Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition
275 Achievements
208-210h
Steam
Age of Discovery
Complete the Francisco de Almeida Campaign.
4.4%
How to unlock the Age of Discovery achievement in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition - Definitive Guide
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The Francisco de Almeida Campaign is a series of five missions with you playing as the Portuguese.
1. The Old World
This one has you start with a small group of men. Stick to the far side of the bridge by the monk when the enemies shortly come to assault you; that way you'll be able to bottle them up. Micro away units taking serious damage to keep them alive, and then have everyone heal up. Your goal is to destroy a series of outposts, but you're going to want to skip around past all of them and gather up the reinforcements from every cranny of the map by bringing the hero unit to them. Once you've gathered everyone, begin your assaults; make sure to rotate out damaged enemies, and use your priests to convert some enemies as well as keeping everyone healed (make sure you do your best to keep them alive!)
After you've destroyed the bases, you'll finally be put in control of a base, with the goal of destroying the enemy military production buildings. garrison your troops inside of battering rams to get them across the bridge safely, and then use the rams to destroy the buildings, supported by your other units. Despite what the objectives say, you don't actually have to destroy the mills.
2. Lion of Africa
You'll start this mission under almost constant attack. You can't really save all your outlying areas from attack, so I chose to focus on the south, taking my troops across it and combing the desert, destroying the encampments. Trade with your neighbor to the west as much as you can while you can; spoilers, he's going to turn against you eventually. Once you've cleared out the south, you can reestablish your economic base here, but be aware that resources are scarce on this map so you're probably going to make heavy use of your market resource trading. Building another watch tower on the island and keeping a villager or two around to repair them is pretty much all you need to defend your base here. Send your armies up along the eastern edge of the map and reestablish a foothold here by the forests that you're going to want to cut down; I ended up building a set of military buildings here for quicker reinforcements. Using siege units protected by your main army, destroy the enemy; your ally will turn against you (I don't know if you can stop this by sticking an army in their base before you destroy the other guy first as the objectives suggest.) If you can't, using trebuchets to siege his castle methodically will still work wonders.
3. Ruins of Africa
This one is lengthy and tricky under normal circumstances, but you can actually cheese it. Leave your troops where they are and take your warships and sweep the entire ocean; you should end up with nine total warships, plus a few troop transports and scattered troops. The most important unit you're looking for is a bombard cannon. You can land this guy first at the city of Mombasa to destroy their wonder by attacking the ground (thus not breaking your diplomatic ally ship), and then doing the same for the castle near the red banner at Kilwa (for turning in your unit to be executed.) If you do this without siding with the rebels or Kilwa, neither will turn against you and you'll win the game with virtually no opposition. Just make sure to guard your bombardier transport with your warships, as there are hostile ships along the waterways.
4. Estado da India
This one has an interesting wrinkle; you can't build any economic buildings, meaning you have to get resources from destroying enemies. To start with, make sure to keep your villagers alive. You're going to want to use the bombard cannons to destroy everything outside your base within their range; make sure to lock your gate so no one wanders out. Use priests to heal your units and convert useful targets (like enemy elephants) when they attack you from land. By sea, you'll periodically get attacked, but it's basically not an issue as long as you make sure there's no artillery ships; to do so, when you're given the side mission, build two or three fire ships and two demo ships and take all your troops east. Use the fire ships and warships to destroy the enemies, then slip the demo ships around and destroy the cannon galleon. From now on, your bombard towers and castle will be more than enough to stop any naval threat.
Back at your base, once you've destroyed what you can within range of your bombard cannons, you're going to need to move out to secure more income. Make sure you have at least three bombard towers, and primarily build pikemen and skirmishers, as the enemy is almost entirely cavalry and archers and you want to counter them. The bombardiers will destroy every building they can to the northwest of your base, protected by your army.
Once you've secured this upper area, you can choose to either work on totally wiping out your enemy, or building and defending a wonder. I chose the latter, which takes a bit longer but is also really simple to do. All you have to do is turtle up in this area; I build two castles guarding the approaches, a few bomb towers, and finally a town center to pump out some villagers to make the wonder building go faster. You'll have to repel some enemies but I found that quickly converting elephants as they approached + my static defenses was enough to make this pretty simple. Just make sure your army doesn't go chasing after them. After the wonder has stood long enough you'll win; alternatively just sweep through the rest of this area with your troops. To defeat the other enemy you'll need a navy.
