Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings/Holy Roman Emperor

Frederick Barbarossa, after being elected the Holy Roman Emperor, attempts to force the squabbling German fiefdoms into his Holy Roman Empire, which he then must defend from the invasions and manipulations of the Italian city states and the pope in Rome.

CHECK THE CONVENTIONS AND TACTICS PAGES FOR DEFINITIONS.

Barbarossa 1: Holy Roman Emperor
Teutons have the best monks. However, their total force has significant weaknesses. The biggest one is that their cavalry is slow. This means, among other things, that it will have difficulty running away from a superior force. Another major weakness is that their scout is not only relatively slow, but weak. There are many important missions for combat-capable light cavalry, and the Teutons just can't do them. Furthermore, the Teuton unique unit is not useful. Sure, it has great melee armor, but how often does it actually catch something that it can beat? The Teutons do have several advantages, such as conversion resistance.

This scenario is not particularly straightforward, so there are more spoilers here than usual. The scenario is fairly hard at the beginning, as a lot of AoE scenarios are. Until you build up, you will be stretched thin, and you need to accomplish a lot. You don't control any secure territory, and you need to be engaged all over the map. You need to micromanage a lot of units all over the map continuously for a long time, otherwise they just commit suicide. Save the game frequently! You need to do like Napoleon did and use those internal lines of communication. The difficulties go down when the Mongols join you, because by that time, you should have some static defenses and some secure territory, you have probably knocked out one enemy, and you have just acquired a strong mobile force, at a bargain price.

The map is comprised of a lot of islands, all connected by bridges and river fords. You start the scenario in the middle. Where to go, what to explore first? There is no way of knowing, but you certainly need a lot more scouting capacity, so build that up immediately. About five scouts, plus a couple of monks to start seems about right. Scout aggressively! This seems to be more imprtant than usual in this scenario. A reasonable choice seems to be straight out, then clockwise with the first scout.

The map is crawling with sheep. Grab as many as you can as fast as you can. At least 10 should be found almost immediately.

By the time you have explored about 1/3 of the map, you should have made contact with Swabia to the west, Saxony to the north, Bavaria to the SE, and Burgundy to the south. Saxony and Bavaria have Towers and walls, Swabia has at least one monk, and Burgundy has Towers. In the balance, Burgundy seems to be the weakest. You should attack Burgundy immediately. Use all available knights, a couple of monks, and some villagers to build Towers and such. Swabia will be next on the hit list. Continue to scout aggressively. At this time you should also start to build static defenses. Stone walls should be used in the west, because those will be permanent positions, and you can expect to be attacked there soon. Some Palisade Walls will suffice in the east, because you have the castle there. Seal off the west completely, including gates, of course, but leave an opening near your castle. This will encourage attacking enemy forces to walk past your castle, where they will die in heaps. If your home area is not effectively sealed off, enemy units will run through there constantly, and at a minimum slaughter your sheep.

Burgundy
As soon as you attack Burgundy, you realize that they also have a monk, hiding in the middle of their town. That's unfortunate, but Burgundy is still the weakest of the potential targets at this time, because they have no other mobile military units. Lure the monk into an ambush, and then leap on him with everybody. If you do this properly, his chance of converting something will be very low. If he does get lucky, you should probably reload your latest saved game, because you cannot afford casualties this early.

Next, knock out a Tower with your knights, probably the one near the forage bushes. This is safe, because Burgundy does not have Murder Holes, and you have a monk nearby anyway. When the Burgundy Tower goes down, you may want to build your own Tower there, as close to the Town Center as possible. If enemy villagers come out to play with it (they often do), kill them with your knights. The next target for your knights is the monastery. You want the relic, and you don't want Burgundy building any more monks. While all this is going on, and definitely afterwards, do not miss an opportunity to kill enemy villagers. The best opportunity is when a villager ventures away from the TC to build something. Each time the villagers run into their TC, you should pretend to run away with your units, until they think it's safe and come out again. When the last enemy villager dies, you can destroy the Town Center safely and probably should. After you are finished with Burgundy, if you built a Tower there, you may want to put a wall around it. Otherwise, enemy melee units could show up and take it down before you can respond, although it doesn't really matter to the scenario.

The attack on Burgundy does not need to happen exactly as described above. The elements or their sequence could be varied. The main points are that you probably want their relic, and you probably want to knock them out. A complete knock-out requires destroying all production buildings and villagers, assuming that the remaining military units cannot hurt your static defenses. But there are other pressing concerns elsewhere, so you probably should only go for an economic knock-out before withdrawing; in particular, kill all the villagers and the TC. This way, even if they get resources from an ally, they can never rebuild their economy. Burgundy does not resign immediately when their last villager is killed, but will do so eventually, after a long delay.

By the time that you are finished with Burgundy, certain other things should have happened. You should have explored almost 2/3 of the map, everything except the SW corner (inaccessible due to terrain), the SE corner and some of the east side (inaccessible due to terrain and enemy presence), some of the west side (the territory of Swabia), and the NW corner (the territory of Saxony and some hard-to-reach areas). You should have made contact with Austria and Bohemia. Austria has a castle, which can easily kill your scout if you're not careful, a monk, and a mobile force, so you need to avoid Austria at this time. Bohemia has a monk but nothing else. Bohemia is currently the weakest enemy, although Swabia is fairly weak and closer to your main base. But Bohemia is right next to your brand new mercenary army! Therefore Bohemia is the next target.

The Mongols
When you check the diplomacy screen, you see that the Mongols want to be our allies. But do we want to accept? After all, they are the scourge of Europe (and Asia). And will they not betray us?

Our diplomatic stance towards the Mongols starts at neutral. At some point, you may decide to set it to ally. You probably won't think of this until the scenario is well underway, because you've got more important things to think about. Exactly when or if you do this is rather unimportant. As soon as you offer to ally with the Mongols, a section of the NE map is revealed, and you see a dozen Mongol units there. These units do not move.

Even if you never set your diplomatic state with the Mongols to ally, it won't have much effect on the course of the game. You know that the Mongols are over in the east somewhere, and you will eventually get there in the regular course of scouting. Allying with the Mongols will locate them earlier, but your scouts have other important tasks, as do all of your units. Therefore, you cannot realistically send a scout to make direct contact with the Mongols until you have explored a third or half of the map, and you will not be able to afford their fee immediately anyway.

When you make direct contact with the Mongols, they offer to join your forces for a total cost of 175 wood (for the market) and 240 gold (including the transaction fee). (For this single transaction, Banking does not pay for itself; you already have Coinage.) Mongolian mercenaries? Why not? For that price, you could normally only get about 3.5 cavalry archers, so these units are very cheap, and they are very useful, especially early in the game. (Note that many upgrades will be unavailable for these units.) Unfortunately, by the time you get the offer, you will have spent all your gold and wood on other critical things.

As soon as you have a reasonable number of villagers and your economy is starting to ramp up, you should make hiring the Mongols a priority. By the time they join you, you should have knocked out one enemy and can immediately throw the cavalry archers against the next one.

Bohemia
When the Mongolian mercenaries arrive, use them to take out Bohemia straightaway. The first step is to kill their monk. Lure him with a scout, and while he fixates on that, hammer him with seven elite Mangudai. He doesn't have a chance.

After that, it is relatively simple matter to hunt down their villagers. At some point, they will probably sit in the Town Center and refuse to come out. Teutonic TCs are very dangerous; you need to keep a healthy distance. Thus you have no alternative but to destroy all their buildings from range. Three Siege Onagers will make short work of undefended buildings, but stay away from the TC! One benefit of wiping out the buildings is that it may induce the villagers to come out to rebuild them, or at least try to. But if they still refuse to come out of the TC, you will need either long range artillery or battering rams.

While the Mongols are attacking Bohemia, your knights should have returned from Burgundy. Use them to take out the two Saxony Towers just north of your island. This is relatively easy, because they probably don't have Murder Holes yet, you have healers nearby, and no troops arrive to support the Towers. After the Towers go down, your mobility increases dramatically. You can now move monks and villagers freely over the entire map without much concern, except for those areas directly occupied by the remaining enemies. Expand your secure areas by building walls in judicious locations. Because of the many rivers and limited river crossings, this should be fairly easy.

Your early military ventures have probably used resources that might otherwise have been invested in the economy. Now is the time to bring the economy and population to the maximum and to go Imperial. You might be able to win the scenario with the forces at your disposal right now, but it would be a hard fight. But if you have a maximum economy and military, winning will be a piece of cake.

Now is also the time to upgrade your defenses in the east. Up to now you have been relying on your castle, with some Palisade Walls for channeling purposes and a few troops to help out. But enemy attacks will have been becoming more powerful, even if not yet dangerous, and they are starting to use siege weapons. Therefore it would be prudent to upgrade those defenses before you get heavily engaged with Swabia. At least a rudimentary Maze Complex is appropriate. Do not seal yourself in completely! Then the enemy will attack anywhere, and they will use siege weapons to safely smash your wall. As long as you leave one opening for the enemy, they will tend to use it, and all of their troops, including their heavy equipment, will just die in the maze.

Swabia
If you cannot finish Bohemia immediately because their remaining villagers are hiding in their Town Center, wall them in and leave a garrison force. If they have no active workers, they cannot rebuild. But this seems to be an unlikely possibility.

Assuming that Bohemia has been finished, redeploy your army against Swabia. Swabia builds a lot of spear infantry. These units are effectively free, because they do not consume any rare resources (gold and especially stone). Relative to their cost, they are very powerful, but only against cavalry, which are primary attack units. However, they are weak against everything else. Swabia does eventually build generally powerful units - monks and artillery.

