Completed Let us RECLAIM THE HOLY LAND

[Darth Roxor]

SURAH 12 - DEADLY COMMANDOS

Spoiler

For a moment I think about getting sabotage for 1k dinars, but I figure guard towers are pathetic enough that it would be a waste of cash.

Haven't seen this map before from this perspective, nope!

The enemy force is surprisingly small and pathetic. They have only 9 regiments, with 3x spearmen, 2x foot knights, 1x hero, 3x templars - only the templars and Raynald of Chatillon should provide any challenge. The suckers don't even have bowmen.

Except, of course, they also have two guard towers and...

Yep, a fucking catapult

SHOULDA TAKEN THAT SABOTAGE, AR-ROXOROWSKI

Raynald de Spacemarine certainly looks familiar.

That catapult will have to be addressed with Kunning. Since it is right at the edge of the crusader encampment, we should be able to bust it with assassins and get out before taking any losses. No enemy archers will only help us at this.

The fact that the idiots scramble for the guard post is also of great help, considering that at deployment the catapult was guarded by de Chatillon himself.

commencing infiltration

elite arab army special forces heading straight into the viper's nest

PEEKABOO

The assassins are done with the catapult and guard tower in mere seconds.

Since the crusaders are too dumb to react, might as well wreck the other guard tower too while at it.

The elite russian-trained paratrooper special forces commando units have secured the perimeter. Now we strike.

I hide everyone worth a damn in the forests.

Shoop shoop shoop

We first get rid of the spearmen, since they are the most flimsy, then also bombard some foot knights.

I have to say I preferred the crusader crossbowmen over the grenade throwers. The throwers may have huge domoges, sure, but they have 3 very lousy problems

- No armour piercing makes them primarily gud against light infantry/spearmen, and for this you can just get normal archers
- Their rate of fire is pathetically slow
- 24 dudes (vs 36 crossbowmen/48 bowmen) also limits their potential

Once the crusaders get too close, the archers pull back and the battle is joined.

Most of the action takes place in the forest to the right, so it kind of spirals into a complete clusterfuck where I have no idea what's going on.

So in other words, you just gotta assume that each morale fail circle means some enemy regiment's just died or whatever

The clusterfuck's a bit of a bummer because you have to remember there are templars around here, and these can actually pack a punch.

In fact it turns out that Turan-Turan was rambo-engaged with a full HP templar regiment, which got him some unnecessary losses.

I think Raynald broke morale (or died) here.

Oh yeah, he must have, considering I bumrushed the remaining enemies with the rest of our blob here.

Just in time too cuz the seljuks were getting pounded by templars.

Again, gotta commend these boyz. Getting slaughtered to the last man and they are still above 50% morale.

Probably because they were far from the morale break domino.

Allahu akbar!

Losses may look big, but you gotta remember like 3/4 of these are seljuks.

Ooooh, I see free stuff on the horizon.

Anyway, as predicted, reinforcements are a little steep.

But cycling the reserves cuts them by half.

Armenia got us a regiment of Mameluks. Pretty cool guys, they have very big damage for heavy infantry, although they pay for it a bit with somewhat shitty defensive stats, especially when compared to the palace guards. Still, you know what they say - better than Seljuks!

Also, between the mameluks, nubians, turk palace guards, turk bowmen and a hundred million billion seljuks, you may arrive at the conclusion that our "Saracen" army is composed 99% of slave-warriors and foreign mercenaries. This is actually very historically accurate, and it is also one of the primary reasons behind the fall of the medieval caliphates, as well as the general end of Arab domination in the Middle East.


Polotix:

My biggest regret with regard to this game, although I might have mentioned it already, is that the crusader campaign didn't let me sack those treacherous bastards in Constantinople

Still, the emprah wishes to fund our moderate jihad with humanitarian aid. We can choose between:

- NGOs and volunteers to assist in rebuilding our war-torn lands (3x Byzantine Mercenaries)
- 10k dinars to keep local hospitals running
- Some provisions and international engineering experts to help us dig after oil wells (2 kaptins, armoire, waffe, elixir)

You are probably wondering what the hell are "byzantine mercenaries". I was wondering myself, so I used the ancient islamic powers of taqiyya (also known as save-scumming) to check:

Yep, they are just reskinned crusaders it also lets us do a direct comparison between them and the seljuk swordsmen, and it turns out the units are 1:1 carbon copies of each other.


