Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings/The Siege of Jerusalem: Difference between revisions

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Start the scenario by scouting aggressively! Since you don't really have any scouting assets at the start, this needs a bit of explanation.

Don't run into the main enemy bases at this time. This restriction will allow you to explore about 40% of the map, from approximately the 11 o'clock position to the 5 o'clock position, not including Jerusalem.

About 5 minutes after the scenario starts, game time, you should have completed the initial scouting phase. All 26 sheep should be in your base. You should have two monks and several new villagers. There is a relic in the right map corner, but leave it there for now, at least until the situation stabilizes. You will have encountered some of Jerusalem's buildings outside their wall, but leave them alone for now. You will have encountered a Hospitaller mining operation outside their base.

Harass the Templars and Hospitallers as much as you can. It won't be too long before their new production is only villagers. You still can't approach their Town Centers with your mobile forces yet, however, and it's too dangerous to expose your heavy artillery over there. Nevertheless, it may actually be possible to break them without siege weapons. The AIs love to hunt. They will send their villagers across the entire map to do so. If you camp out near the hunting spots, you can kill an awful lot of enemy villagers cheaply. The AIs will even send their last villager out to hunt, even if it means certain death. If you really want to play dirty, you could drive a deer into a partial enclosure near your fort and watch the carnage.

Eventually, only Jerusalem can maintain a field army. Jerusalem's biggest weakness is that their city doesn't have many gates, and most of them are on the west side of the city. Therefore there will be time periods when you know that there are no enemy mobile troops in the field. This allows you to bombard Jerusalem's static defenses with impunity, if you stay away from their gates. The obvious initial targets are the two Towers near your base. Attacking those Towers will provoke an enormous response, but your trebuchets should be packed up and heading for safety before the responders arrive.

About this time, you will have completed all meaningful research. For example, there is no need to research Heavy Camel, as long as you limit yourself to the four starting ones, and you don't need to research any infantry upgrades. This means that you don't need any more resources, so all your villagers can be used in combat roles. You could also disband some of them and produce more troops, but that is hardly necessary.

The next target needs to be the two Town Centers outside Jerusalem. In principle, this is reasonably safe, because your trebuchets will be invisible to your enemies before they attack, assuming you do things properly, and they blow up a Town Center so quickly that they will be packed up and headed for home before the response arrives. However, the run for home proceeds at a walking pace, so you might lose some trebuchets. Therefore, you should really build a wall compartment near the enemy base first and use that as a jumping-off point for your attack. Deal with the Hospitallers first, because they are rather closer to your base. When this operational phase is completed, you will be able to safely collect the stone outside your main base, which will allow you to build at least two more castles.

Dealing with the Templars is a bit trickier. First of all, they have some static defenses, so your trebuchets will need to redeploy several times. In addition, they have a leader unit, the Master of the Templar, who generally patrols their base area. You definitely want to recruit, not kill, him, so you need to lure him over to your monks somehow.

Your enemies are very weak by now, and this time, it's for keeps. Move a large strike force to the ruins of the Hospitaller camp. Then just cruise around the city in a counter-clockwise direction, blowing stuff up as you go. Replace Jerusalem's gates with your own. When you have completed this circuit of the city, you will have destroyed one castle from each of your enemies, lots of other production buildings, some Towers, and lots more troops, and any remaining enemies are now sealed into the city. At some point, they will start to beat on one of your gates, but that is not a serious concern. It isn't necessary to do it exactly like this, but this procedure seems to be the most reasonable one.