What do you have that is strong against Swabia? Your knights are too weak in relation to so many Spearmen, so leave them at home. Your Mangudai are definitely required, but stay away from the enemy Town Center! Your regular cavalry archers are borderline, so use them or not, as seems indicated. Your Siege Onagers could provide some amusement, but they are really too slow to be worth using in this attack. Monks are definitely important, but only for healing. After all, would you even consider converting a Spearman? You could build some Teutonic Knights; this might be a rare occasion when they are actually useful. However, while they might be great against spear infantry, somebody still has to take out the TC, and Teutonic Knights are definitely not the unit of choice. You could build your own Town Center in their town, and you probably should. This mini-castle is a powerful attacking unit if properly deployed, and it is relatively cheap. You could build a castle in their town, and you probably should. There are certain risks associated with the Castle Attack, primarily that the builders are exposed until the castle is built, and a castle is an expensive unit to lose. But one of the big strengths of the Castle Attack is that it negates enemy monks.

The recommended attack against Swabia uses the Mangudai, some scouts, some monks, and some villagers. Raid the enemy home areas, and advance your wall line as you sanitize their territory. You should probably build at least one TC for fire support and to give your villagers a safe place. The attack reaches its climax when you build a wall just out of range of their TC. Building a castle just behind that wall is useful but not necessary. When the castle is finished, the enemy morale breaks. This is a symbolic statement, because the AI has no morale as such. However, the fight is now over for practical purposes, because you now move up your trebuchets, and BOOM the enemy TC blows up and then your cavalry sweeps in to wipe out all the enemy villagers and there's nothing the enemy can do to stop it. Complete the conquest of Swabia by walling off what was once their territory.

You now have three relics, and only need one more. You may even have four! All of your six opponents start with one monastery, one relic outside the monastery, and one monk, except that Saxony does not get a monk, and may never build one. All of them except Saxony immediately garrison their relic in their monastery, and at some point at least one of them will raid the Saxony relic. So one of the opponents that you have taken out may have had two relics. Depending on how things work out, it is even possible to intercept the Saxony relic in transit. Note that if you want to keep playing the scenario, you don't actually need to put a relic you own into a monastery.

In any case, the scenario has pretty much become a regular AoE game at this point. You have a strong economy and a strong army and strong defenses. Your strategy, tactics, and operations should be superior to the AIs'. Therefore their attacks will be mowed down by your static defenses, while your attacks will smash whatever they encounter. Even outnumbered three to one, and you're not actually outnumbered in any meaningful way, you should win handily.

There are many ways to finish off the scenario. The fastest way is to grab a fourth relic somewhere; the slowest way is to eradicate all the remaining enemies. The walkthrough ends here because the rest of the scenario does not require any detailed explanation.

Barbarossa 2: Henry the Lion
'''There are some major surprises in this scenario. If you play this scenario knowing what will happen, you are playing it wrong.'''

This is an extremely unusual scenario for a number of reasons. Most importantly, although you do have an economy, you are restricted as to what units and technologies you can have. In particular, you cannot ever have villagers, so you can't do anything villagers are needed for. The primary functions of villagers are to develop a controlled economy, to build static defenses, to build structures offensively, to repair structures, ships, and siege equipment, and to reshape the terrain. You can do none of these things here. (Your economy is not subject to much control.) Secondly, you cannot ever have monks. Therefore, you cannot convert enemy units, and healing your own units will be problematic. Cavalry can only be healed inside castles (there are two in your home area), and infantry can only be healed inside castles, Town Centers (there are two in your home area), and Towers (there are three in your home area). What this means is that infantry become much more cost-effective than in normal games. Infantry are usually worth very little, because they die so quickly that their effective cost is much larger than the purchase cost, while cavalry generally never die, so their effective cost is equal to the purchase cost. But this calculation assumes that healing is readily available, and is not valid in this scenario. Thirdly, you are restricted to the Castle Age, so your most advanced units are unavailable. The biggest problem in that regard will be the lack of long range artillery.

A number of things follow directly from the above points. Loss of any of your buildings is very bad or disastrous. You must protect your buildings AT ALL COSTS, and the same holds true for Henry the Lion's buildings. Damage to your economy is very bad, so protect your economic bases! They can rebuild to a certain extent, and they may even be able to grow, but your income is only their surplus, so make sure that they have a big surplus. Of course, you and Henry can never build walls, so you could be attacked at any point, and there does not appear to be any stone on the map, so your other allies may never be able to build walls, either. In some sense, this is fair, because Poland also cannot build walls. You can never have more than 50 military units, and the same holds true for Henry the Lion. However, this should not be a major problem, because you hardly ever have that many military units in a standard game.

So what can you do? You can build fishing boats and bring in food through your dock. You could also bring in gold through your dock, but that would require some level of cooperation fom Poland, and is not recommended. As the scenario starts, you realize that your allies will have Markets, so you will be able to build Trade Carts and bring in gold. You could do Market manipulations, but this is not recommended due to the inefficiency, except in an emergency. After you have scouted the map a bit, you realize that stone exists, and your allies mine it, so they may build walls. You have Cartography, so you see what your allies see.

What are your weakest points? First of all, the Outposts. They go down real quick if they are attacked, and they are in exposed locations. In fact, they are indefensible against any serious attack. The best you can really do is station some units nearby to lure away attacking units. This might work for a while, but try to keep the Outposts alive as long as possible. Second, your dock, which is your only direct source of food. To defend it, you will need a substantial fleet.

With your initial allocation of resources, produce four scouts, two Teutonic Knights, and several Galleys. Research Bodkin Arrow and Ballistics. You find out in short order that Poland has War Galleys, so research that as soon as you have several Galleys. After that, build up your fleet to five War Galleys. When your allies' Markets are finished, build a couple of Trade Carts. Trading is not as efficient as mining, but you don't know how much gold you will be getting from your allies, so trading is advisable. Of course, if your Trade Carts die, your trading efficiency goes way down, so keep them alive. The Bavarian trade route seems safer than the nothern one, depending, of course, on what Poland does. (The Bavarian market is rated to provide 100 gold per trip, but only provides 30.) This leaves you 50 wood, 80 food, and 295 gold, which is enough to build an emergency reserve of one knight and one cavalry archer, for example, with a bit left over, but don't build those units yet.

Scout aggressively! But be careful. Not only is it hard to heal units in this scenario, but if you run up to an enemy castle, it can kill your scout in the blink of an eye. Poland does not have Ballistics, and cannot get it; use this fact to your advantage. Do not scout with your ships. Their entire mission at this point is to defend your dock, and you do not want to attract unnecessary attention. Send a garrison force to each of your allies. Four Pikemen, two Teutonic Knights, three Crossbowmen, and a knight each seems like a reasonable force. Kill the six Dire Wolves on your home continent, because you don't want them hurting your allies. Use all your archers and a couple of melee units; this way, you shouldn't take any damage. (These wolves are not very dire; they die almost as soon as you sneeze at them. Maybe they are die-er wolves.) As soon as you can reasonably do so, send a "garrison" of one knight to each of your Outposts. The total force listed in this paragraph is larger than what you start with or can build quickly, but do the best you can. This leaves you a home guard of only two Pikemen, plus new production, but it is essential to keep the enemy away from your buildings.

When you have scouted as much of the map as you safely can, you will have found: - on the SW "home" continent, one Polish castle and two Watch Towers; - in the NW corner, five Towers, a Siege Workshop, and two Houses; - in the east, one Polish castle, three Towers, a Siege Workshop, and two Houses; - in the middle-north, one Polish castle, three Towers, a (second) dock, and a House.

This gives the Poles a maximum population of 85 military units, which is much larger than their practical population, so attacking their Houses is a waste of time. Attacking their Siege Workshops is definitely a good idea, because you can fairly easily knock out their production of heavy equipment. After that, it should be fairly easy to deal with the Huskarls, which is all the Poles can keep producing. The Poles will eventually run out of resources, but you have no idea how long that will take. In case it isn't completely obvious, they have no means of generating income. The Poles are restricted to Castle Age units.

Based on what the Poles have, most of your initial force, Pikemen and archers, is nearly useless. You will need good melee units. Do not hesitate to pay off the ineffective units if you are population-limited. Note that Town Centers and even castles are relatively weak against Huskarls. Teutonic Knights are excellent point-defense melee units, but don't ask them to go on extended journeys.

Be advised that the Poles will attack you in force regardless of what you do. As soon as you see their first scout (if you see him), you know that their attack waves are not far behind.

There are three major surprises yet to come. The first is that Henry the Lion should back-stab you. It is not at all clear what triggers this. It appears to happen completely at random, even though all AoE scenario triggers are absolute (non-random), and it may not happen at all. Nevertheless, it is intended that the back-stab occur. It is probably intended that it happen while you are heavily engaged with Poland and most or all of your units are away from home, and you appear to be doing well. Thus Henry thinks he can get away with it, and he thinks that he needs to do it. You might have had some clue that Henry is not with the program, based on the scenario introduction and the way his units behave (they just wander around aimlessly at home and never try to hurt Poland).

The second major surprise is that you can get villagers. After all you have gone through, knowing that you couldn't have any, and trying to cope with it! By the time you get them, there won't be any gold or especially stone left for you to mine, but your remaining allies continue to send you tribute, and there is no shortage of wood and therefore food in any case. Having villagers, the scenario becomes much, much easier.