Now, to Jihad. We've cleared the map of all scrubby missions, so now it's time to proceed into the major leagues. We have three enemy HQs to invade:

Seljuk Sultanate

Aka rescue some turks and kill the crusaders

Damascus

Aka try to win against a massive onslaught with just 6 units and some catapults

Cairo

Aka murder the templars and their merc friends.


You know the drill:
- What free stuff to take?
- JIHAD!!!!!!

 

[Azira]

Oh, I know! Take the seljuks Byzantine Mercenaries.
And do Damascus, for the upgrade points, naturally.

 

[Erebus]

Take the gold, obviously.

Defending Damascus sounds fun.

 

[hello friend]

Get dat paper

Seljuk Sultanate

 

[Storyfag]

Take the monies.
Go to Damascus.

 

[Reinhardt]

Mercs. Obviously you need more units.

And Damascus.

 

[Darth Roxor]

SURAH 13 - REMEMBER THE FALLEN

Spoiler

The Emprah quickly transfers his dinars to our swiss bank account. We can now focus on building pet shops in poor war-torn Syria.

Naturally, some of this donation we divert to hire a foreman for the assassins construction workers.

Some more we spend to outfit them with quality tools as well. Always wear your hard hat!

The engineering points should do nicely to boost our pet shop construction performance too.


I was wondering for a longer while which troops to pick for this mission, and eventually I settled on the 1337est - all heroes, assassins, 2x bowmen. The idea is that the bowmen will get rid of the units that are a pain in the ass, like spearmen and styrian infantry, assassins are an all-purpose brawling unit, Saladin will chase away the archers and stop light cav from trampling, while the heroes will mop up the rest + boost everyone with their leadership skills.

Let's get it on!

Hah, turns out we get lots of cannon fodder for this mission.

To the east we have mameluks protecting the town.

Then there are saracen horsemen up north, conveniently placed NEXT TO TWO REGIMENTS OF PILGRIMS

And at far north there are turk bowmen, seljuk archers and seljuk warriors.

Not bad all in all, I particularly welcome the arrer boyz.

The enemies at this stage are p. trashy.

Apart from the 2x pilgrims next to the saracen knights, here we have some vassals and crusaders, but also 2x english longbowmen. By far the most dangerous units atm.

2x foot knights close to the town too.

Hiring the kaptin actually gives the assassins a (very weird-ass) model to represent him. The same was true for the crusaders, but I forgot to show it I think there the captain was a gold-played langschilde, more or less.

The enemies do some scrambling, I obviously retreat the horsemen towards the mameluks.

But the bad news is the pilgrims follow them right there

I have my doubts about mameluks taking on two regiments of spearmen, but we can certainly try.

Yeah, nope. Time to leg it.

Then something very weird happens - the saracen horsemen are apparently too dumb to exit the town using the western exit. They just KEEP TRYING TO GO NORTH, through the spearmen

what the fuck

I keep trying to retreat them and handhold them out, but nothing works. This takes long enough that even the foot knights manage to catch up.

Our folks are close by too, alhamdulillah.

I hide Sal and the assassins in the forest to flank the incoming archers.

Meanwhile, holy shit, the horsemen actually managed to leg it somehow. Time to bombard the pilgrims with our auxiliary archers.

SURPRISE

shoop shoop motherfuckers

Checking here I had to count the longbowmen again because 2 regiments were on the loose here while Saladin was supposed to be murdering them. On a closer look it turned out Saladin, that damned idiot, ran into crusaders instead.

and then

...

the game crashed

I restarted with the same units, but changed tactics. This time I evac'd the horsemen and mameluks from the town in the corner, while putting Sal and the assassins immediately into this forest here to intercept the heathens.

In fact, might as well put the horsemen here too.

PEEKABOO

Classic cavalry surrounding manoeuvres.

Meanwhile the assassins run into two vassal regiments on their own. Might as well.

The rest of our dudes are getting caught up by the foot knights and pilgrims.

Turan and Asad can handle them just fine, fortunately.

The longbowmen are all but dead. Time to gtfo, no need for more fighting here.

The mameluks finally get their asses here too, which is gud, because we're being a bit swarmed.

more corpses

with those suckers out, we can focus on the remaining crusaders

Who are now running after our assassins in great outrage

We confuse them a bit with some kiting, which lets us shoot them dead with archers.

