Farms are the primary source of food later on, but can be made in the Dark Age.

No more than 3 villagers should be allocated to gold. Some civilizations start out with -100 gold, and it is highly recommended to get a head-start on gold. While you don't need gold to advance to the Feudal Age, it is important to start in the Dark Age (or at least while researching Feudal) because you won't be in the Feudal Age for very long.

Build a mining camp next to your gold pile located near your town center.

You should have about 10-12 villagers on wood. Some new villagers should be allocated to wood, which is very important from the Feudal Age on.

Keep building houses until you can support 35 population. Keep creating villagers until you get to 30 population. Have the other villager chop wood near the town center.The 4 sheep will be converted to your colors and you can continue scouting for the other 4 sheep (in pairs) that are farther away, the berries, two boars, deer (not available on some maps), gold mines, and stone mines. If this occurs, have the scout go to where the sheep is. Occasionally, one of the sheep may already be visible in the fog. Finding the 4 initial sheep is critical in the Dark Age - the earlier they are sighted, the better. Select your scout and scout around what is currently visible to you.Once the two houses are completed, have the two villagers build a lumber camp near a forest (your scout should have already found at least one by now). Do not have one villager build one house each - both villagers build one house at a time in order to keep the steady flow of villager creation. This will temporarily increase the population to 15, allowing more villagers to be created. This pattern is perhaps the most important hotkey pattern in the game.

Thus, the fastest way to do this is to press H and then press shift-C. The default hotkeys are H for town center and C to create a villager (only after selecting the town center). Immediately create 4 villagers from the town center, depleting all 200 food.When the game begins, there are a few steps that must be done in very quick succession:

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