A matter of minutes after capturing the Burgundian town in the center of the map, the English attack you with every single unit they have, leaving their own town defenseless. Their army consists of about 50 longbowmen, supported by a couple of trebuchets and onagers. At this point, it’s very hard to have built anything more than a small base and maybe some basic unit production and it’s impossible to fight this army off. Adding the simultanous attacks from Burgundy and Shrewbury to this, the red AI seems to be tuned too agressive. If memory serves, the English AI played defensively in the original and HD version of the game, is the change in behaviour intended?
Joan of Arc campaign - Level 6: A Perfect Martyr AI too aggressive on moderate and hard difficulties
3 Likes
i won this mission on hard in beta, thanks to AI’s stupidity xD as hard as it is, its really challenging and kind of fun. but i agree its TOO HARD even for lower difficulties
i recommend you to make double/triple layer of walls (only on right side where orange attacks) when you capture the city, and then make your second tc where you met your army at the start of the game, there is a huge woodline at the right edge of the map and a gold pile to the bottom, move your paladins + HC there, block the small path with your HC so no enemy unit can scout your new town, just try to boom there while red and orange and purple are trying to get into the captured city, collect as much gold as you can while they are trying to get into your walls and also snipe orange’s cavaliers with your arblests. red army will either try to siege the captured city , or will kinda bug out and run around your city, if he does you can pick off the longbows with your paladins easily
by the time they break into the captured city, you can reach to imperial in your other town with a solid economy, paladin + halb is the best combo in this mission imo
Yea I had the same problem, just played on standart to relax and enjoy the gameplay which was very easy throughout the campaing but suddenly in the last mission there was quite the difficulty spike. It was still doable and enjoyable for me, but I guess for a total new player this would have been abit too hard
this mission is very hard indeed, but i found a way out.
You must preserve your army, and strike purple, after that you dont build a base there, just go and attack orange with your cannons, cavalry and archers. With your champions and trebuchets go find the other purple base and crush them. You will loose all your champions killing the last purple base, but, once you destroyed purple and tooked orange base, build your TC there (in the old orange base 
) and boom your economy to kill red after.
After that, its easy to deal with red, just train a lot of cavalry units and kill them all to revenge Joan!
4 Likes
In the end I finished the level by cheesing the AI. Apparently the red player doesn’t engage you if you leave the Town Center of the Burgundians intact. I took out orange and purple, teched up, then took down the Town Center to engage the red player. I feel like the tactics above will work as well, but all tactics don’t really feel like it’s the intended way to tackle this level. Maybe the devs should look into it.
6 Likes
Looking at the triggers in the editor it looks like Red doesn’t attack you until you destroy Burgundian’s Town Center/Castle in the center. In HD this is pretty much unavoidable since you start with no resources, but in DE you can avoid this entirely since you start with 100 wood and 100 food.
Pretty cheesy, but I guess it’s a strategy.
The reason for the first AI attack from Red being so strong is because it starts with a ton of units on the map and it just sends it all at you when it first attacks. I guess the devs could fix this by removing a lot of Red’s starting units. But then again, they could also remove starting player’s resources too to avoid cheese.
Picture of clearing Purple at the hour mark. Red didn’t attack before then.
3 Likes
It took me a few attempts but I decided to defend my town from the riverbank rather than the Burgundian encampment. I turtled until I had a strong enough army to take Orange and Purple out.
It is definitely one of the harder missions though.