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62 - Mangonel City
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| Author |
File Description |
| Lord Michael I |
Posted on 07/07/08 @ 09:38 PM
Mission 62 – Mangonel City, proves to be a challenging one. You are almost completely surrounded by enemies - One Emir northeast of you, one Northwest, and a Wazir Southeast of your position.
Everyone starts with 10000 gold, and a huge pack of supplies. One of the only advantages you have here is that you are on high ground, and that stone deposits are real close to your stockpile.
As many missions, Mangonel City also requires a speedy setup of your town, because of two reasons: You need to take the stone for yourself, before enemies put quarries there, and you need defenses set up as quick as you can. Later on the mission you will learn that when Emirs have a mountain of money, they won’t just sit there to raise an army, they’ll rush you with a fairly big army of swordsmen.
To get started, lower down your speed to 20, and extend your stockpile, 5 extra tiles will be enough, preferably shaped as a rectangle, then set up your granary, best placed behind your keep. Now move your screen to the north, and set up two quarries with one ox each. Now erect two woodcutters: One close to your new quarries (There are some trees nearby), and one near the trees to the south.
After all that, go back to your keep, and set up one dairy farm, two Wheat farms and one hops farm. Now build a marketplace, not so close to your stockpile as it may interfere with your future buildings, buy 200 wood pieces and erect three hovels.
Now that you’ve got half of your town working, let’s go to our defense strategy. Although the Emir to the Northwest is your main menace right now, the eastern AI’s will be your pain in the back on the long run. So, erect a huge wall that will isolate you from those pesky AI’s.
Start your wall from the south. It should cross nearly through the middle of the trees, and it will end in the northern trees, right through the middle. Be careful when making the wall, because if you leave one gap, the keep will not be enclosed. To verify if the wall is enclosing you, select your archers, and make them go past the wall. If they can, look for open spots at the end, and try again. When the archers can’t go through the wall, you got yourself an enclosed keep.
The image above shows the early stages of my eastern wall. Note how it goes right through the middle of the small forests. After your wall is set up, build two round towers: One in the middle of your wall, and one to the northeast, close to some rocks that are near the Emir’s castle (I will place an image later).
I need to insist all this has to be done extremely fast. If you take too much, by the time you’ll set up your western round tower, some enemy quarrymen will be on their way, and thus you will receive the message “Too close from enemy to build”. You may even need practice at this. It may require some tries before you get it all right.
I enclosed the approaching enemy quarrymen for you to see how tight stuff are at the start. If I had taken some extra seconds, they would be too close, and I would not be able to build the tower. Of course, you can later kill the quarrymen if you get the “Too close to enemy to build”, but it takes some time, and your tower will be up when it’s too late. So it’s just better to restart if you fail at setting the tower up.
After the tower is erect, build stairs for it. Now go to your town, and place an armory and a barracks. Buy 20 leather armors and 20 crossbows. Recruit the 20 crossbowmen and use them to man the western tower. Also place a mangonel and man it. Use the mangonel to target the keep. You can’t just click on the keep to attack it, so select the mangonel, and click on the sword, then click on the keep. From now on keep an eye on this part of the map, soon there will be a rush attack of some swordsmen, and they will target your tower. At the last moment, you need to destroy the stairs to prevent them from going up. You may be thinking “But I can just destroy the stairs as the last crossbowmen goes up the tower”; but that won’t work. If you destroy the stairs too early, the swordsmen will forget about the tower, and go directly to your keep, making it harder for your crossbowmen to kill them.
Now, do the same for the eastern tower: Buy 20 more leather armors and crossbows, and man it. But instead of placing a mangonel, place a ballista. Also send your archers to the eastern tower. Here you don’t have to destroy the stairs.
Now it’s time to finish your town. Erect two iron mines at the iron deposits south of your keep (It’s downhill), two Fletchers set on crossbow production, one tanner, one poleturner set on pike production and one armorer. After that, build one mill and 6 bakeries, along with two breweries, two inns and two more hovels. You may need more wood, so feel free to buy as much wood as you need. Remember to set up your taxes to -8 when the inns become functional.
So now you got yourself a nice town and good defenses, but the wall must be enhanced with a bit more protection, so build two defense turrets, one in the north end of the wall, and other at the south end of the wall. Go to the market and buy 20 more crossbows and leather armors, and send 10 the north tower and 10 to the south. I recommend that by this point you should save your game, in case something goes wrong later on.
Now that you have set up everything, you can speed back to your normal game speed.
With the image above you can see how my town looks like, and how my wall is set up.
So let’s start the offense. You may have noticed that the eastern Emir is now targeting you with one of his mangonels. Big deal. Go to your Engineer’s Guild, and hire 10 engineers. Make them build 5 catapults. Now, build a gatehouse on the northern part of your wall, get your catapults out, and target the Emir’s mangonel tower. Don’t get too close because then you may be under enemy arrows. It would be better if you don’t completely destroy the tower, just cripple it.
For now the situation will be under control: The west Emir is slowly dying because of constant mangonel fire, the eastern Emir doesn’t have a tower to place his mangonel, and the Wazir… Well, he’s plain weak. So, let’s expand the economy. Build one more quarry along with its ox, and a new iron mine. Recruit crossbowmen and pikemen, and sell everything you don’t need, as pitch, extra iron, stone, wheat, etc.
Let’s take out the west Emir, in a slow, entertaining way. Send in your catapults, and place them near your west tower. Hire 10 more engineers and make the build 5 new Fire Ballistae. Place them near your catapults.
