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60 - Snaking Stream
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Author |
File Description |
Lord Michael I |
Posted on 05/19/08 @ 09:19 AM
Snaking stream is a mission that if done correctly, will not be such a challenging mission. As you will notice later, the strategy here involves some degree of rushing units and agility of your part. In this chapter of the second trail you will be facing two Emirs, in a balanced battle where everyone gets 2000 gold and the same amount of starting goods and troops.
If you have not noticed some time in the past, the Emir take their time to build their castles, they can take even years in completely building theirs. So, you will have to quickly build your castle, and have a nice army up and running as soon as possible.
So, first slow down your game to 20, and expand your stockpile. I recommend you make your stockpile in the shape of a square. Near it, build one granary and a mill. And, a distance away, build a marketplace. Never build your market place near the stockpile, because it will interfere with your industry buildings. After placing your market place, build two woodcutters: One to the west and one to the south, as so:
The one to the south is not visible because it’s hiding around all those trees. You can also see with this pic where I placed my granary, mill, the shape of the stockpile and the market.
After that, place two wheat farms, one hops farm and one dairy farm, for Leather production. You have a lot of greenery around your keep, so choose for yourself where to place them. Of course, the closer to your stockpile they are, the better. Now, go to the market and buy 200 wood planks. You will use these wood planks to build 2 hovels and your weapons industry buildings that will consist of one Fletcher, One Pole Turner, one armorer, and one tanner. Set the Fletcher to crossbow production and your Pole Turner to pike production. After that place an armory near these buildings. I recommend you place these buildings near your stockpile for more efficiency.
To feed iron to the Armorer, build two iron mines on the iron ore, on the small island to the west. Also build two quarries and three oxen to transport the stone over to the stockpile.
Now, it’s time to set up your defenses. Put one defense turret as far as possible, near the river crossing that leads you to where your iron mines are. Put stairs on it, and send your archers over there.
The Blue arrow is pointing to where you should place your tower, while the green one is showing where I put my weapons industry buildings. Now you can speed up to your regular speed. As you wait for weapons to be produced, build two bakeries, and along the game, build more bakeries as you have some wood available. In this mission, 6 bakeries will be enough to feed your people. Build one more hovel, as you will probably run out of peasants by this time.
Build your barracks, and build two breweries when hops arrive to your stockpile. If you have wood available, you can build one more quarry and 3 more oxen, to have money faster. You can buy the wood if you want, as you still have enough gold. If you decide to place this second quarry, build one more hovel.
Buy 5 iron at the market. We need pikemen now, but your iron mines still are not producing any iron. This will keep your armorer busy until you can supply yourself iron without buying it. Remember to recruit crossbowmen when weapons are produced.
When stone comes in, you can sell it for a profit, and buy pikes or steel armors to speed up your pikemen production. When ale is produced, build two inns. You can sell stuff if you need wood or money. When both inns are active, set your taxes up to -8. Now, wait for some wood to arrive or buy it, and place two more iron mines. Place a new hovel. With this you will reach a population of 50 peasants. When you have around 10 crossbowmen on your tower, you can destroy both your tanner and fletcher, and replace them with one pole turner and one armorer (Set your Pole Turner on pike production).
Keep on with this process: Sell stone and other excess items, buy pikes or armors, and recruit pikemen. When you have around 30 of them, send them over to visit Emir Omar. He probably will not have his castle finished, so it will be easy to beat him. I played this map around 5 times, and every time I played it, this Emir never finished his castle.
Although the second Emir seems weak, you will just lose a bunch of pikemen if you attack him like you attacked the previous Emir. So, replace your dead pikemen, and build an engineers guild, where you will hire 6 engineers and build 2 trebuchets to take down the tower with the mangonel on top. Also sell everything you don’t need and build a mercenary post, and hire some Horse Archers. I used a small army of 65 this time.
Although it is important to point that when I started the siege I didn’t have all my 65 horse archers. I only had 15. I kept recruiting horse archers during the siege as reinforcements.
With the image above you can note where I placed my Trebuchets (Blue Arrow). The Tower the green arrow is pointing at is the tower you will target. After destroying the tower, keep an eye because the Emir might rebuild it.
After killing the Emir, I recommend you set the other Emir on “House Arrest”. You can do this by selecting some Horse Archers (15 will be enough), and send them to a place near the gatehouse to keep it closed. This way you will siege the Emir, preventing hi from getting more goods and, since he does not use stairs, the Emir won’t be able to place archers on his towers.
But, there are some things you must have in mind if you decide to do this:
First, the tower with the mangonel has to be destroyed. Otherwise your archers are dead.
Also, you can do this only if the Emir has still not placed any archers on his towers. If the towers are manned, you’re too late. You can still do the tactic, but it is risky. When I did it, there were some archers on the gatehouse, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is when the towers are manned.
The tower with the mangonel has to be crippled (This means the tower has to be unusable). If you destroy it completely, the enemies inside will have a hole where to get out.
I have enclosed in a circle where I put my 15 horse archers. That place is really safe, because there my Archers can’t be hit by enemy arrows. The yellow arrow is pointing to the tower with the mangonel, now crippled.
