[regularfry]

AoE2 was where I picked up the "turn up where they don't expect" tactic: you can just drop a town center anywhere, so slowly building to a crushing blow from an unexpected direction, while simultaneously not dying when your opponent thinks you should, works spectacularly well.

Turns out this is an extremely valuable life lesson.

This tactic was totally broken in AoM, where they forced town center locations (I presume intentionally, for this reason). I hated it.

[paulmd]

Speaking of dropping a town center anywhere... the Persians get a civ advantage of a double-HP town center, which makes it a viable strategy to use your town center in a tower rush (aka the "Persian Douche" strategy). It's very aggressive and can put an opponent off-balance because they don't expect you to be up in their face in the Dark Ages, but the downside is that if it doesn't work you're stuck with a massive research and economic disadvantage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4DF099-DNo

(and here it is defended successfully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcVTHFBeXM4 )

Apropos of nothing: I am not really into the whole "watching people stream video gamess" thing for the most part but I recently discovered that I do enjoy a lot of this guy's AOE2 videos. There's a lot going on in high-level AOE2 play and it's really nice to have someone who knows what they're doing breaking it down for you.

Also, shameless plug for youtube-dl, it's really nice to pull them down and watch them in a local video player instead of streaming them directly.