How the heck? I don't stand a chance! his army is too strong and I do not have time to build up my forces and he attacks them and kills everything! this cannot be this hard, something is wrong here... I made certain I am not playing on elite...
EDIT: DONE! few posts down I explained how I did it!
|||This is almost impossible! the costant waves of attacks is way overwhelming! how the heck does anyone do this? I am level 17 and I cannot hold them off!
|||I am lvl 21, and did the mission without problems. I did not use any golden age technology however. I just first get 15 villagers, teched to age 2 while getting another barracks. I spammed hypaspists out from the 2 barracks, and get more villagers. Then, I got 2 archery ranges, and spam toxotes and hypaspists out of these 4 structures non-stop, while getting more villagers. I teched to age 3 after, and replaced spammed hoplites instead of hypaspists, and even more toxotes. By that time my army was so large that their waves didn't matter much. I was afraid of a counterattack so I got 2 castles up, which were probably unnecessary. Eventually, I got some rams and attacked at 120 pop, rallying reinforcements non-stop, and simply destroyed their base.
Tips:
1. Fight near the town center at the beginning. It fires arrows.
2. Don't get population blocked, balance your resource, and keep spamming.
3. If you can't build troops fast enough, try spamming towers.
4. If that still fails, you can co-op this mission, and hope the other person plays better or has better gear.
I had to try it three times to beat it and went from level 21 to 22 while trying. Good to know that it was White quest according to the game!!!
The two first times I tried to focus on my army and didn't develop well enough in economy (first game gave up at 18 mins and the second one at 30+, when the waves were just too big and too often for me to deal with, while not having a single chance of counter attack). For the third try I wanted to try to add some tower/fortress support so I could have more chances of growing my army faster (by having less casualties). Your mileage will most surely vary but my last experience went like:
- Be lucky with the map? I played it in two different versions (or maybe positions?). The second and third time, they came through a way between two forests, which was "close" to my hall and could be used as choke point with some effort.
- Do not stop producing units/gathering as much as you can. Try to avoid moments of max population reached, at least until you start to dominate the map. Two barracks can help a lot to replenish the casualties of the first waves and more peasants won't be useless (help to build stuff faster like those towers or fortresses is always nice, and no one dislikes better resource flowing).
- Around six basic towers (plus any of the initial ones) and a fortress near your hall and by the side by which the enemy strikes is a good defense. Additional hall(s) can be used for extra room, ranged power and support of "far away" resource points or just cover another enemy route.
- Those mentioned before need to be supported by a big number of the two basic types of infantry and need time to set up. At first the Hypaspist may seem more important but later I faced waves of cavalry so upgraded spearmen were a blessing. In fact, for the first waves, the defense really depends on those two units while the stone is gathered so getting as many as possible is a must anyway.
- Ranged units? The basic archer is a very welcomed addition but the antiranged buy is more important as soon as I can get him.(those hordes of archers are nasty)
- Priests: as soon as I can build them (as soon as I hit Era III, I get the building asap), I recruit at least 6 and up to 10 initially (maybe more latter as my army grows). You may get extra troops from your enemy and, more importantly, get your survivors in better shape for the next wave if given the time for it. They are not usefull if your army lacks power though.
- Cavalry: I found them good once I have stablished by defensive line. Some antiranged support or anticavalry support, depending on the incoming wave but I don't think that they were important. Avoidable, I suppose.
- Siege units: any would do but preferably with ranged. A group of five ballistas did a very fine job in my game. Only built once I was able to stand my ground against the new enemy waves easily.
When my army could stant its ground, I made a secondary and smaller army in a safe point of the map (spearmen, hypaspists, toxotes, peltats and a few priests) to protect the group of ballistas close to them. The ballistas went destroying stuff while protected by the second army. The main army was still protecting my city and economy. Once I had destroyed some houses and seeing as more waves were not coming, my main army joined the slaughter.
Advisors that help in resource gathering, infantry recruitment faster and building reducing costs are nice to use. At least I was using those.I didn't have it at the time but there is a tech that reduces the recruitment time of troops by 25% but it needs Era III. Tech(s) to gather wood faster could be nice as you will be needing lots.
|||I should add while I say that I didn't have particular troubles with it, this mission (and I Need A Hero before it) are the ones where they actually start to send decently sized waves at you, so you would need to be able to keep producing troops. To give you some benchmark, I was helping some other person on this mission on co-op yesterday. We defended and macroed up and attacked at 20 minute mark. At that time, he had 55 pop, I had 115, and this is only off 30 villagers from my end. Of course I am not going to have trouble with that amount of troops. Granted, he did have 2 castles, but on the other hand I have a couple of rams, and started with less stuff than he did since I am a co-op partner.
I should also add that this amount is bad compared to what the high level players do. There's a thread in the main discussion forum how fast they can max as Egyptian.
I DID IT!
I just had to stand my ground and fight off hsi attacks... after that, his waves stopped! (after 35 mins-ish) I stood my ground by building walls in choke points and repairing them all the time whilst archers fired from acrsoo the wall... he did get in a few times but my forts and soldiers fought them off... there were points where the only thing pushed them back was the town centre! i rebuild, had 20+ on food which i sold to make gold and make loads of infentry and here is the GOLDEN RULE:
You have to sneak around his base, go from behind and kill hecter... you wont do it from the first attack but you have to do that a few times till you get him...
|||I had a heck of a time with the early rushes on this mission as well, but I managed to beat it at level 18.
One thing I noticed that helped, is that if you keep your early scouting around the map to a minimum, you seem to get an extra few minutes before the rushes start. That gave me enough time to get a few more spearmen out, to stay alive long enough to put up walls and enough guard towers to take care of them.
Another thing I found useful for cutting through the enemy bases, was building a massive squad of Somatophylax Veteran's at the fortress (you can buy the advisor for them in Mycenae for 300g). They build in a few seconds, can soak up a crazy amount of damage, and lay waste to buildings. They don't do a ton of damage to units, but a swarm of them can still take out enemies quickly enough.
You could also use consumables to get quick units, but usually you still need to be at least Age 3 to use a decent one, and that might take too long.
But yeah - what a pain. I can't stand missions where the enemies start coming in waves within a few minutes. Hopefully they rebalance some of these missions in future patches - save the brutal missions for late-game content, PvP, and Crete horde mode.
- Scott
|||Actually, most missions starts sending waves like this after this one. To be perfectly honest, I find it perfectly reasonable to do so. It's not hard to make more troops than they do out of 2 barracks if you are 1/2 decent with your macro. I don't think they need to rebalance this mission. If anything, the missions before it can be make a bit harder to make I Need A Hero and Hector Must Fall less of a jump.
2 rax, a popular strategy in Starcraft, works just as well in AOEO.
I put towers up at the word go (well as soon as i got the stone) built villigers and built more towers and built on top of that, walls castles etc.
around 35 minutes into the game the rushes will stop simply because hectores army have run out of resources and they cant get to your resources because they are so well defended.
the truth is that the map will not have a lot of resources so i i had loads of farmers and when the time came for me to build an army and crush them i sold food when i ran out of gold.
but towers are key in the beggining of the game because you wont need to many soldiers at any time when you have 10 towers right next to your village.
