Things they don't teach you in the tutorial: for Beginners

There are many little things in AoM you can do to optimise your gameplay that aren't immediately obvious. These are some simple things that beginners can do that don't require much skill. Doing them in the first few minutes of the game can make your early game much smoother. hope it helps. (P.S. I might be horribly wrong about some of these, )

learn a simple build order for the early game - this will help you age up faster. In a very general sense you will see tips to put 4/5 on food, 2/3 on wood/gold, knowing when to build your first house and temple, etc. there are many different guides out there catering to different gods and strategies.

Never stop making villagers. auto queue their production by clicking on the green arrow button. Always make sure food is your priority so you can produce villagers non stop. however, you might want to interrupt this if you need just a bit more resources to advance to the next age.

set rally point for villagers on resource points to auto gather, and for military units if you want them to attack near a location.

always keep an eye on the idle villager banner, try to never let your villagers do nothing. If you are bad at micro, the idle military banner is also very useful to locate stray units that are doing nothing.

Use the Shift key for everything - Shift clicking queues your actions. Most often this is used when you're scouting, where you shift right click a bunch of different locations that your scout will cover automatically.

you might also use it when you want buildings built in a certain sequence, or direct a villager to another specific task when the first task is complete. This is quite useful for chinese or greek, because they have storehouses that take more than one kind of resource. villagers auto prioritize mining gold, so be sure to queue the right actions if your gather point is near different types of resource.

Learn how to garrison and eject smoothly - This will save crucial seconds for villager walking time. if your early hunt for example is on the opposite side of the TC, alt clicking, setting rally point and ejecting quickly(n) is a useful skill to learn. This is also important when your villagers are escaping from a raid.

Fishing - if playing a water map, always build docks right away and prioritise villagers on wood. the food income for fishing is massive and you will lose out if you don't do this. try to build your docks at a point where a fish horde can be visible from the shoreline. in classical age, always build some arrow ships to prepare for the inevitable harassment.

herdables can be used to scout. They are useful for scouting isolated corners or edges of maps where TCs/goldmines/more herdables may be located. however I would not use this too boldly as they can be stolen by the enemy scout.

Hunting dogs - this is practically a must have tech for most early game maps. hunt is the fastest means of food gathering. Always research this asap when there is about 600 food worth of hunt in your immediate vicinity. There are certain cases where you might want to skip this tech (such as low hunt spawn or kronos rush), but generally it's quite a safe bet. This is also why you should not go for berries or chicken at first because they are slowest to gather.

As a rule, you want your resource point as close as possible to the animals to reduce walking time. if you are norse, click ctrl+g from time to time to check if your ox carts are as close as possible to the villagers. try not to crowd too many villagers on one animal.

when building your gold gather point, always do it on the longer side of the gold mine. leave a gap so that your villagers can fit between the mine and the storehouse. when done properly they basically have zero walking time. for wood, try to pick a spot where you cannot be easily harassed. in certain maps there are a few trees around your TC which you can chop first, saving you 50 resource early on.

Hunting - huntables tend to wander about, which can increase walking time. generally you want to kill them ASAP so that they remain close to the gather point. this is where knowing the HP of animals is useful. your standard deer for example will go down instantly from a single hit from 2 villagers. if you use one villager on a deer, it might run further away from your gather point. also try to stand close to non threatening huntables as arrows from villager tend to miss at larger distance.

You can "herd" huntables closer to the direction of your resource point by attacking them from the opposite direction. this can be achieved with low damage units like scouts or using a single villager.

when hunting dangerous animals, you can use the TC to attack the animal while the villager kites around. be careful when you do this though, as the animal might lose interest and run even further away from your resource point. one way to avoid this is to let them hit your villager occasionally.

Scouting and knowing map layouts - when scouting the map, the priority should be to locate patches of hunt, TCs and gold mines. This is where knowing map layouts are useful. maps are randomly generated but they have a certain pattern that can be predicted. Your scout can save a lot of time if you can roughly guess where the resources are going to be.

In ghost lake for example, your starting hunt can be from 1 measly boar to a max of 6 boar or 4 ox. if you encounter only 1 boar, you might be tempted to think hunting dogs may not be a wise investment. however, there will always be at least 1 patch of caribou in ghost lake near your base (sometimes 2 patches, 1 on each side, and each patch can have 4-9 caribou).

Maps typically also have a range of gold mine spawns in the map. If you have only 1 small gold mine at the start, you might want to pay more attention to securing your next gold mine early on. The locations of resources on your side of the map tend to be a inexact mirror of the enemy territory, so this helps you to approximate the location of their resource points. defensive buildings like watchtowers/castles/manor are sometimes built beside gold mines for defending raids or to gold starve the opponent.

having more population than your enemy is usually the key to victory. This is why securing more TCs than your opponent is often emphasised. getting your second TC early on doubles your villager output which can be a big advantage.

Don't accumulate too many resources - spend it on military units when possible. or if you find yourself having too much wood for example, re allocate some of the gatherers to gold or building farms.

Building walls - walls are useful for filling up gaps in your base perimeter where the enemy can sneak through for raids.

Protect your watch towers: watch towers can be brought down by melee units early on since boiling oil isn't available. build a ring of 4 houses around a watch tower to protect it from melee attackers, or 4 single column of wall.

Learn which relics are useful: ones like tusk of iron boar/sistrum o' bast are must gets, the monkey head relic you can skip

Learn to anticipate offensives - this is a huge topic by itself for another post but 1 simple example here: going up against a zeus opponent. if he goes hermes, expect centaur harassment on your villagers, and prepare to counter by making heroes or ranged/fast moving units. if he goes athena, you might encounter a mass hoplite rush, which you need to prepare for with counter-infantry.