The third major surprise is that it is possible to win the scenario without doing anything at all! It is possible that Poland decides to not produce new units. Then all their initial army dies in front of your castle, Poland surrenders, and the scenario ends without Henry ever attacking you. This needs to be considered a bug rather than a reasonable scenario theme. What also appears quite bizarre is what happens if you do nothing or just build up at home, and Poland pumps out their army. Poland attacks indiscriminately, but appears to target Henry primarily. You are quite safe, except for your Outposts. Bavaria and Saxony are also pretty safe, because they restore damage so quickly, and Poland doesn't really have the force and the commitment to take them out. Henry never can attack Poland! Accordingly, his units just stand around and die, and then he surrenders.

But let's assume that you play the scenario in good faith. Then your army will be on the front line with Poland, and suddenly Henry the Lion attacks. The earlier he attacks, the worse it will be for you, because you will have less resources available. Let's assume that he attacks even before Poland, and before you get your first tribute. It's actually not a major problem. Use your emergency reserve to produce one knight and one cavalry archer. These two units, plus your castle, are all you need to deal with Henry's attacks! Henry's main target is your university. Lure his units to your castle, where they die, and use the knight to kill battering rams. As tribute starts to come in, build some cavalry archers as a first priority. Cavalry archers are very effective against Henry's force.

The main action is against Poland. This scenario is too random to say exactly what will happen and what you should do, but there are good general guidelines.

Kill scouts whenever possible. AI units tasked with scouting do not fight back, and in this scenario, each dead scout is a significant loss.

Poland has three War Galleys to start, and never builds any more. Your fleet of five War Galleys will therefore dominate the seas. All the Polish War Galleys attack with the initial attack wave. By using standard naval tactics, you should be able to destroy these ships while taking very little damage. After that, destroy their northern dock. This dock is undefended. But why bother, when Poland never builds any ships? The main reason is that Poland may actually build ships after their Siege Workshops are destroyed, and in any case, all you reasonably know at any point in time is that Poland hasn't built any new ships YET.

The next priority is to destroy the Polish Siege Workshop in the NW. This Siege Workshop is exposed, although it might be defended with mobile units. Not only will the loss of this irreplaceable building cut the production of Polish siege weapons in half, it will limit the directions from which they attack. At first, you will have very little available for this mission, but do the best you can.

As wood starts to come in, build a Transport Ship even before battering rams. This ship will allow you to rescue trapped wounded units, will dramatically increase the mobility of rams and your force in general, and is the only place where siege equipment can hide.

Eventually, you get enough wood to build one or two battering rams. This is enough to comfortably wipe out Towers one by one. The first target is the Tower that has been grinding away at your university. The next target is the Polish Tower that dominates the NW ford. When that Tower goes down (and after the NW Siege Workshop is gone), you can ignore the entire NW region. Then destroy the Tower that guards the Polish dock in the middle-north, after which the dock dies almost immediately. Once you have absolute control of the seas, when more wood comes in, build some fishing boats to secure a small food income. Finally, build more battering rams until you have five, which is a good number to take out a castle. Of course, while all this is happening, you will need to deal with wave after wave of up to ten units at a time from Henry the Lion and Poland.

When you have five battering rams and some breathing room, destroy Henry's castle. Bring along some archers and melee troops to protect your rams against mobile units. These units could not normally stand around near an enemy castle, but in this situation, the castle fixates on your rams, which are fairly immune to missile weapons but very vulnerable to melee troops. When the castle is gone, Henry is finished. You may need to destroy a few more things to force his surrender, but he won't be able to do anything about it.

And then you go get the villagers that are waiting for you in the SW corner. As soon as you have villagers, the scenario is pretty much over. Your first priority is to build Houses and a monastery, then repair damaged buildings, battering rams, and ships, and maybe build some walls. Build a bunch of Town Centers (cheap mini-castles). Use the monks to heal your combat damage. No more running back to the castle for a long convalescence.

After you have villagers, you completely dominate the game and can win any way you like. You could go Imperial for even greater dominance, but it is not at all necessary.

The scenario ends when all the Polish production buildings are destroyed.

Historical note: Henry the Lion did not break fealty with Barbarossa until years later, relating to an Italian campaign.

Barbarossa 3: Pope and Antipope
Start by scouting aggressively on land with all scouting assets. Monks are actually decent scouts, except that they are slow and vulnerable. Guard the monks with your ground troops. The ships are at present your weakest link, and they should hide.

Pick off Crema's villagers with your monks as you find them. Collect the sheep. If you act promptly, you should get 10 sheep. When you find the relic, leave it where it is until Crema is pacified. There will be a brief skirmish with Crema's home guard. Put your knights against their archers, and your pikemen against their pikemen. You can heal your damage. Crema is a piece of cake. You should be able to get about 10 villagers before Crema surrenders. Maybe you can get more in total if you take less up front.

Your immediate priority is Redemption, so you can take over Crema's buildings, but if the River Guard attacks, you will need Houses and ships.

Build up as quickly as possible. Focus on the economy. Limit your initial military expenses to five cavalry archers, two War Galleys, and a castle, or the equivalent. That's plenty to deal with any sea or land attacks that you will face, actually in this entire scenario, because your own offensive will develop so rapidly that you won't need to defend. Of course, you will probably build more defenses, because in some sense, while most of your economy is allocated to the main purpose, a significant fraction of your economy remains available for general purposes, unless you ruthlessly re-allocate villagers on an ongoing basis. Frankly, it's not worth the hassle, and you actually don't know a priori how successful your plan is going to be. Bodkin Arrow and Ballistics are important.

Go Imperial as soon as you can. Start building Cannon Galleons. (For some reason, you get Chemistry for free.) As soon as they are available, start nuking the River Guard. Five Cannon Galleons plus five Galleons is a massive-a fleet for purposes of this scenario. Wipe out enemy docks as a priority, but really, raze everything to the ground. Very soon, all enemy offensive potential will disappear. Your home areas will be absolutely safe for the duration of the scenario, because you control the seas absolutely.

Your ally Carcano does very little in this scenario. Accordingly, feel free to take almost all the stone on the eastern landmass; Carcano won't use it effectively, but you will. You can leave them some gold, because you won't need it all, and you can expect to get a lot more across the river.

The next phase of this scenario is the conquest of Milan. Nothing special is required. Raid an area. Wall off the pacified area. Repeat as necessary. That's literally all there is to it. Not. As opposed to your other two enemies, Milan puts up serious resistance. It will appear that, no matter how many of their units you kill, there will always be about 10 of their units trying to get you. You should see a few monks and medium artillery, and lots of heavy infantry, hand cannoneers, and cavalry scouts. Milan loves to run up and down the shore, and they get massacred by your light and heavy naval artillery. Eventually you need to push inland a bit, so you build a castle on the west bank of the river (behind a wall, of course), and then Milan's troops get massacred by your castle.

There are several special points that should be realized. First, Milan does not use much heavy artillery or any battering rams. Therefore a Wall Maze Complex is not required; a simple wall is sufficient, albeit necessary. Castles pwn anything Milan produces.

Having said that, you will need a maximum force, because Milan does have a powerful field army, and many of their units are actually good, instead of the usual pikeman/skirmisher/light cavalry junk that the AIs produce in extremis. Once you are at your population limit, start converting Milan's Elite Teutonic Knights and hand cannoneers, which, accordingly, you should not bother producing on your own.

You will not at first be able to raid Milan's villagers and cripple their economy, because, when your attack goes in, they will still be working inside Milan's wall. This will eventually change.

The easiest approach to Milan is from the north, because your ships can be used there. As you push forward, you will eventually be able to take out their north gate and replace it with your own gate. After that, you could continue to push into the city from the north, but it is more flexible to attack their other two gates one by one and seal them off as well. When Milan's three gates are sealed, your heavy artillery can roam the map with impunity. You will now be able to assess what is the easiest route into the city. Keep pushing forward, and pretty soon, all resistance will collapse.

Barbarossa 4: The Lombard League
This scenario is rated to be brutally hard. Therefore we will approach it with absolute ruthlessness. We will use every trick in the book, and then some. The scenario may not be survivable on the first play-through, so we may need to "cheat".

Big spoiler: Henry the Lion may betray and attack you. Something like this is historically accurate, so it might be expected in the game. Empirically, it appears to be triggered at any point after 23.5 min of game time, if you have a castle. We will avoid building a castle until we are ready for the betrayal. There is one big argument for not building a castle early in any case, and that is, since the enemy is attacking with a lot of heavy artillery, a castle is simply too expensive and vulnerable until your Maze Complex is well developed. We will be building a lot of mini-castles, which in the Teutonic case, have a range advantage over castles as well as a price advantage. The other relevant thing we will do is observe Henry's behaviour via Cartography.

There are good reasons for building castles. Just because you can do so is not a good reason. As this scenario develops, you will find that you never have a good reason until late in the game.

The most important trick we will use in this scenario is the AoE Pause feature. In all AoE variants except the original one, you can analyze the situation and give orders to your units while the game is paused. There are many intense situations where your units will simply commit suicide unless they are continually micromanaged. But if you play the game in a pure real-time strategy way, you cannot manage more than a few units at a time, and if you do it that way in this scenario, you probably cannot survive unless you know far into the future exactly what the opponents will do. That is definitely cheating, and we will avoid it. We will aim to play the scenario in the best possible way, based only on information available at that point in time.

