I just tried this campaign on moderate. While it is true that you are given 4 trebuchets to smash the first wonder that the enemies start building, quickly the red and green enemies advance to imperial age and mass armies. Attacking red is a losing proposition, he will defend with massed infantry and scorpions and wipe out your starting army, trebuchets included. While this happens green will attack with heavy units like champions and paladins and siege onagers and trebuchets. I consider this game mechanic broken for normal players, maybe some ranked players or pros can defend from green and attack red at the same time, but not average campaign players. The Huns have a technology to increase the time it takes to win by a wonder, but with green smashing your doors the more time you spend on this scenario the more likely you are to be defeated. This mission seems to be heavily dependent on levels of micro similar to Heras so you can wipe out entire armies with 10 cav archers.
Yeah, that scenario is way too hard on moderate, and you don’t have time to get a bigger army to defend from Red and Green.
The scenario is Hard due to the time limits, but it is perfectly completable for an average campaign player. Remember that you don’t really have to defeat them, just distract their army while you sneak Trebuchets and snipe the wonders. Most, if not all, of the wonders have an spot to destroy the wonder from outside their walls.
If you can’t defend, you should pause more, decrease Game speed and develop the economy faster. When they have a lot of army, bait them to come to your castle and snipe their siege weapons, don’t lose army in pointless battles. If you can’t complete the Art of War economy scenarios at least in silver, you should aspire to do it, as it helps you a lot getting speed.
Don’t say something is broken just because it is hard and you can’t complete it, broken means there’s a bug, in which case you should identify the bug and report it
I see your point that the code is technically running exactly as the developers intended, so it isn’t a traditional “broken code” bug.
However, from a modern software and game design perspective, this is a usability bug. A system can be free of execution errors but still be broken if the user experience it creates is severely diminished for its target audience.
When a “Moderate” campaign difficulty requires the hyper-optimized APM and micro-management of a ranked multiplayer player just to survive the opening minutes, the difficulty scaling has failed. For an average campaign player, this extreme, frantic pressure isn’t a fun challenge—it is anti-climactic, stressful, and entirely unfair.
The goal of feedback like this is to highlight that while the scenario technically works, the design fails to deliver a fair and rewarding user experience for the setting chosen.
Nobody said “hyper-optimized”, not even closed, the scenarios have multiple ways to be beaten and the AI is not that optimized or good either. AI is often dumb and easily distracted or baited into castles.
You call Broken an scenarios you can’t beat, when It is most probably a lack of skill. Tons of people play the campaigns regularly even on Hard and they manage to do It. They even make harder campaigns in later DLC, because people consider old ones like this to be overall easy in comparison.
All your complaints are always about scenarios that are considered hard by the community, you seem to want them to reduce the difficulty ceiling in a higher difficulty for everybody just because you lack the skill. Don’t play on moderate if you can’t beat It and you don’t seem to enjoy the challenge, that’s why there’s a Standard difficulty
I don’t have a good APM by far at all and i beat the campaigns on Hard, you need more planification of resources and attacking, “Strategy” they call the Game. You know you can pause the game? Stop looking for excuses for lack of skill