Dieing is challenging, just wall better more layers and give up one of your bases. Also try to go full pop by producing fishers and dont show your units at all. As long as you keep the Island alive it gonna work out.
@“teutonic tanks” said:
Dieing is challenging, just wall better more layers and give up one of your bases. Also try to go full pop by producing fishers and dont show your units at all. As long as you keep the Island alive it gonna work out.
I was full pop. Had more layers. The only thing that worked against me, probably, was enemy villager spotting me faster. I don’t know if I should maybe send swordsmen to attack him, or ships, and if he’s intercepted maybe the rest of enemies won’t go for me. Although they do have a scout… And quite frankly I’m fed up with the “strategy” of AI exploiting.
As for giving up one of the bases, doesn’t work because both Town Centers need to survive. Of course, I could get lucky and maybe they’ll destroy everything but the Town Center on the mainland, in which case we’re back to luck and AI exploiting.
the first thing is really that i sent the vill to wall, i dont know, i tested it again and this time the AI compeltly ignored me. You’re hHgihly unlucky i guess
@“teutonic tanks” said:
the first thing is really that i sent the vill to wall, i dont know, i tested it again and this time the AI compeltly ignored me. You’re hHgihly unlucky i guess
Alright I managed to successfully do it. Twice.
First, I deleted all military units because they’re useless anyway. Then I boomed, while building walls. I won easily because AI was glitching. On the island I walled off half of the island… no more than that was needed because AI only wants to disembark on the northern part of the island. Two elephants managed to get through walls (due to how disembark works I guess) and then they just stood still while my towers shot them. On the mainland I build 3-4 layers of walls but it wasn’t needed. The enemy didn’t come there at all.
I repeated the mission a second time just to be sure, placing the walls at the same spots. This time the enemy did attack the mainland wall… but only the first one. Then their troops just… stopped and AFKed there allowing me to boom. I could’ve stopped them at this point even if they tried to penetrate other walls but it’s still interesting to observe AI. Also, regarding the walling, same thing as with the island - it’s not needed to wall everything, just the parts facing the enemy. A bit on the shore is enough along with the northern wall.
In both cases I had enough time to boom, none of that minute 4 BS onslaught by AI. I assume that when you try to expand/scout further from the base, or build a wall too far away, that AI becomes super-aggressive and just plows through with everything they got.
So yeah, the mission is easy… provided that you don’t trigger minute 4 yolo rush from AI.
PS: Also, there’s a glitch with mission objective and Town Centers (at least the one on the mainland). I remember once when I lost that I didn’t lose immediately after enemy destroyed one of the initial Town Centers (which should’ve happened because both need to survive). I’m not 100% sure now, but I don’t think I had 3 Town Centers.
@JosephC64 said:
The priest I get in the beginning can’t convert anyone in one minute… I understand the enemy is Macedonian
I was going to ask about this, since I’m unable to play the game right now. By what I remember, the enemy on this mission was assigned to Roman civ, I also remember about the map being quite easy and fun to play, especially if you were making a bunch of priests and going after Armored Elephants : P
Smart move by devs to combat this tactic, but Centurions with extra pierce armor is crazy to deal, 11. Although I must remark that Macedonians seems unfit for the scenario on a historical point of view
@MannedLeopard58 said:
Although I must remark that Macedonians seems unfit for the scenario on a historical point of view
Macedonians actually fit well historically.
@qweytr24 said:
@MannedLeopard58 said:
Although I must remark that Macedonians seems unfit for the scenario on a historical point of viewMacedonians actually fit well historically.
Wait, Spartacus was Macedonian/Greek?
@MannedLeopard58 said:
@qweytr24 said:
@MannedLeopard58 said:
Although I must remark that Macedonians seems unfit for the scenario on a historical point of viewMacedonians actually fit well historically.
Wait, Spartacus was Macedonian/Greek?
No. I got confused because JosephC64 was talking about Pyrrhus of Epirus mission previously. In Spartacus, the enemy should indeed be Roman.
@qweytr24 said:
No. I got confused because JosephC64 was talking about Pyrrhus of Epirus mission previously. In Spartacus, the enemy should indeed be Roman.
In Spartacus the enemy is Roman and in Pyrrhus of Epirus the enemy is Macedonian. He got confused not you 
I finally did Spartacus. There is a little lake at 6 o clock on the map. Get a navy there, then use them to protect your houses and woodcutters. Chop more wood, start building uge number of towers near a yellow granary. They will swarm you and destroy the towers, but your navy should be close by to make a lot of kills. There is a river flowing right through the enemy town. Make use of that, get some catapult triremes up there.
