Today I got my first multiplayer win in Age of Empires 2, at least in DE. That game is so fuckin hard, dude. I was a big "sim city" player of AoE when I was young, I just liked to vibe and build nice towns and look at the cool architecture and units. I always had a kind of chip on my shoulder about competitive rts playstyles and how they really broke how you could daydream with them, but recently I'd started watching T90 casts of games, particularly low elo games, again and picked up the definitive edition just to see if I could hack it - plus some nostalgia and to maybe actually beat the campaigns instead of just using cheats to watch the intros and outros to missions.

It was a fair bit of work to learn how to play. I lost my first handful of games pretty handily. Even prepping by learning the basic build order and doing some single player practice (plus some of the very handy Sun Tzu campaign, which specifically teaches how to play multiplayer), I was overwhelmed a lot of the time playing. It's not Starcraft, but you do need to keep your APM up and do a lot of multitasking.

So anyway, after a while of feeling discouraged from the game from my initial losses, today I felt like I wanted to take another crack at it. After a single player warmup, I picked the Franks and did my best to relax and not worry about little mistakes and idle time, just keep playing and try to hit castle quickly and then hit my opponent with knights. It wasn't a very complete or creative strategy, but it was a strategy with a plan for victory: be able to hit their eco before they were entrenched and I had to worry about siege and more counters.

We seemed to be on even pace during the initial stages. I'll spare all the details; suffice to say my opponent rushed me, I think it was scouts, and I had to really play on the fly to respond. I was able to pop out some spearmen and get a stable up for scouts of my own, but they slapped down a tower on my gold. From there on it was fucking on. I felt like I was fucked, I had to shift around my miners, deal with the tower, deal with his scouts and infantry popping over to my woodline, then my second gold, then another tower . . . etc. It was intense. My eco was hurting, even though I kept repelling his raids, sometimes with villagers even. I had to leave soon, I thought about resigning, but I kept going. I'm glad I did.

It was still a lot of juggling vils and repelling raids when I got to castle age, but I did manage to start churning out knights consistently. Through some struggle, I got to the point where I had a second stable and at least most of the cav upgrades. I think it was around this time that I managed to really take the fight to my opponent. They had a better wall than I had, but it had a gap (and and end I used later, I think). They tried to quick wall their woodline, but there was a gap - and the knights got in. Between that and general eco harassment, I started to claw back my belief in victory.

They had been good at raiding, but they weren't prepared to defend against my knights. I ended up keeping their vils cooped up in the town center a lot, managed to take down their monastery and, with some luck, had monks ready to snipe their relics. This helped, probably, since gold was my bottleneck from the raids. Actually might have been around this point I got the second stable working and finished upgrades, idk.

This kept up for a bit. They did some counter-raiding I think, but I still had some pikes left at home and could rapid response with cav. But what it all came down to was they pushed with a bunch of vils and tried to drop a castle right next to my first TC. (I think I had just barely got a second up at some point.) It was scary, I didn't quite have enough troops to take out the vils fast enough, but luckily they were within range of the TC itself and I just garrisoned. And that was it. I arrowed down enough builders and my opponent resigned.

fuckin' GG.