You’ll soon learn that the enemy doesn’t fight that Dark And Darker Gold well as individual units, but is deadly as a swarm, flowing towards you mindlessly but relentlessly through any gap it can find. You’ll need to learn the ‘flow’ of the enemy, funnel it through chokepoints, and set up defences for them to break upon like black sludgy water upon rock.
Send your troops out to find key entry points on all sides around your first settlement, then block off the approaches with walls and towers - a strategy familiar to Age of Empires. You’ll eventually research better technologies, which will allow you to build sturdier defences like stone walls.
As you expand further out, build extra walls at logical choke points - tight passages where you don’t need to build long stretches of wall and where enemies will be forced to squeeze in tight, making them more manageable for your units and defences to pick off.
Siege equipment like ballistas and powerful flamethrowers on wheels will also become available to you, knocking back and decimating enemies from behind the safety of your walls. For this you’ll first need an iron mine, thena forge in which to build your siege units.
The deeper into the game you go, the more epic and spectacular the battles become, but you’ll need to make sure you’re always scaling up with the enemy threat. So when you start hitting those resource capacities, build storehouses to increase your total gold cap, as well as stock caps for nearby resource gatherers.
Which brings us onto another loop familiar to AoE players: the need in the early game for resource-gathering buildings like lumberyards, food huts and quarries. When deciding where to place a building, keep an eye on its Dark And Darker Gold for sale resource yield as you hover it over different areas to see where you’ll gain the highest yields.