5. A Son's Blood
This one is kind of a pain. To start with you're going to need to use your priests and missionary to convert units. If you want the achievement:
The Friends, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears achievement in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition worth 192 pointsConvert Afonso without killing a single Portuguese unit in fifth Francisco de Almeida mission.
You're going to need to make sure you kill no units in this first part. So go slow, using your missionary to convert one unit while your two priests take the other. Do these enemies in pairs, making sure you restore your faith and health before moving on to the next group. Some enemies patrol, so make sure they're separated before you go for this; after successfully grabbing your new friends, quickly send them back to your base so they're out of the way, and then pull back; I sometimes found that the enemy would go looking for their friends and I'd be left with no faith to convert the newbies. After ten conversions, you'll be given the task to covert a hero in the base to the west, but there are still some patrolling enemies between you and them. For this section, I was saving a new copy of my game every four conversions or so just in case I screwed up and lost a priest or so. For converting Afonso de Albuquerque, I got another one or two priests and made sure that I'd researched all the available upgrades. Then I took my conversion train around the edge of their base to the northwest. From here your priests will be able to attempt to convert Afonso, which will cause him to come out with another few enemies; just target each of them with a pair of priests and you'll convert the lot.
Now, you'll be given the task of destroying a wonder. This is a good time to try and get the achievement for destroying a wonder with just a few years left (it doesn't seem like <100 years is good enough, try for just <20.)
The Final Countdown achievement in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition worth 89 pointsDestroy an opponent's Wonder with less than 100 years remaining on the Wonder Victory countdown.
Take your new forces, bolstered by some ships, and land them on the beaches to the southwest, then siege your way up the hill to destroy the wonder.
Once you've done that, your former allies will all turn on you, so quickly evacuate all your forces from the area where the wonder is; fighting across the narrow bridge is suicide and your home base is going to be relentlessly attacked. To stem these forces, you're going to want to build fire ships to protect the corner of your base, and ultimately destroy the enemy footholds protecting the two shallow passageways to your corner of the map.
Once again, you have the choice of turtling and building a wonder, or destroying your enemies. Like the previous mission, I chose the wonder (killing the enemies is much harder in this mission then the previous anyhow); once you've captured the two routes towards your base (they mostly attack from the west, so I built a castle there to cement my control) you'll deal with only naval attacks and a few enemies from the north. They do have some hero cavalry units that are very tough, so always make sure to target them first. You can build Feitorias to generate passive income, which will be useful once you've exhausted the gold, stone, and eventually even wood available in your corner of the map. Remember you can trade surplus for gold and other resources at the market. Tech up and build your wonder, defending it to win.
1. The Old World
This one has you start with a small group of men. Stick to the far side of the bridge by the monk when the enemies shortly come to assault you; that way you'll be able to bottle them up. Micro away units taking serious damage to keep them alive, and then have everyone heal up. Your goal is to destroy a series of outposts, but you're going to want to skip around past all of them and gather up the reinforcements from every cranny of the map by bringing the hero unit to them. Once you've gathered everyone, begin your assaults; make sure to rotate out damaged enemies, and use your priests to convert some enemies as well as keeping everyone healed (make sure you do your best to keep them alive!)
After you've destroyed the bases, you'll finally be put in control of a base, with the goal of destroying the enemy military production buildings. garrison your troops inside of battering rams to get them across the bridge safely, and then use the rams to destroy the buildings, supported by your other units. Despite what the objectives say, you don't actually have to destroy the mills.
2. Lion of Africa
You'll start this mission under almost constant attack. You can't really save all your outlying areas from attack, so I chose to focus on the south, taking my troops across it and combing the desert, destroying the encampments. Trade with your neighbor to the west as much as you can while you can; spoilers, he's going to turn against you eventually. Once you've cleared out the south, you can reestablish your economic base here, but be aware that resources are scarce on this map so you're probably going to make heavy use of your market resource trading. Building another watch tower on the island and keeping a villager or two around to repair them is pretty much all you need to defend your base here. Send your armies up along the eastern edge of the map and reestablish a foothold here by the forests that you're going to want to cut down; I ended up building a set of military buildings here for quicker reinforcements. Using siege units protected by your main army, destroy the enemy; your ally will turn against you (I don't know if you can stop this by sticking an army in their base before you destroy the other guy first as the objectives suggest.) If you can't, using trebuchets to siege his castle methodically will still work wonders.
