Age of Empires/I Shall Return

You need to cheat to survive this scenario, but not very much. Clairvoyance and prescience are required at certain critical times.

As soon as the scenario starts, grab your big bunch of units and hustle them towards your dock. Bring your Transport up to meet them. Then send your isolated villager toward the dock as well. Go back to your large group and assign a control number. Then research Tower and Wall at your Granary, because you won't have it long.

Load your first five units onto your Transport and send them towards the east corner of the map. Everybody else needs to hide as far away from the fighting as possible. Dump the first five units on the eastern landmass and send the Transport back for the second group. Extract all three villagers and all three archers for sure. Extract four healthy Axemen. There is one other Axeman, who may or may not be wounded. If he is pursued, split him from the main group and sacrifice him. Do not produce a second Transport; you need the wood for other purposes. If you aren't given the time to make a third extraction with your one Transport, don't worry about it too much. Hide your Transport in a corner somewhere after the extractions. It may or may not survive.

Use your archers to explore the east corner area of the map. There is a good place to build a Town Centre right in the corner, leaving enough space around it for proper placement of farms. However, if you do that right away, then a lion nearby is liable to attack one of your villagers or some Gazelle. Your food and wood supply is limited enough that you want to circumvent this, so what you actually do is build a Storage Pit in a good location first, then hunt the lion and take the meat, then bring in enough wood to build a TC, and then start building Houses.

You might be tempted to produce a Scout Ship at your initial dock while you still have it, or to build a new dock as soon as you can afford it and start producing Scout Ships. Don't. If you try this, you will be swarmed by enemy Triremes, and against Iron Age warships, your Scout Ships are useless, even in large numbers.

There are large random aspects to what the AI will do, and that may have a huge impact on how a scenario plays out. This walkthrough describes a particular game, in which the AI did something specific. In particular, the AI never attacked with ships, and did not start sending invasions until quite late. It seems to be the case that the AI will not start attacking you until it perceives a weakness, but never stops attacking after that.

Well before you are ready to start producing a fleet, your first dock gets wiped out. You really would like to build a new dock and produce a fleet at some point, but that isn't going to work, because when you start the process, you will get overrun. Therefore it makes no sense to start the process until you have at least a strong Bronze Age army, including artillery and priests. For that, you will need a significant amount of gold, more than is available near your base. Therefore, you have to wait until your army is strong enough to protect mining operations at the distant gold deposit.

Your initial army will have to suffice until further notice. Accordingly, produce villagers until you have 15. Build an early Tower and some walls, and then focus on your economy. Your military is considered strong enough that Elam probably won't attack you until later. Of course, if they do invade you early, you will simply die.

In the Bronze Age, you find out that you can't produce chariots. (You are using the Greek tech tree.) Therefore you will need Cavalry and more Towers, and a few more archers. This force is considered strong enough that Elam probably won't attack you until later. Because your gold is very limited for now, you will need to rely heavily on Tool Age units, and that means that you will take significant casualties in ground combat. It also means that your Bronze Age army is not strong enough to support operations away from your base, so you need to get into the Iron Age. However, even though you have limited gold, you need to spend a lot on troops before you can get Coinage.

Wood is actually in short supply in this scenario. This is because you need to rely on forests to protect your base, and you don't want to set up operations close to the shore.

When there's no gold left near your base, you have to start mining the distant deposit. This seems to be the trigger for Elam to finally start invading you. One thing you want to avoid is losing villagers that are carrying gold, so you will either need a Storage Pit near that deposit, which won't survive, or you need to send only a few villagers at a time to remote mine, and keep the area under close observation.

Even in the Iron Age, you don't get any useful archers. This means that you need to overproduce the Tool Age archers, and you can expect to have to replace them. The main thing is to focus on preserving those units that require gold to produce, as well as your Towers, of course. You do get Ballistas, and it is important to have a fair number of them. Avoid producing catapults for defense, because they tend to kill your own units.

For a long time, each invasion arrives with two siege weapons. You need to send your cavalry after the siege weapons under personal control and let your Axemen and archers and Towers fend for themselves. Of course, you need a couple of priests, well in the back, to heal your units between landings, and literally, that's all the time you will get, because the time between landings is only as long as it takes the enemy Transport to make the return trip with more troops.

Once you realize that the landings are coming fast and furious, you need to keep a number of Scouts near the shore to give you a bit of warning. You can then manage to pull in a bit of gold between each invasion.

At some point, a hero unit joins the invasion. You definitely want to possess him, so send all available priests after him, and use your Cavalry to block, but not attack, him as he tries to get at your priests. Once you have the hero, your life gets a lot easier, because not only do you now have two cavalry groups, but you can leave him well out in front to chop up the enemy siege weapons as soon as they land.

Eventually, and it's not actually that long, Elam runs out of gold and maybe wood as well. You know that this has happened when the invasions are comprised of only Axemen. Once you are confident that this is all Elam has left, you can send your priests out of your base and start converting the enemy warships. You might even get a Transport. Elam cannot replace their Triremes, because they've blown all their wood on siege weapons. Therefore, with just a few Triremes, you acquire naval superiority. Then you can produce a catapult or two and start invading the enemy landmass. After that, pretty much all you have to do is mop up remnants and blow up undefended buildings.