Stronghold Heaven

Kingdom of Jerusalem

Objectives

"Travel South to Cave de Sueth and prepare yourself for a long battle. The Wolf is hiding out in Tiberias using the de Puce family as his first line of defence. Exterminate the rodents one by one before removing the Wolf from his seat of power."

Notes

The final mission in the Crusader States sees a multiple enemy. You may know that for Crusader that the Rat is pretty poor in terms of combat and castle design and therefore I wanted to take these three castles as soon as possible.

First of all, build two apple orchards and a wheat farm. Place a few woodcutters’ huts to the south of the keep where there is an abundance of trees. Build a mercenary post as soon as possible as well as a marketplace. I sold all my starting stone and recruited 30+ horse archers and 3 fire throwers. Send the horse archers south to the yellow keep and place them just to the west of the castle. This serves two purposes: as well as killing all yellow troops, there were a few pikemen and archers from the blue castle that walked this way and my horse archers were able to dispatch these as well. By this time wood will be rolling in. Set up a mill, hovel (for additional peasants) and a few bakeries to make sure food supply is kept topped up. Also consider enlarging the stockpile, building a quarry and an iron mine. With a few pikemen you can kill the yellow rat as he will have been weakened by the horse archers’ attacks.

As before, try to increase religion and ale coverage as well as walling in the castle. You probably won’t need very thick walls here as I didn’t encounter any ridiculously large invasions.

Using the same principle as above, send 30-40 horse archers, a few pikemen and some fire throwers to the remaining two castles but leave the Wolf’s castle until last. It’s a simple but highly effective way of dealing with the rodent problem!

Once you are left with just the Wolf, consider falling back and reinforcing your troops. You’re going to need a large army of assorted troops to succeed. With plenty of iron close to the keep, manufacturing armour, swords and maces shouldn’t be a problem.

I held off attacking the Wolf until I had 100 pikemen, 30 swordsmen, 80 crossbowmen, 90 horse archers, 10 assassins, 4 catapults and a small handful of slaves. The Wolf is located on a plateau giving him defensive advantages. I decided to launch an attack on the wall nearest to the top of the plateau using my 4 catapults, closely followed by the bulk of my pikemen. As soon as the wall was breached I sent all my heavy armour in including the swordsmen to kill as many as I could find. I also moved my horse archers and crossbowmen to the foot of the walls and towers in an effort to take out any enemy archers I found there. Again, once I had cleared a path I moved my flamethrowers into and around the castle walls to burn as much as I could. Try to save the swordsmen until only the Wolf is left to kill given their strong attacking capabilities. Assassins were also deployed to try to take gatehouses and more importantly to scale towers. My troop losses were quite severe but sheer numbers can really work in your favour. Don’t forget to recruit more troops from your barracks and move them to the siege point periodically.

Index