Principality of Antioch
Objectives
| Kill Enemy Lord |
‘It has been discovered that the Truffe brothers are responsible for the recent raids. Take up position in Arzghan, across the river from the Hog and the old Boar’s encampments. This is going to be a challenging mission, as we will be outnumbered two to one’
| Trade | ||
Notes
Antioch is an extremely difficult map initially. Your location compared to the Truffe brothers is at a disadvantage, as iron deposits aren’t readily available. This is an important factor to consider as to ensure victory you will require metal armour to recruit pikemen and even macemen.
The map starts off relatively peaceful enough but a couple of months into the game you can clearly see the progress the Truffe brothers have made in terms of troop recruitment. In order to progress here, I opted to defend resolutely and build up an attacking force over a period of years. With the starting stone, I walled in as much of the area surrounding the keep as I could. Try to leave some room for further buildings that can be protected by the walls. I chose to place a gatehouse next to the keep and to the north. Initially this was to be my only entrance into the castle.
Build a few woodcutters’ huts to the east near the river and one or two next to the fertile land where crops are to be grown. In order to defend from the initial waves of attacks, I bought as many crossbows and leather armour as I could from the market place, lining crossbowmen along the walls, on the keep and the gatehouse. The enemy seems to attack from the north-west more often than not. Build wheat farms and try to get the food supply up and running as soon as possible.
The first few invasions were dealt with fairly easily, but with siege weapons pummelling your walls you need to set up some ballista of your own. I opted for one stone quarry and a few ox tethers, increasing this to 2 when practical. The stone should be used to build a large tower as near to the river and the southern ford point as possible. The sooner you can get a ballista on there, the easier this map will be. You need to make sure they target any siege catapults as soon as they are in range, otherwise you’ll spend a fair bit of time rebuilding walls.
Crossbowmen in large numbers were required here; they would be used predominantly to kill any attacks from macemen. Once you are able to kill the assaults on your castle with little or no damage, the first part of this map is about complete.
As is the norm with these missions where gold is vital, I steadily increased the religious coverage and introduced ale when possible. Within about 7 game years I had almost achieved the highest coverage for both these areas. It is at this point that food can be turned off. If you have a good bread making set up, the gold from selling this can really boost the treasury and allow you to buy iron. I could have tried to place an iron mine or two where the ore bearing rock was located but found that I would be better off saving the wood for other things and buying what I required. It’s certainly expensive but possible to buy enough to allow the recruitment of 80-90 pikemen.
Once I had in the region of 80 pikemen, I built a mercenary post and recruited as many horse archers as I could along with some fire throwers. An engineers’ guild was built and five catapults were made. They would be used to smash a hole through the walls of the Truffe Brothers’ castle. The horse archers are key to any attacking plans. As I have said already in these walkthroughs, they are fairly resilient and the option to fire as they move around the map means that when manually controlled there are few units that can touch them. In numbers they can easily knock out enemy ballista.
Both of the Pig’s castles were attacked in the same way. Launch as many waves of arrows from the horse archers as possible. At the same time, set your catapults to hit one area (due to their pretty poor aim, they also managed to take out the barracks, which was a bonus). Once there is a gap in the walls, send all of your pikemen to attack the Lord. They will be attacked in numbers, but they will get there. I continually moved my horse archers around the castle to take out as many troops as I could. In numbers, and with force, the castle will fall relatively easily.
As an added thought, once one castle has been levelled, I moved all of my crossbowmen from my castle out into the open and made them join the attacking force for the second castle. By this time I had over 100 and this made the final attack much easier.
* denotes a former staff member.