Soon the coast is clear

Now for phase two.

Teehee all this open ground and so many engineering points, let us set up the ballista hell.

turns out there's only one spot

ARE YOU SHITTING ME???

No matter. I put it down, plus three guard towers, plus four patches of burning oil and caltrops, and finally also camo the archers. I also put Saladin and the saracen horsemen a bit further north in a forest, in anticipation of any archer shenanigans.

Aaaaaaaand here we gooooooooooo

Once again, fairly trashy. One light cav unit, heavy inf are all foot knights and crusaders. Spearmen are pilgrims, which is bad news, archers are crusader archers, which is okay.

But we also get to face off an old friend of ours!

Good that all enemy units in this game are always level 0 so this guy doesn't even have any hero skills

The sun slowly sets over Damascus as the infidels approach our holy warriors.

I decide to keal the cavalry before it screws with our traps and camo.

But the fuckers turn tail the moment we get close

Then suddenly something very weird happens. One thing, less bizarre, was that it looked like the cavalry just evapourated - I couldn't find it anywhere on the map.

However, what was much more strange, was that suddenly ALL our active abilities were turned on. Across all units, even the faith power, all of them were suddenly activated and spent for no reason

Well, whatevs. FIRE!!!!



THE REBEL CANNONS BREAK THE SILENCE

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY GUNS MAKE UP THEIR CANNONADE

I charge our knights, seeing some archers out of position, but they retreat behind spearmen

The slaughter now ensues.

Bodies fall like rain.

Some foot knights manage to break through, I stop them with the saracen horsemen and mameluks.

Oh, I think I see the vanished light cav skulking in the woods to the north.

Our archers unleash all hell to keep the spearmen at bay, but there sure is a whole fucking lot of them.

Soon one regiment reaches our guard tower

and takes it down, breaking just a moment after the deed is done

Wilhelm also got close on the right. He's moving towards the other guard tower.

Also, the saracen horsemen are getting pounded by fucking crusaders, nigga wat

Well shit, the light cav managed to flank us. I retreat the horsemen to stop its charge (they won't do much else with just 4 dudes left), while assassins relieve them against the crusaders.

Meanwhile somewhere in the clusterfuck Saladin ran into pilgrims. BAD SALADIN, BAD!

Meanwhile someone wrecked our second guard tower, on the left. No idea who it was, but I think it might have been the light cav.

Also, the saracen knights are unable to stop them in time, and so they also chop up the fire ballista. Huh.

For some good news, Turan and Asad took care of Wilhelm on the right.

Meanwhile I lost the auxiliary sejluk warriors and didn't even notice They fell to the foot knights they were attacking with the Mameluks.

Needless to say, the saracen horsemen bite the dust superfast, and the light cav proceeds to murder our seljuk archers. However we now have more units that are free to help them.

Until all that is left are hundreds of corpses, three wrecked structures and some stragglers that broke morale long ago and barely just rallied.

Holy shit men, we woulda been in trubble without the cannon fodder auxiliaries

Their sacrifice will be forever remembered in the halls of the righteous!

zing

Cheap reinforcements, given that most of the losses were seljuk mercs.

Ah, events!

I swear it's like most of our dealings we have with traitors and heretics.

Choice is fairly straightforward:

- Get German stuff to obtain a free Langschilde unit (HURRRRRRRR THIS IS GIVING ME DEJA VU) and a reric.
- Get French stuff to obtain 7k dinars, 2 waffen and an armoire.

We now have a shitton of spare gold and upgrade points, so I proceed with phase 3 of the Grand Army Deseljukification. The final phase, I believe.

And upgrade the shitty level 8 swordsmen into propa palace guards.

Skill reassign, I pick experienced retainers and master weapons. Obvious.

Then I research stronger faith (op theology studies)

Which leads us to free skill points for all heroes.

Thus we've maxed out the general upgrade tree. Whoop-de-doo.

Seeing how much geld and points we still have left, I proceed to the saracen magix tree and get this shitty thing

Followed by this also kind of shitty thing

To finally unlock this here very ridiculously overpowered thing (or at least so it looks like). No longer will any suckers be able to flank us or ride out from hiding.


Finally, two options for JIHAD!!!!

