Age of Empires 2 Tips
Accompany your armies with monks
This one's quite obvious, yet often overlooked. ALWAYS bring monks with your armies, or at least have them waiting in your city. By using these monks to heal your troops, you can save up tons of resources. While this may not be necessary if you have a huge economy, it might just shift a tight game in your favour.
Build duplicate buildings
Recruiting an army of paladins with just one stable will be very long. Creating 50 villagers with one town centre will also be very long. Instead of giving your enemies the time to attack, build several barracks, town centres, archery ranges, etc. Don't be shy when it comes to building, insofar as you have enough wood!
Build several layers of walls
This is especially efficient against feudal and castle age rushes. Walls are inexpensive and efficient. In the early game, they will slow down your enemies enough to give you time to build your own army. So don't limit yourself to just one layer. build SEVERAL.
Collect food from berry bushes, fish and sheep
Most newbies may overlook this, yet, it's possibly the most crucial aspect of advancing to the feudal age quickly. Around your town centre, you will always have at least a few berry bushes, and some sheep (or turkeys). USE THEM! You will save an enormous amount of time and wood.
Explore with your scout cavalry using waypoints
Your scout cavalry is one of the most important tools given to you at the beginning of a game. You'll want to use it a lot to explore, but don't use half of your time controlling your scout! Instead, set waypoints. These are flags that tell the scout where to explore. Every flag you place, your scout will visit it. You can set waypoints by holding down shift and right clicking the places you want your explorer to go, up to a maximum of ten. Once you've set your flags, simply right click somewhere on the map and there goes your scout!
Hold down shift for quicker building
Another time consuming task is placing several duplicate buildings, such as houses. Typically, if you want to create ten houses, then you have to click on the build icon, then on house, and then place the house... ten times. Instead of doing that, click on the building you want to place, hold down shift, and click where you want to place the first house. Continue holding shift and place the second house, and the third... and so on.
Hold down shift for quicker unit creation
If an army of 40 troops means 40 clicks, then you're losing a lot of time. Hold down the shift key when you click to create a unit and instead of creating one at a time, you'll make 5 per click, thus saving a lot of time (or effort).
Hunt boars
Boars are particularly aggressive and dangerous animals in Age of Empires. Hunting them is hard, but indispensable if you wish to evolve to feudal age quickly.
The first thing you will need is at least four villagers. take one of these villagers and shot a boar two times. You will need to shoot him exactlytwo times, because if you shoot only once, the boar will not attack only that villagers. He will either stop following you, or turn to another villager.
Once you've got the boar charging your villager, make him run in circles around the other three. Make these villagers shoot the boar, and continue running to keep your villager alive. In about just a few seconds, the boar should be dead, without any deaths on your side!
Use keyboard shortcuts
Constantly moving your mouse pointer around the screen ca be quite a burden. Instead, become familiar with the most common keyboard shortcuts like: select villager + B + F (build a farm), B (ring town bell), W (back to work), etc.
Also, assign numbers to important buildings and troops using the Ctrl + number command. Per example, if we wanted to give our scout cavalry the number 2, simply select your scout, press Ctrl + 2, and that's it! Now, whenever you press 2, it will select your scout.