How to beat Age of Empries II on Hardest against 7 computer civilizations

I played AOE II using these settings:

• All random civs
• Deathmatch
• Map: Black Forest
• 7 computer players
• Level: Hardest
• Map Size: Giant
• 200 Population Limit
• Age: Post Imperial
• All Techs
• Conquest Victory
• All Visible

My secret: Bombard Towers

When the game starts, I build a few houses and start making villagers. Then I build a protecting ring of bombard towers around the town center. You don't need to create a sold wall. Space them apart like trees in a forest.

Once I get about 3 rings of towers protecting my town center, I build a castle and a few stables. From the castle, I build trebuchets. From the stables I build paladins. The trebuchets are for attacking things in the distance like towers, walls and buildings. They are not so good for attacking things that move like units. The paladins are for protecting the trebuchets and villagers. Use the trebuchets to destroy all enemy buildings within reach. Try to keep about 20 trebuchets and 20 paladins at all times. With 20 trebuchets, you can take out a tower or castle in one shot.

The idea is not to get too far away from the bombard towers. Use them for cover as the enemy attacks. Pick an enemy and start expanding the forest of bomard towers toward your enemy. The bombard towers will take out most of the attackers. The paladins are for confronting attackers. Once the attacker stops to fight a paladin, the bombard tower can finish the job. Don't let the trebuchets get too far from the bomard towers. If you run out of paladins, the trebuchets are an easy target and will be destroyed quickly. Use your villagers to repair towers, trebuchets, castles, etc. Build a few monks to heal anyone who has been injured.

This is Deathmatch so you start with 1000 of stone, wood, food and gold but you'll soon run out of stone so you will need to build a Market to buy stone. You will need to start chopping lots of wood to buy Gold and then Gold to buy Stone. Never stop making villagers. Build enough houses to max out population at 200.

If they try to take out your bombard towers with cannoneers or trebuchets, then take them out with your paladins. Persian elephants can take out towers pretty good too. Use your monks to convert the elephants. While an elephant is attacking a tower, you can hit it with the trebuchets.

Make sure you place the paladins in front of the bombard towers or trebuchets and set their stance to defensive so that that they don't roam far. By default it is set to aggressive and they will follow the enemy back to their bombard towards or castle and get killed. The trick is to keep your units under the protection of your bombard towers.

You're going to need to make hundreds of these towers so seek out the stone and gold. You will do a lot of clicking to sell wood for gold.

Next time I will try playing with a smaller map and make the enemy civs ally with each other. I noticed that a couple of computer civs got wiped out from the other computer civs. If they're all on the same team, then they will all come at you.

The smaller the map, the more challenging. I played with a Giant map which gives more time to setup the initial forest of bombard towers. There are also more trees to cut to convert to gold and stone.