At the very beginning, Set team for your scout then immediately task the scout to locate enemy town. By the meantime when you are building up your houses, you should have noticed the location of enemy's town already, press the scout team number then task it to kill enemy's house builders. You should do so no matter you rush your enemy or not in order to slower your enemy's action especially when you are facing Goths. In the same way, your enemy usually know this too. If your scout guard your villagers at first, it probably takes you longer time for your scout to kill another scout (you have to trace it) than killing a villager (exception for weak Teuton scout, Chinese, strong Spanish villagers and anti scout eagles.)

 Building

Do not outward build at first as you stand a chance facing a rusher so your villagers will be in great danger. Any time, protect your house builders and check them see if they are working or else you'll face pop limit problem.

In some cases, opponent may target only house builders to limit your pop for further rush. I can tell it may not be the only aim as your troops trace any enemy units until they are killed, this causes your troops to move away from the original place that they are guarding and create an vacuum in your front. So you would be easily rushed if you don't block your opponent from going further.

 Before rushing

Ensure you have sufficient resources for rushing. If possible, be quick to sell off several thousands of food and wood in the market for gold as you may need it.

 Limiting your enemy's space and push enemy back

In DM 1v1, it's very important to limit your enemy's space in the beginning of the game because everyone need space to build (especially siege workshops, farms and others large buildings). Build your front as close to your enemy as possible in order to limit the growth of your enemy.

 Destroy any towers and castles which are in strategic positions

Once you build up the front, you stand a chance to face a crushing blow from your enemy, especially huge numbers of war elephants/ trebuchets. It's essential to cut off enemy back-up likes towers and castles, if not you'll find difficult to break his defense.

 When your enemy lose castles and towers

Time to crush your enemy if you have superiority over the quantity and quality of forces.

See the below example:

• I prevented him from capturing the middle part of the map by sending a few paladins to the right hand side of the map to attract enemy's forces to trace them.
• Then I pushed his forces back as shown in the mini map (marked with yellow arrow)
• I took over the bottom left hand side corner.
• Enemy was enclosed in a small space.
• I pulled down all of his castles through 2 of mine were also destroyed by him
• He was still building halberdiers when my skirmishers and hand cannoneers arrived lol.
• My trebuchets attack range cover nearly all of his front while there is no where else for him to build in his town so his only choices was to build either pikes or champions to fight my hand cannoneers.
• Last task is to hear shit from enemy when you captured enemy's town as shown in the chat.

You have to consolidate your front line before your enemy launch attacks on you. There are wide variety of changes due to civilizations, geographic positions and skill of playing. Gain more experience in real battles is more or less better than reading concepts. Of cause you have to know well about the relations and uses of units, this would greatly help you in real fight.

There are several points you need to pay attention to:

• Sometimes, there are small lakes in the map, since ships are not easily killed by land forces except onagers etc. They may be of great help if the lakes are in the right strategic position.
• When the game is lagging, never send melee units to kill onagers, your units may just get killed before they reach their targets.
• Pay special attention to enemy's trebuchet's attack as they may fire behind obstacles that make your dudes non-reachable to strike counter. In the other words, build your important buildings like castles in safe places which are not easily targeted by enemy's siege weapons as castles are very important in the later half of games.
• IF you are unable to crush enemy's front, simply find his weakness (attack his farms and lumbering villagers if possible)
• Try every possible means to search over your enemy's town (hussars are good for this task) in order to find out your enemy's weakness
• Even through your opponent is something 1800+ or above, there must be some weakness that you can figure out, remember, no one is perfect.
• A proportion of 110-150 producers:50+ armed forces is good for saving gold (sell wood and food for gold) to make a crushing blow upon your enemy

 Well based economy

Farms, lumbering and mining are the musts in game and remember that you must have to protect them from enemy's attack. Find the safest corner of the map to locate your farms and enclose the farms with walls to ensure its safety and maintain stable supply of food. Do not chop wood near to the front or you'll face possible attack from your enemy. You may sell off wood and food in the market in return for gold, but it's not recommended for you to sell stone at first as you may need stone for building of town centers, castles and towers and it's scare in supply.

 Relics

Relics are the important generator of gold, through they generate gold very slowly but they give you gold at no cost. Keep your relics deep inside your city, they are as important as your farms. (Aztecs benefits more from this than other civilizations)