Talk:The Sting of the Scorpion/@comment-27263122-20171119180201

If you feel overwhelmed fighting on three sides, just don't. Wall off the passage a bit north of your base, just a small distance away from the stone so you can still mine them within the walls. Afterward, start a nice economy (I'll let you decide how 'nice' it will be) and reach the castle age as fast as you can. Don't forget to put at least 2-3 on the stone and gold, especially gold.

Once it castle age starts researching, build an archery range and start a couple handfuls of skirmishers and use your stable to build a few scouts. As said above, the scouts will be for the mangonels which are seriously annoying. What you want, however, is to block the immediate small passage to the east of your base with a gate or houses or an archery range. Niger will  be the first to attack and will hit that area first. If the way is denied to them, they may snake around and hit you from the north. Prepare for that.

Once castle age is reached, quickly train knights. They will be to ones to go after the Niger's cavalry archers and their mangonels. If you want, you can even upgrade the skirmishers and use them as well. A nice skirmisher army is very effective against Niger. Just remember to have 5 or so knights to take out their mangonels.

WARNING: Do not venture north of the map with any of your units! What you want right now is to deal with Niger first before the others. Labe and Sangaran will NOT attack you or your allies if you keep to yourself. You may think they'll take out Wagadou while you're distracted, but it seems they aren't set as enemies until you actually meet up with Wagadou.

PS. I'm actually wondering if holding off on meeting Tabon will mean you also don't have to fight Niger either... wonder how the triggers work...

Once you have the stone and troops, start crossing Tabon and head for Niger with your army and a nice group of villagers. You'll see a gate and two towers. Just a bit away from the towers, start building a castle. Some may want the castle to be close enough to hit the towers, but I like to play safe and make it far enough away that you can hit troops that pass the gate, without actually getting distracted by the towers.

By now, the game should run smoothly and you should be quite safe. The castle will absorb most of Niger's forces, so you can concentrate on building a knight/skirmisher army for your invasion. A couple petards (at least 6), can quickly move in and destroy the gate and both towers. Afterward, it's a simple invasion of troops with kinghts on the siege/towers and skirmishers on the cavalry archers. Sneak in the relic cart and you'll win a short moment later.

For the rest, the strategy above is good enough. This explanation was just a way to quickly take out one side without having too much on your plate.

PSS. I had a bit of fun at the end and built a couple dozen barracks and just threw hundreds of them into Sangaran. Since Sangaran mainly used archers/skirmishers, scorpions, and monks, the passive pierce bonus that Malian infantry get made it a fun thing to watc