Talk:Kaesong/@comment-92.203.173.143-20180614231705

At first I thought it's impossible to beat this map on hard, but with tons of pausing, saving and reloading it can be done. It's very important to do all the right steps in the beginning. First of all, build a wooden gate at the city wall and get all your men to the wall AS WELL as the 3 ships at the dock (it will soon be attacked, but nevermind, its not that important in the beginning). Create some villagers and send them to the stone piles right away. Build two towers at the gate as soon as possible (Korean towers have mad reach and upgrade automatically) and man them with 5 archers each. Send Wang Geon out to destroy the trebuchet (he can take a lot of punishment), after that your towers should manage to kill most of the incoming troops. At all the time you should boom and produce a lot of villagers and gather as many resources as possible.

When you reach castle age and have gathered enough stone, you'll want to build a castle as soon as possible. If you want you can try to send some villagers on a sneaky stealth mission to build a castle north of the small red Silla village, build an archery range, man your castle with a bunch of archers and build a wall across the whole peninsula. Now you can try to gain control of the northern friendly villages by killing ALL of „Hunbaekjes army“ in the villages (beware, there is also a ship hiding in the north east). After that, you'll get resources as tribute over time. You should also send some villagers with transport ships to the small islands in the east and west, there are some stones and gold ores out there.

I'm not sure if the AI goes into imperial age before you do, so keep in mind that when you reach imperial age, both AIs will use trebuchets against you – a lot. So have a stable and a monastery close to your castle and rush your chevs out to destroy the trebs as soon as you see them. Use the monks to convert as many cavalry units as possible. Keep in mind that stone is pretty scarce and reparing your castle or rebuilding it will be a costly thing. It took me some reloads to avoid the worst.

Now before rushing to destroy the enemy castles there are three things to keep in mind: the green enemy (Hubaekje) will build a wonder after some time and you'll have to destroy it or else you'll lose. I managed to send two transport ships with 5 fully upgraded rams each close to the wonder and destroy it before time ran out. The other thing is: China will declare war on you as soon as you destroy the northernmost Silla castle. So before that happens, it might be a good idea to destroy the southern red castle and the green castle first (send some transport ships with trebs, but have some fire ships as cover). Even better: build your own castle on chinese territory and a workshop with lots of rams, destroy the northern Silla castle and watch the Chinese get wrecked as soon as they declare war. The third caveat: both enemy Ais will rebuild all buildings EXCEPT castles, so don't waste your time with small attacks but send tons of chevaliers, monks, trebuchets and rams at once, keep a constant flow of units and soon your enemies will stand to the back of the wall (or sea).