Yeah, but i meant you can knock down the whole camp and they spawn in thin air until you destroy all three.

Gave Rise of Muslims 3 a casual try yest... taking the city was ok, but about 5-10min I got hit by a bunch of Italian galleons and fire ships and it was pretty much GG at that point.

I know Italians are supposed to turn allies once I get to 200 kills, but I just don't see that happening quickly. Unless I delete like half the starting city and plop a castle to guard the harbors... but Saracens don't even get Heated shot, sigh.

I rushed a castle ASAP on the northernmost part of the city and that handled them fine. I think there is stone to the south of the city or was it gold to buy stone with? I rushed production on it quickly. Alternativly you can try to avoid the shoreline and just let them have their fun. No cannon galleon so they cant hurt you. You will have to extend the walls westward to gain space with this plan though.

As for the 200 kills thing, i dont really get it. I only achieved this objective when i started killing orange units in the push towards the straights of gibralter.

I updated post 419 with the win of mission three.

[This message has been edited by Cataphract887 (edited 07-31-2017 @ 11:17 AM).]

There's gold to the south. Yeah, that'll be the plan once I sit down for a serious play.

Edit: doing ok so far. I did a 2 castle set-up, one in the north to guard the harbour, and one just outside the town gate so that my workers would have somewhere to scramble to.

I fulfilled the 200 kills objective w/o actually engaging the Berbers. I took out the desert tribes' camps using knights to raid. Then I used the same knights and a bunch of Arbs to steamroll the Berbers along the coast, with a few monks upgraded with Redemption to convert production buildings.

I'm now the undisputed master of Northern Africa with about 1 k of wood left. Italians periodically tribute me 400 g "for the war effort" , and I still need to set up new eco next to the Berbers' infinite resources. Oh, and i'm only like 57 on pop, so still have room to develop.

There's also a relic in the Sahara guarded by Ornlu the wolf, might grab that just for fun.

So far, nothing really impossible about this scen.

[This message has been edited by kud13 (edited 08-01-2017 @ 06:52 AM).]

Now that i know about the gold mine and used the trade, thats certainly true. However they both seem like cheating to me. And of course, i beat it myself already by now so thats clearly not true

Ionno if I agree about cheating. Your civ is Saracens. They have a market bonus. It makes sense to gear the map towards actually making the players use it (also the archers do extra dmg to buildings team bonus to supplement lack of good siege)

I mean, sure, I'd love it if there were several piles of stone in Africa to mine, but I'm not too bothered with the set-up.

As for the infinite resources... yeah, it seems a bit of a cop-out, but then again, it's been a recurring feature in the campaign, so once again, I'm okay with it. Especially since you need to break through the Berbers to get there- and unless you're frugal with your starting resources you can run out before you get that far (though on Moderate, all I ever had to deal with was a trickle of spears, archers and scouts. A dozen of FU Arbs could one-shot anyone Berbers sent at me)

Right, but im still not a fan of having to sit around harvesting infinite gold mines. The saracen market bonus is meaningless in that situation as it doesnt lower or slow down the player from hitting the ultra high prices on wood. I ran out of wood in north africa long before invading spain. I really think B&D games should provide adequate forests to harvest as its such a basic resource. OR provide some sidequests, trading stuff to gain gold. I did use trade cogs, but i suspect it wasnt intended to be done as the friendly docks had those piers placed around them.

Edit;Yeah, but i think they are intended to do the trading themselves with the 400 gold tribute. Because if you dont trick the warships out of their harbor, its very difficult for a cog to even visit their dock.

Perhaps though, with the spanish being only in castle age your FU imperial units+monks can defeat them with enough efficiency that its possible to win straightforwardly. In my first attempt i killed many of them with mamelukes but just gave up when i saw they flooded out so much and i was out of wood.

[This message has been edited by Cataphract887 (edited 08-01-2017 @ 12:04 PM).]

The "scouts" section explicitly says that Italians can be cowed with a show of force and become trade partners,

As for wood: yeah, there should probably be more. I found some in the Atlas mountains, and I suspect France has a lot. I'll see how much I agree with your concern once I do the invasion of Spain tonight.

