databug
08-27-2004, 10:49 PM
I guess this will sit well in this section of the forums. Maybe not, moderators can decide.
Alright, I like AoM a lot, as well as Warcraft 3. But I dumped WC3 for AoM a year ago and haven't looked back. So for those who have it, here's some hints, that you can use playing a random map against the AI bots, or even online against human players. Now if some of these hints don't work well against human players? Don't yell at me! I can only tell what *I* personally do in the game. This is NOT a complete guide! This is a vague guide and doesn't go into detail about each race and strategies for each! These are general universal strategies only, that apply to all races in the game.
Part 1 - What to build first.
I will assume you have the TITANS expansion, if not, get it. It adds the new ATLANTEAN race to the game, and Titans of course. Alright, first thing is first. No matter what race you play as, always build a TEMPLE first. The building that you train myth units at. You'll find the game MAKES you build certain things first lest you cannot advance in the 'ages' in the game. So build the temple.
For every race, send out ALL of your workers! The vikings get an edge, because their troops build the town up, and the workers do the labor, where as the other 3 races, their workers do everything. Go ahead and send workers to build a temple if you use any race but viking. If you use vikings, let that one soldier build the temple, and send the workers out.
Send workers to FOOD first! Do NOT slaughter cows or pigs or goat! Let them sit around 15 mins or so, they fatten up and produce more food. Go for chickens, berry bushes, or deer or other animals walking around. Build your food stores to 400, and UPGRADE your town center to the next age.
What about relics? Don't scout for any until age 2, trust me. Because during age 1 for any race, you won't have a HERO yet to carry the relic. You can upgrade a couple races in age 1 to get relics, but the time it takes to build up 'prayer' to the gods to be able to upgrade a unit TO carry relics... takes longer than it does to just get to age 2 ASAP. Wait till age 2, then scope for relics. Each temple holds 5 relics max. Build more temples if you find more than 5 relics.
After you hit the second age, you need to build TWO HOUSES to get ready to populate your town with some troops, in case a rusher rushes you early on. Get the houses built, and of course buy new workers at the town center, which costs FOOD to do. For vikings, pop out the Ulfsarks at the town center to build.
When you got 2 houses up, and put them near the town center I suggest as protection FOR the town center, try to put 2 workers to gathering food, and 3-4 to wood, and 3 to gold. This isn't a rusher technique, this is more of a defensive 'get ready to defend' technique. I defend first, I don't rush people. An early defense can usually last you longer than rushing to get weak troops out anyhow.
After you get 2 houses up, and are working on gathering, you need to build an ARMORY. Build that next. Now, to upgrade to age 3, I believe it takes 800 food and 600 gold, if I recall. Shift your labor! Work on what is needed to get to age 3! Then, upgrade the town center to age 3. Now you can relax a little, and all of this will have taken, if you shift labor right, 15 mins max. By then you will see a little rogue enemy party of no more than 4-6 WEAK troops knock at your door.
Don't worry about walls or guard towers yet! Don't worry about age 4, the mythical age yet either. That costs 1000 food and gold.
Now while in age 2, YES build a barracks! I would not suggest pumping out more than 4 troops max, cheap ones. They can stave off little attacks as you build, but don't think 4 troops are going to go to an enemy town and damage his workers! You'd need triple that in age 2 to even hurt the enemy town centers. If you do decide to rush and build cheap troops in age 2, at least when ya get to their town center? Kill their workers and take their farms out. Forget their guard towers or town center, hit their ECONOMY. Plus, send a scout out, 1 troop or 2 at least in age 3, to find if they've set up a MARKET, in which they get more money from. Knock it out! If you're playing against the AI bots, the bots ALWAYS BUILD their markets at the corners of the maps, ALWAYS! Go knock them out, and leave 3 troops at each corner of the map, so the AI bots cannot do it again and build more markets there. That will SERIOUSLY hurt AI economy early on.
So.. review: age 1, gather resources and get the temple up. age 2, get up 2 houses, walls if ya want, a few towers, focus on food and gold, get a barracks up and an armory. age 3, get the market up, more towers, max the houses out, get about 6 troops out and use the armory to upgrade them. do NOT sit and make 20 troops, and not be able to afford upgrades! 6 upgraded soldiers hurt more than 12 non-upgraded soldiers, believe me. also in age 3, spit a couple myth units out. have your wood workers FAR AWAY at a corner of the map getting wood, same for gold. i keep food gathers at the town most of the time, i use them to build with and all.
Part 2 - What to do in between building.
