Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my Age of Mythology Retold Fundamentals series. My goal here is to make sure that with the help of these videos, you can go from having zero competitive RTS multiplayer experience to an above-average level of knowledge and skill. So with that in mind, let's tackle the most important thing first, the economy.
To start, I want to demonstrate why you need to care about your economy. Using the Greek civilization in my examples. Whatever your strategy is, you will need to gather resources and buy stuff for resources.
Now this is obvious enough, but there's a huge difference between players that do this correctly and those that don't. This brings us to the first rule of real-time strategy games. More stuff beats less stuff most of the time. Let's assume that the blue player is a bit better with their economy management than the red player. This is how a fight looks like if the blue player has 6 archer units, but red has 5. The 5 survivors can now be part of future fights, creating a huge advantage.
The number of survivors in these fights is exponentially scaling, seeing as every kill they make will reduce incoming damage from the opposition, leading to the bigger army securing more and more kills, while not taking much damage themselves. Let's look at what happens with the bigger difference, let's say 10 vs 7. Now we have 10 survivors. See what I mean? The bigger your lead, the more of the snowball effect you get. Okay, so now we know our goal, but like I said at the start, we need resources.
So how do we make sure that we have more resources than the opposition? The good news is that it's definitely possible, especially at the beginner level. Step 1 is a simple rule.
Constantly create villagers in order to grow your economy. You have no idea how many times I have seen new players just stopping at a handful of villagers, saying, nah, I'm set for life, fam. Let me assure you, you are not set for life, even once you reach the 100 villager limit. You can make this stupidly simple in Age of Mythology. Just enable the setting to automatically train villagers at the start, as well as the one for new town centers.
You can also toggle this automatic training with Alt-Q with default settings. This feature will automatically queue up a villager whenever you have the resources for them. Step 2 is another simple rule.
Always make use of drop sites, placing them close to your target resource. Specifically, you want to be able to wedge your villagers between the target resource, like this gold mine, and the drop site. This way, when the villagers reach their resource carrying limit, They can instantly deposit and you don't need to walk back to your town center.
For food sources, place your drop site in the middle of animal packs or berry bushes, prioritizing huntable animals, then herdables and chickens, and leaving berries and farms for last, given that huntables yield the fastest income rate, while farms are the slowest. In the case of chopping down trees, you should also create a fresh drop site once your villagers have consumed a chunk of the forest. We will optimize this in a future video in an advanced tutorial.
Step 3 is going to be a giant leap, but it is a key element to learn, so please bear with me. It involves thinking mathematically about the economy. If you are truly looking to improve, you will need this to understand the substance behind the pro strategy guides, rather than just robotically following the instructions.
This is a mindset you can apply at the drawing board itself. in order to get a larger economy faster, which will give you the potential for a larger army. Let's look at justifying step 1 from this video as an example. Why do we need constant villager production? Villagers cost 50 food and gather from huntable animals at a rate of 1 food per second.
So in an ideal world, you would pay for their cost in 50 seconds of hunting and everything after that is a net resource gain. that you can spend elsewhere. Of course the ideal world doesn't exist, but we'll talk about optimization in the advanced videos. Anyways, 50 seconds of game time is not that much when looking at the big picture. There is very little room to gain something from not spending the food on villagers.
So let's always bet on a good economy over the YOLO all-in attacks that involve cutting villager training. Let's also do the math around costs and income. Villager production takes 15 seconds each, so dividing the 50 food cost by 15 seconds, we get a 3.33 food per second cost that we need to constantly maintain with our income to ensure constant training.
So with 4 villagers hunting, you have achieved that constant villager production. Your 4 starting villagers have a clear job at the start of the game. Next up, we are going to need a temple in order to advance to the classical age. This will require 150 wood and 150 gold, but we also need two storehouses, one for our wood and another for our gold gathering.
The house is also required on our way to the classical age. Given that classical age costs 400 food, we will want to maximize our food gathering by hunting as much as possible and only gathering the minimal required wood. and gold to build the buildings that we absolutely need, with as few villagers as possible.
What I find to line up very nicely is having the first villager that gets auto-trained on gold, of course building the storehouse immediately, and then the next one on wood, also with the storehouse. Remember to leave just a tiny amount of space between the drop site and the resource, so that your villager can squeeze in. Next villager should join gold, Then the next one goes to wood. From now on, every new villager can join the hunters. Once you have 150 wood and 150 gold, try to immediately build a temple with one of your gold gatherers.