Seljuk Sultanate aka rescue the turks and kill the crusaders

Cairo aka crush the templars and their mercs.


- French bribe vs German bribe?
- Seljuks vs gyppos?

DISCUSS!!!!!

 

[Azira]

German bribe, obviously you need more units.

And Seljuks. Kinda wanna see that relic.

 

[Erebus]

French bribe.

We should take care of the unimpressive stuff first, and "seljuk" is just another world for "unimpressive".

 

[hello friend]

Germans and Arabs are a natural fit.
Seljuk Sultans of Swing

 

[Reinhardt]

German bribe, obviously you need more units.

And Seljuks. Kinda wanna see that relic.

 

[Jaedar]

Let's do seljuks first, then cairo, and use the cairoan gold for a great big victory feast.

Don't want heretics in the army, so lets parley with french.

 

[Darth Roxor]

SURAH 14 - REINSTATE KEBAB

Spoiler

No idea why you'd ever pick the German bribe but so it goes.

Also no idea how you wouldn't expect me to sell these useless longshields

At least the reric is decent, I guess. I give it to Asad.

Also, it seems at some point we went over a faith threshold that lets heroes equip more relics. I guess it must have been Damascus but

To arms!

There's a lot of red dots on the map. Let us inspect.

Well, that's certainly a shitton of dudes.

Fortunately, they are all very scrubby. The vast majority of them are vassals and spearmen, also some crusaders.

The best they can show are two longshield regiments and three crusader archers.

Apart from that, scrubs as far as the eye can see.

Nevertheless, it's still a fuckhuge force.

This hilltop here will grant us excellent advantage.

Also check how many glowy banners they have. Six items in one battle! Holy shit.

Here they come.

A great shame is that what looks like some kind of a swamp on the map is actually just regular open field. We'd send them to a watery grave otherwise

While the heathens advance on our main force, I order the light cavalry to move from the side and cap the strategic points, since I guess one of them ought to give us some free turk cannon fodder.

We get swarmed pretty fast, can hardly even kill anyone before the archers must retreat.

And then the classicest, massivest clusterfuck ever ensues as the enemy vassals just keep pouring in to suicide on our blades.

Some of them take the long way around, but I have Sal and the Circs waiting just there. Gonna have to shoot out the spearmen first though.

I lose track of the battle a bit and see fuckers trying to bumrush the archers. Also sending Turan to help on this side.

Meanwhile I see palace guards getting clobbered by longshields

And here one of the light cav units rejoins us after capping one o' them points.

It blows my fucking mind that these mameluk lancers lose 8 dudes on the approach against ARCHERS, but so it goes. The saracen cavalry is completely and utterly worthless compared to its crusader counterparts.

Some morale-broken vassals manage to run into our bowmen, wut.

The enemy spearmen by the archers are kind of confoos and keep running back and forth letting the mameluks kill the archers. Good.

Eh heh heh heh all them white flags. Whiteys BTFO!

WHEN SUDDENLY! *modest drumroll*

Crusader reinforcements arrive. Fortunately it's just Irenaeus' fanclub and some bowmen.

WHEN SUDDENLY! *adequate drumroll*

I see the mameluks getting murderised and notice the spearmen finally decided to attack them. Sound the retreat

WHEN SUDDENLY! *big drumroll*

What the hell is all this enemy cavalry doing here and how did they even get here?!

I guess they must have arrived with the white company and bowmen, so I must have missed their coming by a very large margin lol

Good news however is that the other mameluks finally capped the point in the corner, which gave us two regiments of cannon fodder palace guards.

Naturally, it will take about half a year before they get to the battle zone, so thanks a lot I guess

I had to tell the fucking mameluks THREE TIMES to retreat from the spearmen because they just WOULDN'T LISTEN. Allah be praised that there are no archers around or these dudes would hit the dirt for sure.

In other news, the turks that got clobbered by the longshields are now at 6/36 men. You know what brought them down to this state?

VASSALS

I SWEAR ON ME MOM

Some cavalry trying to flank us. What they don't know is that I have 48 javelins with their names on them.

Also some knights charging uphill, good idea, shitheads.

Ah, the other mameluk lancer regiment arrives to the scene.

The knights run straight into our spearmen, after which I crush them with flanking Sal and the Circs. Expert manoeuvre if I do say so myself

meanwhile cannon fodder turks...

