Uptimes & Timings

Your uptime is the in-game clock when you click up to the next age. It is not a vibe — it is arithmetic. Because every villager and the Loom each take exactly 25 seconds to produce, your Feudal uptime is a direct function of how many things you queue before clicking up.

Feudal uptime is just pop math

Add up everything the Town Center makes before you age up, multiply by 25 seconds, and you have a hard floor on your uptime.

Lower pop means a faster, more aggressive uptime but a thinner economy. Higher pop means a slower clock but more villagers waiting in Feudal. Neither is “correct” — they are different gameplans. What matters is that you know your number and hit it consistently.

Why clean timings win games

A timing is your army arriving the moment your opponent is most vulnerable. Hit a sharp one and you can cripple an enemy economy before they can react:

• 3 Men-at-Arms at the right minute force villagers off resources and into the Town Center.
• 3–4 Fletching archers out-range Spearmen and pick off gatherers from safety.
• 3 scouts snipe stragglers and deny boar lures.

The damage is not just the kills — it is every second of villager idle time you inflict. A scout pinning six villagers under the TC is worth far more than the one villager it actually kills.

Pushing into Castle Age

The same discipline carries into your Castle Age transition. To keep the clock clean:

• Keep wood low. Banked wood is unspent economy. Float only what your next buildings need.
• Seed farms early so food keeps flowing while villagers shift jobs.
• Move to gold at the right time — too early starves your military, too late stalls the age-up.
• Pre-build your age-up buildings (Blacksmith, extra production) before you click, so you are spending the instant you arrive.

Castle and Imperial benchmarks

Use these to measure yourself against the meta:

If your real games land a few minutes behind these, the leak is almost always idle production or floating resources — not a missing trick. Fix the boring stuff first.

Next chapter

Coming soon: stitching timings, army composition, and map awareness into a single repeatable gameplan.

Adapted from ptee’s Noob Guide for AoE2.