Your population should be about 60% villagers. You’re not overproducing
Always be producing a villager. Then 2 more when you reach castle age and get to build more urban centers
Explore your area first with the scout, not the entire map. There will be time enough to find enemy bases, first just get all your sheep, find your local gold and stone, and boars and berries.
Trading early is suboptimal, and here early can mean castle age. Carts are a waste of gold while there is gold on the ground.
First queue 2 villagers in urban center, and build 2 houses with your initial 3 villagers (2 and 1)
First 6 villagers gather food as soon as they spawn / finish building, from sheep that your scout found by scouting local area.
Villagers 7~10 (next 4 normally) build a lumber mill and start gathering wood. Note that straggler trees will only be felled later on. Note that optimally you will put 2 to work on each side of the lumberjack camp.
Villager 11 lures a boar, they all kill it and gather from it.
You can get away with reaching feudal age without an Agrarian revolution in normal maps. Villager 12 is a builder. Build a house first, then a mill, beside the berry bushes.
Wall against early attack with palisade, e.g. against drush. Use minimum possible resources and wall only resource places.
Don’t build defenses until you’re attacking, if you’re going for a rush.
Take into account which map you got (we also see a ~11 scout army doing a rush)
Against rush, especially trush, you build pointing to your TC to lead enemy troops towards it
Use buildings as walls, especially 3x3 ones like unit production. If you build palisades put your houses before them, or use houses as walls themselves. It is suboptimal for a house to not be a wall!
Gates have less armor and hp/square than walls.
Castles need to be on elevated ground for 25% extra damage, but also 1) consider there shouldn’t be other elevated ground nearby. It’s worse if you’re not and they are. 2) Castles make trebs, which are terrific at sieges. One way to attack the enemy is you build a castle near their base, then make trebs. 3) Castles especially elevated can one-shot small fry like xbowman or archers!
In late you build castles overlooking mines or other resource spots.
Start building house when you’re on pop%3==0, not %5 so your pipeline never stops churning.
When dropping a resource building, consider defendability and efficiency. You may want to surround building with some palisades.
Building camp? Send one villager to build, the rest to gather resources. Each subsequent villager only raises speed by a marginal 30% of what the first one is returning.
Build forward siege buildings on elevated terrain, so produced units get the bonus and also the building is hard to attack.
Monks are very valuable. Build monastery close to TC, and you can make monks convert and shift click to garrison.
Your two extra TC may go one to wood, one to gold/stone. Place TC into resources without camps, for optimality.
When building farms with multiple villagers, build them all with shift then right click into a single one. This way one farmer goes to each farm, which is optimally fast.
A villager collects roughly 1 resource every 3 seconds, so e.g. the 800 food for Castle age take 2 minutes to collect if you dedicate 20 villagers to it. In general it takes 3*F/V seconds for V villagers to collect F food (or any other resource). I think this number is a slight overestimation if the collection point is close, underestimation if it’s far.
small wall
no smith upgrades early (before castle)
~14 on food first, then 3 more on wood, animals gather faster than berries.
From 1200 ELO
The reason we’re putting pressure with the scouts is to make time to wall up our base. This is why we don’t go straight into Fast Castle.
Keep making scout until you’re fully walled.
From 1300 ELO
You use MAA to push and kill a few villagers (typically 3 and the scout to block the trapped villager, repeatedly killing off villagers one by one). This pushes you back a minute, but will push the oponent back by more if you kill 3 or more villagers. This strategy is more complex than following the fast archers build order, but while it is one minute slower it hopefully delays your oponent by more.