Age of Empires II: The Conquerors/El Cid

Spain is divided between Christian kingdoms to the north and Moorish kingdoms to the south. In the barren borderlands of Castille, Rodrigo Diaz, called El Cid, gains notoriety as a brilliant general and heroic crusader. The Cid is so popular among soldier and peasant alike that the distrustful King of Castille sends him into exile. The Cid must join forces with his former enemies, the Moors, and fight against his beloved Castille. But an even greater threat waits across the sea in Africa, where fanatical Berber horsemen are eager to seize what the Moors could not.

Mission 1
Move to the King, fight the opponents and get the horse by walking up behind the king close towards the stable. After the dialogue finishes, you will get an army and a few villagers. The mission will end if you have entered the enemy town and defeated its defenses, then return with the blue king back to the area where you did the fighting in the beginning.

Tips
You start with a lot of units and not much wood, so you will be hindered building houses to cope with the population limit. So with your El Cid unit, ride towards the town in the north, they will cheer at you and give you a few houses for free. Then ride the road south toward the center of the map, behind the bridge a village will join your cause, so you get a few more houses and a mill with fields.

You can take your time with the build-up because the enemy will neither attack you nor rebuild units (on standard difficulty).

Although you won't need many ressources, you might want (maybe just as a matter of principle) to hurry grabbing stones before the others take too much of it. Your ally (yellow) has a quarry in the northeast, between your starting area and his town. And your enemy's quarry is in front of his town walls. A good idea is to kill his villagers there, use only the El Cid unit. That will lure out most of his army, but you can pull them toward one of your ally's castles in the southwest or southeast and let them be killed while you recover inside.

You will encounter two small groups of conquistadors who join you, but you might want to stay away from them until you have built enough houses so that the extra units don't block the creation of villagers.

In the west is a large forest, hidden behind it is a monastery, six monks and four relics that will join you when you managed to hack your way through the woods and explore the area with the El Cid unit.

It is a good idea to waste the infantry units you start with by razing the towers in the west, so they don't hamper your villager production any longer.

There is way enough gold on the map, but if you want to build a market, the northern corner seems to be ideal, if put on the edge the ally's market will yield 25 gold and the carts can drive a straight line.

Just a castle as production building should be enough, you can grind away the town defenses with conquistadors and petards as you please.

Mission 2
You start with 4 Villagers and a handful of cavalry and archers. Set up a town hall and start collecting wood and food from farms. You will find gold just west of the start point just off a cliff and Motamid will later let you know about a stone quarry down in the southwest corner. There are also some stones in the northeast of this quarry and a big gold mine more east, in the mountians by the lake. Resources seem to be sparse on this mission. Fish can be fished from the lake in the northern most corner and there are a few sheep about too, in the middle of the map.

Once you are set up, you will find a transport ship waiting for you on the lake, get on it and travel northeast onto the island where you will find the Monk (Imam). He will tell you that you need to collect all four relics and bring them to him for him to restore peace within the city. The Relic locations will become visible.

You will obviously need some monks for this part. You're best capturing all four at once, so 4 Monks are needed. If you return them one at a time the Moorish rebels (green) will start to attack you. If all four relics are returned at once you will win without them attacking you.

Tips

 * A good thing is to send a villager to the eastern stone quarry as soon as possible and build a town center there, so you can gather a lot of stone quickly.
 * After having enough stone, you can build walls to block the bridges and the northern shallows on the river. Like this you will avoid enemy units and battering rams comming to your town center.
 * Researching Stone Mining is not really necessary as there is only a few stones around.
 * If you manage to have a scout or a knight reaching the southern castle, make him destroy the wooden fence. Shortly after, an enemy monk will bring the relic back to one of the monasteries in the center of Toledo, so you won't have to deal with this castle.
 * This mission doesn't really need siege weapons (in Standard mode at least). By using the tip above and bringing your knights to the monasteries (the doors will open as they are owned by Toledo, an ally), you can get rid of the monks and destroy the monasteries to get the relics. Then go destroy the fence around the monk to the east and kill him to get the last relic. This will only make a few enemy knights come.
 * Be careful not to lose the transport ship, as it will be needed to bring the monks carrying relics to the island. Other wise, you'll have to build a port and a new transport.

Mission 3
You start with only El Cid as a Champion unit at the very beginning. As you reach the gate to the east of the spawn, you are told to grab your horse Babieca before you leave. Walk to the stable to get it. After you moved out of the gates and begin walking down the cliff, Alfonso will start attacking you as you reach the towers along the west map border. Keep moving to take minimium damage from those towers; and lure the two longswordsman out of the tower range to fight them. You will spot 2 knights and a couple pikemen beside a windmill that turn sides and aid El Cid.

You should spot some mountains in the southwest area of the map (the east, relative to the gate you went out). Some more mountains further east creates a valley in between, and there are 2 scorpions and several longswordsman awaiting for El Cid to move across. Pass those Alfonso units are 4 camels waiting for you, and will be controllable for use.

Moving upwards towards the north from that point are two towers from Alfonso and a dialogue is triggered telling you the correct way is to the south. Moving southeast from that point, you will come up to a castle, 2 lookout posts and several units from Alfonso and a dialogue is triggered telling you there is a castle blocking the way to Zaragoza; but you can get siege weapons further to the southeast to knock it down. The units will be lured out when you attack the lookouts. Take them out for a date and then go south. There you meet the GATA, whom will give you gold, food and wood so you can build siege weapons, or reinforce your army. You can either just go for the siege weapons; or train additional units with the siege weapons to booster your forces. The former would mean you have more resources as you start your base later on; while the latter just means you have a stronger force arriving Zaragoza. At the same time you receive the GATA forces, your lookouts outside the walls of Zaragoza will be attacked by Berenguer. There's pretty much nothing you can do to save those since you have no control on that side of the map yet.

After taking down the castle, Alfonso the coward will declare you and him buddies again so you won't have to worry about him attacking anymore. As you move into Zaragoza, they will request you to help take out the siege weapons outside their walls, along with the siege workshop. It should be easy considering you have 6 mounted units, and Zaragoza units will tank the hits. The previous siege weapons that took down the castle should make short work taking down the buildings.

As the Berenguer siege workshop crumbles to dust, you are given 4 villagers and the remaining mounted units inside the Zaragoza walls. Move them to the vacant lands to the North of Zaragoza and start building your base.

Behind the treelines (to the North) is the Berenguer base. There might be Berenguer units coming from the North to harrass you as you build up your base but with El Cid and all those mounted units you now control, you can defend pretty easily.

If you wish to be very safe from Berenguer harrassment, you can set up the base at the Eastern corner, making your base easier to defend since the attack will only be on one front. However this means you will be further away from certain resources such as the stone pile located to the south of Berenguer.

Tips

 * Move to the West once you spawn will save you 5 seconds and a dialogue as you get Babieca immediately. WORTH :D
 * Legendary units like El Cid have regenerative Health, if you wish to minimise the casualty, send El Cid to tank/alone in fights when suitable (he can fight the scorpions and longswordsmen in the valley with approximately a quarter of the health remaining).
 * Two garrisoned battering rams and proper micro ought to be enough to take out the castle blocking the way to Zaragoza. The castle does not have murder holes upgraded so units take no damage once under the castle (saving up the resources allows you to build up the base faster).
 * There are gold mines outside the Southeastern gate of Zaragoza, if your base is set up at the eastern corner you can mine there.