I played this last night and had to restart about 20 times before I got a good start.
As said by others on standard difficulty as soon as you start to convert a yellow villager even at max distance, the yellow team will rush your priest with every single villager they have. Due to random convert times this can mean you die before converting a single villager. If you do succeed the entire yellow team will continue to chase your priest until he’s dead which always occurs before he gets his faith back.
The yellows will however ignore any villager you do convert even if you attack using them. They will kill your priest then go home even if you beat on them.
I eventually got lucky and had a single yellow walk all the way to the shallows in the water, at this point I could convert him and not be attacked by the rest. Then yellow repeated this and sent a second guy to replace the first so I didn’t have to move to get another.
I’ve seen multiple videos on harder difficulty and you can walk straight into yellows base and every villager will run away when converted so there is something very wrong with the lower difficulty AI on this mission.
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I had the same problem then realised that you need to convert strategically.
- Make sure you are not in their base or near their buildings
- Always convert villagers that are alone and don’t have nearby villagers
- Convert early but you only need 3 or four initial villagers
- Build lots of ships to protect the shallows you won’t have enough stone early in the game
6 Likes
These are the tricks to converting without pulling yellow’s villagers.
Okay so I know this an old topic, but I am so frustrated with this campaign that I used the kill cheat with it. I am good up until about 15 minutes in and then as soon as I go to the tool age I get a nonstop onslaught of chariots, chariot archers, slings, and priests. I have tried it on every difficulty level, tried all the videos I could find and walkthroughs. I just can’t get past that onslaught to continue on. My brother beat it by outlasting red after like 4 hours. I can’t get through the priests without running out of food and wood before they do. I nearly chunked my laptop today I am so frustrated I cannot get past this level. I went back and played it on the old AOE with no problem. I do NOT like the AI in this one at all.
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So I finally made it through this one but not after a lot of saving and restarting and on the hard level. One key thing I did discover is leave red alone. Don’t convert their villagers and don’t kill them. That delays the attack by about 5-10 minutes. The second thing is convert the yellow villagers until there are none, but don’t attack the town. They scream for help from red. Get to the gold and stone from where you start right off the bat so you have enough to lay down towers when you get to the tool age, kick out priests, and buy defense for your men. I used houses, granaries, storage pits and towers to create a wall at the river crossing. It didn’t keep out the villagers, but did keep out the men and you could stand there and convert them. This poor one axeman red, blue, red, blue about half a dozen times before my ships finally got their priest. Don’t try to convert chariots, it only leads to the death of your priest. When you are ready to go after red, lots of chariots yourself as they have a ton of priests. Hope this helps someone until they fix it.
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So I guess they just aren’t gonna fix this which is starting to p*** me off like damn just tweak the ai to be dumb as sh*t on easy why is that so hard like I pay money for the game but can’t enjoy campaign on easy that seem like a problem to me I understand strategy on all that but dude to be honest I play this entire series on easy cause I find it relaxing to see my village progress but this level seem to just spit on that.
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So here is the story of how I finally made it on the hardest level (and I still remember). I managed to convert a few villagers from the yellow one. There is always only a certain number (I believe it was around 6 villagers) before the AI starts to act against it. It is important to note that the diplomatic status of both opponents is initially set to neutral. You should definitely use this, but you have to be careful, you only have this one limited time window. As soon as this time window is closed, the AI sees EVERYTHING! Then I sent one of the converted villagers to the north. There is a peninsula, which is only accessible from a small path of shallow water. There I then built the village center and blocked the crossing with houses for the time being. Behind it I immediately built a tower, which was supported by ships. The rest of the converted villagers I had left on the Yellow Island, where they mined raw materials as long as the AI allowed it. Very important: STONES!!! Once I had secured the narrow passage to my island with a double wall and a few towers, the AI was no longer able to break through.
Now the game started…
Theoretically yellow and red are enemies. And they also fight against each other. But actually they are more interested in your destruction. The yellow in particular is not interested in doing anything to the red. Although he is sometimes strongly attacked by him.
In addition, you have a big problem: raw materials. I realized that even wood is only available in very limited quantities. So the building of chariots is best avoided. A few for defense - okay, but that must be enough. Of course gold is also very limited available.
The red one had managed at some point to add so much to the yellow one that it didn’t do much. But the red one didn’t see any motivation in eliminating the yellow one for good either, but stood with his troops on the yellow island and mined raw materials.
After several attempts, I finally managed to build some barracks on the yellow island, spamming some axe fighters and lured the red units one by one into the yellow’s base. As long as the tower rows of the yellow one were destroyed so far that I could do the rest myself with axe fighters. Very important is here: DO NOT destroy the Yellow’s harbor. It is your only source of gold!
