Exp/Gold/Drop multiplier

In terms of XP - The Northern Hold questpack has a quest obtainable fairly early on that rewards you with a 50% account-wide XP boost. You can get a single Pro civ up to 40 in roughly 3 hours by acquiring this reward, then doing, but not turning in a large number of quests, and once you have all these quests ready to go, using the XP boost and turning them all in for a massive XP boost (In my experience, Skirmish Unstoppable 10x daily repeatable, Argos entry quest, Tarsos/Babylon entry quest, and the next Northern Hold quest in the quest series, plus capital city repeatables is enough to go straight from 20->40).

As it's account-wide and lasts for 24 hours, you can also get plenty of XP on your other civs too (And keep in mind that you can hit 10x unstoppable skirmish quest at ANY lvl, once you complete the intial 10 skirmishes)

Also in terms of XP, there's currently an Event underway which is available to civs at lvl 10, and has a large number of repeatable, easy quests that gives solid XP.

In terms of Gold - Not quite a multiplier but rather creep. The devs went and restandardized the amount o gold available at all end-game lvls - Elite quests now reward 1500 coin base (Previously only rewarded 500 coin), and Legendaries can reward up to 20k coin depending on both difficulty, and how often you can do it (Easy legendary quests that have a 12 hour CD only give 1.5k-2k coin, whereas hard quest that have a 2 week CD give 20-30k).

In terms of loot, a loot re-work happened last year that significantly improved it, with specialized chests. While you still have your regular chests that can reward basically any loot in the game, you also have guaranteed Epic chests (From Elite quests) which will 100% reward an Epic piece of gear, and all Legendary quests have Legendary quest chests which have a roughly 10% or so chance to give Legendary loot (And if they don't, Rare or Epic piece of loot/advisor/recipe instead, never a consumable, uncommon, or common piece of loot). Plus there are several legendary quests which have Guaranteed Legendary chests that are 100% legendary.

So yea, XP is better then in the past due to both extra quest packs as well as all quests packs being free, and thus having access to Northern Hold. Coin/Gold is better then in the past due to them reworking it. Loot is also far better then in the past due to both a much, much larger number of legendary quests as well as the loot rework that happened.

 

Welcome back ! What's been said avove is totally accurate.
I would add that now getting 40 at least on 1 civ is more important than it was, because of the community mostly playing PVE and this will grant you help and reduce your time to gear up and get coins in all the end game content which has been improved drasticaly from 5 legendary quests to almost 80 total if i remember correctly.
Enjoy! And feel free to ask for help on discord or in game

 

at level 20 you can acces northern hold from marcus pollux in your capital city, then you have to do couple of quests i don't really know how many but something like 4-6 then you should have it around level 24-25, it's only obtainable once per civ but up to 7 civs so for instance you can get one then create the 3 premiums (starting at level 20) civs to get 3 more with low effort). Using 2 won't give you +100xp but will extend the duration by 24hours.

I would advise to focus on one to level to 40 to at least see the whole content, gearing to complete any content is not hard with decent gear, adding better items if you loot or buy them slowly works just fine and once 40 you can hop on when you can there is no penalty if nobody is available then you can play other civs to level them up with the time you have available (at least that's what I would do, but it's up to you )

 

you can redo the quest after the delay that is mentioned in its description, it's twelve hours for most.

So if you get addicted, you can basically do your quest early in the morning and redo it late in the evening.

 

The CD on missions is based on when you turned it in, with the length being the stated time (12 hours, 36 hours, 6 days, 1 week 6 days)

So there is no "reset" time to worry about, play at your own pace.

 

On gearing, you can get gear to give 90% of max power cheaply and easily, a week of casual play roughly. 95-97% can be reached fairly easily say 2-6 weeks (to do essential-all units). Then the last 5% all depends on what units you care about most and how much you care, its really just for show with almost no impact in how you do in quests but can be long and slow, which is decent game design approach.

 

you'll have x10 materials by setting thirty waves,

Not counting you can obtain crete's advisor by crete chest, by store and global market.

 

At lvl 40 you get a quest called "Elite Meet in Crete", a somewhat difficult legendary quest that gives a significantly higher amount of materials. As ppl farm this quest for a few very highly valued pieces of gear, the amount of Crete materials built up, but didn't have any in-game use. The Advisors were put in as a way to dump those materials.

 

Epic (purple) and Rare (blue) material recipes aren't available in any of the game shops. You might get lucky and get some from quest chests or alternatively you can buy them from another player using trade channel or the global market.

 

With how AoEO is designed, if you want to just "sit in base and turret up" you are going to have a hard time with essentially all quests - quests are significantly easier the faster you do them, mainly because every AI will always start in Age 1, unlike in other AoE games in which the AI can start in higher ages.

If you want a more traditional AoE experience, I would suggest doing Skirmish - Have 2 unstoppable allies and 4 unstoppable opponents, your allies can give you enough breathing room for you to turret up and then sorte out, and you can use Champion Mode to remove any gear disparities.

As for Empire Points, while they are hard to come by at lower lvls, once you hit 40 and start doing elite/alliance quests, you quickly get significant amounts of empire points. Though I do agree that the XP bonus, at least, should be made significantly cheaper, especially considering it's uselessness for high-end players, unlike the coin boost.