EDIT: ok, finished. Iberia was taken by a combo of knights, arbs, FU Emams, and about 8 SOs. Mams soaked up castle fire (looks like no ballistics on Moderate?), while the SOs knocked the castles down.

Iberia still had about 2k worth of concentrated forest left, so the only issue was buying enough stone.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1097776397/

Halting the Franks was laughably easy- my 5 surviving SOs were set on attack ground in the choke, with Emams and arbs pelting whatever survived. A group of knights was on hand to take care of any pesky trebs.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1097776620

Overall, very decent campaign. Scen 2 can use some tweaking, but I liked Scen 3.

Also, Easter egg:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1097775388

[This message has been edited by kud13 (edited 08-01-2017 @ 09:32 PM).]

Yeah, i saw that silly dog flying around

Anyone using the latest HD Beta? Was wondering if there is an issues with using\not using it, like in the last contest i played some entries that needed the beta to fix the bug with not being able to see pregame story, instructions etc

The 5.5 beta was mostly about MP, so I'm not using it. Though now that they've introduced balance tweaks for Indians, Italians and Magyars, I might need to opt in.

Yeah, looks like the beta has little of interest for us this time around. Singleplayer games dont really need to be balanced the way competitive multiplayer ones are. Campaigns and scenarios are inherently unfair to the player putting him at all sorts of disadvantages anyway.

I am working on reviewing this campaign called Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey i was wondering what someone who likes B&D thought of the first mission. Its not exactly a campaign i would recommend to play;the first mission had very weak AI with many walls placed over the map by the author. The player gained kingdoms by destroying their castles, but several AI resigned with the default message and joined me before i even attacked them. I think the biggest army i ever saw was about a dozen units at once. Meanwhile the player can make Jannisaries and dozens of castles...in one later mission i placed 6+ castles down and had 4k+ stone in the bank still...

Annoyances aside i like Rise of the Muslims much better. Playing two B&D campaigns like these in short order certainly helps with perspective...

[This message has been edited by Cataphract887 (edited 08-04-2017 @ 11:52 AM).]

There is also an HD version, which was uploaded by the creator himself:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=138398217&searchtext=
It is one of the most favorite campaigns in the Workshop. I thought this was because ot the topic (Ottomans), since steam is full of nationalistic brainwashed kids from Turkey, which upvote everything what they think is connected to their glorious history. But now I see that panel has written a Review (4.4), stating that this campaign is quite enjoyable. So I'll give it a try, too!

[This message has been edited by Bassi (edited 08-04-2017 @ 01:20 PM).]

I just played a naval battle mission where the map had probably 1 million resources of gold and stone on it. One enemy tributes me 100,000 gold because i looted their treasury, by killing a castle using 15+2 cannon galleons simply built from a dock a screenshot or two away from their castle within a few minutes of starting the mission. The AI in this mission randomly resigned, including the main boss navy of Andrea Doria who is still alive on the map even though i won and the objectives require his defeat.

I will try the HD version afterwards, i am interested to see how it compares to the one on the blacksmith.

Its certainly disappointing to see modern patriots attempt to push their nationalistic agenda onto old games and historical events. Medieval era states just dont work like that. There never was such a thing as an "Ottoman nation", modern turkish nationalism was created by reactionary forces in the opening of the 20th century in turkey against the push of mighty empires like UK, Germany, Russia etc. Nicely detailed in a book "A peace to end all peace" among others. The Portuguese nationalists used to be particularly annoying 10-15 years ago, i remember them constantly requesting to have their nation included in the game in ask sandyman threads. Myself in the USA, am adamantly opposed to the inclusion of any further american-located nations into the game...makes no sense. Leave it for AoE3

44,754 Unique Visitors
14,879 Current Subscribers
321 Current Favorites
408 ratings for a perfect 5\5 stars

LOL

[This message has been edited by Cataphract887 (edited 08-04-2017 @ 01:08 PM).]

