Estructura del ADN y ARN

Let's start our discussion with archers. We've already discussed some aspects of their use in the feudal age which is similar to castle age such as hit & run and retreating to tight areas or to safe

places. The main new micromanagement thing to be dealt with in the castle age are enemy mangonels. When AoC first came out most people would just put their archers in staggered form and attack the mangonel. Most people using mangonels would just right click the closest unit as their archers were approaching. In panic situations where you don't have time to do much else these are still two valid approaches. There are much more effective ways to handle this situation from both sides of the fight if you see your enemy before they are within range. Let's assume your archers are in packed form

because that is how they are most effective against most other units they encounter. As the mangonel user you want to anticipate when the archers will be within range and use attack ground on their

approach trajectory. If your enemy isn't micromanaging their archers this can do enormous amounts of damage and sometimes change a loss into a win. As the archer user you also want to have one hand ready to use different formations and the other ready to move your units towards or away the

mangonel. There is a bit of guesswork as to what your enemy will do next as you don't know if he is going to use attack ground and where he is precisely going to shoot. You can tell approximately where the shot is going once the mangonel fires and although that doesn't give you a lot of time to move out of the way just seeing where it is facing can usually tell you enough.

If the mangonel is facing the middle of your group use the flank button while moving closer to usually dodge most of the shot. After that most people will take their second shot at one of the two groups created. If they wait until right before the mangonel is "reloaded" without targeting a particular group, grab each of your archer groups individually, press flank again and move towards the

mangonel. Now you will have 4 groups of archers and you have likely dodged the second shot. If you know you won't have time to keep dodging shots the best way is to keep selecting individual groups of archers and flanking them again until a mangonel can only reasonably kill 1 or 2 archers with a shot because they are extremely spread out. Most people won't use attack ground on empty space so this style is extremely effective.

As the mangonel user, it is almost always a good idea to retreat after you take your first shot. If you can time it so that you wait a fraction of a second before you can take your second shot and your

enemy still decides to attack you with his archers, that is the perfect time to attack. Archers that are shooting can't move for a fraction of a second so if they get hit by a solid volley you will do a lot of damage. Mangonels also have a minimum range so in some cases your enemy will try to get in that space instead of trying to kill the mangonel beforehand. That is why it is good to retreat to other

defensible areas (like a town center or your army). You can also repair mangonels with your villagers and that is definitely a good idea if your mangonel is the only thing preventing your enemy's archers from denying a key resource or having open season on your villagers.

Raiding is another very useful skill in the castle age. Raiding is when you are looking for stray villagers or units that you can cost effectively kill but you won't have as much time to micromanage your units as you would in the feudal age because you are managing a larger economy and possibly several groups of units as well. When we talk about raiding, most people immediately think of some form of cavalry or certain unique units that are amazing at raiding. We will also add archers to the list because there are a few common circumstances that arise where you can raid with them.

The best spots to raid are areas where there are lots of unprotected enemy villagers where your units aren't in any danger. Those are prime locations and you should usually attack those first. You should especially do so if you have a faster army or at least the same speed than your enemy and it is open enough to run away with minor losses.

Let's start with knights, the most common classical raiding unit that pops into most players' heads (except for relative newcomers who have been around for the cavalry archer era and stick to one of the most popular 1vs1 settings). There are quite a few situations where you will be focusing almost exclusively on raiding with knights as opposed to trying to take down town centers or fighting the enemy army. The main things you have to worry about when raiding with knights are town centers, pikemen, camels, monks, large groups of archers, and walls.

Using knights to raid villagers near town centers is as old as the game itself. When both knights and town center are unupgraded, villagers are working close to the town center (within 3 tiles), and with good players' garrisoning speed my bet would be on the garrisoner rather than the raider. This is because each arrow from the 6 range town center does 3 damage to a knight. This is substantial and at

