After getting back from holiday I have been playing Age of Empires online, much to my like and frustration. I haven't really played an AoE game since the first one and I have many happy memories, albeit old, of playing that game. So when AoE Online dropped I decided to buy the Egyptian pack and just go with it. I got to about level 6 or 7 before I went away on holiday for two weeks and now that I'm back I've been bang on it. As much as I've played so far I would definitely recommend it to people, whether you want to buy the premium civs or not. There is a surprising amount of content in there and if you want to go that extra mile and get slightly better shit and play pvp, it's probably worth it. As far as the RTS playing is concerned I seem to be having some trouble.

Now I haven't played an RTS properly ever, but I spent years of my youth playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim City and Civilization. I have no problem micro managing villagers, building my base up effectively, all that general crap. My problem, at least I think it's a problem, is when it comes to combat. So you have units, and those units do damage, an example of this might be 20. Each unit, I think all but maybe not, has a bonus to another type of unit, for example a Spearman is effective against cavalry, a War Elephant is effective against buildings, normal stuff I believe for an RTS. It just really started to annoy me when ever I got into an epic battle. So I normally have a nice mix of units and in order to maximize the potential of my army it would make sense to send Spearman against cavalry and ranged against ranged. When I get into battle everything just becomes a complete mess, everyone just seems to attack whatever they're next to. Now please correct me if I'm doing this wrong, but I tried putting all my units into numerical bound strike teams and attempt to take out specific things that way. Did not go well at all. I tried a bunch of weird things to try and make my units attack what they should be attacking but it kept stressing me out. I hope someone can help me out here because I feel like I'm playing the game wrong, or maybe I'm just looking into it far too much. My other strategy is to just make 14 War Elephants and just go wreck shit up in the enemy base.

Now that may sound slightly negative but I actually really enjoy the game. Not all the quests are build an army and go fight which is nice and I do like the tech tree, although I imagine at the end you'll have everything maxed out. I would like to get into the pvp but I'm gonna save that until I'm at least level 25.

Hopefully someone can give me some battle tips please :)