Good advice

Athena appears in Arkantos’ dream and reveals Gargarensis’ diabolical plans.

Starting objective: Follow Kastor.

Difficulty levels:

  • Easy:
    • Less enemy units at the Temple and in Erebus
    • Your army in Erebus (5) has more upgrades (Engineers and Heavy Infantry/Archers)
  • Hard:
    • Additional ambush in Erebus after the initial enemies have been defeated
  • Titan:
    • More enemy units at Temple and in Erebus
    • Zeus does not cast Lightning Storm when you are under attack in Erebus

This scenario opens with Arkantos under your command near some ruins. (1) Follow Kastor along the path to the temple. (2) He’ll tell you how you are ‘not like other men’ – apparently this difference is demonstrated best by your ability to pick up and move glowing objects and to kill hulking one eyed giants, as that is exactly what you will have to do to fulfil the next objective. (Go figure.)

New objective: Garrison the Relic into Zeus’ Temple (2) and defeat the attackers.

The statues of lightning will take care of the killing part, so you just have to keep Arkantos alive. Retrieve the relic and place it in the temple to unlock your next objective.

New objective: Defeat the guardians of the Shrine just ahead. (3)

Follow Kastor along the path to the Shrine. Several of your allies from previous missions will appear, which will enable you to defeat the Chimera guardians easily. Again, not much to this. Once you do, you’ll be shown a second cutscene. When it finishes, you’ll find yourself in the underworld. (4)

New objective: Destroy the large boulder (6) to escape the underworld.

Follow the path west to take control of an army. (5) Progress north and defeat the units guarding the exit – your Shades will make short work of most of them. Target your catapults on the exit. Before the boulder wall will go down, new enemies will spawn behind you, so keep your other units surrounding your catapults to protect them. (It will take a long time to knock the wall down without them.) Other than this detail, there’s not much to fulfilling this objective.

Once the boulder wall is destroyed, you’ll be shown another cutscene and be transported to the second half of the scenario.

Arkantos must navigate the dreamscape and invade a strangely familiar city.

Starting objective: Safely transport Arkantos and Kastor to the beach across the bay. (3)

Difficulty levels:

  • Easy:
    • No statues of lightning at dream city gates (5)
    • Evil empire has less starting units
  • Hard:
    • Evil Empire has more starting units
    • Evil Empire starts in Mythic Age
  • Titan:
    • Evil Empire attacks faster

This scenario opens on a small island in the south of the map. (1) You command a small fleet – four Pirate Ships (basically inferior Arrow Ships that can also carry units – you’ve seen them used against you in several scenarios already) and six transports carrying an army of MU’s – plus two unexpected allies.

Send your Pirate ships ahead of your transports, because an enemy navy lies in wait of you. (2) Once you engage them, three Krakens will appear nearby under your command and join the combat, finishing off the enemy ships quickly. Hang on to the Krakens for now (particularly if you want to use fishing as a food source) since you usually get attacked by a large number of Arrow Ships later in the scenario. You can delete the other units once you’ve unloaded your army though, they won’t be much use.

Unload your new army near the marker and begin establishing a base.

New objective: Train an army and destroy the enemy wonder. (6)

Even on easy, your starting army will be insufficient to get near the enemy wonder. So you need to do a little building up. This scenario gives you 180 pop slots on top of your usual limit, (that means you can hit AoM’s absolute max limit of 300) so you can mass a very large army in the mission. You also start with a fairly large resource stockpile, though it’s not likely to be near enough to build the army you want.

So, begin establishing an economy. For food, fishing is a good choice. Goats and Boars can be found southwest of your Town Center, and some more hunting can be found to the northwest near the Settlement there. (4) There’s no point grabbing the settlement to boost your pop limit, but if you want to train villagers faster to strengthen your econ (which would be a wise idea on the harder levels) then it’s probably an idea. Gold can be found directly between the two settlements (3 & 4) and near the free mentioned earlier settlement. (4) Wood is abundant in this area.

On the lower difficulties, it takes the enemy several minutes to reach the Mythic Age. On the higher ones, the enemy starts with it researched. Either way, the Evil Empire always invokes its fourth age god power – Earthquake – in the same location, right over your starting Town Center. You might want to take this into account and not build up too much around it to save the trouble of replacing your buildings later.

Now that you have an economy and town set up, it’s time to build an army. The Evil Empire has quite a lot of heroes, and you already have quite a lot of myth units, so it would probably not be wise to invest in more MU’s. You are playing Hades, so archers are a good choice. (You also have access to both Ares and Artemis’ powerful upgrades to archers.) And since the Evil Empire has a lot of Infantry and Cavalry, you will probably want to focus also on Hoplites. Finally, while you’ve already got quite a few building killing MU’s, several Helepolii (the more, the merrier) are highly recommended – they’ll help you get into the city, and help you take down the wonder quickly – and they won’t go down easily.

When attacking, use the Earthquake god power at the city gates (5) where it will take out the statues of lightning, the fortress, gate and possibly a few enemy siege weapons and towers – providing you quick and painless entry to the city. Alternately, you can wait until you have breached the city gates and use it on the wonder (6) since it can reduce the wonder to under half HP if it doesn’t hit any other structures. (God powers have capped damage – so, if it only hits the wonder, it will do more damage. Likewise if it takes out several structures aside from it, it does less.)

Be sure to use your Toxotes to target enemy heroes if you want to keep your MU’s intact. And remember that you don’t have to defeat the enemy army within the walls, simply keep your army alive long enough to knock down the wonder. So, use your human units to occupy the enemy units while your MU’s and Helepolii hammer at the wonder.

When the enemy wonder finally crumbles down, you’ll be rewarded with victory.

On to mission 17

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