Lake Poyang historical battle is INSANE!

[Sirius]

This battle is impossible and I'm playing this on standard difficulty (whatever that means).

I have no resources, no ships and I'm supposed to amass a big enough armada to push through the blockades consisting of tens and tens of imperial age fully upgraded ships + towers in 14 minutes and 3 minutes of it takes to sail to the edge of the map??? WTF!

This is NOT enough time.
Also, this game should have easy level, as did AoE 1. Standard is something between medium and hard.

I ******* hate timed missions, in any game.

[K1tt3nM4ng0]

I kinda hate to respond this, but Lake Poyang is actually quite easy even on hard. And standard difficulty in this game is actually below moderate, and is arguably two notches below moderate (in my opinion at least). (I guess YMMV, but for me the hardest, and the only genuinely hard, historical battle is Bukhara. Kyoto and Honfoglalas would close up the top three.)

Some basic advice would include to build docks at your starting position (your starting villagers allow you to have sufficient economy for that); you should be able to do pretty much all the food upgrades you need then as well (i.e. for shipbuilding as well as the available bodkin/bracer upgrades) in the initial phase; then you starting shipbuilding, mostly only galleons, and you never stop.

When you get to the second stage (with your base), move nearly all villagers off of food collection; build an early castle down to the west of your base (to shut down Grey's attacks) and just build galleons and a few cannon galleons. You need to go out to destroy as many of Red's docks, and it helps tremendously to pay off Green as well. If you shut down Grey you will never get attacked on land to the northeast of your base and there are tons of resources to be had there.

[Sirius]

I have done that. The moment I reach the building site, I build ~6 more docks, additionally to the existing 2. I put slaves to work on gold and trees, the only non-ship-related techs I upgrade are Bracer and Chemistry as these are the only techs outside of dock upgrades that help the ships.

And I end up with almost no wood and the slaves are unable to generate enough wood in that small time frame. I can't sell food and buy wood because I have to convert food to gold so I can pay 2k tribute to the pirates so they wouldn't attack me, otherwise I have 3 too strong enemies against me. So there's buttload of gold gone.

Every time by the time I have enough ships, I'm out of time and I can't reach the transport ship. If I try with fewer ships I'm not even going to make it to the transport ship or make it with ~3 ships and the transport gets still blown to bits.

As to the gray, the two existing towers full of random infantry around seems to work well enough. I tried walling off and building a castle once but that probably took way too much of my time.

[Sirius]

Managed to win the battle today with relative ease, compared to yesterdays many tries.

Put twice as many slaves to cut trees as I usually do and left a reduced number of slaves to the fields, which helped me out at one point where gold miners were moving between sites.

At around 3/5 shipments I had maxed my navy and it was smooth sailing from there.

I tried to take down the bigger red base yesterday and got totally decimated. Today I just destroyed the fortification with the super long range closest to the transport ship range and moved away. Destroying docks around smaller islands helped too.

[Flakstruk]

Are you racing the convoys?

[chaoticbalrog]

You can also cheese the scenario by setting up two docks, one near your start and one near the actual lake. From your dock near the start, build enough War Galleys to completely block the naval passage into the lake while building more ships from the other dock to clear the lake of enemy troops. If you're ballsy, you can even build Cannon Galleons and attack the red bases. Said red bases are guarded by Fortified Towers that seem to benefit from Eupseong (the Korean unique tech that increases the range of their towers) and have obscenely high attack that is the work of trigger magic. Use one War Galley to draw the tower's fire and then pummel it with Cannon Galleon shots (do ensure that the War Galley does not either sink or lead the tower fire towards where the Cannon Galleons are).

[K1tt3nM4ng0]

Originally posted by Sirius:

Managed to win the battle today with relative ease, compared to yesterdays many tries.

Put twice as many slaves to cut trees as I usually do and left a reduced number of slaves to the fields, which helped me out at one point where gold miners were moving between sites.

At around 3/5 shipments I had maxed my navy and it was smooth sailing from there.

I tried to take down the bigger red base yesterday and got totally decimated. Today I just destroyed the fortification with the super long range closest to the transport ship range and moved away. Destroying docks around smaller islands helped too.

Well done!

[Sirius]

Originally posted by Flakstruk:

Are you racing the convoys?

With the first try I was thinking of escorting the transport ship. Did the speed upgrade and all but then found out that the transport ship is way too fast and it got blown up.

So I had to go in in advance.

[Quintem]

Maybe you'd have more success if you called your people villagers and not slaves.

[Flakstruk]

Originally posted by chaoticbalrog:

You can also cheese the scenario by setting up two docks, one near your start and one near the actual lake. From your dock near the start, build enough War Galleys to completely block the naval passage into the lake while building more ships from the other dock to clear the lake of enemy troops. If you're ballsy, you can even build Cannon Galleons and attack the red bases. Said red bases are guarded by Fortified Towers that seem to benefit from Eupseong (the Korean unique tech that increases the range of their towers) and have obscenely high attack that is the work of trigger magic. Use one War Galley to draw the tower's fire and then pummel it with Cannon Galleon shots (do ensure that the War Galley does not either sink or lead the tower fire towards where the Cannon Galleons are).

You can put 3 docks across the shallows to block the river, preventing the later triggers activating. Freeing up the ships

[Sirius]

Originally posted by Sirius:

Originally posted by Flakstruk:

Are you racing the convoys?

With the first try I was thinking of escorting the transport ship. Did the speed upgrade and all but then found out that the transport ship is way too fast and it got blown up.

So I had to go in in advance.

I don't know, man. I'm pretty sure at least part of my later success was to have a lot more slaves thus upping my wood production.

I don't feed them, they never sleep, they're constantly either collecting resources or building stuff and when I have no use for them, they suddenly die to free space for military/navy.