And thanks for taking the time to read over this dribble of text.
Hopefully at the end of this post you will be able to play your game with more confidance and a better succes rate against players and the AI. and no longer like this guy:



If you find things missing in this guide, please post them at the bottom, so they can be included here to imporve this guide for all.
All valid input shall be placed with the mentioning of the orginal author.

No matter if you are playing against a AI oponent or against a Player.
Sooner or later you will need units to protect your base from future invations.
Depending on the enemy you will face and the starting resources you picked to play with.
All races start with a different layout, and while the races play different, and different tactics will be used at the start, i shall not cover that here. this is purely about starting up the base.

Decide very quickly what type of unit you want to defend your base with first, it is adviceable to pick a unit you have acces to from the start. So don't aim mounted knights, mounted grand masters or warg raiders for instance, as they would require all 4 resource types to get acces to these units.
- Human - Archer.
- Elf - Female Wardens or Ranger.
- Orc - Maraurders with(or without) Impalers.
These units are just as advice, since once the game loads their respective buildings can be build straight away without having to collect resources first. Setting 2 worker units on building the respected building is a very good idea, and use the 2 remaining workers to collect food and wood. Elven players will need to create a symbiosis tree to get acces to spirits for wood.
Straight away create a couple more workers and start a couple buildings to allow a bigger Population cap. once the houses are build send your idle worker units to get the resources you need.
We do this in this way, because all the listed units have the basic requirement of Food and Wood to be produced. Their for leaving our Stone and Gold untouched. This will help you protect not only your workers, but also defend your base a little better if you are rushed. since you will have a small army when you get assaulted. If playing as human this should also give you enough resources to complete your outerwall(one of the reasons why we don't use gold units at the start).(for humans; this is the point where you send out workers and carts to collect stone and gold with your newly made army units defending them).
Level up your main building we do this for the Card(s) we are using, as a Level 1 main building will give you the unit you requested at level 1, While a level 5 building gives the same units at level 5.
This is not always easy to do, especially not as humans since at this stage a orc player can already be rushing you, preventing you from getting the stone which is needed for the upgrades, And this is where the cards will be your saviour. as the building supplies card is enough to get the human townhall to level 3.

From this point on it's how you whish to play, and will greatly depend on your enemy.
Advice-able is tho to try and put presure on your enemy, Leaving them alone by sticking to sitting inside your walls will fight back at you very quickly.


When we fight against the computer we have 2 big advantages
1. They can't rush, allowing us more time to build up.
2. (at this stage 1.4) The AI is not the brightest lightbulb in the fitting.
You can use the 1v1 advice to build up your town quickly and prepare against the AI.
But it is not required, the AI can attack you within 8minutes but more often comes around 12min into the game(race depending). And you will need to see what race you are fighting against.
and make your "strategy" to match their weaknesses, while covering your weaknesses from it.
If you face a elven AI, its not a bad idea to get bit of cav/blund(impact) weapon units up, as you will be most likely assaulted with ranged units and spear units.
When fighting a orc AI we known that maraurders and impalers are easy for the AI to get, so that is most likely what will be in the first attack group.
Against human AI you will most likely get a little mix group, of archers, swordmen, macemen and halbadiers. having a mixed force yourself(Slash/Impact/Pierce + range) Will quickly give you the upper hand.
For all races its a very good idea to get the walls up, just as a extra layer of protection. depending on your play style(defending or agressive) you can defend inside the walls or outside of the walls if you are more agressive.
When defending, make sure to use the chokepoints you are given.(gates). or if the AI tries its luck on a bit of wall let them destroy that bit of wall and get your units behind that section, to use that as a chokepoint(and this is where it shows the AI is not to smart). since the AI will see the opening and rush all its units towards that opening if their is nothing to fight outside the wall.
Placing your units(Pierce and Slash) in the breach is a good way to slaughter them. Place ranged units behind your melee, and it will be a easy vicotry.

A example of a men made choke point;
2 swordsmen in formation in the gate.
2 halbadiers behind them
2 crossbowmen standing behind the melee to fire point blank volley on anything that comes trough the gate.
2 archers on the towers, that will be ordered to shoot towards the gate.
2 archers behind the crossbowmen who will fire as they please, and delivere extra volley's trough the gate.



From their you can play how you like. as you beat the AI once, you can continue doing so untill the end of time. The AI will always try the same, just make sure you keep expanding your population cap so you can grow allong side of the AI's strenght.

