Villagers are the key unit in any Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition campaign.
They provide you with resources, build your buildings and are the cornerstone to your empire, so how many is enough?
Obviously, when playing Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition you will have to adapt to your surroundings and learn what to prioritise. However, as a rule of thumb, you should always be making villagers at the start of the game, unless you are teching up to a new era.
To do this, you must make sure you always have an adequate food supply and houses built. Making this as efficient as possible takes time and can be hard to master, so don’t panic if you realise that you haven’t got enough houses and have to wait.
In the third age – the castle age – you can build more town centres and therefore make it quicker to pop out more villagers. In most campaigns it is optimum to build two more town centres so you have three constantly increasing your villager count and therefore making your economy better.
At this point in time, you will hopefully have over 100 villagers (in a normal 200 population game) and you will probably want around 130 villagers working at all times before you stop making new ones. This is to make sure you can supply your troops with the best upgrades and replace dead troops with new ones.
Remember: you can push the full stop key (that’s the ‘period’ key if you’re American!) to highlight the nearest idle villager and put them to use.
