Just had a crazy weekend 6-8 hour long campaign. Nobody to share it with so telling it here.

Long time casual player from the early 00's but recently decided to play my older HD copy I never really put hours into.

Was playing the Forgotten campaigns, Honfoglalas, where you lose at first and flee with a bunch of farm animals. Well I bugged it out at some point. Maybe because I spent 30 minutes farming up food and villagers in my initial allies base.

• Stuck in castle age
• main objective, Penchangs enemy was friendly/neutral with me
• last remaining enemy was practically infinitely spawning counter units as soon as I approached their base with no end in sight.

Got to the point where I'd kill off all villagers, spawn a population cap army with reinforcements queued from 10+ production buildings, and still get wiped out before reaching halfway to their town center. My solution was CASTLES. I build 30+ castles, columns of 5 filled with maxed out archers. And I slowly built castles towards them until triggering the next scene.

Suddenly yellows massive army becomes enemy again and wipes my entire starting base, as if they have spies, killing every single unit on the mainland. Mining camps, houses, every single thing they could touch got killed. But I got my hero unit and a few villagers out on a transport in a seemingly unintended piece of land to the south east. It was literally a blank land with nothing. Luckily I had insane economy banked.

Now my problem was getting 60 units and my hero to the flagged area. As soon as I landed any units on the mainland, they'd swarm like an unstoppable horde.

So I sent 50+ scouts, quickly unloaded them and rode as far north as I could. It work and I kited lots of them north. While I had 10+ villagers build me 10 barracks and pikeman. All being sent in a train towards the flag with the hero unit. It worked.

Now the final enemy is on a small island and I have the same problem as before. They are practically infinitely spawning units. So I did the castle strategy again. 10+ castles and finally won the damn scenario.

Thanks for reading. I don't know what I did to fuck this scenario up so badly but I refused to restart.