You see a rather poor map and want to skip it? Better prepare for a dense, exciting, highly recommendable eco-invasion.
Starting with a number of trees you can count along the fingers of your hands you have to quickly develop an economy expanding out of itself. You may act like this:
Place only 4 wood cutters to let some trees respawn.
Buy stone for 2 watchtowers to help you overcome the first invasions
Buy wood, start the wheat chain (the farms fit perfectly, forget the dairies), place iron mines.
Serve double rations, raise taxes.
Buy wood for bakeries.
Buy hops and wood to start the ale chain.
Buy wood for the workshops of tanner, blacksmith and armourer.
Buy wood for producing bows and xbows and for further buildings.
Quarry stones to change them into more iron.
Buy wood ... expand.
Maybe place a few bad things. But prepare for war.
Buy leather jerkins. Constantly recruit marksmen (you will need a LOT of them) and Arabian fighters. "Great use of the time" with moats.
Unlike you may think the huge invasion will start long before the time line "until defeat" has ended. You won't be able to escape.
It was painful to see all my buildings that had cost me so much effort burn down one after the other in my first try. What a pleasure later then to reach the number of weapons needed for the king. The other requests will be met in addition.