How to beat The End of the Pig mission (spoiler and cheat alert)

[Bruce]

Warning: There are a few spoilers herein. Also, this thread is not for those who abhor cheating under any circumstances. It is intended for those who, like me, want to finish what they started and not bypass this mission or give up on the campaign. Please, no pontification on the impropriety of cheating. Merely avert your eyes and move on.

Besides, this thread will fade away into oblivion quickly, as they all do. My hope, though, is that in the future, desperate players will search for "How do I beat The End of the Pig mission?" and find this.

Military Campaign mission 18, End of the Pig, has been called by many the hardest ("worst"?) mission of the campaign. Apparently it can be won if you are willing to play it, say, a dozen times or more until you get the right combination of tactics and timing.

Which makes it a bore. And you may never achieve that winning combination, your patience having finally run out. Which, of course, leaves the campaign unfinished. I would venture to say that the vast majority of players end up in this category, even if they are playing it on Easy.

In this mission, and perhaps one or two others in this campaign, the designers failed to adhere to the axiom that players with a modicum of game knowledge and experience ought to be able to win on the easiest difficulty setting. Maybe a replay or two is required, but nothing like the head banging that is experienced in this scenario. (Yes, it's my own axiom but I have read others who have said the same thing.)

And this development failure may in fact be only in this latest version of the game. For example, see if you can find a video of a walkthrough of this mission from an older version of this game, like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OLpAHE7oqQ&ab_channel=LordBalder

Notice in that video how, if you were careful, you could position your archers to slowly decimate the enemy troops on the towers and walls. Try doing that in SH Definitive Edition! Nothing works other than suicidal forays which, done over and over and over again, may leave just enough survivors to finish the job. Maybe. Meanwhile, in any event, somewhere the line has been crossed from fun to not fun.

The only alternative for completing the campaign, having a bit of challenge but still also having fun, is to cheat in this mission. Just once. Remember, though, that this comes at the cost of any achievements that would have been rewarded during or after this mission.

Even so, the procedure that I will relate requires resourcefulness, patience, and skill. As a matter of fact, I suggest that this is how the mission should have been designed to be played in the first place.

So, here is one way to complete the End of the Pig mission without a lot of tedium and frustration. You can even play it this way on Normal difficulty.

First, move the spearmen who are being bombarded at the beginning of the scenario to a safe place. Move your ram to the rear, too. Then place your archers and crossbowmen on Defensive Stance.

Next, do nothing for a while! There will be a single-file stream of enemy macemen coming out of the castle to destroy your ram. Let them come; the archers and crossbowmen will pick them off one by one. You may want to jack the game speed up for a while.

(One saving grace of this mission is that it is not timed, like #15, Carving a Path. Remember how hard it was to take this same castle when it was under-defended? That looks like a picnic compared to the situation in #18.)

When the macemen conga line is finished (wait a bit for any stragglers), now your attack can commence. Begin it by disbanding your two siege towers.

Yes, you read that right. The damned things are worthless, as are the two measly tunnelers and the bunch of laddermen that you are given, except as decoys and human sacrifices.

Disbanding your siege towers will free up eight engineers who are the true treasures in this scenario. Although you probably will not need it, keep the ram just in case something goes wrong.

Now comes the cheat.

No gold is provided by default in this mission. Go to Options and click the chicken shield. Select "Enable Free Buildings." You could also click the "+1000 Gold" a few times but simple free building does the trick.

Have your engineers build and man 4 catapults. Carefully move these forward to a line that runs approximately from the end of the small hill on the left to the middle of the rocky knoll on the right. This is the furthest limit of enemy archers and crossbowmen range; you will know if you went too far if you see them suddenly move forward and get ready to shoot.

From this distance, it is possible to safely destroy the castle's main gate and front towers and walls. Having sent out all of their macemen early in a fruitless attempt to get at your ram, they now have no answer for this.

You can even launch cows if you want, although it does not seem to count for much. I did see one archer get killed by a direct cow hit, however!

Wait a minute, you say. Each catapult has only 20 stones to throw. What's the good of that?

Well, the answer is to disband empty catapults and rebuild them. Each catapult is free and comes with 20 additional stones. It will take many iterations of building catapults, but I did say patience would be required along with resourcefulness and skill.

Move along that range limit as you level walls and towers. Have one set of engineers building the next catapult while the others are firing away.

Care must be taken; apparently while catapults are low enough to stay out of arrow range, an upright man is not. If you are too close, the engineers will come under fire when they emerge. If even just one of them is killed, you lose a catapult as two engineers are needed to run each one.

As you may imagine, this is still a challenge. If you inadvertently lose your engineers before their work is complete, you lose the mission given how hard it is otherwise. So this is not just a lazybones approach.

Here is a tip: If a catapult is on the brink of being destroyed, disband it immediately. The engineers who emerge will be in full health, but they better be out of range or move back quickly as they have very low defense. One arrow hit seems to be enough to kill an engineer.

Also, don't be careless like I was by inadvertently disbanding an engineer! Once he is gone that way, he is gone for good.

The most important thing in this process is not knocking down walls and towers, nor is it killing enemy troops at this point. IT IS DESTROYING THE BRAZIERS. Without these, the enemy cannot fire up those acres and acres of pitch ditches from which the fires erupt and consume your troops dozens at a time. The killing pits and enemy arrows are bad enough, but the pitch ditches are the true joy killers in this scenario. Too much; overdone.