Alright, have 2 houses up during age 2, and try to max out all your houses you can build in age 3. Paranoid? Upgrade your towers during age 2. If you have the resources, max the towers during age 3. Well, max them as in, as far as it lets you FOR age 3. Age 4 lets you finally max the towers out totally.
During age 3, I personally go build 2 more town centers. Gives more population of course, and helps in case your main town center is knocked out. Here's a hint I learned the hard way - don't just build a few more town centers and leave'em there all alone. Expand! If your FIRST town center has walls, and barracks and a temple and all that... build the identical stuff for the second town center ya build. And also for the third and so on. It's common sense: if your main TC gets hit, forcing your workers to retreat to another TC you built a while ago.... you're losing time migrating to the new TC right? When ya get there, wont be any temple, or farms, or towers, or barracks or nothin! Leaving YOU sort of "starting over again" in a way, having to stop and hurry and build up a new town. So build up new town centers every time ya make one. I've seen too many people not do this and die early. Now if you have built 5 or 6 town centers, ya dont gotta build up each of them, but I would build up THREE. See, the enemy will kill the first one, and see that you didnt leave the game cuz ya got wiped out. He'll know another TC of your's is out there! He'll go look for it almost INSTANTLY. So let him. The second TC is stocked and ready, and so is a THIRD one. So while he's fiddle farting off knocking out TC #2 of your's... you still got #3 and can work on a #4, AND go damage his town while all his troops are playing "genocide" at your first and second town centers. Make sense? Always consider your first AND second town centers, your decoy towns. Expendable.
Me, I build walls during age 2. Nothing big. Walls cost 3 gold per 'wall' section, and I wall off the front, and 2 sides. I leave the rear of my village open some times, because walls take a while to build, and you don't want tons of labor building walls when they can be getting gold, wood and food, right?
If you have 2 spare workers, put one on walls. Put the other, on making towers behind the walls naturally, inside your village area. Also, a good idea while building towers in ages 2 and 3, is to build at LEAST 4 very close to the town center! Why? You'll thank me when someone uses a certain god power on your town, that makes it snow and makes the wolves attack LOL, and those lil wolves are mean and can take buildings down, and towers, quickly. Anytime you see it "begin to snow" just go to your town center, ring the bell and call all the workers in for safety. When the wolves are gone, ring the bell and send'em back out.
Now, while you're building up during age 2, you're going to have enemy scouts poke around. They don't attack, even human scouts don't attack, they know they'd get killed by your town center's arrows it spits out. If a scout, like an egyptian priest, builds a watch tower (not a guard tower) near your town, so his village can have line of sight to pin point your town? Go knock the stupid watch tower structure out! You don't need the enemy seeing what you're doing, even if he/she knows where your town is by now.
Playing with humans is funny, because you can bluff. Online, 2 humans vs. 2 humans, you can send a global message in the game to all, and bluff... and say "ok im ready to go find them" and then wait 5 seconds, and type in "oops they saw that" and play it off. Half the time, the enemy team gets paranoid and begins to wall up or build towers LOL, leaving you in the clear with 10 or 15 more mins, to keep building up YOUR army. Pretty sneaky, it works now and then.
Part 3 - Ok so when do you attack?
Oh you can whittle down the enemy at any time! I don't advise a hard core rush until age 3 however. During age 1, ya can't do jack. During age 2, you can scout and catch enemy workers off guard and kill'em off in forests. During age 3, you can upgrade soldiers and actually go damage their markets, their farms, set up ambushes as well.
During age 3 and even 4, you can seriously screw your enemies over, by attacking just their temples. Not only do they lose their means to pop out powerful myth units, but they also will spit out all relics the enemy enshrined in the temples! If you can wing it, and knock a temple out and don't mind losing 8 soldiers... send in 8 soldiers, plus 5 extra (with hero attributes that is) to SNATCH the enemy's relics as soon as your 8 dudes knock down the enemy temple. Now, let the heroes return the relics to YOUR temples! Leave those 8 guys to fight, and of course die. They can be replaced, and the new relics you attain will give you all kinds of great extra boosts for soldiers and your town as well. This is a risky tactic but can work more than half the time.
Part 4 - I want a Titan!
Ok, well some people want to rush to build that Titan. I don't. Now, if an enemy starts building a Titan chamber to release one? I get worried LOL. You got 2 options:
Rush to build that first Titan.......