*crickets chirping*

The mameluks get close to the bowmen. Time to start da killin'

Also the bowmen have yet another item, and so did the crusader knights. Damn lootaz!

Oh there's dudes on the left too. Inconsequential, obviously.

Bye bye

WHEN SUDDENLY *final drumroll*

Second blob with enemy reinforcements appears in the northwest!

Trashy as hell just spearmen/vassals/crusaders/crusader knights. But also even more glowy banners with items!

Better prepare yourselves lads.

Oh look who's finally made it.

Better late than never I guess.

Crusader knights run into javelins + sal + lancers again. They won't bother us anymore.

Now for the rest of these suckers.

The fires of Hell await as I put the grenadiers to the front.

Needless to say, the bowmen pick off just about everyone.

Also the grenadiers actually do hilarious damage against these crusaders. With each lob, 12 dudes die, although obviously they are also shot at by the turks. Still...

Sup

33 fucking enemy regiments, 1446 men in total. Mohammed's butt, that was a lot of trash to wade through. Pretty fun though.

Also look at all them level-ups and loot. Obviously it doesn't even show all the loot, but I think we got a total of... 10 items from this. I'm pretty sure that's about as much as we got through the whole campaign so far

Muh clay

These reinforcement costs are obviously not good at all.

Reserves to the rescue! Much better.


Some level-ups

Saladin gets access to this thing at level 10. We maxed offensive strategy, so this is a very obvious thing to pump next - it's also ridiculously fucking strong.

The grenadiers' selection is absolutely dreadful, so I pick haste for the lulz.

Arms-bearer for the lancers is a no-brainer since they scale so well with gear.

The Seljuks gave us this thingy as reward for our conquest. Not bad, Turan-Turan should make some use of it.

Polotix:

A hero will surely be supah useful with 2 missions to go, the mounted archers won't be much better either, and the 5k dinar bribe is kind of pathetic

We still have some cash and upgrade points left, so I wonder if I should spend it on something. Assassin deep strikes look hilarious, but I'm not convinced all that much, so I leave it for now.

Next stop: Cairo.


You may now discuss!!! which bribe we want from the Seljuks.

 

[Azira]

Upgrade points, obviously.

 

[hello friend]

Let's see the hero.

You should get the assassin pods, too fun to pass up.

 

[Reinhardt]

Mounted archers. Your lack of seljuks units is disturbing.

 

[Jaedar]

Let's see the hero.

You should get the assassin pods, too fun to pass up.

+1

 

[Erebus]

Let's go with the mounted archers.

 

[Storyfag]

Let's see the hero.

You should get the assassin pods, too fun to pass up.

+1

+2

 

[Storyfag]

Also, allahuackbaring for the next page.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Next page? What do you need a next page for?

 

[Darth Roxor]

SURAH 15 - DEVASTATING DEFENSIVE DEEP STRIKES

Spoiler

Lol there's a little ship sailing here on the overland map. I tried to follow it for a while to see where it's going, but then it vanished

We order the Seljuks to give up all their heroes for our cause.

... but we get no heroes.

Had to reload and remove one regiment from the army. Apparently Al Malik Al-Aziz is too good to be placed in the reserves. Just as he's too good to have two hyphens in his Als.

So yeah, meet Al-Malik Al-Aziz Uthman, Saladin's second son and well-known troublemaker. Please don't mind that he's a 1:1 clone of Turan Shah, and also a near 1:1 clone of Asad (Asad has some different-coloured sashes and ribbons an shieet).

During his reign, Al-Aziz tried to demolish the Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt, but had to give up because the task was too big.

He has a bunch of weirdo skills that we haven't seen yet, including

Leader of archers

Seneschal

the choice is, I think, obvious

I also get the assassin drop pods that you asked for.

This means we'll never get to see what these Abbasid Elite are about since we don't have the points to unlock them.

However, using taqiyya savescumming I checked them out at some prior point (just forgot to take pix), and it's a pretty mofo unit. It's basically abbasid lancers on horseback - a heavy cavalry unit that has IIRC lower damage than the circ horsemen and more or less comparable defensive stats, BUT they have spear wall, which means double damage against cavalry. A knight-killer unit more or less, a pretty interesting mix. Just a shame it takes so much geld and upgrade points to get them.

But enough of that shit. We have Templars to crush.

