Age of Empires 3 - How to Turtle

Age of Empires is a real time strategy game for the PC. In Age of Empires, there are three common strategies, rushing, booming, and turtling. Rushing consists of getting to age 2 ASAP and building a barracks so you can create a small army and cripple the opponent's economy early on. Booming is where you start creating villagers right off the bat and create an enormous economy so you can make a massive, fully upgraded army later in the game. Turtling is, in my opinion, the best of the three strategies, you start by fortifying your position immediately and spreading across most of the map, after they fortify, they essentially become boomers. This guide will hopefully help you turtle your way to victory.

If you want to turtle you need to have a good civilization. For the purposes of this guide, I will be using the Portuguese because they get a town center wagon every time they level up.
Start by building a wall around your town center, a SMALL wall that just barely gives your settlers enough room to get out. (If you have extra wood lying around build extra gates around the town center. Task three settlers on wood, one on coin, and two on Food. Create villagers until you hit the population cap tasking them appropriately. Have the last villager build a house. Build five more villagers and make sure that there are five on each resource Age up with the philosopher prince, and then build four villagers. While you age up have a spare villager, build a barracks and build five skirmishers and five pike Men. Build a new town center close to your old one and build a similar wall around it. Build an extra house or two and age up with the exiled prince. Build 5 more villagers and a wall that encompasses your enTire base and build a new town center near your other two. Continue to act like a boomer until the end of the game.

I hope that this guide will help you in the battles to come, but remember, the best boomer will defeat the best turtler, the best turtler will defeat the best rusher, and the best rusher will defeat the best boomer.

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