I'm Graham Sefton. By day I'm a graduate student in ancient history, which means I spend my time with Thucydides, potsherds and grant applications. By night, more often than my advisor would like, I play Age of Empires on the Zone. These are my notes on how to play it well. Where the game touches real history, I've added a short note on what actually happened, because I can't help myself.

Everything here assumes a standard random map game, one on one, starting in the Stone Age with default resources. Team games and deathmatch are different animals.

I. The Opening

You start with a Town Center and three villagers. The first two minutes decide more games than any battle later on. The goal is simple: never let the Town Center sit idle.

1. Start making villagers at once, and keep making them.
2. Send your first villagers to build a house. Each house supports four people, and you'll be blocked sooner than you think.
3. There's no scout in the Stone Age, so walk one villager out a little way to find the berry bushes and gazelles near home.
4. Put a Granary by the berries and a Storage Pit by the woods or the hunt. Foragers are slow but steady. Hunters are fast, and gazelles are easy meat.
5. If there's water nearby, a Dock and a couple of fishing boats pay for themselves quickly.
6. Advancing to the Tool Age takes 500 food and two Stone Age buildings. Most good players advance with a population somewhere around the high teens or low twenties.

The most common beginner's mistake I see on the Zone is having wood for the Tool Age and not food, or food and no houses. Watch all your numbers.

II. The Tool Age: Rush or Boom

In the Tool Age you have to decide what kind of game you're playing.

The rush. Hit your opponent early, before his economy is up. Axemen from the Barracks and Bowmen from the Archery Range, or Scouts from the Stable to harass his villagers. The tower rush is nastier still: build Watch Towers near his wood line or berries and make it impossible for his villagers to work. It works shockingly well against people who don't expect it. Everyone on the Zone expects it now.

The boom. Build a Market, get the economic technologies, start farming and keep your villagers coming. You'll be weak for a while, and then you'll be much stronger than anyone who rushed and failed. The risk is obvious: if the rush comes and you can't hold it, you lose.

My advice: learn to rush first. You can't defend against a rush until you understand one.

III. The Bronze Age

The Bronze Age opens up the Temple (priests), the Academy (hoplites), the Siege Workshop and the Government Center, and it's where most one-on-one games are actually decided. My usual plan is cavalry and priests, or archers with a few stone throwers behind them, depending on what my opponent is doing. Scout him. The best army in the world is useless against the wrong enemy.

Don't forget your walls. A few sections of wall across a narrow approach buy you time, and time in this game is villagers.

IV. What Beats What

• Archers tear up slow infantry that can't reach them.
• Cavalry catches archers and cuts them down.
• Priests can convert almost anything, and an elephant is the best thing to convert. It's slow, expensive and now it's yours.
• Stone throwers and catapults wreck buildings and anything standing in a clump. Spread out.
• Fast cavalry is the answer to siege weapons. Catapults can't hit what gets close.
• In Rise of Rome, Slingers are the cheap answer to archers, and Camel Riders are the answer to cavalry.

V. What Rise of Rome Changed

• You can queue units. Several at a time in one building. This alone changed how the game is played. No more clicking the Town Center after every single villager.
• Four new civilizations: the Romans, Carthaginians, Macedonians and Palmyrans. See the civilizations page.
• New units: the Slinger, the Camel Rider, the Scythe Chariot, the Armored Elephant and the Fire Galley.
• Martyrdom, a new temple technology that lets a priest give his life to convert something instantly. Useful against a big war elephant. Grim.

I hear Age of Kings is due out very soon, set in the Middle Ages this time. My advisor has asked me, in writing, not to buy it until my dissertation prospectus is finished. I'm told I should take this seriously.