Its certainly disappointing to see modern patriots attempt to push their nationalistic agenda onto old games and historical events. Medieval era states just dont work like that.

Yes, exactly! I still get so many high quality messages for KoD like "TAMERLAN TURKIYE!!! GENGIS KAN NO MONGOL TURKISH YES!" In the very beginning I was still answering those messages.
In the case of Tamerlane I even tried to explain that I know that Tamerlane is more Turkish than Mongol (those turkish tribes we're speaking of still have not much in common with nowadays turkish People), but that I won't represent him and his army by Turks, since it would not make sense gameplay-wise (I mean: Tamerlane coming with some Janitschars?), but they never care for those arguments at all. So I stopped answering this kind of bullshit. It's like talking to a brick wall anyways.

Tamerlane even led his horde against the Ottomans, defeating then in the battle of Ankara resulting the Sultan Beyezid being captured and the Ottomans falling into a civil war of several years. Tamerlane has generally been portrayed favorably in the west simply for being an opponent of the Ottoman despite many sources crediting him with the death of perhaps 50 million people...trying to then turn this character around into some kind of turkish hero is bizarre. His Timurids went on to rule northern India as the Mughal Empire under the command of Babur. They just dont have anything to do with modern day Turkey

trying to then turn this character around into some kind of turkish hero is bizarre

Completely bizarre and stupid. Even more bizarre is how they try to turn Genghis Khan into a Turkish ruler.
But what should one expect ... The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even claims that America was discovered by Turkish sailors in the 12th century. Erdogan said that lately at the opening of a school in Ankara: "In Turkey and the world many well-known scholars see it this way." Yeah ... of course.

That one is on my list, but I haven't gotten there yet. (But soon, hopefully)

I suspect the reason it's so popular is because it was one of the first things uploaded on Steam Workshop, and it's quite massive (9 scens, I think?)

Also, the author has been pretty diligent in updating it and recently added voice acting as well (there was a reddit thread where he was casting for voice actors).

And the 5 stars rating on the Workshop is directly related to the amount of subscribers, so it's not representative the way a Blacksmith rating is.

Edit: I'm glad that there's Cossacks and so no Eastern European nationalism spats make their way into AoK. Cause that could've quickly turned this game very toxic for me.

[This message has been edited by kud13 (edited 08-04-2017 @ 01:45 PM).]

no Eastern European nationalism spats make their way into AoK.

Better don't visit the steam community threads about possible new civs then (to be fair: they're toxic in general).

And the 5 stars rating on the Workshop is directly related to the amount of subscribers

Not exactly. It's related to the upvotes given by the subscribers. 25 votes of which the majority has to be positive makes 3 stars. There is no 2 or 1 star(s). 4 stars are unlocked when you have at least 30 ratings, of which the majority has to be positive. 5 stars has to be some hundreds ratings, I think. Not too sure about that, since the most ratings I got so far are 78 (for Terra Nova). Al_Kharn's "Ragnar" got nearly 140 ratings and still has only 4 stars. So I assume that the 5th star is not unlocked before the object has at least 200+ ratings.

Ten scenarios, im on the seventh. The last mission was a straight up arabia 1v1 with some mountain range added down the middle and both players have a deathmatch style opener. The player was imperial over the castle age Persians.

Atleast the campaign is historical accurate as far as i can tell. Thats a good plus, but the vast majority of the text is only available in the winning message. You dont receive an explanation of whats going on in this version at least until you win.

Oh, I occasionally contribute to the master-thread on that. To be fair, the regulars there did a pretty good job weeding out the really toxic members, so it's (mostly) civilized speculation. The downside is that it's like 3 or 4 people who've basically reached a consensus and are now debating minutiae. But on the bright side, it's intelligent debate,

Even if it's basically pointless in the long run, it's still a decent time killer when I need a little break at work.

But what should one expect ... The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even claims that America was discovered by Turkish sailors in the 12th century. Erdogan said that lately at the opening of a school in Ankara: "In Turkey and the world many well-known scholars see it this way." Yeah ... of course.

