I finally defeated my AOE2 nemesis! Gold medal in The Art of War, Naval Battle mission.

Naval Battle is, at least for me, the most challenging mission in the whole set of singleplayer missions. I did Silver medal countless times just because only 5 of my ships got killed. That was always so frustrating. I tried what Viper did but I am not professional Silverboi. I studied lots of other YT videos. But success wasn't coming.

So I decided that this is not The Art of War mission but The Art of Cheese (seriously, the mission should lower conditions for Gold medal). I destroyed the first 2 groups in a normal way. Then I deployed the Cheese. Exploiting AI. Luring away some War Galleys was easy enough and getting rid of 2 enemy Demo ships was essential but AI decides to patrol the rest of the fleet at some point. This is where Demo ships got useful. I sent Demos one by one hitting enemy fleet. Thankfully, they were unable to kill my Demos so their deaths didn't count. First Demo got rid of enemy Demos. The rest slowly reduced the enemy fleet. In the end, I only lost 3 ships and finally got Gold medal.