Another post about AoE1 (not DE) campaigns.

This time just remarking on early Voices of Babylon. Again, Hardest with HD patch.

1 - Holy Man. Another first scenario, and one of the gimmick ones. I don't understand why the wiki is so terrified of the yellow team building towers. Every time I took a shot at this until I figured it out, I always ended up just converting all their villagers before they could even get to the Tool Age, at which point they were seemingly out of food so that they were left an inert lump. From there, with Red seemingly set up to never advance to the Iron Age, it was just a matter of massing some Bowmen to shove off any harassment sent by them, and eventually come up with a strike force capable of leveling them, then get around to finishing off yellow since doing so earlier is a waste of time. Typical stuff.

2 - Tigris Valley. This one sucked. I won by starving out the two proactive teams of all their resources by accident. Also learned that Legion are useless by wasting all the Gold I managed to eventually get away from the Red Island on Legion. I don't like infantry. I'm baffled by the existence of this map because the hints stress a strong navy when you're saddled with a civilization that can't get Triremes. Even a mass of twenty War Galleys will get wiped out and have to be replaced, but the AI seems to be indifferent if you eliminate their Docks, or maybe it had just already broken because of having nothing to do with its villagers anymore by then. It took close to four hours. I never claimed to understand or like RTSes, if Age of Empires 1 weren't a game that I knew when I was a smaller, happier person and also didn't have that stone age aesthetic goin' on, I wouldn't be here. Probably should've used trade ships, though. Oh well.

3 - Lost. Holy Man was unique right? Let's just do Holy Man again except with a boat. The start is a pain because convering the Heavy Transport is a dice throw, and you're not out of the woods yet. Once you do, you need to take your Priest over left-ish and run directly into those two catapults, then convert them while they're too busy freaking out to go in different directions so that one can take shots at you or something. Failing that, huddle up to one and convert the other while waddling back and forth, then run the other into the one as quickly as possible so it doesn't auto-attack and ruin something. Also I guess finish dealing with Red at some point. The Villager you can take or leave, I did start a little town, but ultimately Villagers didn't do anything except prop up a couple of Ballista Towers that might've not been necessary (even if it was, I didn't need a Town Center to do that). Catapults to destroy the shoreline towers and Dock, then what I did was take the Composite Bowmen over and use them to eliminate the Archery Range, Barracks, and Town Center in that order while blowing up anything that walked near them, but really the Catapults probably would've helped. I did use them to clean up after all the unit spawning buildings were taken out though. This map's hints also say "strong navy", but this is another case like Land Grab where if you've let it get to that point, you've already done something horribly wrong. Also, you know, Babylonians and their not being able to make Triremes.