The biggest modification to our strategic approach for this scenario is that we will not concern ourselves with minimizing our casualties or even aiming for zero casualties. Instead, we will concentrate on the most efficient use of the rare gold and stone resources. Any units or buildings that cost only food or wood are considered expendable. We may even build a lot of such units as cannon fodder. A related consideration is that we will not be reluctant to disband obsolete units if we are population-limited. In this scenario, you get a lot of units that will rapidly become obsolete. We will also be converting enemy units even if we can't possibly maintain them.

Our first objective in this scenario is to defend our initial Town Center as long as possible. This is not possible with the forces available to start. Fortunately, you get a lot of reinforcements almost immediately, and they do arrive in time to save you. Defeating the initial assault is Phase 1 of this scenario.

Start by ringing the town bell. Technically, this is not necessary; it is almost as efficient to select all villagers and manually send them into the Town Center, but you do get to hear the bell sound. Garrison all the archers and foot knights in the Town Center as well. One knight heads west to pick up some sheep; the other one heads south to the shore for now. One ship heads west, not that there's much to see there; the other one heads for the open sea. These are not ideal scouts by any means, but they are the only units available, and a key maxim of AoE is that you must always explore and scout aggressively. You will need to repeat some of the orders several times, especially for the villagers, because some of your units will try to head off in other directions. 13 of your initial units will shortly be inside your Town Center. Keep an eye on the garrison limit, because very soon you will have more units than can actually get in there at the same time.

As soon as you have collected the two sheep just west of your initial position, the knight that went there swings around behind the attacking force and tries to take out the trebuchet. This probably won't work, because he will have to flee before the job is done, but at least he will have done some damage.

When all your villagers and archers are inside the Town Center, you will have a 9-shot volley. Focus fire on the catapults, but when they start moving sideways, choose a different target. Archers are a good choice, because you can kill them with one volley, and they generally don't evade fire. The main point is to focus fire with every volley.

As melee units start to attack your Town Center, lure them away with your unallocated knight. He should only run to the south bank of the river. When the enemy pursuit has just about reached him, he hides inside a Transport Ship.

The foot knights should leap out of the Town Center to deal with what can't be lured away. They can take some punishment because of their high melee armor, but will eventually need to hide in the Town Center again.

The villagers could try to repair the Town Center while it is being attacked, but this is not viable or necessary. Use them to shoot.

Your initial force is sufficient to knock out the catapults, half the trebuchet, and probably all of the enemy melee units. But who will deal with the battering rams and who will finish off the trebuchet? Fortunately, you get a lot of reinforcements almost immediately. In particular, you get


 * four War Galleys. Use them for fire support from just south of the Town Center.
 * five knights. Use them to wipe out the two battering rams and the trebuchet. Avoid any other melee combat with these units, hiding in the Transport Ships as appropriate.
 * three foot knights. Use them for melee point defense near the Town Center. Note that not all your foot units can get into the Town Center at the same time.
 * two scouts. Use them immediately to explore.
 * five more villagers. Use them to start building Houses immediately. Line the Houses up in the extreme SW corner of the map. Your active population will now be 49, so build enough Houses to enable you to support 50 units. Your 50th unit will be a monk.
 * five catapults. Leave them inactive for now.
 * two Fire Ships. Use them to explore. They are not ideal scouts by any means, but they are available, so off they go! Head towards the SE corner and your eastern possessions. The scenario map indicates that these are safe areas.
 * six fishing ships. Start fishing immediately. Eventually, you will be using these in protected areas near a dock. Building fish farms is probably better than fishing in distant locations. With all the fish and sheep and other food available, you should not be doing any farming in this scenario.

And then you find, somewhat to your surprise, that you have defeated the initial attack without sustaining much damage. One trebuchet, two battering rams, two catapults, six heavy cavalry, two foot knights, and six archers. How much gold is that? Phase 1 of this scenario is complete when the last attacking unit is dead.

As your Houses start coming online, use the villagers in the south to build a Town Center near the big gold pile. Considering that it can pull in all three resource types there and has other important functions as well, it is a bargain.

Use your villagers in the north to repair the Town Center, to build a monastery, and to seal three of the four holes in your wall. Leave one opening, according to Maze Complex doctrine. After that, most of these villagers should start collecting resources or building infrastructure, while some should build walls. The eastern ford needs to be walled off ASAP, and walling off the western ford is a good idea as well. As in any scenario where you have allies, you build a Market, only to find that Cartography is unavailable. What a rip-off!

As Phase 2 of the scenario commences, you should have discovered some enemy static and mobile artillery in the SE map area. Immediately put together a force consisting of one scout, all the unwounded knights, and all the War Galleys and try to sanitize, or at least scout, this area. The remaining scout explores the western landmass, and all the wounded units need to be healed ASAP. It turns out that the island forts in the SE part of the map are too tough for the forces you have available at this time. Instead, send the ground troops you allocated to that mission to the eastern landmass. Also send a couple of villagers and monks there as soon as you can afford to. Of course, that is not enough to hold the area against a determined assault, but you only have to deal with scouts and such. Be prepared to withdraw this force. Wall off the southern part of this area, and hide the sheep you find there on your side of the wall.

You will have noticed that the scout cavalry you have at this time have poor sight range. Buy better scouts ASAP. You will be doing things ASAP a lot in this phase. In AoE, it pays to be super-aggressive. Thus, as soon as you have your first real scout, send him out immediately, and you will get a benefit immediately. He is useless if he just stands around. You should be thinking like the Americans in the Pacific Theater in the year after Pearl Harbor. Every available unit should be doing something useful. Of course, the slow, powerful units need to guard your home areas. But all the light troops need to be in the face of the enemy at all times, subject to how many you can actually control. Harass, harass, harass.

Aim to build Cannon Galleons ASAP, plus any required supporting units. We want to have absolute control of the seas, and all the associated benefits. Phase 3 of this scenario commences when the first Cannon Galleon is built.

Resources
As Phase 2 progresses, you will find lots of stone. By the time that you are ready to start your first offensive actions, you should have found at least 27 stone mines, every pebble of which you can expect to get. Added to your initial 800 stone, that's over 10,000 stone!! You can easily build 10 castles with this, with a lot still available for other purposes. 10 castles!! Think about that for a minute. The bottom line is, you do not lack for stone in this scenario.

At the same time, you will have two large gold piles available. Many technologies are already known, although you will need to build a lot of troops. Accordingly, you will only need about half this gold to reach your maximum size, as long as you conserve your troops appropriately.

As is normal in AoE, you have an effectively infinite amount of wood and food. If there is even a hint that you will ever run out, you are doing something very wrong.

Phase 3
As soon as you get your first Cannon Galleon, send it to attack the big island fort in the SE. You should already have significant screening forces available. Build several more Cannon Galleons and raze that island. You will bag two Towers, one castle, one dock, some artillery, and a bunch of fishing boats. Ignore the small island fort for now.

In the meantime, start raiding in the NW. Both Venice and Verona have villagers working outside their walls. Do as much damage as you can.

As soon as you have monks, use them to start converting enemy units. Just about anything the enemy sends your way is better than any comparable unit you have until much later. Monks are perhaps the most powerful units in AoE.

Phase 3 ends when the big island fort has been reduced. At this point, you should have explored about 80% of the map. You should control the entire southern half of the map. You should have walled off the entire eastern landmass south of the River Piave, not that you can expect to actually hold it against a serious attack. You should have located Venice and Verona. You should have scouted Henry the Lion. There is no evidence that Henry is doing anything at all to support The Cause. Indeed, he seems to be embedded (in bed with) at least Padua. You should be at population 75, and you should have started to disband obsolete units.

So far, you should not have seen any serious enemy attack (except the initial one), and very soon, the enemy will be crippled and perhaps unable to ever attack effectively. But you cannot say for sure. One major benefit to having your scouts out well in front of your wall line is that you will see the siege weapons coming well before they actually can hurt you, and keep in mind that if you catch an army on the march, it generally does not fight back. One major benefit to having complete control of the seas is that any attack must arrive by walking.

Phase 4
You are now ready to control the seas. All of your Cannon Galleons, plus appropriate screening forces, sail over to Venice and nuke it. Venice is the only enemy city that builds ships in this scenario, and it is easily accessible by water. Venice will try to resist, but your early raids, in conjunction with your fast offensive, mean that that resistance will be futile. Build up your bombardment force to 5 Cannon Galleons. Venice has huge buildings, so they don't go down as fast as other buildings.

In the meantime, the other two enemy cities will be trying to do you. Their attacks include siege weapons and monks. Their attacks bite on your Maze Complex and fail.

And what is our friend Henry the Lion doing? You have already seen that he is not helping you in any way. Keep watching, and you will see his troops wander through the enemy cities freely. What does this tell you? You may even see his troops try to get into your home areas. Not so fast, friend Henry! That gate just happens to be locked. Maybe try the other gate over there. It is a general rule for any scenario where you have allies that you should carefully control who passes your gates. Only let them through if you are certain they won't backstab you, and even then, think about ALL of the potential consequences.

It turns out that Henry is not long for this world. Empirically, there are certain points in time where, if certain conditions are met, Henry will resign. One of them is 8.5 min into the scenario; another is at 41.5 min. If Venice's Town Center has been destroyed by the check time, Henry resigns. There may or may not be other check times, and other conditions. You have just destroyed Venice's Town Center. If you managed it early enough, definitely kiss Henry good-bye.

