Milestones

I encourage all new AoEO players to get themselves acquainted with the official AoEO forum, where you'll come across people with similar issues, and plenty of peers willing to help out.

A couple of recent threads have focused on Milestones, inspiring me for today's topic. Rather than go over some of the better posts, here's a link to a page on the forum worth having a look at.

Milestones are a relatively new addition to AoEO and they appear as a tab in the Palace, as part of the techonology tree.

Each time you age up, you earn an additional notch in your technology tree, and there are three separate tabs which coincide with a different group of technologies.

Another tab corresponds to Milestones which are a further leap in technology and which apply to all of your quests in that civ. They open up at levels 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40.

Milestones: the top line represents the civ you are currently playing.
The lines underneath are your other civs.  The blue circle on each line
represents the milestone I have chosen from each of the other civs.
Question marks are empty slots, I haven't reached that level in those civs.

Open the book to find out more.


At each one of those "milestones", you are offered a choice of two technology improvements (and each pairing differs across all of the civs).

You must choose wisely! Once you lock in your choice, that's it - there is no going back!

Now here is the more interesting bit, about which players may not be familiar..

While the five milestones for the civ you are playing in are fixed forever, all the milestones in any civ you have started show up, and you can choose one of those from each civ. So if you have 6 civs, you effectively have 10 milestones available to you at all times, in each of your civs.

Furthermore, you can actually change these depending on the quest you're playing.

Admittedly, even I forget about this, but every now and then it's worthwhile remembering it and double checking whatever you currently have toggled on.

Another thing, now that you have learned this (in case you weren't aware), you can see the incentive you have to start up more civs - the more civs - the more technology boosts available.

This is the other interesting thing, even if you have a new civ at level 5, some of the milestones which are immediately available are pretty darn good. It's almost worthwhile starting up a new civ just to get access to the milestone!

Since pro civs start at level 20, that immediately gives you 3 new milestones to choose from.

Going back to the choices available, well, as you can see from some of the discussion in the page I linked - it's one of those areas where people can have quite divergent views.

There's a good reason for that - much of it is a matter of personal preference. If you like using priests - choose the milestone which involves priests, etc, etc.

Having said all that, I believe there are 2 or 3 absolute must-haves, and 2 or 3 others where you'd have to ask yourself: when would you ever need that?

It's all a bit daunting starting out, so the very best advice I can give is: lock in the must-haves, and then go with your gut for the rest. The milestones won't make you a champion, but if you can get a bit of a boost with an aspect of the game you use regularly, well, just go for it, full stop.

My Must-haves

In the AoEO economy, there are a number of attributes which attract premium prices, and top of these are:

1. building time;
2. damage; and
3. line of sight (LOS).

This helps inform us about the better milestones.  Following the above rule of thumb, we end up with:

1. Talatat construction (Egypt) - decrease building time by 8%.  That applies across absolutely everything you build.  That's a pretty good advantage.  Worthwhile starting up Egyptians just to have access to this milestone across all of your civs.  
2. Pankrationing (Greek) - increases infantry damage by 8%; Parapets (Greek) - increases building damage by 10%; Munitions (Persian) - increases ranged damage by 5 %.
3. Overwatch (Egyptian) - increases ranged LOS by 20%; Town Patrol (Persian) - increases building LOS by 15%.

Talatat Construction - decreases building
time by 8% - highly recommended.

Now I don't want to say that any of the above is written in stone, there will be good reasons to choose something else, depending on your own playing style.  If I were to say that absolutely everyone must have one thing, no question about it, then you can't go past the first one above.

On reflection, I didn't take enough care and made some mistakes in my early selections, but as they say in the classics, c'est la vie!

Brawny Polecat