hey guys twiglets2 here back with another rise of nations tutorial today we have my top 10 tips for new and returning players to help them get back into the game basically everything i wish i'd known when i first started playing you're more experienced player there might be one or two tips in here for you too if you find the video useful please hit that like button and consider subscribing for more rise of nations content and regular live streams without further ado let's get into number one as you know there are a ton of technologies in rise of nations to be researched keeping track of when they can be researched let alone from which building you may as well make me sit an exam in a foreign language fortunately there is a time saving technique that will change your life and that's why it's earned his spot at number one on this list all you need to do to keep track of your technology is press the tab key what that will do is go through every single building it will cycle through them that has technology available to be researched so if you're looking for one specifically and you can't remember the building just press tab and you'll find it in no time if you just want to remind yourself which technologies are available to be researched right now just tap tab a few times you'll cycle through the buildings and you will see everything that is available to be researched including at the library this is such a time saver i don't even know how i played the game before i discovered pressing tabs that's why it's number one on this list tip number two focuses on water in particular rivers they don't just look pretty they actually have two very big impacts on the game the first of these is you'll notice that your troops move very slowly through rivers so if you're moving through them get your guys out of there right away and only cross them when you need to second probably more importantly your troops when in a river will take twice as much damage yes you heard that correctly double the damage while they're in a river so it goes without saying avoid going through rivers unless you absolutely have to when you need to get across one do it quickly and obviously you want to be ambushing your opponent when their troops are in rivers not only that but you'll notice that on certain maps the rivers kind of snake around so something you could do as a defensive measure is place a city in one of those s bends in the middle there it's almost like a moat halfway around your city and it's a great defensive measure because if anyone tries to attack it their troops are going to have to move slowly through the river while also taking double the damage that's something that can really really boost your city defense and that's why rivers have to go at tip number two tip number three is to help you more efficiently allocate new citizens to the job that you want them to do now you could do this by every time a new citizen is created manually click on them and just click on the task that you want them to do but that takes ages what you want to do let's say you want to create three citizens and you want all of them to go onto that city's woodcut account what you do is when they're being created you tap on w what that does is creates a rally point signified by a tiny flag on the wood catacomb you'll notice as soon as those citizens are created they will go to that woodcutter camp that frees you up to go fight a battle or look at another city because you know as soon as those citizens are created they're gonna go to that woodcutter camp the same can be said for farms all you have to do is tap f you'll see a bunch of flags show up on that city's farms and the new citizens will go to any farms that are vacant the same again can be said for a mine tap m and the same will happen it's a much more efficient way of creating citizens tap tap tap you know where you want them to go you want them to go on farms tap f go off and do something else because you know as soon as they're created they're gonna go straight to the farm it's a big time saver and that's why it's at number three tip number four relates to my absolute favorite building in rise of nations the temple now this has a ton of useful technologies but one feature i wanted to focus on in particular is the fact that a temple will add hit points to the city that it's built near now let's take an example say you've got three cities or you've got your third under construction it's not really worth at the beginning of the game having a temple at each city it would be nice but you probably need the resources to be allocated elsewhere so what you need to do is prioritize which city do you think is most likely to be attacked that is the one where you want to build your temple it's going to add the hit points to that city to make it more difficult for your enemy to take it something that you could even do is if you don't have a temple of the city that's being attacked and you'll see that ai do this quite a lot just build a temple straight away if you manage to finish it before they've managed to sack the city you'll add those hit points on straight away and it'll just take the enemy a little bit longer to do now the amount of hit points that the temple adds can be increased through technologies to the extent that later in the game sometimes it's worth just when you're attacking a city taking out the temple first then taking out the city because of the sheer number of hit points that the temple acts on it's really an important strategic decision early-ish on in the game so that's why i've made this list today tip number five is all to do with creating new units for your army and getting them where they need to be quickly and efficiently now what most rts allow you to do is select the unit creation building and create a rally point somewhere on the map your new units are created and they will head straight there something the rise of nations does that not all rts games do you can create that rally point on another unit so effectively a movable rally point what i tend to do is put that on your patriot unit which should be at the center of your arm here pretty much all times and it's the perfect rally point not only that but if you've already created a control group for your army by selecting them all and doing say control one if you set the rally point of one of those units that are already in a control group any new units that are spawned that are automatically rally pointed to that unit will join the control group so it makes managing your control groups a little bit easier as well and then if you don't like the rally point that you created you could always create a new one or if you want to remove it completely just hold shift and then r and it'll just get rid of it simple as that now that we've finished tip number five that means we're officially halfway if you're still with me i hope that means you're enjoying the video and that you're finding this video useful so feel free to support the channel on to tip number six for this one we're talking about the patriot unit so i'm assuming you either have the expansion for thrones and patriots or the