Oh boy, where do we start here. You start with a land army in Cyprus, you can use it to raid around. Then the Byzantine fleet attacks, and it is game over. Your ally dies in a few minutes, then you have a massive land army attacking you and a fleet, and you lose. That’s pretty much it.
I managed to go back to Alexandretta and put a Town Center there but the Byzantines just sent trebuchets and cataphracts to finish the job. Both allies are absolutely useless, Alexandretta does not even defent their own docks, and Reynald is a joke, even more useless than Suryavarman in Rajendra 5. I would wager that absolutely no one tests these scenarios before the releases, and they are shipped to production all broken as we can see.
I googled and it looks like if you don’t execute some precise steps at the very beginning then you are done. You have to mass 20 galleons with Cilician fleet and about 4 dromons and attack the Byzantine docks. If you take too long you lose. End of story.
From what I see these campaigns take a Real Time Strategy game and implement enough constraints for it to be reduced to an algorithm that you have to execute in a specific time. Ivaylo 3, Kotyan 2, Bari 4, Attila 6. If you don’t follow the script then you are doomed. The game becomes more like a platform game, jump here, avoid this projectile, jump again, longer jump, get the star, run, like the old Mario in NES that did not allow you to go back at all. Oh and lets not forget that the AI gets infinite resources, so you cant even dream of resisting and forcing some kind of stalemate. There should be room to explore, move around the map, try and figure out something different. I recently watched Hera get the achievement for the Alaric mission the giant falls, and he used cavalry, with the goths. That is the kind of thinking outside the box that should be enough to beat he campaigns. But instead we are forced to be inside the box, live in the box and breathe in the box. There is only one path to victory, follow it or die.
You not being able to beat the scenario doesn’t mean it is broken. You have to start accepting that you are not skilled enough to complete many harder scenarios. And like in all your post, none of the scenarios you mention as “needing to follow a script or specific strategy” do actually have only one strategy, there’s countless ways to beat each scenario, but you are stubborn in that there is only one, you do you.
If you have actual proof of “broken”, go to bug reports with the proofs.
Improve your skills with the art of war for economy and army management, design actual strategies instead of complaining of “game too hard” and stopped spamming that everything is broken, people constantly play the campaigns on hard difficulty and the don’t complain so much.
This scenario is not even actually so difficult like most of your previous complaints
Yes, the “turtle” booming strategy works in a lot of scenarios, because of how OP castles are vs AI, but you should not delay economy and army if you fail one time because of an early attack, there’s ALWAYS enough time to prepare, as people manage to beat It in hard too.
And if you play on moderate you should not expect every scenarios to be a walk in the park, improve skill or reduce difficulty. New campaigns are generally more challenging because the average player is more skillful now and demands more complex scenarios
Really? I didn’t find It to be in personal top of hardest, you even have 2 alternative starting positions. Sometimes It is subjective too, like each time I are Joan of Arc 5 in the “hardest top” for some reason ( an scenario where take your time slowly, without pressure)