A straight story this map. We start here.

The enemy start here, and their force is p. well-balanced.

Their only trash units are 2x light cavalry regiments, apart from that it's all templars, knights templar, white company, crusader archers, and even a regiment of english longbowmen. Not a whole lot of them though, but still, they shouldn't be underestimated, especially the knights.

They cap the guard post, form up and go against us, cavalry leading the way.

Let them come.

I decide to give the assassin drop pods a spin. Turns out they have a huge casting cost - 3 faith points out of our current 5.

The upgrade tree description said these can't be spawned anywhere near the enemy, though when I click the icon, there's no obvious range indicator of any sort. Actually, there's no... nothing when I click it, so I have no idea wtf is going on and click some random space on the map.

Oh, hello there

So much for that "can't be placed next to enemies" I guess

This wasn't the best of ideas

's killin' toime

The crusaders get too close for comfort eventually, so I retreat the archers and move in our first line of defence.

Gotta absorb all that charging cavalry.

One of the lancer regiments got trampled to oblivion

Retreating them from that clusterfuck isn't easy either, and I'm sure happy that they have all them ranged defence buffs or the archers would have knocked them out for sure as they run.

Roll in the dominos

I still have a light cav regiment unoccupied, so I send it after the archers. The templars behind them don't mind this at all

Now to mop up the archers

and take these dudes on a trip across the desert

while the grenadiers turn them into bacon

A glorious, well-matched battle

Pfff, no events.

Reinforcement costs are acceptable, although we don't have to reinforce everyone here. We're gonna have to reorganise the army a lil' before the final mission.

Grenadiers got a level-up. Not the most useless skill set to be sure, but bonus hp from resilience won't hurt.

Now for some upgrades

Cairo lets us recruit Mameluks now, so I change our final lvl 4 seljuk swordsmen regiment into them, then swap them out for the level 2 mameluks that we have in our army.

Interesting skill, but one that is good to have on heavy infantry. Spearmen are very no bueno against heavy inf.

Afterwards I spend our last upgrade points on these

The saracen horsemen are kind of pathetic and trashy, basically the seljuks of heavy cavalry. Buuuuuuuuuuut

They are still better than the fucking worthless mameluk lancers

Gud skillset at least. It seems to be a rule in this game that tier 0 trash units get access to good abilities to let them get up to speed compared to their superiors.

Picked resilience and expert riding.

Then I splurge 6k geld on kaptins for all our turk bowmen.

And another 4800 on weapon upgrades for a bunch of units.

Which leaves only the final mission, our prize crown jewel - Jerusalem.

It's a siege, so you can expect much-much crashes, bugs and errors I'll be honestly disappointed if it's not as buggy as Baghdad Although Baghdad was a bigger map with more scripts and spawns and triggers, so perhaps this will work better after all.

Nevertheless... Stay tuned for the final update to this LP, where we finally reclaim the Holy Land for good!

 

[hello friend]

Wow. The pods were both useless AND expensive.

 

[Azira]

Should've picked moar upgrade points instead of another boring hero..

 

[Darth Roxor]

SURAH 16 - ALLAH AKBAR!

Spoiler

There is no time to waste. We march for Jerusalem, having first bought some assets (spread rumours + sabotage). The Lionheart shall feel the wrath of the faithful!

My walls are strong, my men are in good heart. Bring on your slings and arrows!

Familiar surroundings.

We can only deploy trebuchets and fire ballistas - the ballistas suggest the heathens will be attempting sorties against us, but eh, fuck it, imma just deploy 8 trebuchets instead.

Knowing it very well from experience that those siege maps like to have flanking cavalry spawns, I put some cavalry and lancers at the edges of the map.

Battle start reveals a catapult behind the walls. I sabotage it immediately because our men are within its range.

A lot of dudes spawn all over the city. Here we have a German group, with styrian infantry, longshields and crusader archers.

Next we have pilgrims and 2x crusader knights.

Here we have Richard's bastion, and it's certainly formidable. 2x English longbowmen, English spearmen, a guard tower, crusader elite, two regiments of chevaliers!

Also Guy of Lusignan, a French hero on horseback that we never got to unlock in the crusader campaign.

and Rick himself. Note that he has 24 men in his retinue, as opposed to the regular 12 heroes have.