extended edition which i'm assuming is most of you so first of all you get your patriot when you go into the second age build your senate and then you have to choose from one of the governments then you get your patriot unit firstly do that as soon as possible but the thing that the game isn't great at telling you is that your patriot unit provides an armor bonus to the surrounding army within its radius so number one have a patriot number two keep it with your army and this armor bonus really does make a difference if you're facing a more powerful army whether it's bigger or you know just more technologically advanced the armor bonus if they're not using it and you are it really can make the difference and turn the tides of a battle so it's definitely worth using it's also worth mentioning that generals do offer this bonus as well but considering once you have a patriot once they die they just come back for free 30 seconds later they're a lot easier to manage than having a general that you'd have to pay for each time plus a patriot does a whole bunch of other things as well so generals do it too but a patriot is really where you want to start and where you want to focus on this next tip follows on quite nicely from the previous tip to do with patriots but this is to do with the forts which when you're a new player it it can just feel like a step too far to think about building thoughts and let alone the technology that they have to research but there's actually one in particular that's worth knowing about early on in the game so when you reach military 3 there's a tactics research in the fort and what that does is it upgrades your generals and spies and your patriot unit too so this armor bonus i was talking about before that gets upgraded as well as a bunch of other stuff as well so it just upgrading your patriot basically you're upgrading your army as well because of the passive bonuses that they pass on it's actually really powerful it makes that armor bonus even more powerful but it's one of those technologies that's just so hard to miss particularly if you're not really bothering to build a fort in the first place so it comes a bit later in the game but build a fort and go for tactics and all of the subsequent research after that you will definitely feel the benefit next up we have tip number wait where are we tip number eight we're at number eight this may not come naturally to some particularly if you've not really played an rds game before but what you can do when you're telling your units where to go you can actually cue up a particular path which can be really useful all you need to do is hold down the shift key and each time you click you can see that you'll be setting up a path which is indicated by flags for your units to follow this can be really useful for scouting for ruins at the beginning you should definitely be doing that with your citizens so that they're scouting efficiently but you can also do it with your whole army to avoid your opponents defenses and just control them in that way it's a really useful feature and if you want to add to the path that already exists let's say you have citizens that are already scouting but you want to add on to it without removing what they already have select system hold down shift that will show you the flags that they've already got and then you can click some more to add on to that path that they already have it's it's a really useful feature that will be easy for some coming from other rts games but not so obvious for others it's just great particularly if you're a control freak we have two tips left so let's go straight into tip number nine and we're back with our friend the patriot unit because they are the best unit in the game now when you get into the second age build your senate building you will get a choice of governments you could either go for despotism or you could go for a republic this tip is if you go for a republic and you get a senator they have loads of awesome features that they can use they're all very powerful but there's one in particular that i wanted to highlight which is the fact that they can bribe enemy units that are within your own territory this is a brilliant defensive measure and you definitely need to be using it now when i talk to a lot of people they like to play the game quite defensively just playing against the ai and holding them back one of the best things you can do is have your senator and when you're doing that defending try to bribe one of the enemies strongest units take them away from their army and add them to your army now of course you can bribe with spies but similarly to getting a patriot rather than having a general it's just easier to have a patriot and a lot cheaper as well and they're much more powerful so it just makes sense that if you're gonna start bribing do it with your patriot first if you're gonna go down the senator route which a lot of people do we're finally here with the last tip tip number ten and it's such a big one you actually do it before you even go into the game go into the game options and then go into the game tab and you'll see a little section in the top left it's called you know auto citizen and citizen delay now what these do you can first of all select when you have an idle citizen what do they do so they can do nothing or they can construct buildings or they can gather resources or they can do both you definitely want them to do both and then the second one the sliding scale is basically how quickly or how how long do they pause before they actually start doing something for themselves without you telling them what to do and of course you want that to be as soon as possible now more experienced players will know exactly what their citizens are doing they'll be using the shortcuts and hotkeys to ensure they're doing exactly what they want straight away but certainly as a newer player when you're creating citizens you're not really going to be keeping on top of everything but at least if you have it set that they can either build a building or gather resources as soon as possible after they're created you can rest assured that they're gonna be doing something useful pretty quickly it's such an essential tip particularly when you're starting off which is the whole point of this list that i thought i'd put that as number 10. afraid my friends we've reached the end of the video those are my top 10 tips for new and returning players as a new player or when you were a new player which things really helped you develop or which things were the eureka moment that you just found something that really made the game a lot easier for me it's definitely tip number one someone told me oh just press tab and you'll cycle through all the technology it changed my life it was amazing if you liked the video found it useful please hit that like button and do consider subscribing for more rise of nations content and regular live streams feel free to check out the rest of my playlist of rise of nations tutorials i hope to see you soon perhaps in the next video or maybe even one of my live streams but for now long live rise of nations