@JosephC64 Found a good way to beat Phyrrus on Hard/Hardest consistently without waiting for the AI to glitch out…well to make them glitch out yourself at least.
1.immediatly build a wall around the southern Island to prevent the enemy from disembarking their troops there
2.at the same time send all your ships to attack the northern dock of phyrrus. This will trigger his units near the bridge to move towards it. build a few extra ships to protect your home and to bring with you in the attack if you can.
3.while his units are away build several layers of wall on the bridge but NOT on the first tile of it. start building at least one tile inside the bridge or the attack will re-trigger. Also keep some priests in the area when you are finished but DO NOT build Towers. It will retrigger the attack
then build up up until you have 1000 helepolis and crush him 
On the other hand, still no luck with Spartacus…the strategy from the old game does not work, but i still think ballistas are the best option against him.
i just played all campaings on hardest, its possible, use the save feature
@Markanton321 said:
i just played all campaings on hardest, its possible, use the save feature
In that case why not play on Easy or just use cheat codes? What you’re doing is known as save scumming and is considered cheating.
@JosephC64 said:
@Markanton321 said:
i just played all campaings on hardest, its possible, use the save featureIn that case why not play on Easy or just use cheat codes? What you’re doing is known as save scumming and is considered cheating.
I do not like save scumming either, but it is not cheating.
@qweytr24 said:
I do not like save scumming either, but it is not cheating.
It’s cheating by definition.
You’re playing for an hour and need to go? Save and continue later.
Game too difficult? Save/load as many times as necessary to get a favorable outcome. That’s save scumming and it’s cheating.
If you don’t think it’s cheating, just imagine a multiplayer scenario where you do the same. You and your friend play but you need to go. Ok, you both agree to save the game and load later. Now imagine you and your friend play, he rushes you, and… you load the game before the rush so you can prepare. How is that fair?
@JosephC64 said:
@qweytr24 said:
I do not like save scumming either, but it is not cheating.It’s cheating by definition.
You’re playing for an hour and need to go? Save and continue later.
Game too difficult? Save/load as many times as necessary to get a favorable outcome. That’s save scumming and it’s cheating.If you don’t think it’s cheating, just imagine a multiplayer scenario where you do the same. You and your friend play but you need to go. Ok, you both agree to save the game and load later. Now imagine you and your friend play, he rushes you, and… you load the game before the rush so you can prepare. How is that fair?
Cheating does not have a generally accepted definition, so if you are talking about “cheating by definition” you should also mention what definition you are talking about. So let’s go by the Oxford dictionary definition:
cheat: “Act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.”
In multiplayer, save scumming is definitely cheating, since it is unfair towards the other players. But we were talking about a single player scenario. Who exactly is save scumming unfair towards? If it’s the AI, I’d say that simply being human is cheating, since that gives an unfair advantage to the player.
The whole concept of cheating becomes relevant in single player only when people are playing it competitively against each other. The only place where this occurs (that I know of) is the speedrun community and while cheats like console commands are banned in speedruns, save scumming is allowed for Age of Empires speedruns, so it’s not unfair to use them.
I played these in the release patch on hardest so I don’t know if they’ve fixed the AI since then but at least in it it was completely broken. If you walled yourself completely off in the start, the enemy would never attack you because their scouts wouldn’t get a pathfinding solution to your base and thus never “see” you. If that still works, that’s an easy way to cheese almost all the missions. A bit pointless though, you’ll get to the end but might as well type in diediedie then, it’d be faster.
Because of the number of Cataphracts(Roman Catapracts, I know right?) in the army I found Centurions work way better than Legions on Spartacus. I just rushed imp and Centurions did the trick. But like people have noted, the mission is pretty random depending on where the yellow villagers lead the red army. If they run to your base you can have that 4 minute crush and just restart.
I put the mission to run on the background and it’s 20 minutes in-game time and red hasn’t killed either one yet, there’s two yellow barrack on the top right and aside from some scouting units(if they don’t see military or get attacked they ignore your base, let them go,) nothing has attacked blue base yet either. Yellow should be dead by now, the last “attack” on his holdings was at 18-20 minutes so that’s the time you should keep as your absolute limit on moving out on the map. One yellow villager also came very close to dragging five cataphracts to the blue base around 14-15 minutes so that’s probably a safer assumption to make.