Works Cited: Age of Empires III campaign.

Works Cited: Age of Empires III campaign.

11 Good one!
But the Morgan Black campaign takes place in the 16th century, not in the 12th ... ?

[This message has been edited by Bassi (edited 08-04-2017 @ 02:42 PM).]

Minor details. It's all the same to Erdogan

I suspect the reason it's so popular is because it was one of the first things uploaded on Steam Workshop

Good point, but still I think that everything Turks/Ottoman related is suspiciously popular, see other popular Workshop campaigns like "The Siege of Constantinople" or "The Battle of Vienna", which both feature the Ottomans, too.
So my advice for everyone who wants to reach a high amount of downloads. Either you put some GoT or LotR related terms in the title of your object, or you create something related to the Ottomans (could be anything: Invention of the Wheel, discovery of America).

The enemy score is fairly high and keeps going higher, lower from millions to 14k and back again.



Epic armies but no custom AI kept the lag down. Looks like several hundred units per each of us invading. The enemy has only deployed huskarls against out jannisary, paladins and ETK so its a bit of a cakewalk here.

EDIT;nevermind on the lag, it was good while it lasted. Around minute15 i started getting lag spikes every 10-20 second of what feels like 5 FPS. Then it goes back to perfectly smooth, then another spike...i tried torpedoing all my allies but it didnt change a thing.

[This message has been edited by Cataphract887 (edited 08-04-2017 @ 03:16 PM).]

Instead of a closing paragraph:

Eh i gave the campaign a 2.8

[This message has been edited by Cataphract887 (edited 08-05-2017 @ 09:39 AM).]

I played The Quest last night for the first time in at least five years. It was Ingo van Thiel's first scenario for AoK, and I wanted to see how it held up compared to others of similar age.

The scenario is clearly dated in several aspects, particularly in the map design category. You can tell that Ingo had just migrated over from designing for AoE1. Even so, one thing that sticks out despite it not quite meeting today's standards is how fundamentally solid it is in all spheres. This scenario is far better than almost all others that were designed around 1999-2000 (the only other comparable ones I can think of aside from Ingo's other designs are aMa's Sachsenaufstand and a couple of scenarios by Mark Stoker).

The map design, while it has its flaws, still looks rather good overall. Some locations would even be 5.0 material today, while others, despite being of a somewhat less remarkable nature, are still solid. The map plays fantastically well, though, harnessing the base features of the game to excellent effect while a few triggers inject a little extra punch into it. This was before the age where designers started to try and reinvent the wheel in every possible sphere. At its core, this is a simple FF into B&D scenario, but many of the archetypes of AoK scenario design began here (a quest to help a monk find relic in exchange for him joining you, using a gunpowder cart to blow up enemy fortifications, taming a wolf, being screwed over by ineffectual kings (a refined version of the Joan 5 concept), and a chase after an enemy villain that culminates in a final battle, man to man (well, not quite)

There are added twists, though. Depending on which route you take and when there are different events and dialogues. Sending the merchant out ahead unprotected, for example, causes him to get arrested, whereby you must recapture him with a monk. Allow the enemy general Belisarius to escape from his camp when you attack it and he flees to the north, where you must chase him down. Allow him to escape yet again, and he escapes to the west, where you must hunt him down with your protagonists to lure him out of hiding, culminating in a tense showdown to close out the scenario. For its time, it is spectacularly well done.

The gameplay itself deserves a quick run through, as there are many notable aspects of it. The player begins the FF portion with their two heroes (Charlemagne and Siegfried) accompanied by three pikemen, three crossbowmen, and three elite skirmishers, with the opportunity to acquire a monk, two knights, and Ornlu the Wolf later on, and are tasked with reaching a dock to acquire ships to cross the river while protecting the merchant. In your path lie many enemy soldiers, and their layout, troop composition, and AI demand that the player do much more than mindlessly patrol their troops into the enemy. Blunder into a group of enemy troops and you may draw the attention of nearby patrols that will come overwhelm you, or you may end up having your archers crushed by an onager. It is extremely simple, but quite well done nevertheless.

