(As ever, the screenshots that follow are taken from the replay of the game, so there's no fog of war, and we can observe everything as if we were looking down from atop Olympus itself. But had I learned my lessons from my first defeat - and could I seize my first win on the back of it? Draw your reading swords, armchair knights, and charge on to find out: Aggressive map control would be even more crucial here than it had been in the Black Forest, while tigers would become suddenly, and drastically, relevant. As its name suggests, this map is all about fighting for control of gold deposits, almost all of which spawn on a massive hill in the middle. This time, my arrow-spamming, catapult-happy Ethiopians were facing off against the Japanese, on the map known as GOLD RUSH.
But after a week licking my wounds, practising build orders, doing maths with 14 wiki tabs open, and archer-rushing my way through endless 1v1 comp stomps, I came back for another go. A big medieval boot stomped my fingers from the first rung of the ranked ladder, and I splashed back into the mire where I belonged. Last week, after a lifetime of timidity, I finally bit the bullet and played my first competitive ranked game of Age Of Empires 2. This is part 2 of Nate gets good at AoE2, a series in which Nate attempts to get really good at Age Of Empires 2, via the monstrous crucible of ranked online multiplayer.