Should Henry resign if he has never attacked you? Perhaps more thought could have gone into the scenario triggers, but realistically, if you have managed to defeat Venice and never even needed a castle, it is clear that the scenario is essentially over and that you are invincible. Whether Henry resigns, or runs around aimlessly until you are ready to crush him, is moot.

Let's revisit the question of how reasonable it is to not build a castle. First of all, having control of the seas is a major theme in this scenario. We have definitely focused on that. Second, the strength of our land defenses is in the Wall Maze Complex. We have definitely focused on that. Putting a castle in there is almost a liability. Furthermore, a castle is very expensive, and if you don't need a lot of villagers collecting stone, you can have more troops. There are a number of good reasons for building a castle, but none of them was yet applicable in this scenario. For example, if you want Teutonic Knights, you can just take them away from Padua.

It is worth considering what is the dominant unit in the various ages. In the Dark Age, there is no reasonable way of defeating a Town Center. In the Feudal Age, there is no reasonable way of defeating a stone wall, especially if it is supported by Towers. In the Castle Age, there is no reasonable way of defeating a castle behind a stone wall supported by a mobile force or catapults. But in the Imperial Age, there is no static defense that can reasonably stand up against long-range artillery supported by a mobile force. Naval heavy artillery is the greatest threat, because of its high mobility. The only viable response is to have naval superiority, perhaps to keep your buildings away from the shore, and to use a Maze Complex defense.

The Push Inland
It is relatively easy to wipe out Venice. Padua is well inland and not accessible to your navy. Verona has a river passing through it (the Adige), so it should be the next target. There will be at least two difficulties. The primary one is that they use monks, so they have an effective counter to your ships. The second one is that the river restricts your mobility, so you will not be able to maneuver much. You will need to be very careful.

It turns out that only about half of Verona is accessible to your navy. So you nuke half of Verona. Unfortunately, you can't get all of their production buildings, and you can't get all of their villagers. So they just rebuild inland. From then on, no matter how many times you raid them, you can't seem to put a dent in the flood of units they put out. However, they don't rebuild completely. In particular, they are reduced to heavy cavalry, light artillery, and villagers.

Possess as many of Verona's Paladins as you think you will need. Being Franks, they have the best heavy cavalry. Possess as many of Padua's Teutonic Knights as you think you will need, especially after they are fully upgraded. But you can't really go over the population limit, because eventually you will need to produce your own heavy artillery. About 5 each Bombard Cannons and trebuchets should do the trick. After that, and once you are sure that you have all the other units that you will need, go hog-wild with your monks.

Push your Wall Maze as far up the left side as you reasonably can. Eradicate Padua's small outpost there. Eventually, you reach a large open area that's just too hard to deal with. At this point, it makes sense to go after Padua, because it's relatively easy to advance your wall in that area.

Against Padua, you probably want trebuchets because of their long-range Town Centers. So you will need a castle, finally. Pick a spot for it that's not exposed to long-range artillery. You could even put it on one of the small islands in the SE, but that's probably being too paranoid. As soon as your castle is finished, Henry the Lion attacks you. They can't really do much, because they no longer have central control, and their economy is dead.

It is worth mentioning that your enemies are finally putting a lot of troops in the field, albeit not much heavy artillery.

By the time that you are knocking on Padua's gates, they are probably economically exhausted, unable to build any more units that need gold, and unwilling to produce any others. So tear their city down. It is not obvious how to get them to surrender; the trigger might be loss of their Market.

With Padua eliminated, turn back against Verona. Since they are producing with resources that would normally have been used by Henry the Lion, they are not going to run out of units any time soon. In a situation like this, the only realistic way to make progress is to build a castle in a place where they like to hang out. Do so. This breaks them. Then try to hunt down all their villagers, which isn't easy, because they keep rebuilding everywhere. Even after all their units are dead, they don't surrender. The trigger for that appears to be destruction of their Market.

The scenario ends when all enemies are defeated, or if you were inclined that way, after you build a Wonder per scenario instructions.

Historical Note: Henry the Lion did break fealty with Barbarossa around this time, but not in the way indicated. In fact, he did not show up at all.

Geographical Note: Padua is actually directly west of Venice, and Verona directly west of Padua. The triangle arrangement in the game is incorrect.

Barbarossa 5: Barbarossa's March
Standard techniques are not really adequate in this scenario.

Spoiler alert: The Aegean Sea is crawling with enemy warships. When you get ships as reinforcements, they will probably be attacked immediately, and they may be destroyed before you can do anything about it. This is not disastrous, but it may feel unpleasant. In particular, when you get the Constantinople fleet, you may lose some ships unavoidably, but you will have lots of ships left. On the other hand, if you choose not to attack Constantinople (after all, they are nominally your friends), you may find that you have no real choice in the matter. The scenario designer may have intended this, but you may not appreciate it.

When the scenario starts, you have more units than you can reasonably control. Just leave a bunch of the weaker units behind as you advance. You have three main choices at this time. First, you could use a Siege Onager to cut through the trees and explore north of Constantinople. You will find that not much happens over there. Second, you could attack Constantinople immediately. Third, you could avoid Constantinople and head for Gallipoli.

There are too many random factors to say for sure how this scenario will play out in detail, but there are certain general themes. Suppose that we ignore the first option for now. The trees north of Constantinople are impassable at present, and that gives us some security. Suppose that we reject the second option because we don't want to do such a dastardly thing. So we head for Gallipoli, unless we get new information that convinces us to do something else.

The normal AoE scouting rule gets modified in this scenario: Scout aggressively, but cautiously! You have several types of units to use as potential scouts. We start by assuming that our opponents are primarily static, so trebuchets are the best scouts, because they have the longest sight range, and they are safe in almost all situations. As an important general rule in this type of situation, keep a large section of your army, all arms, close behind your scouts to respond to any developments.

Almost immediately, you encounter an enemy warship. It appears to be all alone. Bring up the monks and possess it! It is worth describing the process in some detail. One monk can do the actual converting, and the others can heal him as he takes damage. This allows him to stand right in the firing line, and has the advantage that the target unit won't lose interest. Alternatively, two monks could switch between avoiding fire and attempting the conversion. A variety of techniques could be used. The important thing is to practise them in easy situations so that you can deal with the hairy ones, such as when your three monks want to possess a whole fleet of four enemy ships without losing any of the ships, and definitely without losing any of the monks. Teutonic monks, of course, are better than any other ones because they get every upgrade. Incidentally, the way to capture the four ships is to maneuver until three of them fixate on one monk. Then a second monk lures the fourth ship away and possesses it out of sight of the first three, while the third monk is used for healing. And so on. As the ships get taken over, they run away and hide.

Your next encounter is with a House and a farm. As soon as you see them, they are attacked by four Elite Mamelukes. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. If you want to retain these buildings, the only option is to rush some units forward to distract the Mamelukes. The only units that could conceivably do it are your heavy cavalry. They are not the ideal choice by any means, because you could easily lose some of them unless you are very careful. If you have deployed your forces properly (all arms must be close behind the point), six Paladins should be in range, and with perfect use of Bait-and-Switch tactics, you can save your House. Some of your cavalry will be seriously wounded, but they get healed. The House will be badly damaged.

What you learn from this encounter is that you cannot use the scout cavalry as scouts. They would not have survived this encounter. You should also realize that four Elite Mamelukes popping out of nowhere would make short work of a trebuchet if they saw it, especially considering that you cannot repair your siege weapons.

Almost immediately afterwards you run into a Saracen picket line. Since you don't want to engage them immediately, you move closer to Constantinople. Without any warning at all, Constantinople attacks you! Depending on how, exactly, your forces are positioned when it happens, they may attack with only one unit, or up to ten heavy cavalry, nine pikemen, and three catapults. In any case, these units do not all arrive at once due to their different speeds. Fortunately, their first units probably don't attack your scout, so it should have time to run away. In the upcoming melee, you might be able to convert a few units, but don't count on it. You definitely should put your pikemen against their cavalry while avoiding catapults, heavy infantry against pikemen while avoiding catapults, and heavy cavalry against catapults while avoiding pikemen. The archers can grab whatever action they can. Definitely keep track of which of your units are being hit; they should run away and live to fight another day.

You now have a casus belli for attacking Constantinople. Perhaps you should do it right away, before they rebuild their army, but as it turns out, Constantinople never rebuilds. However, suppose we continue with the plan of heading for Gallipoli. You should probably re-set your diplomatic stance with Constantinople to neutral or even ally at this point.

It now becomes necessary to deal with the Saracen picket line. The essential point is that each enemy unit must be lured out of the picket line in isolation. Do not attack it until it is far from the picket line. Possess as many of these units as you can, but don't hesitate to kill them to protect your monks.

Eventually, you encounter a castle (and Tower). Here it gets a bit tricky, because you can't lure a castle out of the line, and you can't be perfectly sure that there aren't mobile units hiding nearby ready to leap all over your trebuchets. Be prepared to send Paladins in to dance around near the castle, because they can take a lot of punishment while having high mobility. After you destroy the castle, you are almost at the coast. (You could consider converting the Tower, but that's just a little extreme.)

When you approach Gallipoli, the normal course of action will produce a bad result. There are four Transport Ships near the Gallipoli dock that will come over to you, but if you take them now, they will most likely just get sunk immediately. If you think this is silly, then you need to avoid Gallipoli harbor for now. Instead, you head for the coast between Gallipoli and Constantinople. There are a number of Saracen warships there. You should possess these ships. Start with one that is all alone, and be prepared to abandon the attempt if his friends show up. Clear the coast slowly, and hide all your recruits until you have a substantial fleet. There is also a Saracen dock there that you should take over.

