Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome/Birth of Rome

This campaign covers the several hundred year time period during which Rome grew from small settlements to a huge political entity surrounding the entire Mediterranean Sea. Two of the battles are from the Second Punic War, and a third one was indirectly connected to that war.

Rise of Rome 1: Birth of Rome

Some people advocate a very straightforward approach to this scenario: just fight off the attacks, and build the required Towers as rapidly as possible. We are going to use a slightly different approach here.

You have 6 enemies. Five of them have about 6 units each, so they are individually much weaker than you. The sixth has about 30 units, and is much stronger than you.

We need to build 12 Sentry Towers, which will require 950 stone. So far, we have or have found only 650. We have only 200 gold, and don't know of any more. The best way to spend this little gold is on a single priest, and we may as well get him now. This will use up almost all of our initial wood stockpile. The best way to spend our initial food stockpile is then on 4 new villagers. Put 3 villagers on food, 2 on stone, and build a Temple with the sixth one. As the next 4 villagers show up, reasonable choices for them would be Temple, wood, Tower (2).

Explore a bit with your troops. Don't go far, but check out the nearest flagged Tower locations. There are no enemies camped out there, so start building Towers, using 2 villagers on each one. You quickly find another stone mine near your Town Center, which is still less than we need. There is one gold mine at your remote mining camp, but you can't really access that yet.

Enemy villagers start wandering through your base almost immediately. You should kill them. This can be expected to provoke attacks, but the attacks might be coming anyway, and some of your enemies are so weak that the loss of even one villager will be damaging.

You will need a lot of troops. Having no gold, and not wanting to use any stone, you are limited to Axemen, Bowmen, and Scouts. Fortunately, most of your enemies don't have anything better. Aim to have two control groups of 10 each, half archers, and half melee infantry. Get them into service as soon as you can. Don't spend your limited resources on Scouts until you have all the infantry. This will strongly restrict your ability to explore.

As the attacks start to flood through your base, you will need to withdraw the two villagers from the remote mining operation. That is, if you want them to stay alive. When villagers are collecting an extremely rare resource, as these ones are, you need to be absolutely certain that they don't die while carrying, not that you particularly want to lose 50 food a pop, either. Incidentally, make sure that your priest stays far away from the combat.

The two nearest Tower locations fit into your integrated defense at this time. That is, they are close enough to your base that they help to defend it, and your troops can defend them. When you have 20 infantry and a Scout, then you can probably build the third Tower NE of your base. That gives you a decent defense in that area.

Wood is in short supply at the beginning of this scenario, and you probably won't find much more until your first Scout is in action. You do find a lot of wood fairly quickly at that point, but protecting your woodcutters is still problematic. The AI knows where all your weak points are, and will generally attack them preferentially. You also find some more gold mines, two to the NW, near the flagged area, and a second one near your remote mining operation. None of these mines is particularly accessible at this point in time. There is also a lot of natural food lying about, again not reasonably accessible yet.

By the time 15-20 minutes of game time have elapsed, you will have determined patterns of behaviour for each of your enemies. Yellow attacks from the SE with Axemen, and they are probably dead by now. Green attacks from the NE with scout cavalry. They have no upgrades, so they pose no threat except to your villagers, and Green is probably almost dead by now. Red attacks from the NW with groups of 3 slingers, which pose a threat to your archers, but your melee troops will cut them to shreds. Red is also very weak by now. Brown attacks from the east with Cavalry, and they will actually do some damage. Fight each cavalry unit ten to one if you can. Fortunately, Brown appears to be very weak, and is not expanding at all. Orange attacks from the east with improved archers, and they also will hurt you. Orange still has significant power, although you are about twice as big as them at this time. Grey is still significantly bigger than you, but they don't seem to be doing anything. Touch wood. Actually, they don't have any villagers, so they can't really be considered a threat.

At this point, you should have a significant stockpile of food and wood, and a good income of both. It's time to expand a bit. One thing you could do is build two Towers in the NW area, pull in some gold from that area, and produce a Cavalry force. This is still somewhat risky, because you cannot protect those Towers for sure. The conservative and good option is to build a fleet. Just past your Towers in the NE is a body of water. Even if it's only a pond, several of your enemies do attack from over there, and a fleet would waste them before they even reach your base. In AoE, always produce warships if the opportunity presents itself!

You can build the dock under the protection of one of your Towers, and of course, once the dock is pumping out warships, your Towers and the entire NE approach to your base are secure. Just start with some Scout Ships, because they won't face any naval opposition at all. Get about 5 of them, and just park one on each of the fords near your base. Upgrade them to War Galley.

When your fleet is in being, and that flank is secure, produce a couple more villagers and build a couple more Towers in the NW, under the protection of half your army. Then build a Storage Pit behind them, and start sucking in the gold. You should have found at least several more stone mines by now, so you now know that you will have plenty of each type of resource.

The rest of the scenario is pretty much just a mopping-up exercise. In fact, you could kill all your enemies to win, but it is faster to build the required Towers, although some of them can't realistically be built without first effectively crushing your enemies.

At some point, Grey will start attacking you. Even though they have decent units, they need to get through your fleet and then through your Towers and then through your Cavalry, and then they still have to deal with your infantry. In other words, they won't make it.