Age of Empires II: Stephen Speedrun World Record (

[@manansuthar9859]

Wow, you made it look so easy. I can't believe you can beat easily without building much knights or serjeants. I thought you need pop efficient units like knights in early game till you have 30-40 longbows. I get it why you prioritized towards Scottish king as they build huge number of seige onagers but you finished them before even onagers. Is it possible to be faster to capture 4 matilda's castles then towards north and then east? because you can get many relics from matilda and parallelly you can mass searjeants against irish and can get potentially more gold. Also the first castle i thought should be matilda's eastern castle, that can give access to relic, 2 gold piles, some stone piles and easy safe wood income as you need to defend on western side and northern bridge. Will starting from eastern castle slow you down?

[@TheMcGreevy]

Hello again! I did prioritize the Scottish because in practice runs they seemed to always attack me or get a lucky onager shot like you said. Also because I'm English and it is our natural instinct to attack the Scottish... I found Matilda to be more difficult to kill until I had a lot of army and upgrades. If I destroyed her closer castles and pushed to finish her, her remaining base created so many units that it was difficult to completely kill her. Her raids didn't seem to be too strong either and I was able to stop her raids and the Welsh raids with just a few walls whilst I went north. I found the others were easier to kill so I took those out first to increase my population limit for Matilda and grab a couple of relics. I never found myself to be too low on gold so I didn't prioritize relics too much. The other big reason was to have all my army regrouped in the South for when the Normans attacked. If I start North to South, everything is gathered there to fight the Normans right away. I do think there are a lot of ways to do this scenario that are unexplored, serjeants being one of them. I just love longbows and if you give me an opportunity to use them I can't help it! I'll have to do it again at some point because I need to get the rams only achievement too. I enjoyed the Stephen campaign and I appreciate that you think about these scenarios as much as I do :D

[@manansuthar9859]

@@TheMcGreevy yes I noticed Matilda mostly raiding you with longbows for some reason. Imagine if all 3 main AI players become aggressive then it would be so difficult with so little gold access. But you never know if you take a different path then you may not need to gather much gold and manage your vills much. 2 matilda's base (east and north) and then towards north also seems good. Once your pop cap increases, you can build 2 donjons to create 12-14 slite serjeants and petrol towards Irish 2 bases and they will destroy everything and you have pretty much all 4 resources accessible there. But I can't believe how easily you sneaked in between two welsh bases to gather gold and stone. I thought they are supposed to raid you easily there and you were supposed to pacify to have access as they mentioned in hints or scouts report. But I think that gold is very important as you didn't collect a relic and 2 gold piles in the east. Yes I agree if you beat Matilda at last then you will have an easier time to beat the landing party but I also found it easier if you just build donjons all over the southern coast from east to west and kill as many transports as possible so if you beat Matilda at last then you don't have time to prepare donjons. But you need to Target each transports manually as they are neutral. I killed so many transports so only 80-90 units landed and the battle finished early. Yeah the thing about using rams, I think it is very difficult to destroy 2 Scottish bases once they have full siege onagers because rams will slow things down and give them time to pick upgrades. I also thought that capturing all castles is mandatory as normans will trigger around the 1:38:00 mark, so it is necessary to capture all to beat your run.