Incidentally, it now becomes clear that you can actually have an economy of sorts in this scenario, as can be seen from the equation Dock + Fishing Boat + Market = income. Monks are great. Not that the income stream is very efficient. If you think about this some more, you realize that you can actually produce all sorts of units (except villagers) in this scenario. Practically, though, you will be recruiting so many enemy and neutral units that you won't even know what to do with them.

When you have about ten warships, start scouting the sea. Be very cautious, because you have no way of repairing any of your ships. Lure any enemy ships over to your monks for assimilation, hopefully one by one. Eventually, you will be able to approach Gallipoli harbor and get your transports safely. If for any reason you do not get these transports, you will be forced to attack Constantinople and take their navy.

You should probably try to take out the entire Saracen navy. This isn't strictly necessary, because your mission is fundamentally about your army, but it could be useful and might be interesting. If you are going to deal with the Saracen navy, you need to do it now, before your monks are otherwise engaged. The Saracen ships do wander about, and while you have no way of predicting what any wandering ship will do at any point in time, you do know that they will eventually become aggressive. Bear in mind that the fleet in Constantinople is hostile to you at this time, so stay away from them.

At some point, the Saracen navy may decide to attack you en masse. Fight near your monks, and try to set them up as the prime targets. The monks may be too busy running around, avoiding fire and healing themselves, to do any converting, but in the meantime, your ships are sinking their ships unopposed. Eventually, the Saracens are down to just a few ships, and they will probably just wander around peacefully forever. Never mind that; sink them all! (Or possess them if they get near your monks, but you may not want to wait for that to happen.) There is one unit that may be worth waiting for: the only Cannon Galleon in the game, and it happens to be fully upgraded. This is definitely a nice unit to have, but it is by no means necessary, and in any case, all your ships will soon become completely irrelevant. To complete the defeat of the Saracens, wipe out their two Towers (there are several ways of doing this), and destroy or convert their second dock. Or leave it alive as a potential source of gold.

It now becomes appropriate to revisit the question of Constantinople. One course of action is to push forward and forget about the past. But it seems prudent to keep your lines of communication open, and to that end, we need to knock out Constantinople, and we need to do it now. We don't need to raze the whole city, just the castle and some walls, and maybe a few Towers. It is possible for a mobile unit to do the job while leaving the castle intact, but if we take out the castle, we will need to destroy some Towers first to clear some space for the trebuchets. The second option is straightforward, but it is worth describing the first option in some detail. Use your trebuchets to knock down the front gate of Constantinople. Now run a Paladin into the city, zig-zagging madly. (Actually, walk him in on a completely deterministic path.) Constantinople knows Ballistics, and Bombard Towers use it. Therefore you can avoid the fire of all such Towers, if you pay proper attention. The castle is trickier, because it fires more often, the arrows travel quite fast, and they affect an area. You can avoid most of the fire from the castle, but should try to keep your Paladin out of range of the castle as much as possible. As soon as you get him to a certain spot next to the Wonder, Constantinople recognizes that you are top dog here and hands over their fleet. Fifteen fully upgraded warships plus six fully upgraded transports is nothing to sneeze at, except that, at this point in the game, they are also completely irrelevant, because all naval opposition has already been eliminated, and you probably already have a comparable fleet of Saracen design. Incidentally, do not play diplomatic games with Constantinople after this unless you are prepared for the consequences.

The effort that we are putting into these naval considerations has some value. Fundamentally, you just need to get your troops across the water. However, if you have ships available to support the landings, and if you don't have to worry about enemy naval interference, the landings will proceed a lot smoother.

Turkey
By the time all operations in the western part of the map are complete, or maybe well before that, you have probably started to explore the coast of Anatolia. On a small island in the SW part of the map, you recruit six fully upgraded Frankish axemen and a trebuchet. It's nice to have them, but they are unnecessary. Extract them from there ASAP. When you convert the second Saracen dock, or maybe by some other method, you recruit two monks and a monastery. They cannot be extracted at present, because they are at the top of a cliff. That cliff runs the full length of the coast of the eastern landmass, with only two breaks, both near Constantinople. There is actually a third way in, on the extreme northern map edge, but it will require knocking down a bunch of trees. There are also a number of orphan beaches that could be used for various purposes if it strikes your fancy.

The rest of the scenario is very straightforward. Possess what you can; kill everything else. Only the most unusual points will be described here.

You should have far more units by now than you will ever reasonably need. In fact, you could probably finish the scenario with just a few of your original units, plus new recruits. It is generally easier to just kill enemy units than to take them over. But how much time do you want to spend on this scenario? With a lot of extra effort, you could wind up with a really humungous force, but it is totally unnecessary. There are certain units that you should definitely not try to convert. Onagers, for example, are too dangerous because they could easily kill your monks with one shot.

On the northern beach, which we tackle first, there is only scattered opposition. The first enemy unit you encounter is a single monk. It is somewhat risky to try to capture him, but you do have three Teutonic monks and other advantages. To the NW, there is a group of cavalry archers and an Onager. Using standard tactics, kill the Onager and possess the cavalry archers. There is one Tower close to the beach, and one to the NE. You could possess them just for the heck of it. One monk does the dirty work, one monk heals him, and you have at least three monks. There are two enemy monks on the plateau at the north edge of the map. One is completely trapped by terrain, and cannot defend himself; the other has some mobility. Nevertheless, you can possess them both in absolute safety. Use your Siege Onagers to extract them. You now have 5 or 6 monks available. The ex-Saracen monks do not have your normal range, but they work just as well as your normal ones for many purposes. There are four free cavalry archer recruits near the NE Tower. You should now have 8 fully upgraded cavalry archers. Eventually, you are blocked to the NE and SE by static defenses.

On the southern beach, a mass of enemy units awaits you. This is not a problem; your navy can kill them all easily. The only "difficulty" is that you probably can't possess a lot of them, unless you really work at it. After you fight your way off the beach, you link up with the two monks at the monastery. Your push southward is blocked by some static defenses. Cliffs block you to the east, and more static defenses to the north.

Your next target should be the Turkish strongpoint in the middle of the map. It consists of a castle, some Towers, and some mobile units, including Bombard Cannons. Lure the mobile units away first as best you can. Bombard Cannons are actually pretty easy to deal with, because you can lure them from so far away, they have a low rate of fire, and the projectiles travel quite slowly. If you don't have any yet, you should definitely try to possess these cannons. Bombard Cannons are very useful because they are much more mobile than trebuchets, although their other properties are worse. If all the mobile units can be lured away from the castle, the castle is helpless against your long range artillery. Otherwise, those units will definitely come out to play when the artillery starts shooting. There may even be units inside the castle, and that is the big unknown.

You will need Bombard Cannons to deal with the castle in the extreme NE safely, because it is defended by a trebuchet (and a lot of cavalry archers). When the castle goes down, you should add the trebuchet to your collection. You will have been advised that you can recruit some Siege Onagers over there (there are 4), so be sure that you do not detect them before the castle is gone, otherwise you can kiss them good-bye.

At this point, very little opposition remains. There are two ways through the cliff line to your destination. In the north, you can smash some trees, deal with a few enemy units and a whole crew of wolves, and you are home. In the south, you can deal with some static defenses, and then a final line of static defenses. If you attack in the south, an Act of God helps you out, and then half the wall collapses if you even think about attacking it.

Historical Note: The interactions between Barbarossa's army and the Byzantines were by no means peaceful, and there were certainly motive, opportunity, and justification for the Crusaders to attack Constantinople. However, that did not happen at this time. It did happen a few years later, on a different Crusade.

Barbarossa 6: The Emperor Sleeping
This scenario is rated to be hard. What do we do in this situation? We pull out our bag of dirty tricks! Of course, all of these tricks are perfectly legal and in no sense program bugs, and they really should be part of every player's arsenal. However, you need to think creatively to come up with them, so they are rarely used. To a certain extent, they could be considered unfair, because the AIs can't use them, or they wouldn't work against a human opponent, but only to a small extent.

Dirty trick 1: Kill sheep that you can't get with military units. This denies the enemy (or ally!) about 85 food each, although the practical amount is quite variable. The AIs don't put a lot of energy into this one, or into protecting against it, but it is definitely a human trick. You won't do this in this scenario.

Dirty trick 2: Wall off ore. The AIs are generally helpless against this one in many situations, but it can be very effective against humans as well, simply because walls, even wooden ones, are so hard to knock down without siege weapons. This is definitely a human trick; the AIs can never do it. You won't really do this in this scenario. Incidentally, you can also wall off relics and other objects. Try putting wooden walls around Towers or around catapults. Go hog wild!

Dirty trick 3: Seal gates with stone. This can be devastating against an AI, because they generally don't have the resources to break through, or at least, you won't do it if they do have the resources. A human, of course, can simply delete an adjacent wall section, but the AI can't. The AIs can't use this trick. You will use this one in this scenario, although it may have no practical effect.

Dirty trick 4: Seal gates with the lock. This is only useful against your allies, and is only meaningful in scenarios like this one, where allies really aren't. The AIs can never use this one, because they aren't devious, but it never applies to them anyway. Humans definitely need to use this to protect against backstabbers. You should definitely use this in this scenario.

Dirty trick 5: Delete walls. The AIs can never do this, although a scenario designer might force it to happen. This is very important in this scenario in the negative sense, because the AIs' inability to do it protects you.

