Hauteville Mission 2 (Sicily) tips

[Silver]

Hauteville 2 was one heck of a challenge and I managed it on the 2nd try on moderate cause the first try took me completely off by surprise.

According to the description, Sicily is ruled by 5 rivaling emirs, but I got the feeling they are all allied against me. If you dont turtle properly, you will quickly get swarmed by 4 different armies who show up at your walls with trebs and a ton of cavalry, your towers will get taken down, and then your TC and castle will be the only thing protecting you, so you gotta act smart:

In the beginning of the mission you have 2 choices, hand over Timnah the prisoner to the green transport ship of Hawwas or keep him, I chose to keep him, maybe the difficulty is different if you comply with the green emir's demands.

Once you got that behind you, board your men into the two transport ships and disembark west, on sicily's east coast. Timnah will reveal the location of all castles to you, each enemy faction only has one castle and its emir (always a mounted unit of some sort) is programmed to seek refuge near it, whenever the unit's health drops below 20%. Green is the closest city and has no gates like the others, so it should be your first target.

Scout south along the east coast with your men until you come across a few bedouin tents and its units will join you for having sided with Timnah. Then take them north to another group of bedouin tents before drawing out green's cavalry near the city walls so you can decimate them without being in range of the castle. Try drawing out Hawwas and weakening him, and as he retreats back toward his castle, chase and finish him. This variant is preferable to making a beeline straight for him, because that usually gets you swarmed by his army halfway there and right within range of his castle, leading to a massacre of your troops.

Once you have the city, build gates, start booming (the more villagers you have, the better), research blacksmith techs to upgrade your cavalry, grab all the sheep, once youre done harvesting them, take your villagers for the berry bushes northeast of your walls, and send at least one villager ASAP via transport ship back to your starting island to build a 2nd base there (he cant build a TC yet as youre still in feudal but he can build a donjon near the cliffs to protect the island from enemy fleets and then start working on the sheep). Still, be prepared to lose all your docks as the coast is swarming with enemy ships and fighting them with ships of your own - even demolition ships - is just not worth the cost.

Now, one thing you should never forget is that despite being a norman player, you can train berber genitours for having sided with Timnah. The 2nd thing you should never forget is that genitours only cost wood and food, no gold needed. Which also makes them a better investment than training Light Cav, as your stockpile of wood is usually higher than food and genitours only cost about half the food as light cav does (and you cant upgrade to hussars in imperial but you can upgrade to elite genitours, so forget the light cav).

While this is happening, make sure your archery range keeps making archers to man all your towers with 5 archers each and research ballistics as soon as you get to castle. I dont think masonry will make your city better because it got converted rather than built from the ground up.

Also, as soon as you reach castle, train 4-5 monks and research sanctity. Place your cavalry army west of the city walls where the gold mines are, and place your monks there too so that they can heal your army between enemy waves. You will soon get norman reinforcements consisting of knights and sergeants, the sergeants also make good guards for the gold mines.

The mission description mentions relics but i didnt find any on the map, maybe they spawn on your starting island if you choose to hand over Timnah, idk. But supposedly putting them into sicily's churches starts local rebellions.

But to convert an enemy town, you need to kill its emir, yet he is usually behind a double gate (one marking the entrance to the city, the other to its castle) and even if he sallies out to attack you, once his health drops low he will retreat back to it, so to breach them quickly, bring plenty of trebs and rams filled with pikemen or halberdiers, as enemy cavalry is abundant in this mission.

When you are running out of gold, remember: genitours, genitours, and scouting to grab some more of Timnah's men scattered further inland. Good luck!

[BirbNotBird]

Thank man, should you make it into a guide so it won't dissappear through the sea of comments?

[Helios_One]

"rivaling" implies they shouldn't all gang up on you. Being in the 11th century implies they shouldn't be able to go to imperial age. I wonder when the devs will fix these anti-player and historically inconsistent aspects.

[Helios_One]

BTW, the problem of anti-player AI is still there with the other option. It's virtually unchanged. In fact, it's even worse.

[James3157]

At least on standard difficulty this mission does not seem hard. However, when you take over the green city (Emir Ibn al-Hawwas ) because of refusing to hand over Timnah, I noticed that orange ( Emir Ibn al-Ward) attacks almost immediately. You have be prepared for an attack quickly because even on standard difficulty orange will attack your base almost immediately. After some practice I was able to figure out how to kill orange's leader easily when going on the offensive. If you refuse to hand over Timnah for execution your next easiest leader for taking out is from orange.

[RePence]

I did that one on Hard a few days ago. I got swarmed on my first attempt but the second attempt went smoothly. What I found is I was taking too long to take a base and gathering recruits. As it turns out, you don't need to at all.
Side with Timnah, drop east of Green and storm Green's base immediately.

After that Orange should be first priority so Timnah has a base to harass your enemies, and from there it's more or less business as usual.

The relics are in the middle between Red and Cyan, by the way. There's an achievement to put them in the nearby monasteries and trigger a rebellion, for which you'll gain enough troops to destroy the town centers in the middle.