Or wait a bit, build resources and when you see the enemy building one? Go rush the punk and knock the Titan building structure totally out! He will not be able to start a new one, cuz ya only get 1 shot to build it anyhow. If you can prevent the enemy from getting a Titan chamber going, and YOU get one going and get it 50% completed? Chances are, that enemy is basically gonna be dead. Sic all the workers ya got on the Titan chamber to build it ASAP, and release the sucker and sic him on the enemy town center. Don't even worry if your town gets attacked while your Titan is hitting an enemy town. Your Titan can smash their town center, barracks and temple and leave the enemy basically holding onto bread and water so to speak LOL.
Part 5 - ALL is fair in love AND war!
Finally... practice alone. Play on EASY difficulty, and play 2 AI bots against you. It'll be a cinch to win. Then, try 3 Ai bots, on easy mode, against you. Bit harder, game may take almost 2 hours to finish.
What about water and ships? Ehh, I usually build walls RIGHT on the edge of an island map I'm on haha, so the enemy cannot land and deploy soldiers to knock you out. If on an island, get to a new one asap and make new towns, all I can offer, and have a hella lot of water myth units docked at each island where a town center is you might have.
Then, try 2 on 2. You and a bot, vs. 2 other AI bots on MODERATE difficulty. Then, try you and one bot, on 3 other AI bots. Finally? If you're ballsy? Try YOU alone on one AI enemy, on the TITAN difficulty! It can really piss you off too LOL you'd swear the pc was cheating, but it just knows what to do precisely.
Also, at the main menu, use the RECORD GAME feature, turn it on. Record a game and see what YOU did wrong, and what the enemy might have done RIGHT. Copy-cat the enemy's moves and expand on their strategy.
Or if you're a punk, make your own map. Set traps up, memorize the map, get online, play people with it, and you'll win most times LOL. It's a sneaky thing to do, I did it alot in WC3. I'd let people play on my map against me and a friend ya know... and I'd have hidden huge purple spiders trapped in a forest area by my base, so when the enemy came to knock that forest down to get to me? Ooops! 10 spiders came out LOLOL. It was cheap to do but funny. If you make a map of your own to set traps in... use the MIST object a lot in forests, and hide MEDUSAS all in the mist hahaha. Horrible way for enemy troops to die - walking down a misty forest path, looking for you.. and oops! They just ran into 20 medusa! Naturally they DIE, leaving you free reign to go attack their town using a secret lil hidden route only YOU know of, since YOU designed the map ;)
Alright, I like AoM a lot, as well as Warcraft 3. But I dumped WC3 for AoM a year ago and haven't looked back. So for those who have it, here's some hints, that you can use playing a random map against the AI bots, or even online against human players. Now if some of these hints don't work well against human players? Don't yell at me! I can only tell what *I* personally do in the game. This is NOT a complete guide! This is a vague guide and doesn't go into detail about each race and strategies for each! These are general universal strategies only, that apply to all races in the game.
Part 1 - What to build first.
I will assume you have the TITANS expansion, if not, get it. It adds the new ATLANTEAN race to the game, and Titans of course. Alright, first thing is first. No matter what race you play as, always build a TEMPLE first. The building that you train myth units at. You'll find the game MAKES you build certain things first lest you cannot advance in the 'ages' in the game. So build the temple.
For every race, send out ALL of your workers! The vikings get an edge, because their troops build the town up, and the workers do the labor, where as the other 3 races, their workers do everything. Go ahead and send workers to build a temple if you use any race but viking. If you use vikings, let that one soldier build the temple, and send the workers out.
Send workers to FOOD first! Do NOT slaughter cows or pigs or goat! Let them sit around 15 mins or so, they fatten up and produce more food. Go for chickens, berry bushes, or deer or other animals walking around. Build your food stores to 400, and UPGRADE your town center to the next age.
What about relics? Don't scout for any until age 2, trust me. Because during age 1 for any race, you won't have a HERO yet to carry the relic. You can upgrade a couple races in age 1 to get relics, but the time it takes to build up 'prayer' to the gods to be able to upgrade a unit TO carry relics... takes longer than it does to just get to age 2 ASAP. Wait till age 2, then scope for relics. Each temple holds 5 relics max. Build more temples if you find more than 5 relics.
After you hit the second age, you need to build TWO HOUSES to get ready to populate your town with some troops, in case a rusher rushes you early on. Get the houses built, and of course buy new workers at the town center, which costs FOOD to do. For vikings, pop out the Ulfsarks at the town center to build.
