Strategy:Containment

A Containment Strategy on Age of Empires games is an offensive mode of gameplay whereby the player aims to weaken their opponents by forcefully cutting them off from key resources such as Stone and Gold, inhibiting them from creating higher quality units and defenses. A successful containment strategy requires effort and concentration, but allows the player to wage a long war of attrition against their opponents and soften them up for a full scale attack.

How to use
In all Age of Empires scenarios, Food and Wood are abundant but Gold and Stone are not. In all games the latter two are required to build high quality units such as heavy cavalry, elite infantry (such as academy units and unique units), monks/priests, siege weapons and of course defensive structures such as towers, walls and castles. As a game gets going, all players will inevitably use up their close stockpiles of stone and gold and have to venture further into the map, competing for reserves with other players or resorting to trade.

A Containment strategy thus aims to weaken opponents by purposefully depriving them of these key resources. To do this, a player avoids besieging an enemy town and instead focuses raids upon enemy gold and stone mine sites, killing working villagers and aiming to hold these sites against the enemy. To do so, it is recommended a player builds several towers or a castle near the captured mines and utilizes units to defend them for as long as possible, repeating the same strategy for every set of gold and stone mines in the enemy's proximity.

If the player can hold on, the enemy will inevitably quickly exhaust their remaining resources in attempting to retake the sites, thus running out of gold and making it less difficult to field high quality units. The player can then also intensify their attack and work to destroy enemy defenses, walls and towers, which will exhaust their stone reserves accordingly. This makes the eventual attack on the enemy city much easier.

Examples
Containment strategies are a very successful approach to handling aggressive AI players who's behaviours are predictable, especially in campaign modes. In Age of Empires Definitive Edition, the Hittite quest Raid_on_Babylon has been cited for its difficulty, particularly in the fact that raiding the Yellow Babylon player's base becomes practically impossible due to its overwhelming focus on spamming Priests, heavy catapults, legions and aggressively constructing of Towers. However, if the player uses a containment strategy and first aims on instead cutting it off from its gold and stone reserves to both the north and south of the map, building offensive towers around the resources and killing their villagers, eventually the AI runs loses its ability to create excessive numbers of priests and catapults allowing each wave of attack to weaken their base.

A containment strategy is also the best option in the Rise of Rome Campaign the The Battle of Metaurus wherein both Carthagian teams attack with endless waves of War Elephants and Academy units. Thus the player must act fast and decisively to cut these players off from their resources before they are overwhelmed.