The Booster Packs

AoEO comes with four booster packs:

1. Skirmish.
2. Elite Meet at Crete.
3. Fertile Crescent.
4. Northern Hold.

Once loaded, these booster packs are available from all of your civs, being represented by specific regions on your map, which you visit to play the quests relevant to each pack.

Not only do the booster packs contain fun quests in their own right, but they can be useful in levelling up all of your civs, either by providing useful consumables and advisors, or by allowing you access to quests which are rich in XP.

I'll go through each of these, in no partiucular order.

The Skirmish Hall, centre of the map, is found on Cyprus

Open the book to find out more!

The Bandit Leaders

The Bandit Leaders is an example of what is known in AoEO as a Global Quest.  This means that you complete it by doing other quests and accumulating whatever the objective is asking of you.  These are found frequently throughout all the civs and booster packs.

An example in the Greek civ is one which counts the wolves you have killed.  An equivalent with the Eggies is one which counts elephants killed.

In the case of The Bandit Leaders, you have to kill the three bandit chieftains:  Draco, Clutus and Homer, by completing three separate quests:

1. Draco's Legion
2. Clitus Attacks
3. Homer Run.

The Bandit Leaders is a global quest

Open the book to find out more!

We Found Them

We Found Them is a capital city quest which appears with your Village Elder at around Level 7.

The objective is to defeat the enemy, requiring to go round the map in a circle as you destroy successive enemy camps, walls, buildings and soldiers.

The Village Elder is the quest giver, centre 

Open the book to find out more!

Fishing Our Waters

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had started doing the Greek quests from scratch on another server.  Every now and then I'll pull up one of those early Greek quests for a bit of a look.

The quest Fishing Our Waters can be found with the Port Master around level 6.

I was curious when this quest came up because a few weeks earlier, on the official AoEO forum, a poster mentioned that he had had trouble completing it because he ran out of enemy fishing boats to destroy.  This didn't happen to me.

The Port Master is the quest giver for Fishing Our Waters

Open the book to find out more!

The Bandit Armada (Elite)

This is the final of a three part series of posts on the Greek capital city repeatable quests which you can do in Elite mode.

This is the bigger and grander of the three repeatables, but it's not any more difficult.  Once again, there's a smart way to complete it efficiently, including the second objective, which requires you to produce no military units.  The quest can be, and should be, completed by focusing on ships.

Start Game

Let's remind ourselves of what the quest looks like from the start.

I've just started aging up to Age III, I have one dock ready to go

Open the book to find out more!

Challenge: Kill the Docks (Elite)

This is the second article in the series dealing with Greek capital city challenge quests on elite.

Early on in your AoEO career, you want to start having a crack at this quest on Elite, and even when you get to level 40, it's worth the occasional look at it because on Elite mode, you're receiving level 40 chests.

Plenty of people do this on co-op, which is fine, but try and get to the stage where you solo it. I wouldn't say it's a difficult quest (it's not), but there's a smart way to do it, and then there's, shall we say, the inefficient way to do it.

You should always (always) be aiming to get the second objective of finishing five minutes early.

Kill the Docks is one of two capital city quests available from the Port Master. The Bandit Armada is the other one, and I'll cover that one another time.

The Port Master is the Quest giver for Kill the Docks

Open the book to find out more!

Improving Game Play - Hotkeys

This is the second in a series of articles aimed at helping the newer player improve their game play.

I'll start this by showing you a cross-section of hot keys available. You will find these in the options menu in-game.

A selection of hot keys - the full range is available in the options menu

There are a large selection of hot keys available to you, and it is not my intention to go through all of them, and in any event, that would be a futile exercise.

Rather, I would like to encourage you to start practising some of them, and to get you started, here's a bit of a run down on how I introduced hot keys and how it helped me become a better player.  Take a bit of a look, and then apply some of those lessons to your own game, introducing  one or two hotkeys at at time, and gradually expanding your repertoire.

Open the book to find out more!

Starting Out - Part III

I wasn't going to have a Part III for the starting out series of posts, but then I remembered something earlier today.  A while back, I discovered that all the civs and booster packs you own, you actually own them across all servers, and you can play them from the start at each server.   I suddenly recalled that I had started a Greek civ on the Athens server a while back, and had forgotten all about it.

Now this is good news, because it allows me to re-visit a few things, re-live some old times, but more importantly, have a bit more up-to-date hands on exposure to stuff which otherwise, I hadn't seen for a while.

And I have to say to you - it's a lot of fun starting all over and re-acquainting myself with some of these very early quests.

So I have gone back to the very start, and that has inspired me to write one more starting out post, while I aged up from Level 4 to Level 6.

To start off with, here is my very plain, bare, empty Greek city at level 6:

Open the book to find out more!

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.

The Civilisations - Persian

This is the third of my posts on the six AoEO Civilisations.

The Persians are  a pro civ, meaning that you start at level 20 with a decent selection of level 20 uncommon gear.

The Persian shield in AoEO.

