What the title says. A while ago I had a winning streak and I got to 900 ELO, but I’ve lost ever since and I can’t get back up. Build orders don’t work for me. Any advice?
Do you player for several years ? Take few lessons with a pro or another player ? Watch more videos ? Coz you certainly do something wrong to be so low elo after several years.
Yeah, I’ve been playing for the past 5 years. I’m beggining to assume I’m mentally impaired.
Does it really matter that much? (If you a competitive person, I understand.) But for me personally, I’ve been playing since the CD version and I’m still 600-800 range. I just learned to accept it at this point.
edit: As long as you play to ‘have fun’ there is no need to worry about this.
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The main reason is usually playing too slowly. It’s always idle TC or idle villagers. Use CaptureAge to watch your replays. It always reveals where you’re going wrong
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A few things that got me from 500 to 1k Elo:
- Always let your Town Center work → don’t stop making vills (I used to stop production at around 50-60)
- Have more trust in your units → let’s assume that you play Arabia and Scout Rush. Don’t just panic and run away when you see the enemy chasing you with spearman, instead still try to ride around in the opp’s base and find targets. Even if you don’t kill their villagers, you still cause idle time to them by just attacking which draws their attention away from the plan they follow
- Likewise, don’t panic and overreact when the opp rushes you → don’t use Town Bell, instead, practice to garrison the vills that are actually in danger. Try to wall off important parts in your economy by e.g. placing palisades around your berries or wood lines. Also, don’t make 5+ spearmen for the 3 scouts your opp just sent. Usually 1-2 spears on defensive stance that are strategicially placed near your resources are enough.
Feel free to upload a replay file if you want some more indivial feedback! 
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1. Build orders are a must, they don’t work for you? you got to make them work.
- Scouts into Knights.
- Archers Rush.
- Castle Drop.
- Generic Hybrid Map. (water)
You can play vs easy AI with explored map for practice. You only have to master 1 of these: either scout into knights or archers rush. But ideally, you should know how to do all 4, not because you’ll do it, but because you know what your opponent’s layout looks like if he does it. - Not much to know here, just google the build orders and try to follow them in-game with the text next to you.
I know a guy who just reached 1200 by just mastering the build order. He plays Hindustani, he doesn’t know many counters in the game, he has no idea what most units do, he is just able to out-speed most of his opponents because he has a build order, this is how important a build order is. Build order is like an opening in chess, if you don’t know your opening, good luck with the mid game.
2. Have a perfect Dark Age.
- Or as close to perfect as possible.
- Dark age is one of the most important yet most underrated parts of the game.
- Here you need to learn things like: always always always always keep your TC producing vills, resource management if you have too much of one resource you didn’t manage them well, boar > sheep/farms > berries in terms of collection rate so you want to start with the better ones to get to feudal faster, and many other skills that don’t look like much but also add up.
3. Learn the counters, yes, siege too.
- Not every counter in the game, but it’s imperative that whenever you see a unit you’re like “I know how to deal with this”. The important ones are: Archers (knights/scouts unless massed, skirmishers, onager), champions counter all trash units so skirmishers pikemen and scouts.
- This is not something you will get with experience.
- This is something you will get by reading and learning about them.
4. Learn the basics with hotkeys, walling, boar luring, scouting and the 4 resources.
- If you don’t know these basics, your build order is going to be slow and this is why you fall behind.
- Hotkey: don’t use the mouse for everything. I can’t emphasize this enough, hotkey is the most important out of these, this is why these other guys are faster than you. You don’t have to learn every hotkey there is in the game like a pro, just the basic ones.
- Q, Q → Build a house, Q, A → Build a farm.
- Middle Mouse Button → Go to last notification.
- HOLD Alt → Select everything except military units with the mouse. This is amazing when raided and you want to garrison your villagers without the army, because the Town Bell is bad.
- G → Garrison. After you selected your villagers with Alt, instead of clicking TC you can just press G for garrison. Makes you defending from rushes much faster.
- .-> select 1 idle vill ; Shift+. → select all idle vils ; , → select 1 idle soldier; Shift + , → select all idle sols.
- H → select TC; Ctrl+Shift+H → select all TC; you add villagers quickly and distribute them evenly.
