What you start with
Every skirmish opens in the Dark Age with a Town Hall, 6 Villagers and 1 Scout Rider, and 200 food, 100 wood, 0 gold, 0 stone. The Town Hall houses 15 people, trains villagers for 50 food each and takes every resource your villagers carry home.
A skirmish is won by defeating your rival. Everything else, from the first farm to the last trebuchet, serves that.
Commanding with your thumbs
The game plays in landscape. Tap a unit to select it and tap the ground to send it there; tap an enemy to attack it. Double-tap a unit to select every one of its kind on screen. Drag with one finger to move the view, and pinch with two to zoom.
To select a group, press and hold, then drag a box around it. Press and hold with soldiers selected to open the command ring: move, attack-move, patrol, hold and rally. Its queue switch adds an order after the current ones instead of replacing them.
Keep your army in squads: hold a squad button to save the selection to it, and tap it to select the squad again. The idle buttons find villagers and soldiers with nothing to do, and the Army button selects every soldier you own.
Reading the screen
Alerts slide in when you are attacked or a building finishes its queue; tap one to jump to it. The minimap moves the view with a tap, and a long press on it sends the selected units there. The age plaque selects your Town Hall.
Open the build menu from a villager. Its tabs sort buildings into economy, military, defence and advanced; place the outline, then tap the tick. A drag lays a whole line of wall.
The first minutes
Keep the Town Hall training villagers without a pause. Send the first ones to berries or a deer near home, the next to wood, and build a House before you run out of room: each holds 10 people. A Lumber Camp at the forest's edge and a Mill by the berries shorten every trip.
The Feudal Age costs 500 food and needs 2 different buildings of the Dark Age, so put up a Barracks and a camp on the way. The economy guide goes further.
Learn by playing
The tutorial, Training Grounds, teaches selecting and moving, workers and buildings, and soldiers, squads and counters, one lesson at a time. The six campaign missions then build on it, and a skirmish against the computer lets you practise at Easy, Medium or Hard.