When you got 2 houses up, and put them near the town center I suggest as protection FOR the town center, try to put 2 workers to gathering food, and 3-4 to wood, and 3 to gold. This isn't a rusher technique, this is more of a defensive 'get ready to defend' technique. I defend first, I don't rush people. An early defense can usually last you longer than rushing to get weak troops out anyhow.
After you get 2 houses up, and are working on gathering, you need to build an ARMORY. Build that next. Now, to upgrade to age 3, I believe it takes 800 food and 600 gold, if I recall. Shift your labor! Work on what is needed to get to age 3! Then, upgrade the town center to age 3. Now you can relax a little, and all of this will have taken, if you shift labor right, 15 mins max. By then you will see a little rogue enemy party of no more than 4-6 WEAK troops knock at your door.
Don't worry about walls or guard towers yet! Don't worry about age 4, the mythical age yet either. That costs 1000 food and gold.
Now while in age 2, YES build a barracks! I would not suggest pumping out more than 4 troops max, cheap ones. They can stave off little attacks as you build, but don't think 4 troops are going to go to an enemy town and damage his workers! You'd need triple that in age 2 to even hurt the enemy town centers. If you do decide to rush and build cheap troops in age 2, at least when ya get to their town center? Kill their workers and take their farms out. Forget their guard towers or town center, hit their ECONOMY. Plus, send a scout out, 1 troop or 2 at least in age 3, to find if they've set up a MARKET, in which they get more money from. Knock it out! If you're playing against the AI bots, the bots ALWAYS BUILD their markets at the corners of the maps, ALWAYS! Go knock them out, and leave 3 troops at each corner of the map, so the AI bots cannot do it again and build more markets there. That will SERIOUSLY hurt AI economy early on.
So.. review: age 1, gather resources and get the temple up. age 2, get up 2 houses, walls if ya want, a few towers, focus on food and gold, get a barracks up and an armory. age 3, get the market up, more towers, max the houses out, get about 6 troops out and use the armory to upgrade them. do NOT sit and make 20 troops, and not be able to afford upgrades! 6 upgraded soldiers hurt more than 12 non-upgraded soldiers, believe me. also in age 3, spit a couple myth units out. have your wood workers FAR AWAY at a corner of the map getting wood, same for gold. i keep food gathers at the town most of the time, i use them to build with and all.
Part 2 - What to do in between building.
Alright, have 2 houses up during age 2, and try to max out all your houses you can build in age 3. Paranoid? Upgrade your towers during age 2. If you have the resources, max the towers during age 3. Well, max them as in, as far as it lets you FOR age 3. Age 4 lets you finally max the towers out totally.
During age 3, I personally go build 2 more town centers. Gives more population of course, and helps in case your main town center is knocked out. Here's a hint I learned the hard way - don't just build a few more town centers and leave'em there all alone. Expand! If your FIRST town center has walls, and barracks and a temple and all that... build the identical stuff for the second town center ya build. And also for the third and so on. It's common sense: if your main TC gets hit, forcing your workers to retreat to another TC you built a while ago.... you're losing time migrating to the new TC right? When ya get there, wont be any temple, or farms, or towers, or barracks or nothin! Leaving YOU sort of "starting over again" in a way, having to stop and hurry and build up a new town. So build up new town centers every time ya make one. I've seen too many people not do this and die early. Now if you have built 5 or 6 town centers, ya dont gotta build up each of them, but I would build up THREE. See, the enemy will kill the first one, and see that you didnt leave the game cuz ya got wiped out. He'll know another TC of your's is out there! He'll go look for it almost INSTANTLY. So let him. The second TC is stocked and ready, and so is a THIRD one. So while he's fiddle farting off knocking out TC #2 of your's... you still got #3 and can work on a #4, AND go damage his town while all his troops are playing "genocide" at your first and second town centers. Make sense? Always consider your first AND second town centers, your decoy towns. Expendable.
Me, I build walls during age 2. Nothing big. Walls cost 3 gold per 'wall' section, and I wall off the front, and 2 sides. I leave the rear of my village open some times, because walls take a while to build, and you don't want tons of labor building walls when they can be getting gold, wood and food, right?
If you have 2 spare workers, put one on walls. Put the other, on making towers behind the walls naturally, inside your village area. Also, a good idea while building towers in ages 2 and 3, is to build at LEAST 4 very close to the town center! Why? You'll thank me when someone uses a certain god power on your town, that makes it snow and makes the wolves attack LOL, and those lil wolves are mean and can take buildings down, and towers, quickly. Anytime you see it "begin to snow" just go to your town center, ring the bell and call all the workers in for safety. When the wolves are gone, ring the bell and send'em back out.
