So I saw a post earlier today with a lot of complaints about the AI being overly aggressive, even on easy setting. Having already done the first three campaigns on hardest I was questioning, but pointed to the Reign of the Hittite Campaign, namely the second mission - Raid on Babylon.

WELL

Overly aggressive is an understatement, but after a few restarts and a lot of scouting I managed to complete it on hardest in a timely 4 hours.

The Strategy

At the bottom left corner of the map is an ocean with a small island on it. What you will need to do is take your entire force south to where you get three villagers.

As soon as you have these to the left side of the map and find the ocean corner, build a dock and build a transport ship immediately. You will be under attack from a single galley and it's likely babylon priests are already massing to convert your force.

Once the transport is built, take your villagers south to the island, build a town centre and spam villagers on wood. Get every single vil on wood at this stage, don't worry about the gazelle or gold.

Wood scarcity is real so you need to be incredibly careful what you build. Get a dock and 3 houses. Build 5-6 scout ships and clear the ocean of enemy ships. Take care not to lose any ships of your own and repair damaged ones.

Back at home, scrape the island of all resources and build a granary and a market. Upgrade the woodcutting tech only.

Next you can start harassing and clearing priests that are on the shores, as well as taking care of the yellow babylon team. They have a few towers which you will need to be careful of, but with good micro you can basically wipe out the entire yellow team.

Whilst doing this build 3-4 fishing ships and fish until the entire ocean is basically empty or you are sitting on around 2000 food.

The next part is the hard bit. You need to land your villagers and try and gather as much wood as possible whilst building up. Grab a barracks and a stable and immediately go to bronze age.

I found that not building any military units meant I wasn't attacked at this point, and anything that wandered too close to shore was taken out by my ships.

Upgrade your ships when you hit bronze, build a gov centre and a temple and then try and land a second TC.

Once your second TC is down it's a game of getting as much wood as possible. I planned to potentially fall back here but fortunately was not attacked too much. The more wood you can get the better. If you are overwhelmed, fall back, build a few more ships to clear the land and start again.

From there you can start building a load of barracks to spam axemen to start clearing out enemy areas. Build farms to get your food supply running as the ocean will be fished out. Once you've got a stable foothold build an army of your choice to wipe out the rest.

Twitch video = https://www.twitch.tv/videos/234168444

TL;DR - AI is really really broken and shows in this campaign scenario more than any other. Aside from the insane level of aggression from the enemy, you see loads of examples of villagers just not being smart with resource collection, ignoring nearby resources, getting stuck in one spot etc etc. I've replayed AOE Gold Edition plenty before DE was released and in some ways the AI is worse in the release than the original. Definitely needs rewriting. If you want to win this one without cheats be ready to cheese it.