- Early game: put your scout in a control group. Ctrl+1
- Ctrl+z → go to lumberjack ; Ctrl+w → go to mill; Ctrl+g → go to stone/gold mine; Ctrl+b → go to barracks ; Ctrl+l go to stable; ctrl+v go to castle.
- Deselect queue: Ctrl+Shift+clickonunitqueue → removes the unit from the queue. Or ctrl+click just a single unit.
- Patrol: Q
- Attack move: R
- Defensive stance: S
- Aggressive stance: A
- Shift+queuenumber → immediately select to create 5 of that unit if selecting a single building, or 1 for each selected building if selecting multiple buildings.
Try to play a game vs AI easy where you’re only using hotkeys as much as you can, so that you develop a new reflex.
Now, if you do just these things mentioned here ^ you shouldn’t be 700 anymore.
5. For the other: walling, boar luring, scouting and the 4 resources.
- If you like closed maps like Arena, ignore this. If you like Black Forest, just do this early game in dark age, if you like arabia, walling in feudal is important to prevent a scout or archer rush. Try to wall between different forests to have the forrest as an extra wall, you can use houses or military buildings in your wall, make sure you build your wall outside your food, wood, gold and stone resources, use palisade walls initially as they cost less and are faster to build, fully finished palisade wall > half/quarter finished stone wall, and if you can wall into the edge of the map do so.
- Lure boar, every important, the sooner the better because the boar gives you more food/minute than sheep or farms.
- Scout: first things you need to find: herdarbers, wood line, boars, berries, gold mine, stone mine. And after you know your base fully scout the location of the opponent base: their TC, their wood line, their mill, their walls placement if any. After that you can auto-scout.
- Know how the 4 resources work: hunters > shepherds/farmers > foragers ; food is needed for all barracks and stable units and most technologies ; wood is used for building buildings but also archery unit and siege ; wood is tied to food income because it costs wood to build farms ; 1 lumberjack = 3 constant reseed of 3 farms ; in imperial age with Two-Man Saw & Crop Rotation 1 lumberjack = 13 constant resseds of 13 farms ; gold is used for stronger units such as archer, champion, knight; you need 4 vills on gold to make archers constatnly and 7 vills on gold to make knights constantly ; stone is for TC, castle and walls ; you need 100 stone/TC 650/castle 5/wall tile; AoE2 economy is simply just wood economy.
- Make sure you always spend your resources, if you don’t always spend your resources, you aren’t doing something right.
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Okay… advice was fine until the last reply, now my head is spinning out of control. I really feel this is impossible. It’s just TOO MANY things to consider.
It always depends on what your goal is. You don’t need to perfect everything if you just want to be a little better.
For example: in best scenarios your towncenter produces all the time vils until you have around 130vil. It is pretty unlikely tho that you lose a game at 1000 elo because of that…it’s more likely your opponent struggles to achieve that as well.
600-800 elo is pretty low(no offense)
So my guess is with these few tips you should be able to climb:
- know and try to play the strengths of your civ(archers for britons and cav for franks for example)
- know the counters of every unit and try to react accordingly, if your opponent only spams them…but don’t be too scared. You shouldn’t run away from 5 pikes if you have 10 knights.
- don’t forget blacksmith upgrades(for cav armor first, for range units attack/range first)
- try to set up your eco for your strat. If your eco is unbalanced, use the market(he can be your best friend in low elo) either way you should never have like 2000 wood and no food/gold
Hotkeys are also nice but i think at this level you should survive without
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Just focus on fixing one thing per game. Start with no idle TC and no idle villagers. Then watch your replays, you should have zero idle time before castle age.
Once you have mastered that, fix the next thing. Usually idle time is because you’re not force dropping food on your hunters under the TC. Just fix one thing at a time. Master one thing then move onto the next fix.
If you literally do that one thing (no idle time at TC and no idle villagers) that alone will get you up to 800-900 because that level are bad at multi tasking. They also panic and stop producing when they get attacked. This even happens at much higher ELO levels. Keep spamming villagers when you’re under attack, this is key. Stopping villager production for 30 seconds is the same as having a villager killed. Always remember that and you’ll improve a ton.
Don’t save up tons of wood, spend it on buildings, houses or farms, that is so important. Spend wood before taking fights.
I’ll start practicing the “no idle town center/villagers” advice.
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I’ve put it to practice in three matches tonight. Is anybody present who wants to read how it went?
As OP is another Gargarensis alt, this thread is closed.
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