Start a normal Skirmish game and select one computer opponent.

This way you can see how many villagers are working on gathering resources at any time. In addition, make sure you can see additional information about how you distribute your villagers. The game score also indicates how well you're doing compared to the enemy. You should choose to have the list of players enabled, which allows you to see which age your enemy is in and how many trading posts he has. Prepare for the game by adjusting some settings in the User Interface. Repeating this process, the melee unit won't be able to land a single hit on the ranged unit. One example is 'dancing', where a player takes a ranged unit, fires at a melee one, moves away and fires again. It is a skill that must be practiced, but there is a good amount of techniques that can be learned. Good micro is an essential skill, and it can make your troops a lot more effective. It is most often used about military units.

Micro is the opposite of macro, and refers to moving individual units.

With good macro you will always have a good army and plenty of resources. Macro is to micro as strategy is to tactics. Expanding your base or taking map control are examples of macro.

Macro is the term given to any gameplay that benefits the player in the long term.

When turtling you focus on economy and defense, not building an attacking force. The player invests only in a small force and builds more static defense like towers.

The Turtle, or Turtling as it's called is a defensive strategy as the name suggests.

A single misstep, though, and your forces might be outnumbered and defeated in the early parts of the game. The idea is to keep military investments at a minimum through the first parts of the game, building up the economy until the point where you can overpower your opponent with superior forces through upgrades.

The Boom is quite hard to do, as it require the player to balance economic growth and military investments.

Rushing in AoE3 is very hard because the defending player can garrison all his villagers inside the town center and build some anti-rush forces for a small fee. The most famous is perhaps the Zergling Rush from Starcraft. Because the rushing player sacrifices so much of his economy for an early attack, a failed rush often results in the victory for the other player. With the rush the player sacrifices the economy in order to build an army before the enemy has any way to counter it.

The Rush is one of the simplest strategies around, but there is quite a lot of risk involved with it.

Understand the difference of micro and macro, and be able to identify the three most basic strategies.

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