AoC DM Micro! Part 7th of the CooKiEs DM Guide !

Mains Points
Pretty much experts stuff, don't bother with most of this unless you have the hang of the basics.

Basic Micro Tips (Example of Huns)

Using rams in front of fight is deadly, first of all it attract's the arrows which give you an advantage over him.

Use Your Rams (Ramming) Against his Rams ... That way you end's up with rams in front while he doesn't... he'll eventually have to pull back.

A lot of players just like to mass economy and patrol's non stop, that's why most of those players never get over 1900, Some of you might believe that having non stop eco is obviously gonna give you a victory.. but the problem here is, if you keep patrolling, eventually i'll have a bigger army then you therefore im going to push you, and kill you because you won't have any units alive, Unit control is more important then economy.

Here's some different Unit Control actions that can be done during a huns wars.

Small Distance Patrol For Archers, basically it make's your units look retarded, however the advantage of it is, they are going to attack first, and you don't have to worry about them, so you can either do economy or take relics or whatever you feel like doing at this point of the game.

Stand Ground For Archers, extremely useful when playing against market, it makes all your archers shoot at one unit at once, pretty good vs rams or paladins.

A little Combo of mine that i like pretty much to do whenever im on defense or offense, is to put my units on "Stand Ground" and patrol them, it's quite usefull for axemens too (Franks wars).

Taking advantage of Hills, this is really important in every wars, hills give armor bonus and stuff, always try to sit on a hill with a castle and units.

Luring units in, don't be afraid like to move your paladins in front of his units, make them follow your paladins to your archers, if you notice that his units are not following yours, it's mean that he has his units on Stand Ground, therefore the best thing to do in that situation is to patrol in your archers that will pick up his archers one by one because they won't move.

Monks Micro, Onagers Micro -- credit to November_I2ain

This is a little micro trick that I use. Ive asked alot of dmers if they use this but none know what Im even talking about. Top rmers do this though.

Ill start with an example that is a Persian killer. Lets say you have like 15 monks ready to steal some eles. You double click on one of them and then you have all of them highlighted. It will show all of thier icons on the bottom of your screen. Now a bunch of eles are coming at your army. With your group of monks that you have highlighted, click to convert one of thier eles. You dont actually want to convert one elephant with your whole group of monks. You want each monk to steal an elephant, rite ? Now intead of using the whole group of monks on one elephant, deselect one of your monks.

This is done by clicking on one of the monk icons while holding the Ctrl button at the same time. Now you will have 14 monks highlighted so you click on another elephant with them and then deselect one of them. The monk that is deselected will be converting an elephant. If you are fast you can have all 15 monks trying to convert an individual elephant in a matter of seconds. I will say that on average you will steal about 7-8 (50 % of what you wanted to do) for a few reasons. First is because there is a random chance that the conversion will fail. Another reason is that maybe the 7th, 8th, or any monk that you selected is accidentally trying to convert an elephant that is already in the process of being converted.

I think if you are good at this you can own persian with almost any civ in a 1v1 type of battle and this trick is why.

This can be done with siege to. Lets say you have a bunch of onagers and you want to use them to kill your enemies onagers. Take some of them or maybe everyone you have then double click on one of them and make it attack an onager. Now deselect one of them and just let that one onager hit an enemy onager.

You can do this with regular units too. Lets say you have a group of paladins, hussars, or any fast unit that is good against siege and you want them to kill the scorps that are with the persian army. Double click on a paladin to highlight the whole group and then attack a scorp then deselect one of them and use the group to attack another one, and so on....

This is micro to me. I hear alot of people refering to great micro skills in dm while all I see is them constantly pulling back thier units to keep them in tight formation. I call that army control not "great micro". Good micro to me is making certain units in your army attack what they are good at killing. Archers vs pikeman, paladins vs siege units, siege against archers, and so on.

In lots of civ wars like huns and mayans this is not needed except for maybe killing rams. In them civwars you probably are just going to use patrol followed up with good army control meaning pulling back your groups. Later in the game if you are trying to make a comeback, or maybe some small skirmish off on the side of the map where you have a few of your units run into a small group of your enemy this deselecting will come in handy.