Talk:The Lion and the Demon/@comment-38338366-20190128174758

There is a relatively easy way to beat this mission in moderate difficulty - without the need to construct a wonder - by defeating all the enemy AI.

When you start off, have your villagers concentrate on farms and gold mines. Put 3 on wood. Put the fishing ships to work.

After starting, immediately take your galleys East - you will find an island with gold and a river that leads inwards. This river leads directly to Jerusalem's town centre - take your galleys there and take out all the villagers. You can position your galleys to avoid the towers.

Keep creating villagers and concentrate on food production. Keep at least 6 mamelukes garrisoned in your castle to deal with raids.

Train a transport and take the 2 trebs, around 5 mamelukes and your cav archers to the island near Jerusalem's base. Use the trebs to knock down all of Jerusalem's buildings. They should resign.

Now take 2-3 villagers via transport to Jerusalem's former base and build a TC near their gold pile and wood line. Afterwards, build a castle to guard this new forward base. Train vils at the new TC to take wood. Create all military buildings in the new base. There is a gold pile to the east of Jerusalem's base - use a light cav to scout it out and take a villager to seal it off with palisade walls.

Build a castle near the front west of your main base to keep away teal's warships. Train 5 cav archers in your main base and keep them garissoned along with your mamelukes. Use them to beat off the oncoming raids on your main base.

Now, concentrate on taking out red, who is arguably the most dangerous opponent. Train seige rams and hussars. Use your hussars to scout out reds base. Start your attack by taking out his forward towers. Counter the longbows and scorps with hussars. Blue and yellow will help red defend by sending over paladins and bombards - use your mamelukes to counter.

By the time you take out reds towers, your ally should send you the war elephants. Send these to your new forward base. Replenish your troops and push forward with the siege rams, trebs, war elephants - focus the attack on reds 2 castles behind his tc. War elephants help tremendously to take out the castles by soaking in the damage. Use hussars to suppress the longbows and your mamelukes to protect the rams from paladins.

After taking out reds castles, wipeout his TC and the rest of his base. Use hussars to kill of all his villagers. Red resigns.

After taking out red, it's easy. Next take out yellow- Kill your hussars and switch over to heavy cav archers. Use them with mamelukes to deal with yellows Teutonic knights and paladins. Treb down yellows base, kill most of his vils - he should resign.

At this point, the AI should have run out of gold and can't make units to bother you. Take out blue and teal at your leisure.

Of course, it's much harder in the hardest difficulty -  watch the Viper AOC's YouTube vid on how he beats the hardest AI in this level (without wonder victory)