Soph's AoE Chronicles: Saladin 3 The Horns of Hattin
Difficulty: Hard
Attempts: 1
Ah the Horns of Hattin, historically Saladin would decisively win this battle by having access to water while the crusaders did not. On the actual map this is supposedly shown by us having lake Tiberias on our side of the map. Funnily enough the "English" (not sure what they are doing here as they weren't part of the actual battle, maybe they were based on the Norman crusader state of "Antioch" ) does seem to have an easy route directly to the lake on our map. I don't think there were any changes at all in the defnitive edition.
The hints tell us not to try fishing in the Lake but to focus on farms instead, we ignore this as there's plenty of fish in the lake to feed our troops. I also ignore the second hint that there isn't much stone in the desert, we can just buy a bunch in the market after all to build up our Castle so let's get right on that! Syke... we can't actually build castles or walls at all in this scenario. Maybe they should've said so in the hints instead of claiming stone was such a commodity/ We also can't proceed to the imperial age.. Oh well, it's just a bit of gold lost.. we will manage!
Attack is the best form of defense and we want to attack the English asap, their crossbows can become a rather annoying sight if left alone for too long. I focus on knights for the attack against the early English, mixed up with some Camels to keep the cavalry from the Knights Hospitallers and Templars off my back. With some good raiding and a ram or two I flatten the English base, making his resources mine and us having even more space to dock lake Tiberias.
Reynald the Chatillon will actually attack as a hero unit against your southern base, it's such a terribly futile attack with some pikemen you wonder why he even tries. Repairing the attacked palisade with a vil and you can just let your cavarchers slaughter him. In the actual battle Saladin managed to capture Reynald, he was the only enemy general he didn't keep alive as a prisoner. In fact Saladin beheaded Reynald himself because he was such an utter shitheel.
My camel + knight army at this point was growing so big it became an unstoppable deathball, I didn't capture the piece of the true cross but just defeated all three enemies that were left. The French barely put up a fight at all. Both Templar and Hospitaller factions were a little better in resistance, but the whole scenario was a breeze in the end.
Oh, Reynald actually got me on my first try, i wasnt ready for the attack at all and didnt have enough barracks to train a high enough count of pikes. I could have recovered but I would have lost a lot of momentun so I just decided to restart. The english are actually quite easy to defeat, the starting mangonel is enough to deal with their tc (as it outranges the tc) so just using that and a bunch of skirmishers was enough to cripple them super early. Blue just straight up dies to a very basic unit spam,they dont produce anything good enough after that sucide cavalry charge.