Dirty trick 6: Trebuchet picket. If the enemy is attacking with trebuchets, put some of your own trebuchets in front of everything else as pickets, provided enemy melee units can't get them. The AIs love to go trebuchet on trebuchet. Keep your trebuchets moving! Bear in mind that trebuchet fire has a lot of scatter, and can wipe out any unit with a lucky hit. The objective is to buy you time to deal with the enemy trebuchets.

It turns out that this scenario is actually quite easy. If you look around the map, you see that your enemies have a lot of developed bases, and all you have is a bunch of units, so you think that you might be in trouble. But if you look closely, you see that the main Saracen base and Jerusalem are completely sealed off! A human would simply delete a wall section as appropriate, but the AIs can't do so. (It's possible that a special event happens to open the wall, so stay alert!) Therefore you are really only fighting Damascus and Saladin's north base to start. Later, when you have a humungous force, you will have the situation well under control.

The first 10 minutes of the scenario are really only an accounting problem. You can determine exactly what you want to have, and calculate exactly what you need to procure, and almost everything else follows from that.

It is worth pointing out that the scenario instructions are full of red herrings. The instructions appear to refer primarily to the 10 minute mark. First, you are supposed to use your melee units offensively. This is incorrect. You need to use your pikes for melee point defense, and your cavalry for mobile melee defense. Second, you are supposed to procure a lot of siege weapons, especially battering rams. We won't be getting any rams at all, and we will not have the resources to acquire a lot of siege weapons until much later. Third, elephants are rated as being very powerful. This may be a joke. Elephants are actually incredibly weak, and hardly worth bothering with.

At the start of the scenario, there is a severe resource imbalance. We have immediate access to only 6 gold mines, and 4 stone mines in the remote SW corner. We should eventually be able to acquire a further 8 gold mines on the west side of the map. Damascus has 9 gold mines and 4 stone mines inside their walls, and that's all they will ever get. Saladin gets 9 stone mines and 7 gold mines in their northern base, and 10 stone mines and 13 gold mines in their main base. Despite the fact that we get all we really need, we will be seeking redress immediately. Specifically, we will be taking over Saladin's northern base in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

At the start of the scenario, we have 24 villagers, which is good enough. We have 8 archers, which we will live with, and 12 Pikemen, which are inferior units in general combat, but very useful against the forces that we will be encountering in this scenario, so we will keep them. We have 6 heavy cavalry, and will procure 4 more. We will also build 2 Scout Cavalry. Teutonic light cavalry are very weak, and they are even weaker relative to the enemy units in this scenario, so they need to be used with great care, but they are our only relatively mobile scouts. Until we possess some Saracen scouts, that is! We will fill up our roster with 8 monks, 5 trebuchets, and 5 Bombard Cannons. After that, we will have lots and lots of converted units, but we won't be able to actually keep the converted units until we have all the core units.

We will build one castle, a stable, and a monastery in our initial base. We will build one castle, a Town Center, and a Siege Workshop in our NE base. We will also need a university for Chemistry; this gets put in the NE corner. We will also need a number of support buildings. In particular, we need 10 Houses, 2 mining camps, and a lumber camp. All of these buildings are required to fill up our roster as rapidly as possible, and they will all be built within the first 10 minutes of the scenario. We will also build a lot of (fortified) stone walls in the first 10 minutes. Eventually, we will build or possess other buildings, but they have lower priority. The castles are required as defense bastions, as is the second Town Center. The first castle and the 10 Houses allow us to have 75 units. We can't afford to wait for the second castle. We might be able to shave one House off the list, but that has a very small effect. Two castles and two Town Centers allow us to hide 70 units, which is good enough, because the artillery can't hide anyway. The mining camp in the SW corner is definitely required. We could perhaps get away without the other two ... camps, but, without doing an exact cost-benefit analysis, it looks like they are worth it.

How much is all this going to cost us? The two castles alone cost 1300 stone, which leaves us 200 for walls. That's not really enough, so the second castle is going to have to wait until we get some more stone. Accordingly, stone mining is a priority.

The buildings cost 175 + 200 + 275 + 200 + 200 + 300 + 300 = 1650 wood.

The siege weapons cost 1,000 + 1,125 = 2,125 wood, so we have a deficit of 2,275 wood.

The units cost 300 + 800 + 1,000 + 1,125 + 200 (Chemistry) + 250 (Bombard Cannon) = 3,675 gold, so we have a deficit of 2,675 gold. Incidentally, that's only 3.35 gold mines, so it can be seen that we won't really run out of gold in this scenario.

The units cost 400 + 300 (Chemistry) + 500 (Bombard Cannon) = 1,200 food, and we start with more than this, so we will NOT be collecting food during the first 10 minutes or so of the scenario.

When the scenario starts, we immediately put 4 villagers each on stone, gold, and wood. Each group builds their own support building. Six villagers head off to the NE corner of the map, and the remaining six start building whatever is needed in the NW corner of the map. Bear in mind that you can't produce any new units until you have a bunch of Houses, but really, the build order is not that critical, except that the monks need to be coming out ASAP, because they are slow, and they have a long way to walk. There isn't much space available in your initial base. Line the Houses up in the extreme corner.

We will divide our military units 50-50 for each base, to wit, 4 archers, 6 Pikemen, 3 Paladins, 2 knights, one scout, and 4 monks head to the NE base, exploring as they go and when they get there. Note that your new-production heavy cavalry will be less capable than the initial units for quite some time. All remaining initial military units explore down the west side of the map. By the time that any new units are available, there will be nothing left to explore.

As you explore, you find 2 sheep in the west, and 3 in the NE part of the map. You also find a relic in the NE. Pay attention to what your "allies" explore. You should be able to claim the sheep in the NE, but you won't get that relic until you pry it from someone's cold, dead hands. You should claim the relic near your starting location with your first monk. There are 6 sheep in the SW area of the map, one of which has already been claimed by Saladin. No matter. These are all your sheep, all you have to do is collect them. To extract them from that area, you may have to march them the long way round along the west map edge. When all is said and done, you will have 21 sheep in the NW base, and 3 in the NE base for 2,040 food. I hope you like mutton.

When you approach the SW stone mine, Richard the Lionheart's forces become active and attack the enemy suicidally. You have no realistic way of preventing this. They will all be dead soon, with the exception of a few buildings. They do give a fairly good account of themselves.

You need to expect that you will come under heavy assault quite soon after the 10 minute mark. Accordingly, your NW base needs to be as far away from the enemy bases as possible, which means quite small, and the lack of stone indicates this as well. It also needs to be built according to Maze Complex principles. In particular, the wall needs to have a hole, so the enemy will try to get in there. Make them walk past your Town Center and castle, laughing all the way, as you pick them off one by one.

We need to use a different approach with the NE base. Here, you need a simple continuous wall, to deny the rare resources to the enemy as much as you can. You have a lot of space available here, which means a lot of reaction time if your initial wall is breached. Keep your buildings out of trebuchet range from Saladin's main base. The Town Center gets built first, then the production buildings and the wall. As more stone becomes available, you build a second castle. We will use this castle to break Saladin's northern base. It gets placed as far forward as possible, subject to the constraint that enemy trebuchets attacking your castle must be outside the range of their own castle. As it works out, your Town Center and archers, and a few other units, will sanitize the first wall compartment, where they only have to deal with some enemy archers and villagers. Your castle, Pikemen, and Paladins occupy a second wall compartment, from which your trebuchets can reach the enemy monastery. This base is somewhat at risk from enemy long range artillery, so we will use a dirty trick to make us feel better. You can't avoid Saladin's forces; in fact, by building your base right inside their base, you have chosen to go mano a mano with them right away. However, Saladin doesn't really have much in their northern base, relatively speaking, so they should not worry you. But we do want to keep Damascus off our backs for now, so we will seal the one and only entry point to this area with a stone wall. In fact, seal it with a double layer of wall. (The only reason this could be called a dirty trick is that the entry point used to be a gate in the enemy wall.)

We are not going to defend the stone mine in the SW in any way.

By the time the scenario is 10 minutes old, all of your units will have accomplished all of their assigned tasks. Everybody will be back in their bases, and the decks will be clear for action. Your roster will be complete, except that you will only have a couple of trebuchets. Priority for the trebuchets is the NE, because you are attacking there. You should have one trebuchet in the NW as a picket.

Consider making a map on paper, because when your "allies" turn against you, you don't even get a last-known record of their areas.

About this time, put some of the villagers that have been building things on food collection.

When the fighting starts, you clear out the area in the far NE in short order. Your castle in the NE comes under heavy attack from Saracen cavalry, monks, and castle units. For some reason, they don't like having your castle in their city. Actually, although Saladin sends every unit he can muster, those attacks are uncoordinated and pretty weak, because he just can't muster a lot of units in that region. It is pretty easy to crush Saladin's northern base, and most of the gold and stone over there is now yours. Incidentally, you could have chosen to attack prior to the 10 minute mark, but that would have been pretty foolish.

Damascus also wants a piece of you, and they send coordinated waves of elephants and trebuchets. Perhaps due to you blocking access to the NE corner, but perhaps just because they want to, all Damascus' attacks target your NW base. They head for the hole in your wall, and as they go wandering past your line of monks waiting behind the wall, who patiently explain the virtues of Christendom, they decide to serve Our Lord Jesus Christ. But what about the trebuchets, you say? Well, your cavalry needs something to do, doesn't it? After each of these attack waves, you have a larger number of fully upgraded war elephants waiting to welcome the next wave.