There is a lot of information on the card that may baffle you a bit.
To explain what it shows you i shall use the unit card of a Human archer unit.
Other cards can look different, But the symbols will denote the same thing.


Not shown on this card:
Because i am using a Archer unit as example it does not display the different symbols for the different damage types you can deal, But when selecting the propper unit, the number 6 would change from a spear into:

Keep in mind that the unit cards will update, depending on the unit you are using and what the unit is doing, Melee units will not get the Ranged and Ammunation Symbol for instance.
And the Mage hero unit will use the Stamina bar as Mana bar.

Leveling up your units are a great way to get more "Bang out of your buck".
When we are dealing with normal units they can level as high as 10. and can be maximum produced at 5. Hero units can level as high as 20 and be produced at 5.


These upgrade points we get, we would be very wise indeed to spend them as well. otherwise our unit will not improve enough to be a vetran in our army.
What we spend it on is, different per player and how you plan ahead with your army.
Personally i pick for what their role is going to be.
For instance, if i create a anti-cav unit(level 5), i would get 4 upgrade points, and because it needs to be very strong against cav attacks i useally put 2x Health upgrade, 1x Armor(depending on the cav unit i'm fighting), and the last point will go into 1x Attack.
When i am creating a Archer unit(level 5), i would put 1x Pierce armor protection, 2x range, 1x Attack.

how you apply the points will decide how your army will excel or not in how you use it.
Experimentation to find what you like, and give your units that extra "bang" for "their buck".
A small advice can be given tho. and that is that you need to look at your situation/purpose when creating units of higher level.
If you are fighting against something that is having a lot of ranged weapons, a little more pierce protection will defently not hurt you, While giving your "Hold the line" units. extra Health and better armor is defently a +.

Something most players won't be used to, since most other RTS games cover a lot of this with auto take-over by the AI, taking away tasks from the player.

Here how ever, units are not "Fire and Forget" weapons.
even a numerical supperior force can lose quickly in a fight where you are not micro managing your units.
For instance, 20 Caveliers VS 10 Archers Will lose, if you just click to attack them and then go and do something else, you need to conduct your battles yourself or you will suffer more losses or even defeat in a battle.
To make sure your numerical supperiorety counts, you will need to make sure your Caveliers are devided into groups(2 of 10, 4 of 5, 5 of 4, 10 of 2 etc). we can do this easily by pre-making our groups before the combat(or during combat), by selecting the desired units and using the ctrl + 1 to 0 to create a group, to call out a group we simply push 1 to 0 to get the respective group.

We do this for a number of reasons;
1. If you select all 20 and click to attack, all 20 units will try to move to the same point and clutter up, leaving the other 9(in our example)units basicly untouched.
2. Because they Clutter up it makes your enemy archers more effective. since every arrow will hit something.
3. the enemies 9 units can just walk away and attack something else.
4. 1 of your cav units will be their sooner then the rest. if it suceeds in killing the targe the other 19 units will stop dead in their tracks.
5. Running head first into a group of archers is by far the dummest thing to do.

Now point 5 may seem a bit harsh. but knowing that archers(especially by player controlled). will just get the enfilades up, giving them much more protection against Cav units, and volley straight down into your charching line, giving them not only a almost 100% accuracy, but they will survive longer, and deal a ton more damage on your line.
This is where the S from RTS comes to play. and it is as much part of micro manage as anything else.
You will need to use your Strategic advantage, and micro manage your attack. this can be done easily with real life militaire tactics, and since not all will know them, here are some examples.

Flanking is not hard to do, using our example armies.
We would devide our 20 caveliers into 9 groups.
keeping 14 units for the main charge, and 6 for the flanking.
The 14 we divide in 7 groups(2per group). the 6 we split into 2 groups(3 per group).
While we charge in with our 1 to 7 group we Shift + Right click to attack various units, be sure not to send all 7 groups on the same unit to prevent the unit clutter.(point 1 and 2).
While the groups are charging in a line we use the last the groups to try and flank the enemy line, by either going left or right. and hit the enemy line from the side or rear.

Keep in mind tho, If you make your flanking force to big, Your Flank will become your main line.
But keep your flanking force to small and they are just not effective to create "the shock" you need to decimate your enemy.
Their is no correct size or pre-set value for this, but as a rule of thumb it is always said that a flanking force can never excide 35% of your main army bulk.

