Melth
Mortal
posted 17 February 2017 09:39 PM
EDT (US)
1 / 4
Yeah, I beat this on Titan a couple of times and slammed it out of the park the last time. First of all, the game is very buggy. To start things off properly, you MUST watch the opening cinematic. Otherwise several problems occur including starting in the wrong age and being able to build the wrong stuff.
Also, you MUST build a garden as the objective states within about 4 minutes or the flood timer will not start and the game will bug in several ways. Put off the garden for a while since no attack will come until you build one, but if you get the message that it's time to build the dam without making one, you have bugged it and should restart immediately.
Now the enemies are a serious problem since you can't build any good units. Lizards (NOT War Salamanders) are glass cannons. Their damage is completely insane, but they're so fragile that a mob of villagers can kill them if you focus fire. The best strategy is to kite them harmlessly around your town center while it kills them.
War Salamanders on the other hand have both brutal damage AND huge HP. Again, try to kite them, but you need to get together vast amounts of Chu Ko Nu (archers) to bring them down because they'll chew up your heroes unsustainably fast in melee.
You need to use the grace period before you build the garden to get a strong economy (There are LOTS of fish available for food at least, scout before your main play attempt to find where they all are) and at least 1, preferably 2, buildings training Chu Ko Nu continuously.
If you can do that and micro decently, you'll have only three remaining problems:
1) Lack of gold. The northwest mine is very difficult to defend and the nearby one has only 1500 gold in it. That's a good start but you'll need to construct many gardens and have them produce gold too. You can't use Favor anyway since you can't make Temples in the non-bugged version.
2) Defending the northwest dam. if any dam section is destroyed, you lose. It is quite possible you are losing because you didn't notice one enemy chewing on the dam. Thankfully, only the northwest section comes under frequent attack. It starts with only a few HP, so you'll lose if you don't do something about that. Fortunately, the dam sections have HUGE armor, so having a villager work on one for even a minute can give it enough HP to be nearly indestructible.
3) The floods. Once you build the garden, two timers start. One is till a 'small' flood which just deals a bunch of damage to your buildings and possibly units near the gate to the water. Try not to build much there. The 'great' flood is an instant-lose. You MUST finish every single dam section before then. Your main obstacle in this mission will end up being that you can't get many villagers at once to work on some of the dam sections due to the terrain. The efficient solution is to have a few villagers working on every section at once instead of trying to pile them all onto one or two. You may want to prioritize the northwest one since it's hardest to protect your villagers there though and you therefore want to get it over with.
Aoe_1337
Mortal
posted 18 February 2017 05:03 PM
EDT (US)
2 / 4
Thanks for the reply, i eventually beat the mission anyways.
I dont know why i kept on losing for no reason, maybe one of the dams got attacked? Must be it, but i never saw any attack on them.
I think i may have glitched out this mission, though i did watch the cutscene to get to classical, i didnt build gardens.
Didnt have to deal with any floods,
After a few retries, i scouted gold on the other side of the river, along with plenty of wood. Simply moved my operations over there, so i had a steady supply of gold without being harassed.
Then i just spammed cho ku nu from two barracks and eventually overpowered the lizards and ai.
Maybe i kept on losing because i glitched the mission? Idk.
Melth
Mortal
posted 18 February 2017 09:03 PM
EDT (US)
3 / 4
Right, if you don't build the garden then the mission bugs in several ways- including usually no floods. But that would be cheating!
My guess is that the strange losses were due to one of the camo-colored lizards killing a dam section while you were fighting elsewhere. Hard to tell though. It's a buggy mission even in this buggy campaign.
It's intriguing that you weren't attacked at the mines across the river. I remember scouting those but just assumed they'd come under attack I think. Well the gardens provide plenty of gold anyway and you don't need that much as long as you micro to avoid casualties, so either way works.
Aoe_1337
Mortal
posted 20 February 2017 11:47 PM
EDT (US)
4 / 4
Well, they do come under attack, you have to deal with a war salamander or two, nothing you cant handle though. After that, you wont get harassed getting wood and gold anymore, which helps massively.