Now, while you're building up during age 2, you're going to have enemy scouts poke around. They don't attack, even human scouts don't attack, they know they'd get killed by your town center's arrows it spits out. If a scout, like an egyptian priest, builds a watch tower (not a guard tower) near your town, so his village can have line of sight to pin point your town? Go knock the stupid watch tower structure out! You don't need the enemy seeing what you're doing, even if he/she knows where your town is by now.
Playing with humans is funny, because you can bluff. Online, 2 humans vs. 2 humans, you can send a global message in the game to all, and bluff... and say "ok im ready to go find them" and then wait 5 seconds, and type in "oops they saw that" and play it off. Half the time, the enemy team gets paranoid and begins to wall up or build towers LOL, leaving you in the clear with 10 or 15 more mins, to keep building up YOUR army. Pretty sneaky, it works now and then.
Part 3 - Ok so when do you attack?
Oh you can whittle down the enemy at any time! I don't advise a hard core rush until age 3 however. During age 1, ya can't do jack. During age 2, you can scout and catch enemy workers off guard and kill'em off in forests. During age 3, you can upgrade soldiers and actually go damage their markets, their farms, set up ambushes as well.
During age 3 and even 4, you can seriously screw your enemies over, by attacking just their temples. Not only do they lose their means to pop out powerful myth units, but they also will spit out all relics the enemy enshrined in the temples! If you can wing it, and knock a temple out and don't mind losing 8 soldiers... send in 8 soldiers, plus 5 extra (with hero attributes that is) to SNATCH the enemy's relics as soon as your 8 dudes knock down the enemy temple. Now, let the heroes return the relics to YOUR temples! Leave those 8 guys to fight, and of course die. They can be replaced, and the new relics you attain will give you all kinds of great extra boosts for soldiers and your town as well. This is a risky tactic but can work more than half the time.
Part 4 - I want a Titan!
Ok, well some people want to rush to build that Titan. I don't. Now, if an enemy starts building a Titan chamber to release one? I get worried LOL. You got 2 options:
Rush to build that first Titan.......
Or wait a bit, build resources and when you see the enemy building one? Go rush the punk and knock the Titan building structure totally out! He will not be able to start a new one, cuz ya only get 1 shot to build it anyhow. If you can prevent the enemy from getting a Titan chamber going, and YOU get one going and get it 50% completed? Chances are, that enemy is basically gonna be dead. Sic all the workers ya got on the Titan chamber to build it ASAP, and release the sucker and sic him on the enemy town center. Don't even worry if your town gets attacked while your Titan is hitting an enemy town. Your Titan can smash their town center, barracks and temple and leave the enemy basically holding onto bread and water so to speak LOL.
Part 5 - ALL is fair in love AND war!
Finally... practice alone. Play on EASY difficulty, and play 2 AI bots against you. It'll be a cinch to win. Then, try 3 Ai bots, on easy mode, against you. Bit harder, game may take almost 2 hours to finish.
What about water and ships? Ehh, I usually build walls RIGHT on the edge of an island map I'm on haha, so the enemy cannot land and deploy soldiers to knock you out. If on an island, get to a new one asap and make new towns, all I can offer, and have a hella lot of water myth units docked at each island where a town center is you might have.
Then, try 2 on 2. You and a bot, vs. 2 other AI bots on MODERATE difficulty. Then, try you and one bot, on 3 other AI bots. Finally? If you're ballsy? Try YOU alone on one AI enemy, on the TITAN difficulty! It can really piss you off too LOL you'd swear the pc was cheating, but it just knows what to do precisely.
Also, at the main menu, use the RECORD GAME feature, turn it on. Record a game and see what YOU did wrong, and what the enemy might have done RIGHT. Copy-cat the enemy's moves and expand on their strategy.
Or if you're a punk, make your own map. Set traps up, memorize the map, get online, play people with it, and you'll win most times LOL. It's a sneaky thing to do, I did it alot in WC3. I'd let people play on my map against me and a friend ya know... and I'd have hidden huge purple spiders trapped in a forest area by my base, so when the enemy came to knock that forest down to get to me? Ooops! 10 spiders came out LOLOL. It was cheap to do but funny. If you make a map of your own to set traps in... use the MIST object a lot in forests, and hide MEDUSAS all in the mist hahaha. Horrible way for enemy troops to die - walking down a misty forest path, looking for you.. and oops! They just ran into 20 medusa! Naturally they DIE, leaving you free reign to go attack their town using a secret lil hidden route only YOU know of, since YOU designed the map ;)