Once all your settings are in place, I strongly recommend watching the video tutorial to guide you through your first game. This will help you understand how to apply the concepts you’ve learned and improve your gameplay.

As a first step we will focus on getting good in the dark age and improve our mechanics. That’s why I want you to focus on one strategy only so decision making isn’t important yet. Improving at the execution will be the key for you to be able to execute anything you learn. Imagine watching a tutorial and not being able to do it yourself. You know it but your hands can’t follow. Well it’s going to happen and it happens to everyone who plays this game.

To get rid of that feeling I strongly recommend you to book a coaching session, in 1h I will manage to make you much stronger at multitasking and not feel overwhelmed in your games. From practicing my coaching drills and advice you will realize that you too can become a really strong player.

As a first build order let’s focus on “scout rush” on the common map arabia. We will use the magyars which is the best beginner civ to improve as it has no eco bonus (you don’t want to get used to any bonus) but one of the strongest rush in the game and almost all units available in the tech tree. The goal is to click feudal at 20 villagers having close to no idle time in the town center and with good efficiency.

20 villagers is a good start and a good strategy so don’t try to copy the pros going for 17 villagers uptime. What is really important here is for you to understand why we do things and if it makes sense to you it will be so much easier to remember.

Remember to practice against the AI so you can pause after each time to focus on the next one, note your feudal age time after each try and consider the practice as a challenge to beat your previous personal record. A perfect feudal age time is between 9:42 and 10:00

Here is the build order:

 

All dark age takes in consideration making houses in time and creating villagers constantly, more details in the video

  • Create villagers using your hotkeys and make 2 houses with your starting villagers
  • Bring the sheep under your town center to start collecting food as fast as possible

Now every goal should be followed step by step, watch the video for more details but keep in mind it’s all about knowing your goals at each step of the dark age:

  • In order to create villagers constantly have 6 villagers on the sheep 

Our goal is to click feudal age quite quickly so we need 500 food and 2 dark age buildings (lumber camp and mill on berries), in order to do that we need:

  • next 3 villagers to wood next to a lumber camp
  • all the new villagers on food until we click feudal (21 villagers)
  • Remember to make a mill on berries

That food is going to be “sheep”, “boars” and “berries” (don’t go for the deers), the only rule is to ALWAYS have food available under your town center and have constantly working villagers, the order isn’t the most important but having a guideline can still be cool.

Good job you managed to click to feudal age now you need a barrack and a stable soon so let’s focus on collecting wood : 

  • Have 9 lumberjacks around the camp (+6)

That’s basically all the wood you need for now so the other villagers will stay on food for now to produce scouts after.

To make the stable instantly in feudal age (remember it’s a “rush”): 

  • Start building the barrack around mid feudal age transition (60% maximum) 

Once in feudal age:

  • Make a stable to create scouts, get the lumber camp upgrade and mill upgrade.
  • Your new villagers will go on the stragglers trees waiting to get the wood to make farms, trying to build them as early as possible. 

You probably didn’t know where to send your villagers who finished the sheep, right ? In ANY build order they belong on future farms so they should collect the straggler trees until then.

There are so many things to do and remember in feudal age so see the game as a song, here is mine 

“Villagers, farms, scouts, Villagers farms, scouts…” and houses (but this we all forget so no worries).

Following the previous advice it’s your turn to put in practice the “what do I want to do now?” -> “What’s the cost?” to balance your eco properly to reach the castle age and make knights after your scout rush. Keep focusing on the dark age again and again but still good luck for the rest. 

If you have any question about the build order you can ask on my discord, there are many people there to answer quickly.