Excerpt from this article:

"Age of Empires 2 is a simple but complicated game. There are many secrets that a simple glance at the technology tree doesn’t actually tell you. This article will hopefully expose some things that the tech tree doesn’t tell you. Without further ado I present you with 5 things you may or may not know about AOE2!"

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"Today I want to talk about the market. I've always wondered how the rates change every time you ask your merchants for help to fund your war effort. And since I failed to find anything relevant, I decided to figure it out myself. Actually, in the beginning I intended to title it "How Market Really Works" (!), but I will only cover buying and selling resources here, not the trade carts."

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"Knowing upgrade times of the technologies is a great tool to have. It could improve advancing, attacking, and initializing certain tasks greatly. In AoE knowing that it took 2 minutes to adavnce an age was the deciding factor for manyplayers to either not advance and build a defensive army verse a rush, or to go ahead andadvance, "I have the time." Below are all the times (in "GAME SECONDS")."

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"As we all probably know, Age of Empires II - The Conquerors has four different types of resources that are required to build more units and structures, and research technologies - food, wood, gold and stone. Your civilians (Villagers and Fishing Ships) gather these resources in order to sustain your civilization. Let's give a close examination in each of these individually."

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Excerpt from this article:

"Relics are very useful for gaining an extra gold, and in standard games, collecting all the relics starts a countdown to victory. But standard games are rare, and in conquest game, the most played ones, collecting many relics ensure you a good gold income. Relics are specially useful for the gold dependent civilizations such as the Turks."

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"If your new market is completely finished, then when you delete your old markets, your carts will automatically go to the new market. However, your allies carts will go directly to his or her market and then stand idle, which may block your carts from getting through to trade. So communicate with your ally to keep the gold flowing."

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Excerpt from this article:

"I have completed a test on elevation effects and can report the following:

The amount of elevation advantage has no effect on attack bonuses. An archer will inflict just as much damage shooting at a target just 1 elevation lower as against a target 5 elevations lower."

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Excerpt from this article:

"Age of Kings is a game of military conquest, but beneath those charging armies is a powerful economic engine. Economic strategy is often more important than military strategy. To make the right choices you need to know the real cost of your assets in four economic sections: Pre-Castle (including both Dark and Feudal Ages), Castle, Imperial and Post-Imperial. This article will reveal the real cost of every resource, unit, building and technology in the Pre-Castle Age."

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"With the release of two expert Castle Age strategies featuring Monks (the Sheriff’s SMUSH and Crexis and Methos_ST’s C&M Express), these preacher/healers have suddenly become all the rage. But how exactly do they work? What little is known of how the work comes from the kind posting of Ensemble Studios’ ES_Sandyman on AOKH. This post, combined with players’ anecdotal evidence, has come to form the generally accepted monk theory, and has provided the backbone to most strategic thinking of how monks work."

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Excerpt from this article:

"In AOE and ROR, n builders took T/n time to construct a building where T was the time required for a single builder. When you needed to make several buildings at once, it was often best to have all your builders on one building at a time. The advantage of this was that you could start using buildings before they are all complete while still finishing the last building in the same amount of time as if you had split your builders up."

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"A few days ago MFO Blue sent me MFO's copy of the beta so I could do my unit tests.

Here are the results of my Rate of Fire (ROF) for all TC units with a few of my thoughts added. I apologize if anything is different from this beta and the released game. Soon MFO will come out with complete unit tables like we have for AOK and ROR."

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Excerpt from this article:

"Look here for a sortable table of all the units in the game from all the expansions with a full list of stats! The table also has links to individual unit pages with even more info about each unit."

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