Stronghold Heaven

Antioch, The Counter-Siege

Objectives

'A huge Turkish army is on its way so quickly garrison the city walls and man its towers. All food & trade routes have been cut off. Make the most of the limited supplies; it will take a lot of faith to hold Antioch'

Resources

No trade options are available in this mission

Notes

There are vital clues in the description in terms of what to expect in this map. No trade options are available. What you grow you can eat; what you manufacture you can use. Your castle here is small but walled. You have to ensure that you are able to feed your people, manufacture weapons and offset the lack of trade facilities and thus gold income by providing healthy religion coverage.

I found the best way to start this is to immediately build four or five apple orchards, followed by 3 woodcutters' huts. The placement of these is up to you but to the south of the castle is ideal. Five orchards will easily cover the peasant population you have. Build another hovel and you need to keep a close eye on food levels due to the increased consumption.

I built an additional chapel with the starting gold, which buoyed my religion coverage and as a result it never dipped below +4. Use this to your advantage. Reduce food to half rations or set taxes to generate additional income

If you have enough wood, build a fletchers' workshop. You have no weapons to start with so production needs to be fairly quick. The starting troops, a handful of archers and pikemen, won't see you through this map. When possible, try to have two or three fletchers' workshops. Lining the walls and placement of archers in the tall towers will be part of your defences. As the wood stocks increase, consider placing an iron mine and manufacture swords & metal armour. A few swordsmen will be important here to guard your walls.

Note that you aren't able to build walls, towers or other defences here. You do have a supply of stone with which to repair the gatehouse and/or the towers adjoining the gatehouse. You don't have enough stone to do all three structures, but you shouldn't need this in any case. A good defence covered by plentiful archers (30 or so) and a handful of knights will be more than enough to see off the invasions. There are three in total, increasing in size as the map progresses. In terms of defence, I kept the swordsmen close to the main gate, with a few inside the walls as a last line of defence. Using primitive, simple defence tactics, the walls were never breached. This level isn't too difficult and offers a good introduction to both economic and military management.

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