HARDEST ACHIEVEMENTS done fast

Tips & Tricks to help you get those pesky achievements. I just unlocked all achievements & wanted to share some advice on how to unlock the most difficult ones with strategies I did with the really tough achievements or achievements I personally had trouble with or saw people had trouble with. I also included my thought process to some of the strategies in hopes of helping you recreate a similar outcome.

Most Achievements

• Do not load/save
  
• Campaign achievements: change difficulty to story (campaign is very long & this is the most enjoyable difficulty or else each mission can be 1 hour or more especially while doing achievements)
  
• Mastery Achievements/Individual Challenges: if it doesnt say kill/defeat enemies you can create a solo game with max resources, revealed, any starting age & when finished surrendering is the fastest. (Example: Build 50 cavalry units before castle age = set starting age to 2 [feudal] , solo & when finished creating 50 units, surrender)

Great Walls

Construct 1,000 Stone Walls as the Chinese.

• Setup: Solo, Max Resources, Age 4, Revealed
  
• Map: Dry Arabia, size 8 players

This is not a hard achievement. I included it because I saw people having trouble & its in bottom percentages. This should take 1 game.

Build walls map length. You might have to build around trees, but 4 straight lines across the map should get the achievement regardless. Make sure to build gates for villagers after they finish 1 line because they get stuck between walls.

Classic Conquest

Destroy all enemy units and production buildings during the Siege of Kazan.

• Story Difficulty

I saw many people having trouble with this as well. Make sure to scout the entire map. Destroy anything you see. The tricky part is the fact that there are archers on top of the first walls. These are so easy to miss. There was even a couple of archers hiding behind the big khan statue during my run. I took the time the first play through to check every corner of the map & double check the walls. I built wooden fortresses along the walls to check for archers. This was after destroying everything inside the first wall. Dont breach the second wall because after you kill all the units in the second wall, the level ends. You can destroy the wall towers but just not the walls because they might rush you when the 2nd wall breaks.

The Faithful & Wololottery

With this method, you can easily do The Faithful 1st try, Wololottery is alot more tricky'er.

Wololottery

Assume control of 25 units in a single conversion.

The general strategy for both achievements is to kill 1 ai, letting their villagers turn to neutral or "white" colored allowing you to convert them easily. You want to look for large groups of villagers & kill the ai with big groups of villagers (map is set to revealed). Make sure to snipe landmarks, dont attack move or you might end up killing villagers.

• Setup: 2 ai rus civ(hardest & easy), Max Resources, Age 1, Revealed
  
• Map: Black Forest, size 6 players
  
• Civ: Holy Roman
  
• People claimed they could convert sheep, but cant after latest patch

Why this Setup?
The enemy ai or player civ doesnt have to be these civs but something happened in my game where it was easy to get this achievement first try. Age 1 because I think the ai makes most villagers in age 1, I think that is how they are programmed, but not sure. Max resources to build army & landmark quickly to kill off hardest ai because they make more villagers than the other ai. Easy ai because they dont help their partner when there being attacked. Black forest because you can easily wall off 1 ai & kill the other. Ive noticed that on most seeds on map size 6 players, they have lanes, 1 for each ai, making everything way easier.

Early Game
When the game starts, send all villagers to construct landmark, take 1 off to make lots of houses (19 for 200 pop), & 1 other to build lots of barracks (when you see blimps of them on map, start adding more villagers to build them faster), I made around 11 barracks. The hardest ai likes to rush early, but even on max resources they only send small groups (they get bigger as time goes on), so they are easy to kill at the start. Make sure to make more villagers, rallying them to landmarks. Also make sure to build lots of blacksmiths for upgrades & make sure to wall off the lane leading to the easy ai. Build stone walls & a keep behind it, so you can focus on the hardest ai. Dont worry about the relics, the hardest ai likes to pick them up with their horse monk first anyway, but this works in our advantage because when you kill them off all the relics will be safely in their base for you to burn down & grab right next to the neutral villagers.

Killing Hardest AI
to kill off hardest ai, just make a ton of units with a constant production of units & snipe their landmarks. They dont have to be fully upgraded & probably not even upgraded at all. As the holy roman, I had 130 units consisting of men at arms & landsknechte. I just spammed full production in the barracks of both units, rally'ing them up behind the full army. They had 1 keep in their base so I believe I did the rush when I just got a huge amount of units enough to snipe the landmarks quickly. Dont attack move or youll kill villagers.

How I got it
So being my first try, I didnt think it would work as smoothly. Once I killed off the hardest ai, I noticed that this method did not work as good because they had small groups of villagers. When I looked over to the easy ai base, I couldnt believe the beauty that I saw. For some reason, the hardest ai villagers were gathered around the easy ai monk landmark & there was about 50 neutral ai surrounding that thing. I quickly burned all but 1 of the easy ai landmark so I couldnt win & so that they would not bother my monk while they are converting. Im not sure if this is reproducible, but I hope that it works.

Be Subtle

Reveal 300 Villagers with a single use of Imperial Spies as the Chinese.

• Setup: 1v4 ai rus civ(all hardest), High Resources, Age 1, Concealed
  
• Map: Black Forest, size 8 players
  
• Civ: Chinese

High resources should be enough to build up & then make that specific landmark. The general strategy is to build that landmark as fast as possible & defend only (until they kill you) all the while using that landmark to constantly reveal villagers in hopes that 1 of those scans has 300 villagers being spotted throughout defending. Black forest is the easiest map to defend. Also build barracks for rushes & houses for that defending army (song dynasty has villages aka 40pop house).

