Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Guide – Winning Conditions, Conquest, Beginners Tips And Tricks

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Guide to help you learn everything you need to know about getting started with the newly released Definitive Edition of Age of Empires.

Here we have curated a nifty Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Guide that will help you remind all the mechanics of the game or if you are a new player to the series, give you a brief overview of what to expect when you enter the world of Age of Empires.

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Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Guide

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is now out and it looks beautiful as ever. We are very excited for this remaster as it brings back so many memories of our childhood spent of advancing through different ages. It has been such a long time since we played the original title that we think it is time for a small reminder to all the basic mechanics and elements of the game.

Below you will find some detailed guides to all-important mechanics of Age of Empire Definitive Edition. These will help you get on the right track of building your empire and owning the competition in no time.

Starting A Game

As soon as you start the game, you are presented with a number of different game modes including single-player, campaign and multiplayer. You can pick any of the modes. The basic method of playing the game is same for all different modes.

You start with picking up one civilization out of 16. Each civilization has a rich culture and they come with unique units and powers. This also means that each civilization also has its own weaknesses, which can be exploited by the enemy.

After choosing a civilization, you can pick a team and check addition host settings if you are playing an online game in the additional settings tab.

When you click ‘I’m Ready’, the game starts. At first, check your initial resources. Your growth depends on these resources. You will notice that you get three villagers right at the start but they are not enough. You must start training more villagers and this process must never end until you have a steady workforce.

After queuing up villagers, you will be required to build houses where these villagers can stay. You cannot build more villagers until you have enough houses. Each house will increase your maximum unit limit by four. This is not much so it means that you will be required to build more houses continuously.

The next thing you must focus on is food. Food is vital for your empire. Food dictates how many villagers you can train and how much can you advance age wise. Build as many food-collecting structures as you can. Assign villagers to them and your food supply will become in motion. Different options are spread in the map for food such as Berries, fish, elephants and gazelle.

Avail as many options as possible for food. After food, you can start focusing on other resources such as stone, wood and gold. To speed up the resource gathering process, you can build storage pits near these resource structures so that the villagers can drop the resources there.

Apart from that, steadily expand your empire and start building up an army to defend your empire.

Important Mechanics

While playing the game, there are certain mechanics that you must keep an eye on and make sure that you have a good knowledge about maintaining them. These include Resources, Age, Villagers and Military.

Coming to resources, resources are the basic building materials for your civilization as well as basic requirements of your villagers and armies. You will need to collect different sorts of resources in the game such as wood, stone, gold and food.

You will not be able to do much if you do not have enough of these resources in your hand. You must focus on constructing as many resource collection structures as possible. Everything you build in Age of Empires: Definitive Edition requires resources.

The next thing to focus on is your current age. Age dictates your current progress level. You can only build structures and units belonging to that certain era. To build more advanced units, technologies and structures, you must first advance to the next age. Each age will unlock more advanced and better units and structures for you to build.

Each age will cost you certain amount of resources to advance so make sure that your resource collection is efficient and you are not spending all your reserves on useless things. The next element that we are going to discuss is also the most important element of Age of Empire Definitive Edition.

You should try to advance your age as quickly as possible because age advancement is vital for success in Age of Empires: Definitive Edition. If you lack behind the age, chances are that you will not survive for a long time, as the enemies will defeat you easily with advanced technology.

Villagers are your most important assets. Although fragile, they can do miracles. They will build your structures, expand your base and collect resources. It is vital that you maintain a healthy force of workers and protect them from enemy invaders. Any empire can be crippled if their villagers are killed.

The last important element of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is military. You cannot survive on the map without a good military. You must build and sustain a diverse military capable of pushing back enemies of any caliber. They must not focus around one or two units. They must be as diverse as diverse as different units are efficient in certain situations.

Understanding Winning Conditions

Winning in Age of Empires can be achieved by different methods. Instead of a single winning condition, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition gives you a variety of options by which you can win. These winning conditions relate to different sorts of first person shooter modes as well.

The first way to win in Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is by Conquest. To win by this way, you must destroy all enemy presence from the map. This includes all units and buildings. This is the most basic way of winning the game and does not require you to reach certain goals. You can eliminate your enemies as quickly as possible and you will be the winner.

The second way to win is by Ruins/Artifacts. There are a certain number of ruins and artifacts in every Age of Empires: Definitive Edition game. To meet the criteria of winning by this mode, you must find and collect all the artifacts/ruins in the map and hold them for 2000 in-game years.

This is a very tedious task and it will take a long time. In addition, during this time, your enemy will be continuously try to steal them from you. So you will be required to protect them as well. This gives us vibes of the game mode Capture the Flag from FPS games but here; you must capture and retain all flags for 2000 in0game years.

The last way by which you can win is by building a Wonder and maintaining it for 2000 in-game years. This again is hard to achieve because the Wonders cost a lot of gold and resources to build. After that, you also need to protect it from the enemies for 2,000 years.

We recommend that you opt for the Conquest, as it is the easiest of all the available options to win.

This concludes our Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Guide. If you want to add anything to this guide, feel free to use the comments section below!

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Ali is a passionate RPG gamer. He believes that western RPGs still have a lot to learn from JRPGs. He is editor-in-chief at SegmentNext.com but that doesn't stop him from writing about his favorite video ...