After dispensing with the treacherous merchant who claims to sell oats-that-are-actually-gunpowder by lighting a fuse in his cart and rolling him into an enemy fortress, the player is free to cross the river, albeit while keeping an eye out for enemy galleons. Having crossed, the player must fight--or sneak--their way towards the allied city. They will then sit in shock as their cowardly king deserts the city with his massive army, leaving nothing but a pile of gold to help finance a defense. The first set of enemy attacks that come your way are fierce, being comprised of imperial age units backed by bombard cannons, trebs, and other siege, and the player has barely enough time to prepare themselves with knights, crossbows, and a mangonel or two to smash enemy attackers at the walls while booming up in a niche south of the city. I left my mangonels to shoot at enemy soldiers approaching the walls while I took my army out the south gate and made a sally around the flank. Knights made a beeline for enemy siege while my crossbows (in staggered formation to minimize damage from enemy cannons and siege onagers) backed them up. The extra +1 range for Britons was key here.

As soon as I could, I rushed to imperial and went arbalests (castles are disabled, so no longbows), cavaliers, and onagers to push out and attack Belisarius' camp. Their resistance was initially fierce, but as their troops flooded out to attack my arbalests I landed an attack-ground shot with my onagers that flattened around 25 enemy troops, making things considerably easier. After demolishing the camp, I followed Belisarius north, where I let him escape again so I might have the full experience. A couple of docks producing 10 galleons allowed me to clear the river of enemy ships and ferry Charles and Siegfried across to find Belisarius. After forcing him out of hiding, the final battle began, and a close one it was. Charles had just 4HP left when Belisarius fell to the earth, concluding what in my mind remains an excellent scenario.

The Quest is a simple and dated scenario, but one that nevertheless plays better than many of the works that were released in the following decade. Even now, there is still much to learn from it.

I once used my fixed force troops to kill off Belisarius's entire camp Took several hours of luring manageable chunks of troops out but i did it in the end.

Interesting to see you like the scenario hockeysam. I said in the exchequer back when we discussed tamerlane\etc old scenarios that i would probably give 4s and 5s to the quest still. It may not light the world on fire anymore but its a really solid gameplay scenario with good characters and all the supporting elements you would expect. Its simple stuff compared to our epic "8000 trigger with new healing system" RPGs, but sometimes simple is good. Its also not purely a B&D but mixes it up with a variety of genre...FF, light RPG, then a B&D.

Great analysis HockeySam. I must give the Quest and the King's Best Men another go sometime soon.

I really enjoyed KBM, especially after I found out there is more than one scenario in he campaign The amount of creativity (steal enemy flag, bombard cannon flight, etc...) is amazing.

Has anyone figured out every single riddle/easter egg in The Crazy Kirch Quest? I really wanna see them all, but as dumb as I am, walktrough would be appreciated

If I were to review The Quest I would give it a 4.8. The map design doesn't quite meet today's standards, but it is very fundamentally solid and plays extremely well, so I'd give it a four. The other categories are straight fives. The King's Best Men would probably receive a similar evaluation, while Ulio and WTWB would still get 5.0s from me. It's remarkable how ahead of his time Ingo was, and how well his works still hold up today.

Since Kata mentioned it in one of his latest reviews, I tried Mark Stoker's "Ottoman Onslaught" and horribly failed in scenario one! Man, this is quite tough! I don't know why, but I have never played it before. Which is strange, since I'm a huge fan of Mark Stoker, who is some kind of idol for me and a huge inspiration for my own scenarios.

About the first scenario so far: Great map design. I really enjoy those laid back designs from the golden era.

[This message has been edited by Bassi (edited 08-06-2017 @ 01:30 PM).]

Haha, looks like quite a few people left comments about the difficulty. It might have gotten a bit more insane on HD and UP, since these make some older scenarios tougher now than they were on 1.0c

Fighting multiple enemies with large towns is extremely difficult on 75 pop.