Servants of the Land

Edit: mentioned by @FUBAR in the comments. A bug where deleting Landsknechte counts toward achievement. Strat: make 100 barracks, queue non-elite Landsknechte, once all spawn, delete
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Easy just time consuming.
Kill 10,000 enemies with Landsknechte.

• Setup: 2v4 ai any civ (hard-hardest), Max Resources, Age 4, Revealed
  
• Map: Black Forest, size 8 players
  
• Civ: Holy Roman
  
• note: watch out for lots of siege engines like mangonels (try to snipe them when you see them)
  
• extra: the mastery challenge "kill 50 with Landsknechte" can only be done with regular Landsknechte not elite

Team up with 1 easy ai to take some of the attention away from you. I would send some troops to help them so you can get kills & attention always goes to them if they are alive. Can also add more easy ai depending how good you are with defending. Hard & Hardest AI make lots of units. This took me about 6 hours of grinding.

Late Game
With mass units, you'll end up with a quick shortage of food since they are gold heavy. Make sure to send you vills to food after building all the buildings you need. Also its good to mine out all the far away gold first that way enemy doesnt have alot of gold for siege engines. I usually dont gather resources at all at the start of the game & devote to building until I see that all the starting resource about to dry up.

Shifting Winds

Defeat 1,000 enemy cavalry units with your Camel Riders as the Abbasid Dynasty.

The general strategy is probably the most difficult so far in regards to doing this achievement fast. The reason is, is that the ai response to spamming camels is to stop all the production of cavalry to the point where you'll have to rely on only scouts which will take forever. What I came up with is spamming regular archers as soon as you see no cav. What happens is they switch to cav & keep cycling between both units. Another element is to snipe everything that is not stables.

• Setup: 1v2 ai french civ(hardest), Max Resources, Age 4, Revealed
  
• Map: Black Forest, size 6 players
  
• Civ: Abbasid
  
• note: "Camel Riders" are a stable unit & it doesnt mean any camel unit (like camel archers)

Why this Setup?
I always pick hardest because they have the highest production of units (any less difficulty will take longer). My first strategy was 1v7 easy ai (old ai) & spamming camels. Well for one, they rushed early so starting was really hard & they also compete with each other since they are so close together meaning they end up not making alot of units when you get to the point where all the max resources are used up. I ended up taking map control on dry arabia & boxing all them in which just adds lots of time to this. This new strategy should maximize the amount cav you'll see.

Hardest part for Abbasid is how long there wings take to finish. Apparently its equivalent to 3 villagers working on a landmark. To fix this, starting at Age 4 allows you to quickly make camels with the bonus of being the only player with a landmark (since you cant build landmarks when you start at Age 4), so you wont see landmark keeps, thankfully (ai loves to repair their landmarks)

Early Game
Build your wing to get camel upgrades. Build lots of archery ranges & spam archers, making the ai switch to mass knights. After vills make archery ranges build lots stables & spam camels to counter cav. Make sure to build blacksmith/university for upgrades.

Switching between archers & camels
Make sure its always regular archers & not cross bows or gun powder units. When the ai stops making cav after dominating them with camels, spam archers. Make sure to let the archers fight alone & keep the camels back. You can always have very small groups of camels to snipe cav & retreat while keeping mass archers as well.

Other strats
I also tried playing against hardest ai Mongols thinking they would have the most cav units, but for some reason, after I dominated them with camels & switching to archers to stimulate them, they gave up on making alot of units when I sniped all military building except stables. They acted confused at one point & kept packing up all their buildings , but not moving them. Very strange.

[DAELIUSPRIME]

Thanks guys!

[dirtywig]

@DAELIUSPRIME I havent played this game since i 100% years ago so I dont remember how I got it, I believe I just spammed demolition ships or i agro'd enemies with cav to the demo ships, but i like @Rykin strategy

[Rykin]

@DAELIUSPRIME, This achievement was bugged, they fixed it only a few days ago, now you should be able to get it in without a problem, just wait until the enemies transport lands on your island and kill them with Demolition Ship or kill the transport with 4+ units on it.

[DAELIUSPRIME]

Did you unlock "having a blast" achievement? I dont know how to pass it

[dirtywig]

@Omnomberry (Hikari) you could also try reducing starting resources and then decimating their gold production, which is the main resource for sieges. you can also change it to easy/intermediate ai they just are way more slower.

[dirtywig]

@Omnomberry (Hikari) oh ya i remember that being a problem. I just destroyed thier siege workshops. if you still have trouble try starting from like 2/3rd age. if that still doesnt work try changing civs with the least dominate siege.

[MoonFox (Hikari)]

for Shifting Winds it somehow never works for me, the AI makes almost exclusively siege engine (especially the five barrelled canons that decimate troops)

[FUBAR]

xD fun for me as well ;d not so fun for them I suppose

[Bran Dragon]

You're welcome :) I was hoping it did, if not I had spent an afternoon trying to get it without result LOL
Mesmerizing sight tho, seeing them flop back and forth before dropping dead xD Or is that just me?

[dirtywig]

@bran dragon , surprised it still works XD, thanks for the confirmation.