I consider the first two minutes to be the most important time in AoE. The goal is simple: get a food supply going fast enough to allow your town center to continue pumping out villagers. Every second which your town center must wait before pumping out your ninth (or tenth) villager adds a second to your bronze age time.
AoE provides a berry patch near every town center![[*]](foot_motif.gif)
,
hence you need only look for those berry bushes and get
that granary started quickly.
Here is what I do in the first minute:
.
Use the "down time" early in the game to explore. Your 4
foraging Shang villagers don't need your help, and as you get more
villagers you will send them chopping
wood. The wood cutters will not need much help from you
either.
So, rotate between your explorers
and your home operation.
Send your fifth villager (after she has finished building your second house) exploring, assign her to unit 1 by typing ctrl-1. Likewise send your sixth villager exploring, assign her to unit 2. If there is a coastline, your top priority is to search it in both directions. But, don't explore more than have the distance of the map along the coast because that is too far for your villagers to walk.
Use artifacts to explore. I usually give an artifact 4 or 5 way points crisscrossing my side of the board, and then ignore them. They are slower than villagers and see much less so I don't want to waste much time on them. On the other hand, they can be used to explore near lions without risk.
Watch your explorers as much as you can. When you have a spare second, type alt-1 to see how explorer 1 is doing and then alt-2 to see how explorer 2 is doing. If they are exploring coastline you will want to bring them back to the coast repeatedly to look for shore fish. Avoid lions if possible and kill them otherwise. Run away from alligators.
Build a house whenever you have 30 wood available, until you have 5 houses (i.e. enough to support 24 villagers).
If you hear the attack sound, type ``alt-1'', click on the
lion and hit ``H C'' just in case. If no lion, hit ``alt-2''
and click on the lion.
As soon as an explorer has been wounded, re-assign them to the safest
job you have (presumably chopping wood) and replace them with a full
strength villager.
After you have started building your fifth house, you can relax a bit and see what your explorers have found. If you haven't found three new food sources and a forest, send out another explorer and concentrate even more on exploration.
As soon as you have 120 food, send villagers out to build a storage pit near a forest (See section 7.2).
At this point, your goals is to build three food collection points and
have 4 villagers assigned to each one. It will take
about a minute to create and staff each food collection point.
Start shore fishing first, berry picking second and elephant hunting third. Shore fishing is the most productive and also requires the fewest villagers. The others are roughly equally productive, but berry picking is the easiest. And, it has the advantage that you can start berry picking with as little as one villagers, whereas hunting requires at least 4 villagers, preferably six.
You will also re-assign your explorers to food collection in this stage. Once you have found three food sources, you don't need those explorers anymore and you won't have time to devote to the explorers anyway. The easiest way to bring them back is to type ``1'' and then click on a tree in your clear cutting operation, and then type ``2'' and click again. However, this has a couple risks: lions and poor path finding by the computer. Poor path finding can leave your explorer stuck in between. Both of these hazards can be checked by looking at the direct path between explorer and where you told her to chop wood, but this consumes your valuable time. Another option is to have the explorers continue to explore but have them end up near one of the food sources (or even not explore but end up near a food source).
You might not have to do much during this transition. This is the time to check to make sure that you are on track. You should have eight villagers collecting wood and about 200 wood in your stock pile. You should have 16 villagers collecting food in 4 food collection operations.
If you have only three food collection operations, add one.
If you have more than 200 wood at the time you click on the advance to tool age button, you may be able to move some wood cutters to food collection. My rule of thumb is:
number of wood cutters = (1000 - wood) / 100
Send one villager to build a barracks and a house.
Recheck your first foraging operation. If you are down to one or two bushes, reassign a couple villagers.
Double check for idle villagers. Cycle through your explorers
(alt-1, alt-2, 
). Click on the dots of your color in the
diamond shaped map.
Determine where you are going to build your market and stable, and which villagers you are going to use. If you have enough wood, use your wood cutters, otherwise use food gatherers first.
Build a market (``B, M'')and a stable (``B, L'') using 4-6 villagers on each task. Advance to the bronze age.
Send the villagers who built the market and stable back to work.
Your goals during the transition depend upon what you want to do when you reach the bronze age. My recommendations here are pretty general but lean toward waiting until you get to the bronze age before building a military force.
Build a scout (``ctrl-L, S'') as soon as you have 100 food.
Build a gold mine and convert 8 villagers to gold miners.
Build some houses. If you have excess wood, go ahead and build 6 houses (for a total of 12). This will bring you up to the 50 population limit (unless you are playing with a higher pop count).
I believe that these are reasonable goals for an intermediate player following the building sequence which I have recommended above. The number of villagers is based on the assumption that you lose two seconds per villager (i.e. you create a villager every 22 seconds).
This sequence leads to a 13 minute and 40 second bronze time. So, you can be slightly off this and still achieve a 15 minute bronze.