With your catapults, destroy the tower pointed out in the image above, to make a hole where the Fire Ballistae can comfortably send in flaming arrows at the Emir’s bakeries.
When setting the castle on fire, destroy as many wells as you can since they can spoil all your fun.
Come on baby light my fire: )
With the Emir under your control, set you attention now to the eastern front. Hopefully, things are going well over there too, but it’s time to expand your kingdom. We’ll do this by expanding the wall, through a slow process.
First, make a wall going from the center tower up north. At the end of it, place a round tower with a mangonel on it. Don’t man it yet. Then erect a wall that will connect your north defense turret with your new round tower. Destroy the old piece of wall, man the mangonel and send your crossbowmen from the north defense turret there. Also grab half of the crossbowmen on the center tower to your new one.
This is how it should look like. By this moment I have already destroyed the old piece of wall that was there.
Now, do the same process on the south. Before you start, take your spearmen, make a small hole o the wall (Or make a gatehouse, as you please), and destroy the enemy buildings in the area, as they might get in the way. Extend a wall from your center tower, this time going south. Erect a round tower with a mangonel, send in the rest of your crossbowmen there, and man the mangonel. You may want to wait to send in your engineers because there will be enemy Fire Ballistae in range, so it’s better to put some crossbowmen before to destroy them, and then build the mangonel when the site is Fire Ballistae free.
This image shows how I extended the south strip of the wall. After doing this, connect the two new towers with a wall, and destroy the old center tower. Make a gatehouse, too.
Behold, sire! Your new wall is completed!
With this new front it will be much easier to take down your enemies. Use your mangonels to target the keeps, and keep recruiting pikemen and crossbowmen. When you have a decent number of pikemen (You can buy the weapons needed to speed the process), start killing your enemies, I recommend you start with the west Emir as he is the weakest.
After killing him, the next Emir must go. Grab all your catapults, Fire Ballistae and pikemen, and move them to the east front. With your Fire Ballistae, set the castle on fire, you can target the round towers to a side of the Emir’s castle with the catapults. When the fire goes down, send in your pikemen. Since your crossbowmen on the west tower are now useless, you can take them down, and distribute them amongst the east towers.
You can now stop recruiting crossbowmen, but still concentrate on pikemen production. Also, try not to sell too much stone as your catapults need them.
After the second Emir is down, go visit the Wazir. To kill him, I targeted some outside buildings the Wazir had, like the Apothecary and some hovels. Meanwhile, I built a mercenaries post and recruited some Horse Archers.
I had 70 Horse Archers and 39 pikemen when I killed the Wazir. I also had 5 crossbowmen and 5 catapults, but I didn’t use them on the siege. Remember to stop mangonel fire when attacking as the rocks can kill your men.
Hooray! You have finished Mangonel City! The save file attached can show you my town distribution, how I made my wall, etc. The west Emir is dead, but both eastern enemies are up, yet they are no harm to you.
For those lazy ones, you can use the save to skip the mission (Naughty, naughty!) If you still are stuck, feel free to email me with any questions. My email is in my profile. |
| Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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| peter2008 |
Posted on 07/08/08 @ 07:12 PM
To this map I'd like to mention that it is possible to place the eastern wall far closer to the enemies' castles from the start (with stairs!, e.g. in the middle). Either you buy some stone to place round towers at once, too or you can add them later: your marksmen will eliminate the workers at the quaries, then you'll be free. With the heights advantage and a concentration of men you'll suppress any form of attack, even the mangonel of the north-astern Emir or the fire ballistae in front of the Wazir's stronghold.
The barracks, engineers and mercenary posts being outside you can destroy them with fast troops (macemen, assassins), and when the gates have closed lite the whole thing with slaves. The rest will be silence. |
| Ghatanothoa |
Posted on 07/09/08 @ 09:27 AM
Off-topic
@Peter2008:
Somehow the "lonely Saladin" wasn't a problem for me, because the start position was easy to defend and the Saladin distract the other AIs. Only in the last mission larg armys attacked me, thus it take over four hours to win this level. |
Lord Michael I
Staff
File Author |
Posted on 07/09/08 @ 11:15 AM
And yes, I was in fact able to make the eastern wall a bit more closer to the enemy, but then a series of problems appeared: (I had to take out the Wazir's fire ballistae, I had less time to take out the Emir's swordsmen, enemy mangonel fire would be really annoying), so I decided to gradually expand the wall. |
| peter2008 |
Posted on 07/10/08 @ 01:47 AM
your info really surprised me, because for me things went vice versa. The last task was - relatively - well to deal with, but in "Lonely Saladin" I was overcrowded several times. (I wanted to by cheeky setting the Caliph under fire from the start and expanding my walls too wide in all directions.) Am looking forward to learn from Lord Michael I and you. |
| Ghatanothoa |
Posted on 07/10/08 @ 09:17 AM
Don't produce any food, beer is enough. You get gold from selling goods in this mission. And buil a wall around your castle with your many and the rest of the starting gold. Saladin will be enough to stop the hardest attacks in the first minutes, thus you can build your castle easily.
Protect the castle with crossbowmen and put Macemen on the walls too, to stop assasin which reached the top of the wall.
When your castle is save, you have enough time to build a big army and to kill every enemy. |
| neilkanep4 |
Posted on 07/26/09 @ 02:52 AM |
| shareef |
Posted on 07/17/12 @ 12:58 PM
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| Added: | 07/07/08 |
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