mind.

 

[Deathcounter]

Such a nice community!

Yes we are, we are very carrying here on aoezone

Some say learn hotkeys

It varies from time to time, for me, hotkeys really can improve your speed, maybe its best to stick with some hotkeys and then change them to your needs when you get a better understanding of the game, All in all you should use hotkeys early on to get used to them. Notice those hotkeys were you need to make weird handmoves and feel uncomtable and change those :3

Some say play on Voobly, others say don’t do it at the start. Move if you are ready. Isn’t Steam the place to be for Age of Empires II? Steam is a famous multiplayer platform. Why would you move to something else?

Steam is more for casual players, steam has many disadvantages compared to Voobly, Voobly is currently the plattform where the proscene is at, with the mod WololoKingdoms (Basically all the HD DLC's on Voobly) there is basically no advantage for steam anymore, Steam crashes more often, desyncs more often, has appearently more pathing issues and dont use Userpatch, a patch (made by users xD) that improves the game significantly. Voobly has an good lobby/room system, spectators do not count as actual players and provides with userpatch access to more complex mods. All mods are easy to install/deinstall

Be careful tho, converting from Steam to voobly might not be the easiest, but with a lot of youtube guides and can be easy (depending on your computer skills). Also voobly has a higher game speed.

BF is a really good map to pratice booming, yes keep making villager is NOT a joke

100-140 villagers?!

140 is the MINIMUM required for substainable army production, you can even go for more, keep in mind you can delete them afterwards anyway

Use eco upgrades

Eco upgrades are Key, always make them, (after you age, immeditaly go for the wood upgrade, always. You can delay Gold/Stone upgrade, mill should follow after wood upgrade fairly soon

I am amazed most people didn’t talk about civs!

Civs arent #1 priority, just go for the unit the civ has a bonus with - you cannot do something wrong when following this rule

Things like archer rush and scout rush heavily depends on the civ.

Yes - if archer civ -> go archers, if cavalry civ, go scouts - its not always like that but mostly. Just dont make longswords in castle except when fighting eagles

Some of you also mentioned practicing against AI in SP mode.

Yeah, praticing vs barbarian is very good, barbarian is the strongest AI currently and only avaialable on voobly i believe, even i cant beat it in 1v1 on hardest (it plays like 17-18xx on voobly (like 2000-2100 on steam)

 

[iViktorius]

140 is the MINIMUM required for substainable army production, you can even go for more, keep in mind you can delete them afterwards anyway

140 is not "the MINIMUM", many civs can go with less, maya can even go with 90 if you play it well 11
and thats just 1v1, in TG you want way less in the end and have ~40 trade carts

 

[dataidiot]

Two small but important things I forgot to mention:

- Screen
Be sure to have the largest Screen your PC/laptop allows, so you have a wider vision and more control of your actions

- Scroll speed
Increase the Scroll speed on daily/weekly basis(depends on how often you play). This should be a slow change, so don't go the highest Scroll speed immediately. Instead, set a Scroll speed you feel slightly uncomfortable to play with and go for a higher after you got used to. Repeat the process until you reached the highest.

Also, a cheap trick that was very useful for me(I still use it to avoid getting housed after Dark Age): as you are executing a build order, think out loud the actions you have to do(send 3 Villagers to Wood; Take boar; research second Wood upgrade). By doing so, you are less likely to forget important things that could ruin your game.

 

[Henkdesupernerd]

Two small but important things I forgot to mention:


- Scroll speed
Increase the Scroll speed on daily/weekly basis(depends on how often you play). This should be a slow change, so don't go the highest Scroll speed immediately. Instead, set a Scroll speed you feel slightly uncomfortable to play with and go for a higher after you got used to. Repeat the process until you reached the highest.

Many player would disagree. I know that even some pros prefer to have a rather slow scrollspeed.

High scroll speed: faster panning around, faster clicking around
Low scroll speed: more accurate clicks, less mistakes

 

[Faultier321]

@AttilaTheHun

I see you are getting a lot of answers here, but let me you give my opinion about things, since i started the game like 2 years ago as a noob and now i am 1700 on Voobly, which is like 2k1 or 2k2 on steam.

