The Turtle, or Turtling as it's called is a defensive strategy as the name suggests.

A single misstep, though, and your forces might be outnumbered and defeated in the early parts of the game. The idea is to keep military investments at a minimum through the first parts of the game, building up the economy until the point where you can overpower your opponent with superior forces through upgrades.

The Boom is quite hard to do, as it require the player to balance economic growth and military investments.

Rushing in AoE3 is very hard because the defending player can garrison all his villagers inside the town center and build some anti-rush forces for a small fee. The most famous is perhaps the Zergling Rush from Starcraft. Because the rushing player sacrifices so much of his economy for an early attack, a failed rush often results in the victory for the other player.

With the rush the player sacrifices the economy in order to build an army before the enemy has any way to counter it.

The Rush is one of the simplest strategies around, but there is quite a lot of risk involved with it.

Understand the difference of micro and macro, and be able to identify the three most basic strategies.

Age of empires 3 gameplay