How do people age so quickly and have an army by 18 mins in?

This looks like a good Fast Castle build into some pressure. If you know the drill, it isnt too hard.
On open maps you can even expect an army in feudal age or even in dark age.

It is all about doing things as efficient as possible. Things like: Dont have an idle TC, but create villagers all the time. So gather the right resources to be able to buy what you need. In Dark age you mainly wants food to create villagers. Also you need the wood for buildings to advance to the next age and build farms for after sheeps / boars runs out. You dont need stone / gold that early. So just dont take stone / gold that early if you dont need it already.

Things like this are optimized into build orders. This game is already out since 1999. So these build orders are highly optimized. So this info is also widely known. I dont really know your level, but i guess it is below 1000. Might even be below 800, since i feel like players around 800 elo even try to use build orders nowadays.

Having said this, i wont suggest to just look for build orders and copy those. You are just copying some one else build order without really knowing why it works (or why it also somethings failed). So in the end you still dont really know why you are doing certain things.

I will suggest the guide of Survivalist for newer players:

It consists of 4 parts and build orders are also discussed. If you finished part 1 and part 2, then you will end up with a discussion about build orders in part 3. This also show the priority to me. Build orders are nice to have, but before you really want to use build orders, it is much better to have a more broad understanding of the game, so you know why you want to do certain things in a build order.

After watching this serie (it is about 1h long in total), you can have a look at specific build orders and try to learn some build orders based on you preferred maps and strategies.

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