1 Hotkeys:
You dont need Hotkeys at first for every single command of the game. But it is really usefull to have Hotkeys for the most important, basic Stuff like:
- A Hotkey that brings you to your TC (this also allows you to circle around your TCs when you have many of them)
- A Hotkey to create a Villager when you have selected the TCs (for me its A, and TC is D, so i just click D and A to create a villager, Or DADADA to create 3 Vil in 3 different TCs)
- Hotkeys for the most basic Buildings: To build a House and to Build a Farm
- Remember to put your scout on a control group: You press ctrl+1 when you have selected your scout, from there on you can just press 1 twice to jump to your scout, this makes it much easier to scout the map
- The "go to" commands for your military buildings are something you might want to add pretty soon aswell

The longer you play the game, the more you will feel comfortable adding more and more hotkeys, to get faster and dont need to click that much. You are going to want to add hotkeys for Lumbercamps, Barracks, Blacksmith, and some commands for your military, like formations etc. But that is stuff for the Future.


2 Which map to play?
It always depends if you want a peacefull booming game, or if you want some agression earlier.
To really learn the game i would highly recommend not to play closed maps like Black Forest, but open maps like Arabia. However, Arabia can have really tough map generation sometimes, so i would suggest you to start with a more noob-friendly version of it, its called "green Arabia"

3 Buildorders?
Buildorders can aslways be optimized, even at the 2k+ "pro" level on Voobly. Almost nobody does them really perfect. But it is important to know what ressources to go for in which order, to execute a strategy. If you play closed maps and just want to boom, i recommend checking this build order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kHXnXjkA5s

For Feudal Agression, i would recoomend to learn the 2 most basic Buildorders: The Archer Rush and the Scout Rush:
Scouts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBvLLIP2R5k&index=4&list=PLkfKpVNo6sRmnJn5PIDLNL_uFj8QIplB_&t=0s
Archers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNlTdpuaurg&index=10&list=PLkfKpVNo6sRmnJn5PIDLNL_uFj8QIplB_&t=0s

4 Civilisations:
Like mentioned before, focusing on Civs is not the most important thing at the start of the game. In Feudal age, pretty much any civilisation can start with any strategy. It later gets more complex and specific in Castle and Imperial Age. To learn the basics of Civilisations, i would recommend the Civ overview Videos by Spirit of the law. He has a very Noob-friendly youtube channel, and is quite an entertaining guy to watch. There have been some balance changes, since he did those videos, so some of them are outdated, but still gives you a very nice overview of the strentghs and weaknesses of civs. Very good for watching while eating, doing a break while studying or just to fall asleep :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd3YuOLSa40&list=PL6co4ILAvwIDNC8TfoJSIRFNn01f2x_4V

5 Voobly or Steam?
Since you already have Steam installed, i would recommend to stick with it at first, and later switch to voobly when you feel more comfortable playing. The game speed in Steam is a bit lower than in Voobly (1.5 vs 1.7), so its easier on steam at first to keep up with everything. Later on, when you feel you have learned the game, better switch to Voobly, because its much less lag, better unit pathing, better to spectate games and much, mcuh more. However it is quite difficult to set up and it can easily take you a few hours until you have everythinmg running perfectly. I would suggest you to look for help here on AoEZone when you want to switch to Voobly.

6 Further tips
- it is REALLY IMPORTANT to get the small trees mod (also known as pussywood). The original trees in Age of Empires 2 are just way too big, its makes it really hard to wall your map or see whats going on behind woodlines. You can find it in the steam workshop.
- For Gameplay: It is very important to learn und understand the importance of Blacksmith Upgrades. They make a Huge difference in combat. In general, for ranged Units always go for the attack Upgrade First, while for Melee Units, the defense is the most important Upgrade.
Eco Upgrades: The most important Eco upgrades are the Wood upgrades. I would always get them as soon as i reach the age where i can research them. I would say the most important Eco upgrades are, in the following order: 1. First wood upgrade 2. Horse Collar(first farm upgrade) 3. Second Wood Upgrade 4. First gold upgrade (this one you should not get right when you hit feudal age, but delay it for a while)
The other Economy upgrades are not that important at First.


Alright, that was a pretty long message, i hope you took the time to read all of that, good luck, have fun and enjoy AoE2 !

 

[Faultier321]

A thing for the Buildorder Videos:
The "Fast Castle" Video by zeroempires is much more noob-friendly, so i would recommend you to watch that video first. The Scouts/Archers build orders are made by stark, who is a pro player that makes Buildorder videos for more advanced players. Ignore some stuff he is telling you (like blocking the boar with sheep) and just try to follow what tasks he is giving his villagers

 

[woot]

Good evening allies!

How you are doing folks?! Great to see Age Of Empires II is still alive and kicking! I played this game years and years ago. Just after the release. I spend most hours with single player / campaigns. So to say I am not a good player. Recently my eyes felt on Age Of Empires II HD on Steam. Some weeks ago it was on sale. I got all expensions for a really cheap price. I did notice some new expansions in the latest years! Wow! I was not expecting new expansions!

