MISSION IMPOSSIBLE SOLVED : ALARIC 5 (HARD MODE)

[Player 002]

This scenario is probably the hardest one that I have ever tried on AoE campaign. You are started with only several villagers, troops, bunch of gold but lack of other resources, and you are fighting against 5 formidable forces from nothing. What makes it worse is that when you have established your own base, the enemies just throws everything on you at the same time, leaving you clueless. And no, I am not talking for moderate or standard difficulty. No. This is on hard mode. I already have restarted this scenario so many times, so let me guide you in, before you become frustrated on this game and break your keyboard.

I will explain this as detail as I can, so bear with me.

Enemy Situation
First I want to explain what you will encounter. You will have 5 enemies :
1. Purple (Sarus). This is your strongest enemy. They will mass-produce huskarls, halberdiers, champions, and rams. You have to deal with this one first. I will explain how to do it below.
2. Red. This team is located on the south of the map. Their troops will mainly consist of Hussars, archers (arbalest), and rams.
3. Blue (western roman empire). This team is located at the south west of the map, and they consist of many legions, cavalries, trebuchets, and two handed swordsman (or champions, I dont remember it correctly). You should avoid to attack this team as much as possible, because they are not in your objectives and their base is located on such hard terrain to reach. I will teach you how not to trigger their raids.
4. Cyan. This team is located to the north west of the map, and your second strongest enemy. Their troops will consist of Paladins, Throwing Axemen, Monks and Trebuchets.
5. Yellow. This team is located to the north side of the map, and their troops will consist of hussars, halberdiers and scorpions.

In General, your target should be like this : Purple --> Red --> Cyan --> Yellow. I will explain how to do that below. Before get into that, I will briefly explain the economy situation.

Economy Situation
1. You will start the game with an okay amount of resources, except for gold which is crazy at around 7k gold. A good management of your available gold is vital in survival.
2. At first scene, there will be boats, and if you cross the river with the boat you will land in a no-man island (I will call it "island" to differ it from other base). This island is full of woods (you will get your main source of woods in this area), two good mines of stone, and a little mine of gold.
3. Your starting gold is tremendous, but you will run out of it eventually. Be wary not, there are huge amount of mines of gold inside every enemy's base. So you need to take down every enemy base to get more gold.
4. About stone : you will find good stock of stone in the first island, but there are also good mines of stone near yellow base. But it seems impossible to safely mine there before you have a formidable forces and base.

Alright, now lets get into the game.

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1. As I stated above, Purple is your scariest enemy. So it is a good idea to take down Purple as early as possible. But how to do that with your tiny troops? First quick get all your units (including villagers) jump into the first two boats you encounter. But dont cross the river. Instead, go sail along the bay line of the island to south direction until you meet the crossing iceberg (hug the beach line of the island so you will going circle to the center). dont worry, your boats can go through that iceberg, and after crossing the iceberg you will meet two directions, one to the left, and one to the right : take the right direction. Again, go along the river until you meet a Purple tower attacking you. Mark that as Purple's island. Then go along the bay line of Purple's island (circling again) until you reach the north side of the Purple's island. If you already reach the north side of the purple's island, then you will meet a small space of beach with gold mines near it. Drop your units there, and get your villagers directly build a market near the gold mine. Purple's troops will not notice you since they also in a process of building their base.

Once you finish your market, quickly buy stone to 650 stone to be able to build a Castle beside your market. Once your castle is built, it will attack whatever in its range, and that will trigger some purple troops to come. So get your villagers inside your castle, quickly produce a trebuchet to take down purple's castle which is located at the center of the island. You will take down purple's castle in no time and you will find Sarus standing right on where purple's castle was. So kill Sarus with your available troops (your champions are enough)....

...and the Purple is surrender. One enemy down.

2. Now after purple is down, dont start building your base there. Quickly get all your units back to the ships, and remember the iceberg that you crossed before? Drop them there. As you walk slowly approaching red base, you will encounter several trees neatly planted right in front of red's base gate. Buy some stones from your market and build a castle around those trees (in front of red's gate), but beware of red's towers range. After your castle has been built, it will trigger all the troops from inside red base to come out, so get your villagers safely inside your castle while watching the red troops are being taken down by your castle.

After red's initial attack is slowing down, produce a trebuchet more and rip down all military buildings inside red base (archery range, towers, siege workshop and stables) and rip down red's TC and villagers. Important notes : dont crush red's docks since it will make red defeated and trigger Blue raids onto you. Once you have got a good grip on red's base, you may now proceed to build your own base OUTSIDE THE WALL OF RED BASE (right beside your last castle). Why? Because Cyan and Yellow will come after you and you will find hard times defending your TC if it is located quite afar from your castle.

Two important things to consider :
1. dont take down red's market, since you will use it to trade for having endless gold supply.
2. dont build a castle inside the flagged area since it will also trigger Blue attacking you.

There are huge gold mines at the south side of red's base (near their docks), so if you can get a good grip on red's base pretty fast, there will be still huge amount of gold left there.