Now, once you have under siege the second Emir, send in some pikemen (You can send in all of them if you want), to guard your Horse Archers. It is probable that some Arab Swordsmen got stuck outside, which represent a big threat to your horse Archers. Put your pikemen near your horse archers, where they can’t be shot at. Once you have the situation under control (You killed the archers that were on the gatehouse, the guy with the pot of oil), move your 15 horse archers to stand in front of the Gatehouse. There was one time I played this that the Emir opened his gatehouse while my Horse Archers were standing in that corner where they were first, so putting your Horse Archers right in front of the gatehouse will keep the enemy inside. Now that your Horse Archers have a better angle, you can target those sitting Horse archers, and, when you send in the rest of the horse Archers, target the swordsmen.
By this moment the Emir is under your control. Do whatever you please. A tip: Unman your trebs and build some Fire Ballistae. Send them over and set his castle on fire! Then, send over the rest of your Horse Archers and take out the enemy archers on the keep. Remember to not move your 15 horse archers you moved in first, or the gate will probably open and everything will turn out bad.
After you wipe out the keep (It can take some time), break in the castle and kill the Emir. Good luck!
You can always email me (Email on profile) if you have any questions on this or any other walkthrough. The save game attached has the first Emir defeated, but the second (Emir Sapehr) is still standing.
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Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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strongholder nl |
Posted on 05/21/08 @ 04:42 AM
Thanks for the great walkthrough. I changed a bit in it though. After i killed one emir i send my pikemen to the spot where your horse archers were. This way the emir was already under house arrest. You don't have to criple the tower because the emir rebuiklds it real quick. Destroy the tower place your horse archers and the castle will be under control. because the emir doesn't use stairs his tower will remain unmanned. Et voila 2 emirs killed... |
barbarius |
Posted on 05/21/08 @ 07:00 AM
What is funny by reading this is that I see other strategies to accomplish the skirmishes. Well, in any case, I think the only difficulty of this skirmishe is the less of place. Otherwise, about the mangonel of the second Emir, we can also put a woodcutter poste behind the castle. The mangonel will automatically shoot on this structure,letting your troops alone (of course, this trick doesn't work for the balistas, or the archers). And, instead of using pikemen, I've used macemen, who are also efficient. Anyway,I've also written on my French forum solutions, so I know that wirting solutions may take a lot of time. Good luck ! |
peter2008 |
Posted on 07/08/08 @ 08:05 PM
Hello Lord Miachel I,
for the first time I disagree with your defence line. Why not place towers on the island?! Let it be watch towers first, bigger ones later, you can add walls for more troops. This way you are able both to protect the quaries and iron mines and to keep approaching and passing enemy colums under fire. There will be a harder repetition of this mission where this forward defence will prove priceless.
PS. Somewhere I learned a trick how to place large towers on uneven ground. First build (little) walls which will chaotically resemble the shape. Upon them set the tower! |
peter2008 |
Posted on 07/09/08 @ 02:08 AM
The article I was thinking of concerning the large towers can be found in Strategies section of SHH, it's How to Build on Sand Dunes by Boingo. |
Lord Michael I
Staff
File Author |
Posted on 07/09/08 @ 04:59 PM
Ah yes, I remember Boingo's article.
Sadly, in that moment I had forgot about it... If I'm correct, the reason on why I didn't place towers on the island was because it was possible only to put big towers in the Southern side of the island, so I could protect the quarries, but left the passageway to my keep poorly defended (I had forgotten about Boingo's article and didn't know about placing towers in uneven land).
"There will be a harder repetition of this mission where this forward defense will prove priceless."
Snaking Stream Rematch - I had finished that one too, but don't remember on my strategy...
Thanks for your kind words on the rest of the walkthroughs, peter :) |
indrekp |
Posted on 01/06/09 @ 11:03 AM
I agree with tower on island thing. But I did not use build-on-walls cheat. All it took was one tower!
I started out as I always do: maxxed out stockpile, 2 granaries, 5 woodcutters, market, a mill, three farms and 8 bakeries. Bought extra wood to get all this, and a church to raise taxes a bit.
Then, my resources were wasted, I spent time on defense - see below. When done, came back and...
After some wood came in, added armory, barracks, 3 fletchers and one tanner, two dairy farms.
A bit later, hops farm, 4 breweries and 4 inns (sold some wood and extra resources to get gold faster)
That's my usual setup to get money coming in and forget about the castle management.
Notice that I did not build stone or ore mines.
And defense...
I built a defense tower onto northernmost part of tiny island (there's room there), added initial arabic archers (4 or 5?), a bezier, and about 15 crossbowmen.
Then sent slaves over river and dug as much moat as possible, and then carved a path for enemy to cross into moat, using "delete" tool.
Made path a bit tricky to save some time... it's a bit of exploiting the AI, but gain was really minor here.
Enemy swordsmen never made it to the island...
When all this was done, I put down one stone quarry and one ore mine.
Then I noticed that neither of AI's have gathered enough stone to set up round towers yet - having still large gaps in walls. I sent my 4 crossbow men to the first AI, just to check... Funny enough, 4 crossbowmen wrecked havoc upon the enemy, killing his peasants and archers. I quickly built merc camp north of enemy castle and started pumping out horse archers and selling any surplus wood, stone, food etc to buy them. About 20 horse archers later, enemy was totally paralyzed and southern AI's swordsmen did not care about battle, they wandered towards my defense.
So, made 10 assassins and got rid of closest AI.
And by then, I had enough economy going to farm gold, sell bread and weapons to buy my usual task force: 200 horse archers and block & finish lower enemy.
I always build up a strong economy to have enough gold, buy 200-400 horse archers and render enemies castle inoperable quickly. Then set about 50 H-archers to "attack ground" near enemy campfire so no new workers survive. And then move in with assassins or whatever I wish.
That's my strategy. |
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