3 or less range almost all the arrows will likely hit. Even if you go close to pretend to tap a villager, when you are at 4 tiles away they garrison and you micromanage well by turning perpendicular to avoid the shots you will still likely take more in damage than it costs for them to have idle villagers for a couple seconds - and that is if you are paying close attention. If you see a villager further from the town center at say, 5 or 6 tiles away, then you might be able to get away with cost effectively killing it by running a touch closer to their town center and attacking the villager outwards. From practical experience (and by checking a few enemy's and personal recorded games over the years), it seems that the approximate breakeven point for raiding villagers under enemy town centers is when you have the first armor upgrade on your knights and you are attacking in 2 spots simultaneously. This is well accomplished by numbering both groups of knights and patrolling them into their attack zones (where you are sure there aren't enemy units waiting for you!) and then retreating whichever group the enemy garrisons first and retreating the second group 4 or 5 seconds later. In important tournament matches with the best of the best there have still been times where the player thinks the warning attack bell was just for that one spot only to turn to another town center and see half their villagers are dead. When you are running away with your knights make sure that you don't run in a straight line outwards from the town center. You might have to for the first few steps but after that you want to change your trajectory to an angled escape so that the enemy town center shots miss your knights. Town centers also have a limit of 15 villagers garrisoning at a time. This gives you another approximate breakeven point when your enemy has more than 15 villagers in the area. If you don't have any armor upgrades researched it still probably isn't worth it but once you have the first armor upgrade and 4 or more knights with no enemy army nearby, it will be approximately cost effective to kill villagers while taking town center fire directly under the town center until you have less than 4 knights or most of the "stray" villagers are dead. This gets even better when you have both armor upgrades and your enemy still hasn't researched fletching. At that point it becomes cost effective to keep knights under town center fire solely to keep the villagers from working. It isn't cost effective by much if you only have 1 knight under a town center and he can only attack buildings but it is absolutely great if he is killing stray villagers. If you are the person defending against this, research fletching immediately. Fletching doubles the amount of damage each arrow will do to a knight and you will still have 10 arrows per town center because 15 villagers times 5 damage per villager divided by 6 damage per shot is still greater than the maximum arrows of 10 (keep in mind that AoC rounds downwards so if you had 7 villagers garrisoned times 5 per villager divided by 6 you would only have 5 arrows).

them in battle when you have at least 2 knights for every pikemen. Most times it is better to just avoid them because they are slower than knights so you can attack for a few seconds and then run away. Another good tactic is to split your knights and run away any knights that are being chased by pikemen while leaving the ones that aren't in any immediate danger hacking away. If you do have to engage pikemen, especially if the enemy army is mostly pikemen, it is extremely effective to send in any noncavalry unit first, even villagers or rams. Since units in AoC typically attack the closest enemy unit or the one that is attacking them and since pikemen take eons to kill noncavalry units this could easily turn a cost inefficient fight into a cost efficient one.

Camels are a big problem for knight raiding especially if you are in enemy territory. They run slightly faster than knights and kill them in 1 to 1 ratio so if you try to run home you might not make it or you will but lose a lot of hit points. If you have more knights than they have camels in a 3 to 2 ratio you should fight them. If you fight 1vs1 while you are uphill you can do okay too. It is best if you have extra army nearby, especially if they are ranged units, and even if the enemy has ranged units too because knights against camels with crossbows shooting on both sides is more cost efficient for the knight/crossbow player due to camels low pierce armor.

Monks are the ultimate knight raiding defense unit. Not only will you almost always convert an enemy knight if you target him from more than 9 tiles away but you also get the added benefit of converting more than once, garrisoning if there is danger, collecting relics, and healing your units. If you are the knight raider you want to avoid micromanaged monks whenever possible. If you know where they are located sometimes a small distraction elsewhere can give you enough time to get close enough so you can kill the monks before they convert. One other thing you can do as a raider is to keep knights always close to where the monks spawn so that you can kill them before they get far away or get to a garrisoning spot. If you are using knights and the monk has been wololing for a few seconds, and you are about 4 to 6 tiles away, and this makes you pretty sure that even if you run or attack you will still be converted, it is better to delete your unit so that your enemy won't obtain possession.

Knights can take down palisade walls pretty quickly. As long as the wall isn't up against

something else you can have 3 knights target it if you move your knights close and target the tile a few times. If you are unaware of where your enemy might have stray villagers because you haven't scouted

then it is a good idea to keep your knights in scattered formation so they cover more ground.

Raiding with archers and cavalry archers are very similar so we are going to discuss both of them at the same time. As we discussed in prior sections when you attack with archers you want to have an exit strategy most of the time. When you are raiding with archers the same deal applies, although you already realize that you might lose some of your army while you are running away but you are trying to more than offset that by doing damage to your opponent. The best way to do this is to have several groups of units. If your enemy sees 10 archers on approach from one side he is very likely to send his entire army to kill it. What you are trying to do is to immediately start running to a decent place to fight or just plain run while you rush in with your other group and try to kill as much as you can. Let's use an example to clarify our point. If your opponent has a ridiculously open map and you both have about 30 ranged units (let's just say 50-50 mix of archers and skirmishers). You are on the offense. You send 15 skirmishers and 10 archers to one side of his base where you know you can't do any immediate damage if his army is there so he sends his entire army to defend. Meanwhile you have 5 archers attack on the other side of his base wreaking havoc. Often when panicking people make mistakes so it is quite likely they will send too much army over there to compensate and then you can attack with your main crew. If they don't, you still might have killed a few villagers while you run away. Another effective ways to raid is to leave archers in every spot conceivable. It is usually cost effective to leave an archer behind the enemy wood pit or within range of farmers. If you see the enemy army coming in time you can just run away or lose a single unit. For the amount of harassment this does it is usually a good proposition on open maps.

One other thing that is very effective is if you have a low hit point scout that you won't need and you place it in such a way that you would see an enemy town center being built but your enemy