3. After settling down right outside the red base, Cyan and Yellow will come down to your base in no time, so quickly get another castle near your TC to get a good defense. Another castle will help you A LOT in defense.

Alright, you may consider Cyan more, since they will bring bunch of Paladins and Throwing Axemen and 4 TREBUCHETS! (seriously, dev needs to fix this. this is so annoying).
To deal with this, get ready about 20 huskarls inside your castle (they are cheap, so it will be easy to prepare them considering your developing economy). Then, pay attention to this pattern : when Cyan attack, their 1 or 2 paladins will come forward first, and then followed in around 10 seconds with a group of throwing axemen and those 4 trebs. So when one or two Cyan's Paladins coming to your base, prepare your 20 huskarls to take down the next incoming trebs. One of your castle may be going to be down 1 or 2 times but it is not that problematic since you have get a good establishment of economy.

Yellow should be a no problem for you, your 2 castles can face them easily.

4. When you already get the pattern to face the Cyan, slowly build your own troops and take down Cyan base and Yellow base. I highly suggest to build a castle in every flagged areas after the Cyan and Yellow base are burnt to the ground. Once you build a castle in one of the flagged areas (in red, cyan or yellow), all the Blue troops will come out to your main TC, but with your 2 castles (or you may even add another castle), the incoming Blue will be no problem at all.

5. As I stated above, on process of no.3 and 4 do not try to get into Blue base by any means necessary.

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There you go, the comprehensive guide on how to defeat Alaric Mission 5. Feel free to discuss below.

[Heinrich]

There is an another good tip:
You just need to activate Sarus trigger. The way to activate this trigger is to bring all the initial units as this post directs. After that, move the bring ur units to the point where they are barely out of castle's attack range then Sarus will say something(trigger activated). You can bring your units back to "no man island"
In about 8 minutes Sarus will rush you.
You can easily deal with him with a TC and ofcourse your units.

[Player 002]

yea, that will probably work too

the main idea of my strategy is that to decrease the number of your enemy as soon as possible, because facing 5 enemies with such a minor base is an impossible thing to do. so after taking down Sarus, you might want to take down Red asap since Red has the worst defense of the 5.

[Heinrich]

Yep agree
After the red has fallen there are actually no threat left if you dont build any castle inside any cities.
I build them at the last moment.
So there should be no blue waves.

[Silver]

Just finished Alaric Mission 5 on Moderate. I used a more "picturesque" and traditional strategy than your rush on Hard: on moderate, the enemy uses cavaliers instead of paladins.

I got my butt kicked on the 1st try, but on the 2nd try I made it. Basically stay on the east bank of the rhone river with your starting villagers, because the enemy will never be able to capture this base as he doesnt load up his units in transport ships. So if your 2nd base gets overrun, you will always be able to fall back to this one. Build your 1st town center there, cut the surrounding trees, get 8 farms going, build a couple of houses, maybe a blacksmith to research blast furnace for your starting infantry army and then put them in the 2 transport ships and let them "discover" the burning gaia buildings on the opposite riverbank. Then send a few extra villagers over, have them repair the buildings and build palisade walls between the forests and then build your 2nd TC on the other bank in a forest clearing. Immediately send half a dozen villagers to mine stone and research guilds in the market and then buy the stone necessary to build 3 castles - one in the north, one in the west and one in the south-west. While you are doing that, take your infantry and knock out the 2 Sarus watchtowers nearby.

Build 2 archery ranges and train archers to garrison in your castles for extra firepower. Alternately you can build towers and put them in there, to spread out your killzones.

Build a stable and train hussars to rush enemy trebuchets that try taking out your castles from afar. Once you have a mobile cav force near each castle to rush enemy siege weapons, your defenses should hold, but because they are only palisade walls, you cannot rely on them for long against enemy infantry waves, so you will need to build a barracks or two, research perfusion and start pooling champions near each castle / wooden palisade gate who you then put in defense mode and send out near the palisade walls outside the castle to tie up enemy infantry while the castle and archers do their job and your palisade walls remain intact. Place some monks inside the palisade wall to heal the defenders outside.

Next, offense: train a large heavy cavalry archer force. This will be your mobile fortress that you can slowly move away from your main base while constantly beset by enemies. Use them along with champions and some healing monks to crawl your way closer to one of the 2 cities (yellow in the north or red to the west) and then assault them with trebuchets and take them and then move in some villagers and build your next base here and set up the castle within the flag area. Make sure to plug in the wall breaches with palisade walls/gates of your own.

Go after Sarus in the middle of the map, kill him to eliminate his faction, then take on the remaining 2 cities. Ignore the blue romans in the mountain fortress to the south west.

[Gigaknyghte]

Thank you all for the tips. I've lost this mission several times on hard. If I vent my frustration in writing I'll regret it later so I'll just say this: As a player, it's not much fun when the only ways to win a scenario are either (i) hours of tedious, eye-burning unit queuing, market selling, and defensive damage control or (ii) resorting to some sort of cheese. Unfortunately, these choices seem to be a theme in some of the newer (i.e., post-Conquerors) campaigns.