After just enjoying the game in single player, I wanna try multiplayer. Guess what happened? In the words of Edison: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” I loose every single game. I was nowhere near a victory. My base was full of towers when I was still in the Dark Age and nowhere near to clicking up to the Feudal Age. And I had enemy knights around when I was still in the Feudal Age. This even happens in rooms with ‘Noobs only’ in the name. Those player were clearly no noobs at all… Maybe they are cheating?!

So I’m looking for help! There are lots of guides. All the information is overwhelming! The new question is ‘How to start?’ Just trying everything from every guide is no option. There are many maps, many civs, many strategies, many build order, … I feel lost in all the information. Is there some kind ofprioritization of all the subjects you need to learn? Just a simple list can be fine:
1. Focus on subject X
2. Focus on subject Y
3. …

And don’t bother with subject Z. It doesn’t matter at low level. It only matters for pros. Is there such list?

So, anyone can help me?

Thanks a lot!

Spend some of your play time to watch daut streams. Start with the videos on youtube where he started an account from 1600 to 1800 or something. He talks about a lot of important stuff during those games. After that practice those things to get the multitasking and you will be 1700+ in no time

Watching that one video is much easier than following any of the tips in this forum. Try it, you will surely improve.

EDIT: Seems from your other posts that you almost have no experience of AOE multiplayer. The video I mentioned is still very useful. That will give you an overall idea of what happens during a real AOE game. Playing AOE is a bit hard because all players have been playing this for a long time. A build alone won't be helpful. You can practis BOs and games after knowing what to expect in a real game. Go for that video.

 

[AttilaTheHun]

It seems like the ratings on Steam and Voobly are different? Voobly ratings are a bit lower? Woot say you can be at rating 1700 easily. Faultier321 say he needed 2 years to get to rating 1700. Is Woot speaking about Steam and Faultier321 about Voobly? Do I miss something else? I think ratings arent import to me. Having some fun matches (both teams can win) is more important to me.

I think i got the other points. I will try to learn some BO from youtube and just go with the flow. I do understand people are playing this game for years. So getting into the game can be pretty hard. I tried the Barbarian AI. That AI is pretty good i admit. I just started on easiest and i did win. It was pretty one sided. Just a level up, and it became already difficult for me. First game i loose. My start was messy and i couldnt found my boars at all... Second try i won. Both games were really like the multiplayer games. The games went almost peacefully to the imperial age. The winner of the first push wins. My experience with multiplayer games is a much faster pace. The fighting start really early.

 

[BFuu]

It seems like the ratings on Steam and Voobly are different? Voobly ratings are a bit lower?

Yes, there are different ratings. Steam ratings are a bit higher, difference should be around at least 300-400 ELO points. Voobly has several rating systems tho, there's a New Player Lobby rating, a 1v1 rating and a rating for team games.

 

[AttilaTheHun]

Why isnt it the same? That would makes comparing your rating between platforms much more clear. Maybe that something from the past? I bet Voobly was already there when AoE II went to Steam and both platforms wont wanna merge into one big platform. As newby it was very confusing to have multiple platforms.

I played some more and have some questions:
- What do you do if you cant find your sheeps / boars? The first 4 sheeps are really near you town center and you cant miss them. The other 4 sheeps and boars are sometimes hard to found. It happened multiple times i tried to practise a build order, but couldnt find all sheeps / boars in time.
- How to deal with bad civ match ups? I mean, you go random civ and the enemy has a civ that pretty hard counters your civ. Last week i went with fully upgraded arbalest. I didnt look at the civ of the enemy: Goths. I think i dont have to tell you more details about the battle... So how to deal with this kind of match ups?

 

[guitarizt]

These just came out today. They're great! https://www.aoezone.net/threads/interactive-build-order-guide.150157/

 

[Faultier321]

Why isnt it the same? That would makes comparing your rating between platforms much more clear. Maybe that something from the past? I bet Voobly was already there when AoE II went to Steam and both platforms wont wanna merge into one big platform. As newby it was very confusing to have multiple platforms.

I played some more and have some questions:
- What do you do if you cant find your sheeps / boars? The first 4 sheeps are really near you town center and you cant miss them. The other 4 sheeps and boars are sometimes hard to found. It happened multiple times i tried to practise a build order, but couldnt find all sheeps / boars in time.
- How to deal with bad civ match ups? I mean, you go random civ and the enemy has a civ that pretty hard counters your civ. Last week i went with fully upgraded arbalest. I didnt look at the civ of the enemy: Goths. I think i dont have to tell you more details about the battle... So how to deal with this kind of match ups?