Also, I wonder if we could bribe his unit had we taken that asset at the start...

Next up are pilgrims and crusader archers here.

And finally templars, foot knights and crusader archers over here. Plus another guard tower.

Looks like it's gonna be a big fight!

Gird your loins, sharpen your steel. You will soon be tested.

The moment our trebuchets take down the first piece of the wall, I see movement on the minimap.

The cavalry from Richard's retinue is moving against us! Guy of Lusignan, crusader elite and all the friggin' chevaliers.

and then

...

the game crashes

Victory! The lion roars once more!

What? Forget it, infidel!

Upon restart I just arrange everyone in the same mob since the crusaders apparently won't be getting reinforcements from outside the walls.

Also I lowered all settings to the minimum to lower the odds of runtime errors. The map props sure look silly without shadows

This time I just bust one gate and halt the trebuchets, to herd the cavalry into one chokepoint of death.

Here they come.

My men are eager for battle and so am I! Prepare to fight!

Fuck, I busted the wrong gate/set up my dudes in front of the wrong one

Doesn't look like we'll manage to save that one trebuchet in time

Nope, there it goes.

War is a dangerous game, my lord, as you are finding out.

Thus the cavalry battle is joined.

Shit, there are chevaliers running for the saracen horsemen. There's no way they are gonna survive that, sooooooooo

DEFENSIVE DEEP STRIKE IS A GO!

The assassins faceshield very nicely, and soon we gain critical advantage.

After which the western knights are no more.

Bravely done! You fight like a man!

Of course those 3 assassins aren't going to be very useful for anything anymore.

So I send them against this here guard tower

Aaaaand they fail

Looking around the map where I could launch the second assassin drop pod, I decide to put them on top of this micro-mob.

PEEKABOO

Allah akbar, these idiots weren't even able to wipe the archers

But well, with just 2 left, they are as good as out. So the deep strike wasn't entirely useless.

The desert is a cruel place to fight. Are you sure you have the heart for it?

I tell Saladin to finish the job at the guard tower.

This unfortunately triggers the crusaders something vicious!

Fine, you can bring down a few buildings. How about a fair fight?

WHAT CAN ONE DO AGAINST SUCH RECKLESS HATE?!

Also it's only now that I notice these knight regiments are actually 48 men strong, while the normal knight units are 21/21. Goddamn cheaters!

Turns out it's the entire city that's after our asses now. Well, let them come.

Our trebuchets can't wait for all that juicy, slow-ass heavy infantry

But first we wipe the knights.

The templars come under heavy fire.

German units are the first to reach us, so obviously I focus on the styrians first. No javelins for you, assholes.

Then our infantry engages the longshields and pilgrims while the cavalry starts doing elaborate manoeuvres.

Motherfuckers put a lot of meatshields between us and the archers, which means I can't just go ahead and trample them.

Until the infidels finally disperse.

DON'T RUN! WE COME IN PEACE!

Which means that all that is left is Richard himself.

Events have come to a pretty pass when a king must cower in his castle. But cower I must.

We shall strike from multiple sides.

First our archers will dispose of the spearmen. Then the cavalry will charge in from the south and the east against the archers.

Meanwhile the assassins will sneak in from the north.

Open fire!

The saracen horsemen are the first to make it to the scene... which makes all the enemy units switch targets to them

So I dance the horsemen around a bit to make everyone else get there, otherwise they'd get slaughtered.

Our klever stratagems let us split the crusaders and engage them on our terms. Meanwhile the spearmen turn tail and run.

Saladin tears down the guard tower, meanwhile the rest massacre the bowmen.

Soon it's just the Lion left on the field of honour.

He puts up fierce resistance, but he's too vastly outnumbered to make a difference.

After which the assassins chase down the retreating spearmen.

And slaughter them to the last man.

Victory!

So... I am bested and my poor bones must rest in these wretched sands!

All those looted items will be very useful now...

Now, I wonder if the outro is any different from the crusader campaign.

...

...

...

...

NOPE

IN FACT IT'S THE EXACT SAME ONE

HEUHAUEHAUEHUAEHAHUEAHUEHAUEAHEU

And on this optimistic note, we shall hereby end our grand LP of conquest and suffering.

The Holy Land has been reclaimed. And then reclaimed again! Truly, we have accomplished some miraculous feats in the last months.

Thanks for reading.