Hello, aoe2 subreddit! I and my friends are new to the game and we are trying to learn to play and I have one particular question.

(If this doesn't go here, I will remove this.)

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So we have been playing this game for over 1 and a half week and all of the games goes like this:

Start game > gather resources for 1 hour and go into the Imperial age (nobody fights) > Fight with large armies.

Normally we are 4-6 players at any given time so it's hard to be aggressive in the early game cause if one is attacked another of my friends attacks the aggressor.

I guess my question is: is this the correct way to play the game? We normally end the game with thousands and thousands of resources and I feel like we are missing a huge chunk of this game.

Thank you everyone in advance!