[Are there any strategy guides?]

Hello vmos,

I won several team matches online not because I'm an specially talented player, but because the

multiplayer lobby is full of newbies, and, in my opinion, the way the game is designed, it's very easy

to win a 2v1, 3v1 or even 4v1 against 1st timers. Take my advices with caution, since as I said I'm not

actually a "pro". Anyway I'll leave here some tips in hope that you or someone finds them useful:

Economy:

- Your first movements in the game in many maps should be: send your women to food,

man to wood, horse for chickens and batch train 5 females or citizen soldiers.

- If I'm not mistaken, women are bonused for forraging and farming, man for taking wood,

mining and constructing.

- You can build barracks since the beginning: this means when you have enough

resources you can start training units in parallel, which will gather more resources,

allowing you to build more barracks and also more units increasing your population

exponentially since the beginning. In Age Of Empires II, this only happens in castle

age, you can't recruit units to gather resources earlier.

- Check your population at various points: in order to improve your technique it

would a good idea to check how many people do you have at minute 5, 10, 15, for example

and see how are you doing compared with your previous games. You can see the game time

pressing F12.

- Batch train in batches of 5: Allways train your units in batches of 5 as long as you can

afford it.

Military:

- Watch out civ center build attempts: Don't allow other players to build civ centers near your

first one, specially if they are good players.

- Garrison units in your castles: In this game castles doesn't woork like in Age Of Empires II;

in that game castles are strong without people garrisoned in them, also you can take them down

with trebuchets or with enough melee units. In 0ad, they are too weak without people garrisones in

them so as long as they are ungarrisoned they can be destroyed easiliy with melee units. However,

when you have people garrisoned in them they shoot too many arrows. They are so strong that - in my

experience - it's very difficult to take them down with pikemen. It also takes effort to take

them down with siege catapults. So remember to garrison units in your castle if it's under attack,

most newbies doesn't and they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they did.

- Garrison units in you civ centers: sometimes when you are expanding and you have built a civ center

and you have some units around it, your enemy comes to attack it to prevent your expansion, and

you both have like 10, 15 or 20 units. In this cases, some newbies fight back the attacker with his

units, however it would be much more effective if you garrison the units in the civ center and you

wait for the enemy soldiers to be killed or retreat, then you can repair your civ center.

- Buildings doesn't fight, people does: it's important that you have a fair amount of population,

because otherwise you won't be able to defend yourself, you cannot rely only on buildings to defend

yourself, ungarrisoned castles and civ centers are too weak, as explained above.

- Military units diversity: usually it's a good idea to have soldiers of different types, thus you

can handle better enemy attacks. The more diverse is your army, the more chances you will have

to get the appropiate units to counte enemie's units.

- With melee soldiers, attack the unfinished building, not the builders: when you are stuggling to

not get an enemy building built usually it's better to attack the unfinished buildings

- Attack the buildings, not the repairers: sometimes it's better to attack directly a damaged building

rathern than the people who is repairing it.

- Blacksmith: this one is obvious, you should have a blacksmith and research technologies of your

convenience. Beware, because unlike in Age Of Empires II researching some technologies prevents you

from research others; choose wisely which ones you want to research.

- Be careful with elite units: they are very, very strong compared with other units. In many cases, a

small number of champions can kill a fair large amount of citizen soldiers.

- Don't make "early walls": building walls too early in hope they will stop the enemy to break into your city and also

giving up on expand yourself over the map is usually a bad idea, Romulous explained it very well in the

post above:

Remember that walling yourself particularly against a human player is in actual fact disadvantageous because you can easily be starved. Your resources will eventually deplete spending it on troops and defenses when the enemy besieging you has the entire map to plunder and invest in the assault.

Map specific advices:

- Gold Oasis and Team Oasis: in team oasis there are treasures, you should pick them with your horse.

In both maps - believe it or not - there is a fair amount of wood, but you have to take it. One thing

you can do to reach the wood of the center of the map is building a row of barracks (which will expand

slighly your frontiers) instead of waiting to evolve to the phase II.

- In maps with water, for instance "Lake", usually the water is useful mainly to send troops to other place

of the map, and sometimes it's not worth it to fight for the control of the sea because unlike in Age of Empires II

it's not possible to destroy a city in maps like "Lake" just using boats (at least so far, I couldn't figure it out, if

I'm wrong and any of you guys know how to destroy a city with ships, please tell me).

Newbie killer techniques (this wouldn't work if your enemy is a reasonably good player):

- Pikemen flood with Spartans: this is just making a myriad of pikemen early (before the enemies reach

the phase III) and send them to destroy the enemies civ centers.

- Civ center sandwiching: this is surrounding the first civ center of your enemy with various of your civ

centers, thus your enemy won't be able to expand and will starve economically.