Voobly and Steam both use ELO system (like in chess) that starts at 1600, and you get points for wins and loose points for losses. However, Voobly has been around since 2006 or 2007, and the experienced players from the MSN Zone in the first days came there, so it had a competitive community all the time. When HD started 2011 or sth., many people who played the game as a kid and never touched it again since then started playing there as total noobs. The community on steam is just not as competitive.
I think its fair to say that Voobly ranks are ~400 points lower, so 16/17xx Voobly = 2000/2100 HD

- What if you cant find sheep?
If you cant find starting sheep, scout with your villagers and maybe send some to berrys until the sheep are at your TC (dont build mill, just gather some berrys). you should always be able to find the starting sheep within an minute, if you run out of food, you might have to click loom.
- Boars: You should always be able to find both of your Boars. Missing a Boar usually means you wont be able to make the Build order you want to, because it has 340 food and also hunt is gathered faster than sheep.
To compensate for the food lost, make some farms and if possible, make another mill to your Deer. It is also possible that you push Deer which is not too far away to the TC with your scout, but that is advanced stuff.
Also you can maybe just take 1 or 2 Deers over the distance with 3 or 4 of your villagers, without making a Mill.
Note that you on Arabia you always have 8 sheep and 2 Boars, and while sheep might get stolen, it is too difficult for Players to steal a Boar at your level.(this takes some skill). So if you cant find your Boar, you probably did not scout good enough. Try to scout in circles around your TC and not leave any black gaps. Dont hesitate to use sheep to scout in closer areas.
Missing just 2 sheep is a bit annoying, but not such a big deal. Making a Farm and going up 1-2 vils later than planned and it should be fine. Also you can compensate that by taking/pushing a Deer (whi is 140 food)



Bad Civ Matchup:

Well you gotta know the civs. Goths Infantry spam in imperial age is very scary, but they are a very weak civ before that point. Very often the answer vs Goth is just to play agressive in early game, so they cant get to imperial with a big economy.
Also against Civs who want to go for a castle and their Unique Unit in Castle age (like spanish, goths, Burmese) it can be very effective to keep them away from stone to get a castle up for as long as possible.
Later on, you need to know what your own Civ has to offer: Say you are Britons vs Goths, it obviously that as soon as he has a castle so he can make huskarls, you cant go Archers alone anymore. In castle age, knights can help out a lot + your archers to kill pikemen. In imperial age, Brits should go for their own champions to kill huskarls, + Archers behind if Goth switches to their own, cheap Champions.
That is still not a very good situation, so when you have a civ matchup that you think you will loose in the long run, try to deal as much damage if you can before it gets to imperial age.

Same goes the other way - if you are goths, try to survive until you have a big Economy in imperial age, and then you can just spam Huskarls, Halbediers, Champions

 

[Rayne]

- What do you do if you cant find your sheeps / boars? The first 4 sheeps are really near you town center and you cant miss them. The other 4 sheeps and boars are sometimes hard to found. It happened multiple times i tried to practise a build order, but couldnt find all sheeps / boars in time.

First, its important to know that every resource you have spawns in a certain tile radius. Both your stones, all 3 of your golds, boars, and sheeps are all within this radius. Once you understand and have a feel for this, you should always 'know' where all your resources are. You shouldn't be -4 sheeps almost ever, unless enemy stole. Occasionally, you will be -2. Should rarely be down a boar unless its stolen.

Then, if it does come to a point where you are -2 sheeps or -1 boar (if both there is probably not much you can do to makeup for it), the best thing is to lure deers. You should almost always have 3-4 deers nearby, especially if its KOTD2 Arabia (not sure if you play ara). If you can't do that, best to just send another vill or two to berries (5-6 total on there instead of usual 4), and make another farm perhaps. Best thing is to lure deers for sure though -- I'd leave the extra berry and farm vills as a last resort (reason is because foragers are slowest food source [exluding WK French] and that 'extra' farm takes away wood).

It also does depend on your civ with WK. There are a good deal of civs that can escape flawed Dark Ages like this, so you won't really feel being -2 sheeps. Mongols escape the easiest by far if you can lure deers/zebras and French should escape too for instance. Indians are probably fine this way as well.

- How to deal with bad civ match ups? I mean, you go random civ and the enemy has a civ that pretty hard counters your civ. Last week i went with fully upgraded arbalest. I didnt look at the civ of the enemy: Goths. I think i dont have to tell you more details about the battle... So how to deal with this kind of match ups?

This depends on your map. Are you talking about Arabia 1v1 bad matchups or Black Forest bad matchups? (I see you did mention playing Black Forest) It also depends whether there is an extreme matchup or just-a-bad matchup; there is a difference and latter can still be winnable.

What civ were you vs Goths and what map was it?