Noob here! Tips appreciated

Hey everyone! First post. I started playing AOE maybe just over a week ago. I use the Huns but my friend told me they weren’t all that great. They’re the team I’m most comfortable with but I’m wondering if I should try new ones or if anyone has good tips for how to use the Huns!

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In general, if you feel comfortable with it, play it. You can succeed with any civ. But in general it is always an advantage to play and get to know other civs.

I recommend getting to know more civs. Huns are a “good” starting point cause you don’t need houses, so you have 1 thing less to keep concentrating on all the time at the very beginning but, no other civ works this way so getting too comfortable at the no house play will just be harder to learn the others eventually. Also trying out and getting to know different civs gives you more information on their strengths, so even if you choose to mainly play a civ or two, you’ll atleast know how to counter the other civs with those civs. Mostly a tip I can give you is you should come familiar with the game itself and huns have a very select tech tree, so there are many things they cannot do at all, their main advantage being very good at the earlier parts of the game and falling off badly to any civ at the very later stages.

Here you go mate!

As a personal advice, elephants are amazing, but be aware of monks and spearman/pikeman/halbediers

If you plan on playing ranked games or already doing so you could pick 1 or 2 civs for each map you intend to play and figure out how to best make use of your civ on that particular map. That way, you’ll be able to learn different civs and strats without getting lost in the huge variety the game offers.

Generally, for basic learning purposes I find civs whose bonuses and tech tree coheres well towards certain strategies are suited best. For example, Franks are really easy to play since their berry bonus, free farm upgrades and more cavalry hp and line of sight for knights work pretty well together towards a scouts into knights strategy which is strong and quite easy to pull off, at the same time.

Keep. Your TC. Running.

There is literally nothing more important to your game than making sure your TC is always producing.

If you drop production for less than a minute on your TC, you’ve effectively lost two villagers. Those villagers would have paid back their cost in well under three minutes of work and then continued to provide to your economy for the rest of the game. This is thousands of resources that is eventually lost due to a slip in the dark ages.

Get your houses down early, find food sources (and if you can’t find them quickly, get the wood to make them with farms) and always make sure you have enough food to keep your town center producing. That is the most important step.

Therefore, I recommend three civs:

Tatars: Your sheep provide 50% more food so you don’t run out as quick, gives you more time to make farms to support your economy
Lithuanians: +150 food right at the beginning of dark age, meaning you have three extra villagers worth of starting resources before you run dry.
Britons: Your sheep gatherers work faster, meaning you collect the food from them faster. It’ll be easier to get the food in, but you’ll need to transition to another source quicker. Once you learn how to build a strong economy, Britons having cheaper TC’s is a big edge.

Play the Art of War scenarios to get a good foundation to play from. Trust me on this. I went from barely beating a moderate AI to crushing hard AI after Art of War.

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