You have a few home city quests, including the standard repeatable craftsmen quests (good for getting used to the Persian military at a leisurely pace), and you have immediate access to the Argos quests.

The various Cyprus quests open up to you at some point, perhaps after completing Defence of Arsinoe which is one of those milestone quests which pop up in the home cities of each civ at a certain level (around high level 20s, can't remember exactly).

The key feature of a pro civ - you don't have any additional cities with other unique quests, what I mention above is pretty much it.

Just open the book to read more.

Challenge: Keep Them Under Our Wing (Elite)

Your Greek city has a few repeatable quests which are worth doing in Elite mode as you gear up and start to improve your game play.

One of these is Keep Them Under Our Wing.

Keep Them Under Our Wing with the Scout Quest giver next to the Adviser Hall

Even once you've reached level 40, playing this quest in Elite mode gives you three level 40 chests, not too bad for a 10 minute quest.

On top of that, it's a good game for practicing a few basic skills, micro-managing your villies, etc.

Open the book to discover how to crack this quest!

Challenge: It's the Final Farm Down

The Helice Merchant, to left of the Palace, is the quest giver for the farm quests.

All of the three premium civs  offer a series of challenge quests which are often as much about improving your game play as anything else.  The Final Farm Down in the Greek civ is a good example of this.  In this series of challenge quests you have to build 10 farms in 10 minutes, and a minute is knocked off each subsequent quest, until finally you have a bare 5 minutes to build your 10 farms.

If you're anything like me, you were relieved to build your 10 farms in 6 minutes and were completely dismayed that you had to do it all again with one minute less.

I struggled a couple of times with the Final Farm down until I cottoned on to something really stupid which I
was doing.

Open the book to read more!

Consumables and the Crafting Hall

Consumables are items which you can use while on a quest.  They can be dropped automatically into a quest without the need to use the resources you have gathered during the quest.

The Craftsman school symbol

I have to admit I'm not a big user of consumables myself.  Not because I'm opposed or anything like that, but as a general rule, once I'm up and about in a quest, focusing on the game, I just don't think about whatever conusmables I have.

It is fair to say that the elite player (that doesn't include me) will generally shun consumables, because:

1. they don't need them; and
2. well.... they don't need them.

Having said all that, I believe they do have their place in AoEO so it's worthwhile getting to know them a bit better.

Open the book to learn about consumables!

Starting Out - Part II

This is a follow up article to my first one aimed at those just starting out on the great AoEO adventure.

Today, I'll try to explain a few more bits and pieces about the AoEO screen.

Some items are visible in the identical positions in both your capital city (ie when you're not on a quest), and while you are on a quest, although their use might vary slightly in each case.

Below I have grabbed a screenshot of my one of my capital cities.

A shot from my Greek capital city.

Click Open the book below to find out more.

The Civilisations - Egypt

This is the second of a series of articles in which I go through each of the six civs.

Egyption shield used in AoEO

Many of you may have begun your AoEO gaming experience with Greeks, and naturally gravitated to the next civ in the series:  Egypt.

I did this by earning Empire Points after reaching level 40 on Greek - I was able to buy Egypt (Eggies).

My knowledge of the Eggies isn't as detailed as the Greeks.

I can say this though, despite my obvious bias for the Greeks, almost every day I’m discovering something new with my Eggies, being pleasantly surprised by what you can achieve, and this leads me to believe that if I had come to Egypt first – it probably would have been my favourite civ!

Click Open the book below to read more.

The Civilisations - Greek

Greek coat of arms used in AoEO

This is the first of a series of articles in which I go through each of the six civs.

Many begin their AoEO experience with the Greeks, and I’m no different in this regard.  The Greeks were my first civ, the ones I first took to level  40, the ones I first managed to gear right up to the rafters, the ones with which I first completed alliance and legendary quests, and they remain my one true love.

It’s probably natural that you might come to favour your first civ, primarily because you will become so familiar with it, get used to the bits and pieces you like most, get used to the various build orders, how to make your economy  hum each and every quest, build a massive army, etc, etc.

So what do I like the most about the Greeks?

Click Open the book below to find out!

Age of Empires Online – Starting out

Starting out 

We have had an idea kicking around for a while about commencing a series of articles aimed at assisting the newcomer to Age of Empires Online (AoEO): navigating the various maps you will encounter, learning the myriad of points systems, and overall, learning how to get more out of the game.

I'm guessing that as we head down this route, gamers will start to make suggestions about what they want to see, what they are having trouble understanding, and the like, and over time we might build up a volume of useful reference material that will provide a range of assistance to gamers.

Obviously this series of articles is not aimed at the more experienced player, but if any of you have any comments to make (which are publishable) they will be gratefully received.

On the whole, I have come to like the AoEO community, have had a lot of good times co-opping with other players from around the world, and with a bit of practice, all newcomers should be able to get the same enjoyment out of the game in no time at all. 

Starting out, this is one of the very first screens you will come to:

Click Open the book below to read the rest of this article.