An interesting, and grimly amusing, by-product of your bombardment could be if you hit the "dog" (wolves, actually) cages. The newly-freed beasts will turn on their masters and cause a good amount of beneficial enemy casualties. Of course, you will need to deal with any surviving canines yourself once you are inside the castle.

There comes a time when the front wall, towers, and main gate are all down. Several enemy troops have been killed but not many. However, they are on the ground now. This is important because it lessens their range.

Whereas, now YOU have a height and range advantage, albeit slight. Move your crossbowmen to the rocky knoll. Their bowmen cannot reach you now, but you sure can hit them from the top of that knoll. Pour it on and wipe out the front ranks. Work from right to left and when you cannot reach any more targets, carefully move your crossbowmen to the left to find more targets in range. Be sure to stay out of the pitch ditch field, though.

You will take a few casualties now as the enemy finds your range as well, but you have superior numbers and will quickly prevail. Be sure to kill the archers with braziers on the left-hand wall while you are at it.

So now that the enemy's front ranks are all down for the count, carefully move your catapult teams to the ridge in the north. There is a sweet spot up there that allows you to reach the right side of the castle and the angle will improve the wall destruction. Not too close, however! The remaining archers with braziers can still reach the near edge of the pitch ditches and, if they do and your catapults are among them, mission over. And even the rear archers can reach long distances and nail your engineers with one arrow apiece. Stay just outside of their range.

Destroy the archers and their braziers on the right-hand wall. Destroy the nearest tower on the rear wall as well. Those archers will no longer have a height advantage, either.

The next target for your catapults is the tower between the interior gatehouse and where the destroyed tower was located; this is the one crammed with crossbowmen. Inch your catapults forward, off the ridge, to get within range; just close enough to reach it without coming under fire. Knock down that tower and dump those crossbowmen to the ground.

The final braziers are on the interior gatehouse. You need to get them before the catapult operation is complete. The problem is, you cannot reach them without going into the pitch ditch and killing pit fields.

Now is the time for human sacrifice! You have almost 30 tunnelers and laddermen. Take, say, 8 of them at a time to the ridge behind the catapults. Have them go roundabout so as to not set off any traps prematurely. From there, move them forward toward the moat. Move them back and forth, up and down. You will see all of them die in killing pits. Do it again with another batch of 8, and another, until the path to the moat is clear.

Here is another test. The AI is smart enough not to fire the pitch ditches unless there are many of your regular soldiers in harm's way. Take 50 spearmen and, by the same path, move them toward the moat. (You may want to move your catapults back a bit first.) This ought to trigger the pitch ditch fire. Let it burn out.

The way is now clear for the catapults to move up and destroy the interior gatehouse and any archers with braziers that are left there. At this point, your standard tactic of filling in the moat with your spearmen will work as there will be no huge barbecues frying them before they even touch a spade. A frontal attack will do; the moat is narrowest where the drawbridge was. Charge!

Enjoy the ensuing massacre of the Pig and his troops. You certainly will have earned it with all the hard work that this approach required. So long, Mr. Pig:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3108305876

Still feeling bad about the one necessary cheat? Well, consider this: In addition to normally not being able to do anything in this mission except sacrificing hundreds of soldiers in the hope of getting a few remaining dozen into the castle on the chance it's enough to do the job — a forlorn hope, really — ask yourself why, when you were just able to deploy a large force of pikemen in the previous mission, there are none to be had in this one? What, is the Pikemen's Union on strike?

I can tell you that I don't feel guilty in the least. This mission was STILL quite difficult even played in this manner. For one reason or another, I was down to my last catapult when their job was finished. And, without revealing too many more spoilers, there are still a lot of men to kill and a few nasty surprises in store once you are in the castle. Suffice to say that you should keep to the walls as much as possible, not the courtyards. I didn't have too many men left at the end to finally slay the Pig.

Even so, I feel good about this. I was able to beat this mission by playing it and winning it rather than skipping it or giving up altogether. Because, unless I could really defeat the Pig, the campaign would have been over for me at this point.

[Bruce]

Heh. Thinking about this the following morning, now I hope the devs do NOT tinker with this scenario, having realized perhaps that the way they originally designed it 20 years ago is no longer viable. Something about that capability of picking off tower archers from a distance no longer being possible now in this version . . .

Well, devs, please do NOT change this scenario now! I like this plan of battle that I worked out and I am looking forward to using it again the next time I play The End of the Pig mission. I bet I would have much less casualties the second time around!

(Very selfish on my part to wish this, I know. But I am happy. )

[st0rmpr00f8]

Originally posted by Bruce:

Something about that capability of picking off tower archers from a distance no longer being possible now in this version . . .

This is unfortunately true. Even on Easy, there are many more defenders compared to the original version. At least that is my assessment. So the mission seems to have become even harder and I actually don't feel like playing it anymore :D I can remember that I never managed it (I am very impatient) and then years after on the first attempt and I was surprised how easy it actually was. Now I “have” to deal with it again.

[SIUnit]

I still find mission 15 to be harder for the sole reason that you're on a timer. While I did both on easy difficulty, it took me fewer tries for mission 18.

[Скіф]

Tldr but basically what you wanna do is attack the castle from the left side, you send some spearmen first to get rid of the pitch ditches, then you send some more do dig the moat.

After that you can either use tunnelers or the ram to breach into the courtyard. When that is done you can send all the remaining troops you have and your siege tower in the courtyard. Put your tower on the wall and climb it with maceman. Use the walls and towers to slay some archers with your maceman and then beeline for the Pig. You dont have to kill everyone, you only have to kill the Pig :)

Its not easy but I did it on normal with like 88% troops lost. On easy you get even more troops.