Oh they found the barracks now, 27 minutes in game time. xD
Roman priests don’t get +3 range so using them vs siege is doomed to fail. Ballista with walls could work but you’ll have tons of pain when the catapults come rolling around. If you want to be fancy you could make a few cavalry and go killing all his catapults early to prevent this, should also make his army chase your cavalry around the map to give you more time. Will slow your imp time though so a bit iffy if it would be worth it. Depends on your luck with the catapult hits I guess. Could also try Chariots for that, they could also take care of the priest while they’re at it but they are too slow to run away from the Cataphracts so not sure how that would work out.
As for Pyrrhus I didn’t have any trouble with that. Just crushed navy with full ship production from the start and walled the top off leading all the enemy units to the shore route where the navy could easily kill them on the way. This was a simple rule on all maps in the campaign, if there’s navy, win it. Everything else is secondary. It’s relatively easy winning navy, you can micro against both triremes and catapult triremes, just make sure to block the incoming transport(literally block it with your ships from reaching your shore if you have to) and you’re golden.
I put the mission to run in the background and it seems the initial naval attack is still the same so you can easily hold that. The attack on top came around 12 minutes. Not sure if that has changed or not, since I don’t remember the timing from the release patch since this mission seemed rather trivial. After wiping everything I could from the sea I just spammed siege to win. The enemy can’t build any more units because they are pop capped so as long as you survive the first attack, it really doesn’t matter what you do.
You’re right about the TC by the way, I just watched the TC get crushed on my other screen but the mission is still going so “without losing your two Town centers” must mean you only need one to survive. Since this is the case, you can just gather as much wood from the top as you can and then evacuate to the other island, from there you can then do whatever after winning navy. It’s trivial with that, really.
PS. What I meant by running in the background is exactly that, I started the mission and just left them idle at max speed. Not one command given. So if you don’t do anything, that’s more or less how the mission is going to go. If you aggravate the enemy earlier in some way, there’s going to be more pain.
@qweytr24 said:
Cheating does not have a generally accepted definition, so if you are talking about “cheating by definition” you should also mention what definition you are talking about.
The definition of “scum”.
In multiplayer, save scumming is definitely cheating, since it is unfair towards the other players. But we were talking about a single player scenario. Who exactly is save scumming unfair towards?
In that case even using cheat codes would not be cheating since you’re the only human there. Obviously, you haven’t thought deeply enough about the issue if I can refute your point in half a second.
Type Bigdaddy
repeat 5-20 times
???
Profit
@JosephC64 said:
@Markanton321 said:
i just played all campaings on hardest, its possible, use the save featureIn that case why not play on Easy or just use cheat codes? What you’re doing is known as save scumming and is considered cheating.
Because this way you might learn more.
I used to play a racing game called Stunts. (Some of you just went “Stunts, that was awesome!”, the rest have no idea what I’m talking about. The game is impossible to not develop fond memories of.) In competitive Stunts as it started out about 15 years after the game’s release (yes, age of empires is new by comparison), save scumming or “replay handling” as they call it is the standard way the game is played. The game has no multiplayer feature, so everyone sends in their fastest replays, and this method allows for the craziest bug filled replays full of one in a million jumps. (The origins of this method of playing were mostly that there is no good way to prevent players from using this cheat if you try to forbid it, but those that stick around like the way of playing.)
However, it’s also a way to learn things. Have problems with loops? A track with 3 minutes of racing followed by 4 loops and a finish is not going to work out for you. Having the option to redo just the section with the loops a bunch of times let’s you learn how to use them while working towards the goal of competing that month.
Single player is a self imposed challenge. You play it because you want to beat it, not to collect some stupid cards or something (buuuuuuurn, aoe3), so of course you can choose how to play it. There’s nothing wrong with playing it on easy using cheats, but it’s not going to give you any practice that you can use elsewhere, except that elsewhere also has you playing with cheats. Yes, it’s easier to repel a landing by the Romans if you know they’re coming, but at least you get to practice repelling them. Plus if you restart the mission they’re probably going to land as well, you just have to wait longer to get your practice in.
Now if he was hiding it, going for the bragging rights of “I beat the campaigns on hardest” without mentioning using save games, or cheats, or the classic AI, sure, that would be kind of sneaky. But just playing the game differently, nothing wrong with that.