Who knows how to play Age of Empires II

[Diomedes1976]

It depends if you want to play online or deathmatchs against the computer.

Online you have to do the same as always ,start getting tons of food for a fast demographic growth and later once you have lots of population gather a lot of stone ,wood and gold to advance you civilization and create a big ,modern army .Keep upgrading your units in their bases with the appropiate icon ,select a strategic placement so you have at least one side covered by the terrain ,etc.If you have some wood to spare and you dont have any geographical limit guarding you I counsel you to construct a wood wall there ...it wont stop the enemies much but at leat will give you some 10-15 seconds to reunite your troops and send them there once they appear.Also you should create many city centres and quarrells ,stables ,castles etc ...that way if you are caught by surprise by an attack you always have other places to build the army for the counterattack .

Against the machine is similar but easier as its way more predictable.The machine really is more efficiente developing itself that human rivals but its less agressive early on and waits until it has a good army until unleashing assaults on you.That can give you enough time to build good defenses.Stone walls ,defensive towers with offensive powers ,a good naval force to protect your coast ...etc.One thing that worked for me is actually giving the enemies one way in to my territory...that way had lots of defensive towers around and defensive castles where I could cure my units and the castle itself attacked the invaders.If you do this well they will send army after army to their annihilation.They will provoke some damage ,though ,so you better have some civil units in the castle to repair the towers and stone walls after the invaders have left or died.You may have to reconstruct some towers from time to time .This strategy can grant you your territory and from there you can plan ,upgrade your units to the maximum and create invading forces that you will lead a lot more skillfully once invading the enemies domains.Main menace with this strategy is the Stone Throwers ,that you construct in the castles.They are very expensive but have a enormous reach.You should have some of those just behind the stone walls that way if the enemy starts installing them up near your walls to destroy your walls/castle your stone throwers will automatically start firing at those and destroy them in no time ...after all you have them already mounted and the enemy needs some time to mount them once they arrive ,this gives you advantage.If you cant destroy those because you dont have units in position you must send the cavalry from the nearest castle to destroy the stone throwers.

When you are attacking you must protect the stone throwers and keep the militar units out of the castles/towers reach.Use the stone throwers to destroy the defensive buildings ,castles and quarrels and limit your army to the protection of those stone throwing units.Once you have wiped out those buildings its time to send your armies in and destroy.The city centre of the enemy can also attack specially if it has lots of citizens inside ,so proceed with it as with the defensive buildings.

For this defensive tactic I always found the bizantyines quite good ,their castles were among the best ,the cataphracts were great and they had good units with gunpowder later on .