Depending on how much artillery you managed to produce before you had to start possessing enemy units, you can either disband the elephants and get more artillery, or go on with what you have. You should have at least 3 trebuchets and 2 Bombard Cannons in your roster.

Once you have dealt with Saladin's northern base, you turn your loving attention to Damascus. You start by denying them access to the two gold piles outside their base, which they will be starting to try to use about this time. You also start to move artillery to the edge of the plateau north of their base. This will precipitate artillery duels. Do not fight trebuchet on trebuchet! No matter how lucky you are, you lose a lot of trebuchets that way. Use your Bombard Cannons to blow away any enemy trebuchets that deploy to shoot at you in this area. But watch out for the smaller catapults! Bombard Cannons can blow these away as well, but it is much harder and riskier, and involves calculating velocities and "attack ground" orders.

Damascus does not stop attacking your NW base, and your vehicle park of slightly used elephants just keeps getting larger. When you have about 40 or so, it is time to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. You should have knocked a hole in Damascus' wall by now, probably the north gate. Damascus does not replace it. Take, say, 20 elephants, and 5 Paladins, and send them all into Damascus' base at the same time. This may sound like a lot, and it is enough to cripple Damascus if properly employed, but it is by no means an overwhelming force. It is the way that you are going to use it that makes it so powerful.

Allocate teams of 5 elephants to important buildings as you locate them. Production buildings are the primary target. Resource collection buildings, the Town Center, and villagers are also targets. Do not engage the swarm of enemy military units in combat, unless the combat is very much in your favor. You should fight one elephant vs. one Paladin, and you have to destroy any catapults you see, but each time an enemy elephant attacks you, you have to lure it away. Run away with your wounded elephants as well, not that elephants ever run, but the pursuers move just as slowly as you. Head for your NE base, where your 4 monks await to possess them. Park your old and new elephants over there somewhere while they wait to get healed. It takes a long time to heal one Elite War Elephant, and you will need to heal many of them. By the time you have destroyed both stables and Siege Workshops and the other buildings mentioned, your force will be exhausted, but it is being rebuilt to the NE, and then some. Ignore the barracks, because Damascus doesn't produce anything there. There's nothing you can do about the castle at this point in time. Avoid the southern wall; there's bad news over there.

Eventually Damascus is crippled. But they are not down for the count, not by any means! They will have been rebuilding like mad all over the map, and you now have to hunt down and kill them all over again. This is relatively hard, because the Teutons do not have any combat-capable scouts. Take another assault force of 20 elephants, and repeat the process described above. This time, your wounded elephants head for your NW base.

Normally, you would just build a castle in the enemy's assembly area to administer the coup de grace, but you can't really afford it in this scenario. So you have to bite the bullet and hunt them down one by one.

When the flood of enemy units gets a lot smaller, wipe out their castle. Only your Bombard Cannons can do this with any measure of safety, and you only have a few of them, because you were well over the population limit before you could afford a lot of them. Now, hopefully they can't rebuild their castle, or at least not for a while. After the castle is destroyed, and with no more enemy melee troops in sight, your monks can come out to play. You will probably find some enemy trebuchets just standing around. Definitely possess as many of them as you can instead of just killing them. You probably haven't used your trebuchets much yet, because there is so much enemy cavalry running around, and Teutons can't really kill cavalry quickly, but you want to have as many of them available as possible.

If Damascus has no units and production buildings and Market left, they will surrender. But you may want to keep some of them alive for now. In any case, when you have knocked them out, completely or effectively, it is time to reorganize. You will have wounded elephants (maybe as many as 60) standing around everywhere, and it will take a long time to heal them. Start scouting Saladin's wall. Deal with any orphan Towers that still remain. Now the hard part of the scenario starts. (Not really.) You should have about 150 units by now.

You will find that Saladin has a lot of archers waiting for you. If you check your paper map (you did make a map, didn't you?), you see that Saladin could build archers, siege weapons, and castle units in their main base. In scenarios, the AI is often prohibited from building new types of buildings. Assuming that that is the case here, it means ... drum roll ... no monks. No Pikemen either, which will become significant if they run out of gold. Right now, they are strong against cavalry, siege weapons, and static defenses, and weak against monks.

There are two main approaches to dealing with Saladin. One is to build a new Wall Maze Complex, breach the enemy wall, and let the attacking enemy troops die in the maze. You may or may not have enough stone to make this work. The other is to pick the enemy units off from behind their wall with your monks and artillery. Without monks, they have no effective counter to your monks and Bombard Cannons. We will start with the second approach while building up a Maze, and see how the situation develops. You might be able to recruit an entirely new army inside their wall without ever crossing it.

It turns out that Saladin does not take too kindly to the notion of you building up an army inside his city. He does what he can to stop you, but alas, it is not enough. A sort of deadlock develops, where you have a few units in his city, then they get wiped out, then you get a few more, and so on. In the meantime, your Maze approaches his city. Soon you are ready to create the first breach in the wall. The most effective location is probably in the middle, where Damascus used to be.

With the wall breached, you can now extract the units you recruit, and your force starts to grow again. Seal the breach with a gate and keep recruiting. It won't be long before you are ready to put in your first major raid. Use about 20 Elite War Elephants, 10 Paladins, half a dozen each Elite Mamelukes and Heavy Cavalry Archers, and monks and other supporting units, and have a reserve force ready. The elephants go in first. Elephants are really only vulnerable to three types of opposition. Monks, of course, but you haven't seen any yet in this part of the scenario. Anti-cavalry units, in this case Mamelukes, so use your Mamelukes to slaughter enemy Mamelukes the instant they appear. Mamelukes are vulnerable to archers, so use your heavy cavalry to ride down enemy archers. And stay away from the castle. Destroy Saladin's production buildings with the utmost prejudice. Depending on whether Saladin produces trebuchets or Mamelukes at his castle, you should try to get your trebuchets into action. If not, you will have to use elephants. Your combat engineers are right behind the troops, extending your Maze Complex.

It turns out that Saladin does have monks in this area, which makes your life more difficult, but you have a lot of fast heavy hitters, so enemy monks won't last long. The main thing is for any unit targeted by an enemy monk to immediately flee at top speed, while the anti-monk reaction force swoops in and kills him, with one shot if possible, before he switches targets.

Saladin keeps pumping out new units, and your monks are healing damage. This keeps them too busy to recruit, and anyway, you can't really recruit during intense combat. Accordingly, your attack force can only grow if you throw in reserve troops; otherwise it will get weaker because you can't heal the damage fast enough. Therefore, if you can destroy Saladin's forces faster than he can rebuild them, you will just win this engagement and occupy his land, but if not, you will have to withdraw from the raid when your damage gets too severe. If you don't win the first engagement, then at least you will have advanced your Maze and hurt Saladin's economy.

When the enemy Town Center goes down, be ready to massacre all their villagers. Depending on how fast you move and on how dispersed they are, you may be able to get them all right away, otherwise they will rebuild. You can use the "Spies" feature to determine how many enemy villagers exist. You can hunt down enemy villagers a lot more effectively now than when you were attacking Damascus, primarily because you now have a lot of ex-Saracen cavalry. Finish clearing out the east part of Saladin's main base, heal your wounded elephants (or bring in fresh ones), and turn west. (Actually, the road to Jerusalem is now open; you don't need to crush Saladin completely. In fact, if they do manage to rebuild in the west, then it's probably not worth the bother to finish them off.)

As you approach Saladin's castle, you find that it is heavily supported by a mobile force of heavy artillery and anti-cavalry units, with lots of resources available to keep replacing losses. This is a tough nut to crack. Any frontal assault, no matter how strong, will incur heavy casualties. So what can you do?

You will have seen by now that Jerusalem has no gates in the north. You can attack them from that direction with little fear of retaliation, and you should take out their Towers to secure your flank and give you some more maneuvering space. You should note that Jerusalem's score is so low that they can't really have a field force, and they definitely don't have an economy.

Creep your Maze as close to the castle as possible. You want to be able to set up trebuchets to attack the castle, but protected from melee troops by a wall. Enemy trebuchets should probably knock this wall down, and they could do so with ease, but they probably won't. So you start employing counter-battery tactics. You deploy a trebuchet to take one shot at the castle. Then you immediately start packing it. An enemy trebuchet will deploy to shoot at your trebuchet, but your trebuchet will be able to flee in time. At the same time, your Bombard Cannon shoots at the enemy trebuchet. You also might be able to attack the castle directly with a Bombard Cannon. It takes a long time to knock down a castle with one Bombard Cannon, but enemy heavy artillery will not respond, although all other arms will.

While you are attacking Saladin's castle, you will have to fight off a steady stream of enemy melee units. Eventually, their reserve is gone, and they come at you only one at a time. You might want to build a Town Center nearby to help you out, but not a castle. While the Town Center is not as strong, it is effectively free, and, even if you can protect your castle for a while, you may run out of stone to repair it.

With Saladin out of the way, you can approach Jerusalem. They have only one gate. Replace it with one of your own. Take out all defensive structures that you can reach from outside the wall. This proceeds quite rapidly, because you are now employing your heavy artillery in force. Jerusalem only has three monks, and they will try to convert your trebuchets, but they fixate on the trebuchets, and they have to walk all the way over to stand next to them, which means they won't make it.

Take out all of Jerusalem's production buildings. It turns out that this is unnecessary, because Jerusalem is unable to produce new units, but you don't know that a priori. Walk into the city, taking down all necessary buildings as you do so. This is really anticlimactic, because Jerusalem does not resist. And then drive Barbarossa's remains to his final resting place.