Alaric 5th scenario. Any tips?

[Buchiba]

I'm a casual AOE2 player, so I'm doing it in standard difficulty. But even then, it's very hard for me.
I read a strat of building a castle close to Sarus's base, and then building trebuchet to snipe the castle and forcing him to fight or retreat, which I have to take advantage on to kill him.
But somehow, it's does not work for me. Either I can barely keep my units alive defending the castle or all my offensive dies trying to reach Sarus after the north castle falls down.
My offensive is quite small, I think. They are not more than 30 units.
Until i get some response, I'll keep trying with more units.

[Chaosium]

Yep rushing Sarus is very, very recommended, if you let him do his thing he'll just counter attack with 10 million huskarls later...

It's been a while since I played this map but I think the idea was rushing with the starting units, build a castle in his base and try to pull him in range. I do remember he refused to do so for me :d Try to pull him with some ranged unit like skirmisher while dancing around the castle arrows, lowering game speed helps

[76561199169650260]

Originally posted by Buchiba:

But even then, it's very hard for me.

You can pause at any time in Single player and issue perfect[0] commands to every unit.

You can perfectly micro 200 monks if you so choose. Or you can outmicro all Mangonel/Onager shots like the AI does. Or you can actually get some value out of your own Onagers, by issuing multiple areas for attack grounds so that AI doesn't just dodge them all.

Pausing often is the single biggest tip for Single Player anyone can give you.

[0] You can't click anything in Multiplayer though, so don't rely on this too much if you are practicing for multiplayer

[Nightflash]

I've done almost all the campaigns on hard and in general you should be able to beat anything in late game by having a sustainable economy, a hotkey for all military building and shift clicking (queing 5 units with one click) to have nonstop military production.

[Buchiba]

Thank you all for the responses. At the end, i saw that if you rush all your starting units to the south entrance, and destroy TC, and other buildings out of the range of the castle, Sarus ends up trying to fight alone and then i did could kill him. After that, it's was pretty easy.