These are just some basic AOE strategies in no particular order of importance.

- Build town centers, granaries, storage pits, docks, etc. near the resources you intend to gather. This will make your gathering of resources more efficient. The only time you don't have to do this is when building farms near granaries, but still, don't build farms too far from the granaries.

- Don't build military units until the Tool Age. In fact, you shouldn't build your barracks until you're upgrading to tool age. If people attack you early with clubmen, then group all your villagers together and fend off the clubmen. You should be at an early advantage now!!

- In the stone age, begin off by gathering food and lumber. You should try to stick with gathering food rather than hunting. Fishing is also a possible alternative if you want to build a navy or you can simply have villages fish from fish sources adjacent to the shoreline.

- Late in the stone age, begin to gather stone. Put one or two villagers on stone and build a storage pit near the stone if you can afford it. You'll need this stone to build towers and walls in the tool age. During the mid or late tool age, you should start gathering gold. Put no more than 3 villagers on gold, but you should put a lot more once you reach the bronze age.

- Never depend on a single type of unit in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. For example, if you build lots of priests with very few other types of units, then someone building lots of chariots and chariot archers will utterly crush you. Try mixing your groups; mix slow and fast units; mix units with lots of strength (like Centurions) with chariot/horse archers or with calvary.

- Understand the advantages and disadvantages of your opponents' civilizations. If you're being attacked by an organized and diverse army that includes Greek Centurions or Assyrian Archers, you'd better pray if you don't have a good defense. =)

- Guys! new trick that I (me thats right me) discovered in AOE. Once u have gone through land and there is fog u can find where the Enemies units/Buildings are by using a peon and telling him to Build a house and move the thing all around the map and when it flashes Red (meaning u can't build it there) then there are enemy units there! cool eh?

Thanks to Mayhem for this cool strategy.

- When u start select Shang. (This is for a multiplayer game.) Go on a building bonanza and build everything that you can. You'll be low on wood and you will need to have 4 or 5 guys on it. You should be training villigers all the time while building are being constructed. As soon as you have 10 plus guys, upgrade to through he ages like this: In the Late Tool age put 3 guys on gold. U will see why later. In Stone age build at least 2 archer places. In bronzze research the improved bow and then upgrade to Composite. Then beacause u had guys on gold and you should be smart enough to have guys on food you can build them like crazy! It helps if you also have towers during build up also.

By:James Carlson. Also known as Jc787 on Internet Gaming Zone.