A pincer movement is a extention of the flanking movement, the idea behind it to hold the line while your flanking forces close of any way of retreat and push the enemy line into your holding the line units. it is far more complex to manage succesfully. and speed is certainly of the essence here. as waiting to long will see your line being destroyed quickly.

Just as with the Flanking movement, be carefull on how strong you make your Pincer movement. If you make it to strong, the enemy will just turn around and attack your Pincer. Which will result in much higher loses on your side, since they are not ment to hold a line. You can "Correct" the pincer if this happens by indeed using your PIncer force as the main line, and asign the "Hold the line units" to become the Flanking force, and attack the turned around enemies in the rear.
As noted tho, doing this wrong can allow your enemy to escape, and results in higher casualties on your end.

Using your units in this way, rather then just "chucking" them against your enemy will give you a much better succes rate on your units, and lower the amount of vicims you will recieve against a enemy.

Now ofcourse it is not always posible to Flank or Pincer your enemy as natural barriers(mountains, rivers etc) might be present, or even choke points, This is where you will need to be a little creative in your micro manage skills, And use your brain to adapt the tactics in a different form.
I shall use the "Reverse Pincer" as a example.

The Idea, here is to "bait" your enemy out of its strong point. into a more beneficial area for you to fight. The other differance on this movement is, that we not only try to get the enemy out. but we take its previous position, to prevent them the escape and quick reinforcements they might need.
This is a risky movement how ever. as you place your army between 2 fighting fronts.

If your bating is succesfull rather then taking the enemy place, you can also apply a whole series of counter attacks while the enemy is moving into its new spot. giving the Reverse Pincer and more guerilla style of fighting.

Protecting your base can be a pain in the rear lower backside.
The buildings are quite big, and easily exposed to enemy archer fire.
Not to mention that your walls are next to useless if the enemy can scale them without much resistance.
Placing units on the walls are a great way of defending your walls against laders and towers, but if there are a lot of siege works coming towards your walls, your units might not be able to destroy all of the siege units coming to you. to defend your walls you can always resort to real life tactics, that date back from the middle-ages and that is simply to deny acces to the walls for siege units.

Here we can see that the houses would block the towers attachment points, and the only way for the enemy to attack these walls is to destroy the buildings infront of them first.
Note that this is only a delay tactic, it is used to buy you some time so you can get the units on the walls the time you need to destroy the siege weapons. or the few brave(or idiots depending on view point) who where tasked with destroying the buildings.
Now this set-up is very vunerable against archer fire, especially Fire arrow volley's.


Now your walls are not completly useless to help you give some cover.
It is how ever much harder to do since it depends a lot on the angle of attack and from where your enemy is attacking.

in this example you can see that the houses are as close as they can be against the wall.
This will give the houses aditional protection from anything coming from the right side flank.
Due to the height, and the building being lower then the wall. the enemy archers need to fire at a short range at a high angle(volley). to be effective against these buildings. if the enemy would use a long range volley the angle of the arrows changes and about 50 to 60%(in my experiance) of the arrows will bounce off the walls, and not hit the building. Ofc, since these are houses, 40 to 50% is enough to set it on fire and let the fire spread quickly. you can prevent the fires from spreading a bit, by placing workers between the houses. that way the wild fires will be put out, while the building burns.
But due to about 50 to 60% of the arrows having missed their target. the building took less damage, and most-likely will not burn down to the ground.
As said the protection is only limited, since if the enemy would come of the left, top or bottom flanks, these buildings would just be sitting ducks.

Never the less, the wall system can be used this way for buildings and units to hide from enemy volley fire. as long as you place it correctly against the angle and flank of attack.

If you are forced into a defending spot. make sure your base is a mess in the parts where the enemy needs to advance. And keep your area clean and open.
This will create a load of chokepoints and issues for the attacker to deal with, not to mention that to get siege weapons on the desired spot a lot of time will need to be spend to free the way, which buys time for you to defend your city/castle against your enemy.

In this area it will be next to imposible for your enemy to manouvre effectivly. which will not only delay him more, it will also make it almost imposible to give the corect movement order, since the buildings are in the way. forcing the enemy almost to just clutter the units against the wall. Or to play it safe and stick back while the buildings are being destroyed. this ofc. still buys you time to volley/shoot at your enemy outside of the walls.