After that I started to explore the rest of the map, noticing that there were almost no resources left. Only a few trees, which I also cut down. Since I had developed everything and also had gold units, I took a look at the red one and attacked it. I failed miserably, because he still had a superiority. I then blocked the southern island crossing with a wall, which allowed me to mine the last crumbs of raw materials. Since it didn’t occur to him to attack the wall, he tried the direct route to me and stopped at the coast. First I tried to make trouble with ships, but it was rather futile. Then I had the idea:
The map was completely empty, no resources! Not a single tree stood anymore. But the computer is stupid, thank god. So I built as many strong units as the population limit allowed and finished ALL the work. The plan was to let him build fields until he had no more wood. All the villagers of mine just stood around, even the trading ships. I let the game run and watched two movies. When they were over, I sent a scout to check them out, and indeed - his wood was gone. I killed his priests one by one until he didn’t have any more gold either and then I could finally finish this ■■■■■■■ mission.
Game time was a whole day, at 2.0 game speed.
I hope I was able to help you a little with this torturous experience.
Many greetings.
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I don’t think they are gonna mess with it and AOE2 is about to be in the same boat. They are too caught up in getting 3 to release to pay any attention to the other 2 games. Maybe later they will get back to us, but 2 seems to get the most attention. Unfortunately this is not the only scenario that makes you want to chuck your computer. One of the Hittites and a couple of the Roman ones are just as bad where you are slammed by opponents and cannot develop your town as you are just trying to keep up and/or setup defense. This and units getting stuck together needs to be the biggest fixes on the next update.
1 Like
Several campaign missions definitely need improvements to be as good or even better than in the original game. The potential of having great campaigns in a good old school fashion is there!
Under the following reddit link, there is feedback to every single campaign mission: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe/comments/c7tl4f/campaign_feedback_all_missions/
If the devs would implement those suggestions, the campaigns would be way better! Most of them don’t even require much work.
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Господи,это маньяк какой-то сделал эту миссию в новейшем обновлении 2020 года, крестьяне агрятся как бешеные. Я убил кучу времени и перезапусков ,чтобы её пройти. И в итоге, я убил всё живое что было в этой миссии, поверьте мне я военный человек и воевал,но чтоб столько кровищи,даже мне стало дико, насколько бесчеловечен создатель этой версии. Земля полностью опустошённая от ресурсов с обеих сторон, вырезать пришлось каждого жителя, потому что в итоге даже крестьяне у шумер кидались в атаку. Может мне продали сломанную версию, но я покупал через Steam. В итоге могу приложить скрин ни одной красной точки на карте, но победу мне не засчитывает. Я сижу в недоумении.
So I posted my findings here and are looking for feedback from you guys struggling with it.
I came here to read about how others passed this level. I read your entire post and laughed so much at the end! 
“I watched two movies”.
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This really should be taken into consideration by devs. Like, campaign is one of the best things the game has to offer! 
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So I played all the campaigns in very hard and I have to say that most of the missions were pretty easy. Yes, there were a few that were really tricky from time to time (like the first Babylonian mission), but I found the majority of them really not that hard. Please don’t get me wrong. This is not meant to be disrespectful to those who have problems. But I have a little bit the feeling that often it is exaggerated.
Many greetings.
2 Likes
My best tactic was to start by attempting the conversion of one yellow guy, and as soon as he starts to chase me, re-purpose the priest to run away. Then, when there’s only one yellow guy chasing you, turn around and re-convert him. I think that one starts with two priests; so I lead one yellow guy to the other priest with the other priest, then I have 2 priests to convert him faster. I usually take one of the guys working on the gold. You have to have a really quick trigger finger on the mouse.
This mission and alot of others on here are so hard that makes me not even want to play any of the AOE 1 or 2 DE versions. I remember long ago the classic versions were much easier. Too bad they ruined a good game. People of all skill levels should be able to play on the level that they wish or that matches their skills or lack thereof without being destroyed every time. If too many people have the issue even on the lower skill levels then that should be a sign to the developers that it needs fixed. I like challenging but not when you have to play 50,000 times to win. 
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This mission is why I stopped playing AOE 1 DE as it didn’t bring me any joy and it wasn’t this difficult in the original…
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I repeatedly try to beat this on the highest difficulty. Converting villagers wasn’t a problem; as long as I could keep a moderate distance, they’d rarely gang up on my priest. The problem is that the Sumerians arrive at the Bronze Age before you can amass some decent defenses, and they rush you with dozens of chariots, slingers, and sometimes a few priests. I tried settling next to the Akkadians (and defeating them), settling in the north, settling in the south, and the end result was the same: the Sumerians rushed me with their chariots and my village was as good as gone. The fact that somebody in this thread finished it only under extremely unusual circumstances suggests that my own skill probably isn’t the issue here.
I switched the mission’s difficulty to Moderate out of sheer exhaustion, and made it through thanks to an abundance of Sentry Towers. It’s a good thing that there isn’t an achievement for beating this on a certain difficulty setting.
Game Version: Steam
- Build 28529 (whatever live is as of 9/17/19, I might be wrong)
Issue:
This occurs with both Sumeria and Akkadia. On any difficulty setting except Hardest the AI will send their entire population at your priest as soon as you start converting. The only way to break the aggro is for the priest to leave vision range of the enemy units. Understandably, this makes the scenario much more difficult than intended, as getting more than 2 conversions with the priest is unlikely, and your priest will likely die in the process.
Reproduction Steps:
- Start level on any difficulty setting other than hardest
- Play the scenario.
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