I built two town centers to boom. Managed to get to imperial. Built a castle so I had two castles. None of that mattered. Waves after waves after waves of teutonic heavy infantry and rams reduced my base to rubble. All infantry I could muster was slaughtered. At some point could not pay tribute to the seljuks and they merrily piled on the now deceased corpse of my civilization. There is no standard defense that can apply here, the enemy will come at you witho rams and wipe you out in full force. Normally I rely on the computer maklng the mistake of sending troops that attack the casle direclty so I can deal with several enemies at the same time. Not here. They will attack like a human, protecting their rams and smashing through your defenses. On one hand I commend the devs on improving the ais attack pattern, on the other I think this makes it impossible to beat several ai opponents at once, especially in the campaigns where the computer has more resources than the player. It was the stupidity of the computer that made it necessary to give it more resouces, but a resource advantage coupled with a smart ai is not beatable. As a side note my plan was to restart and build a base inside the seljuk camp, but the crusaders dont attack the seljuks and viceversa. From my experience this sce nario is beyond the reach of a guy like me
I managed to beat this one by googling the strategy. First build a wall around your base. If you dont build it you lose. Then train some archers and mangonels, the only way to avoid having your walls breached by rams. At the start visit the crusade in the south to escort him to a ship, and you get a base from which you can extract gold. Always pay your tribute to the Seljuks. At some point you will have an army and then you can use trebuchets to attack the crusaders castles. Then the Seljuks attack and you have to mass troops to defeat them. At least you can then trade with them. This is one of those scenarios where a single error in the starting sequence like a wall not closed will make you fail. Not good design.
This is AoE1 forum not 2,You are not able to choose the correct forum to post your complaint post half of the time, no wonder you struggle with the game