We still don't have enough food at this point and we need more wood as well for a house in a moment, so it's optimal to choose a gold villager for this. Once 50 wood is reached, it's time to build a house with a wood villager. 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the game, the final villager from the Archaic Age has started training.
Make sure to rally this one to gold. Just before this one pops out, cancel auto training without cancelling your villager by either right clicking the icon or pressing Alt Q. Now you can manually tell your hunters to drop off their food, which should get you above 400 food stored. Classical Age clicked, and there you have it, a perfect 2 minute 45 second age up click and in 1 minute you will be in the next age.
Now if you did exactly what I suggested you have 11 villagers on food. This is way too much food income for pretty much anything in the classical age. It would be great to start off the classical age by immediately building two military buildings but that will cost up to 200 wood. We will also need another house So we are looking at a minimum spend of 250 wood, given that we clicked up with roughly 50 wood in the bank. We need 200 more within a minute to hit our goal of 2 buildings upon age up.
That requires an income of 200 wood divided by 60 seconds, or 3.33 wood per second. The gather rate on wood is 1 wood per second. So we have our familiar pattern of needing at least 4 villagers on the job. I would however recommend going for 5, as we could also train our hero while we are aging up, and some small reserves of wood for houses will be needed. Now I could do this all day, but instead I will recruit the comment section.
Let's see if I have taught you anything. How should we distribute the villagers between hunt and gold, if we want to train Hippeus and Hoplite constantly? Here are the stats you need for the calculation.
Hoplites cost 50 food, 40 gold, and train in 12 seconds. Ipeas cost 40 food, 80 gold, and train in 12 seconds. Villagers cost 50 food and train in 15 seconds. Villagers hunt at a rate of 1 food per second, and mine gold at a rate of 0.85 gold per second.
Step 4 is to simply start building your houses before you reach your population cap, or as we put in the community, being housed. When you are housed, unit production stops, which is catastrophic, especially in the early game. No new villagers are joining your economy, which results in reduced income. No new military units are being made, so your army will likely be outnumbered.
While in the early stages, you generally want to build houses one at a time. Generally speaking, you should build the houses the moment the game sends its warnings and flashes your UI. In the later stages of the game, when you are training units from many buildings at once, it's a good idea to build two or three houses simultaneously, as doing it one at a time you would instantly get housed due to all the units popping into existence. And step 5...
The last one for today is scaling up your production and spending the resources effectively. As you get more villagers, your income will grow, and those initial two buildings I asked you to get are no longer spending your income, leaving you with resources in the bank. They are in fact dead weight if you don't do anything with them.
Remember what happened with the bigger and smaller groups fighting earlier in the video? You don't want to be on the losing side of that. So you absolutely have to spend your resources as soon as possible when your income is enough to support additional buildings. Make sure that your villager distribution is appropriate for the type of units you are training.
So if you add several archery ranges, you will need to heavily scale up your wood income. If you want to train more hippeas simultaneously, then a gold-heavy economy will be required, and so on. As you approach the later stages of the game, you will have hopefully scaled up to tons of military production structures, to train more military faster, while having several town centers, maybe even village centers to grow your villager count and thus your income.
As a rule of thumb, this should be done naturally when your resources have built up to a level where you can just afford a town center. But there are specific strategies that focus on getting a town center as early as possible. A bigger economy early on scales faster, and so can result in a much larger army down the line, but this can be vulnerable to early attacks.
Then, there's the matter of economic upgrades, which has the same goal, investing to grow your income. The global economy upgrades are usually small increments, and you're going to want at least 10 villagers on the given resource to buy these. For the second and third levels, the costs are higher, and you will have to make a judgment call about when the time is right to prioritize the eco upgrades over military.
You will have to identify whether the economy or military are playing the bigger role in the given moment. All of these are investments that take time to pay off, but by now, you already know that you can quite easily calculate the break-even points yourself with basic arithmetic and a bit of experimentation to verify it all. There are countless decisions to be made in Age of Mythology and ultimately they are all situational and you will have to react on the fly to what is happening in your game. To build your intuition up will take hundreds if not thousands of games. But now you have a core set of fundamentals to start your journey.
I will of course be back with more of these guides to help you on the way. Feel free to leave a thumbs up if you liked the video and subscribe to be notified of future content. See you in the next one!