Age of Mythology Retold beginner guide – tips and tricks

Real-time strategy games can be inherently complex when trying to play optimally. But we all have to start somewhere. The beginning steps in mastering any game involve learning the basic principles. With that, we’ll summarize the basic principles to keep in mind when starting out as a beginner in Age of Mythology: Retold. 

Age of Mythology: Retold beginner tips

Before any other advice, we suggest that you play through the game’s tutorial missions. While brief, they offer an introduction to how the game is played. This can be especially useful if you haven’t played many RTS games before.

Our main suggestion if you’re just starting out is to take your time and learn the basics – skipping to advanced strategies without knowing the underlying mechanics will leave you exposed against harder opponents.

Don’t neglect your economy and villagers

It’s easy to get carried away by just building up your army and harassing the enemy. However, that could lead to them outpacing you economically if you’re not careful. To keep progressing through ages and tech, your economy must expand at a steady pace.

Always make sure that you don’t have idle villagers. Expand your workforce and assign them new tasks – build new buildings, gather resources you lack, construct defences, and so on. Speaking of resources, you may overspend on one or the other as your army ramps up. Check where you’re lacking and add more villagers to compensate. Then, switch them to a different one when you reach equilibrium.

Scout the map

Information is key! You need to know where the enemy base is located, but that’s not all. Find relics, future Town Center locations, and resource deposits. If the map is coastal, map out the coastline, which will help you strategize for a naval assault. It is also of vital importance to know the enemy army movements – where are they advancing on the map; which angle of attack will they use? This will let you preemptively reposition your army to deal with an attack.

Every Civ in the game has scouting units, most of which are available from the start of the game. Some advanced options, like the flying Pegasus for the Greeks, are even better but come at a higher cost. But even the most basic units can act as scouts in a pinch, so don’t wait for proper units, just begin and keep scouting.

Study god abilities and powers

The gods and their powers set apart Age of Mythology: Retold from other similar games. When starting out, you pick a civ, and then a god who comes with their own pantheon that you then further choose from when advancing through ages. This provides a large branching tree that can shape the way your game develops. Each god boosts a different aspect of your civ and provides different god powers, Mythic units, and special technologies.

You can familiarize yourself with every choice you can make before even starting the game from the main menu. Click the Tech Tree button and you’ll be able to read everything at your leisure, without the pressure of the game running in the background. You can use that knowledge not only to plan around your gameplay but will also know the direction of your enemy’s development as well.

Research technology 

We cannot stress this enough – do not neglect tech research. Similarly to keeping an eye on your economy, progressing your tech can help you outpace your enemies in the long run. Tech advances improve some aspect of your civ – whether it’s unit’s attack or defence, boost to resource gathering, building HP, and more. 

Even when out on a campaign against an enemy settlement, make sure to queue up research, so your buildings aren’t idle while your attention is elsewhere. This habit will help you in the future when you begin employing advanced strategies like “timing attacks”.

Move your army

Even while small, your army should never be stationary. If you favour a hands-off approach, you can set them to patrol the perimeter of your base. However, we suggest that you keep your army moving at all times. Seek out enemy units that stray too far away from their base or intercept their expansion.

During the mid and late-game, you should have a good defence force for your base, while micromanaging a raiding force to harass enemy expansions. Each casualty is economic damage to the enemy and keeping your army on the move will help you find those opportunities.

Keep applying pressure

Directly following the previous tip, the right pressure is something you’ll get a feel for the more you play the game. In essence, that means pushing through when you gain the advantage. 

For example, let’s say you’ve encountered a smaller enemy force guarding an expansion camp. If you annihilate their troops, push forward and destroy the camp. Chase down any villagers that are present. The trick is knowing when to pull back. If their main force is approaching, rather than a pitched battle, pull away and circle around. Find another weak point and strike there. 

You can apply the same principle during the raiding phase of the game, usually in the early stages. This will let you snowball your economy compared to the opponent’s in the late game.

Use the right counters

Like many strategy games, Age of Mythology: Retold has units that are strong or weak against other types. With the three main distinctions, there is a rock-paper-scissors approach that you can take. Human units are good against Heroes, Heroes are strong against Mythic units, and Mythics decimate Human units.

Build up your force to be able to tackle all three types and mix them up. You can set them to different army groups so that you can match them against their natural prey. Neglecting one of the unit trifecta can make your army composition exposed to an enemy who notices your mistake. Instead, use the combined arms approach and try to micromanage larger battles to come out on top.

The best way to learn proper counters and the right tools for each fight is to read the descriptions of your units. Some of them have bonuses that are easily ignored if you follow just the above principle. So take the time to learn what each unit is strong against and take advantage of that.

Learn build orders

After you are familiar and comfortable with the basic mechanics of Age of Mythology: Retold, you can branch out into more advanced concepts. One of the staples of the RTS genre are the so-called build orders. You can think of them as schematics that detail the timing and order of your opening moves while playing with a certain civ and pantheon. They are designed to provide the most optimal opening strategy for their gameplay style.

Players will develop build orders and share them online. You can always look them up on the internet, or take the time to practice and develop your own. After a while, they will become second nature, and you’ll have the opening moves of the game down to muscle memory.

✓ Bonus tip

Many of the build orders from the original Age of Mythology franchise will work in Retold. Experiment and adjust to fit with your play style.

Keep practicing

Last but not least – just keep practising. Age of Mythology: Retold is a game with many moving parts. The more you play, the more familiar you will become with everything that’s going on the screen. In the beginning, your first sieges and battles will look chaotic, but as you develop as a player, you will learn to control that chaos and know when and how to apply the resources at your disposal.

If you want to get better at the game, play custom games against AI. Scale the difficulty and add more opponents as your knowledge expands. Develop build orders in concert with your improvement, and soon enough you will be able to match against online opponents if that is your goal. Otherwise, you can keep playing custom games, or play through the campaign missions.