3. Ruins of Africa
This one is lengthy and tricky under normal circumstances, but you can actually cheese it. Leave your troops where they are and take your warships and sweep the entire ocean; you should end up with nine total warships, plus a few troop transports and scattered troops. The most important unit you're looking for is a bombard cannon. You can land this guy first at the city of Mombasa to destroy their wonder by attacking the ground (thus not breaking your diplomatic ally ship), and then doing the same for the castle near the red banner at Kilwa (for turning in your unit to be executed.) If you do this without siding with the rebels or Kilwa, neither will turn against you and you'll win the game with virtually no opposition. Just make sure to guard your bombardier transport with your warships, as there are hostile ships along the waterways.
4. Estado da India
This one has an interesting wrinkle; you can't build any economic buildings, meaning you have to get resources from destroying enemies. To start with, make sure to keep your villagers alive. You're going to want to use the bombard cannons to destroy everything outside your base within their range; make sure to lock your gate so no one wanders out. Use priests to heal your units and convert useful targets (like enemy elephants) when they attack you from land. By sea, you'll periodically get attacked, but it's basically not an issue as long as you make sure there's no artillery ships; to do so, when you're given the side mission, build two or three fire ships and two demo ships and take all your troops east. Use the fire ships and warships to destroy the enemies, then slip the demo ships around and destroy the cannon galleon. From now on, your bombard towers and castle will be more than enough to stop any naval threat.
Back at your base, once you've destroyed what you can within range of your bombard cannons, you're going to need to move out to secure more income. Make sure you have at least three bombard towers, and primarily build pikemen and skirmishers, as the enemy is almost entirely cavalry and archers and you want to counter them. The bombardiers will destroy every building they can to the northwest of your base, protected by your army.
Once you've secured this upper area, you can choose to either work on totally wiping out your enemy, or building and defending a wonder. I chose the latter, which takes a bit longer but is also really simple to do. All you have to do is turtle up in this area; I build two castles guarding the approaches, a few bomb towers, and finally a town center to pump out some villagers to make the wonder building go faster. You'll have to repel some enemies but I found that quickly converting elephants as they approached + my static defenses was enough to make this pretty simple. Just make sure your army doesn't go chasing after them. After the wonder has stood long enough you'll win; alternatively just sweep through the rest of this area with your troops. To defeat the other enemy you'll need a navy.
5. A Son's Blood
This one is kind of a pain. To start with you're going to need to use your priests and missionary to convert units. If you want the achievement:
The Friends, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears achievement in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition worth 192 pointsConvert Afonso without killing a single Portuguese unit in fifth Francisco de Almeida mission.
You're going to need to make sure you kill no units in this first part. So go slow, using your missionary to convert one unit while your two priests take the other. Do these enemies in pairs, making sure you restore your faith and health before moving on to the next group. Some enemies patrol, so make sure they're separated before you go for this; after successfully grabbing your new friends, quickly send them back to your base so they're out of the way, and then pull back; I sometimes found that the enemy would go looking for their friends and I'd be left with no faith to convert the newbies. After ten conversions, you'll be given the task to covert a hero in the base to the west, but there are still some patrolling enemies between you and them. For this section, I was saving a new copy of my game every four conversions or so just in case I screwed up and lost a priest or so. For converting Afonso de Albuquerque, I got another one or two priests and made sure that I'd researched all the available upgrades. Then I took my conversion train around the edge of their base to the northwest. From here your priests will be able to attempt to convert Afonso, which will cause him to come out with another few enemies; just target each of them with a pair of priests and you'll convert the lot.
Now, you'll be given the task of destroying a wonder. This is a good time to try and get the achievement for destroying a wonder with just a few years left (it doesn't seem like <100 years is good enough, try for just <20.)
The Final Countdown achievement in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition worth 89 pointsDestroy an opponent's Wonder with less than 100 years remaining on the Wonder Victory countdown.
Take your new forces, bolstered by some ships, and land them on the beaches to the southwest, then siege your way up the hill to destroy the wonder.
Once you've done that, your former allies will all turn on you, so quickly evacuate all your forces from the area where the wonder is; fighting across the narrow bridge is suicide and your home base is going to be relentlessly attacked. To stem these forces, you're going to want to build fire ships to protect the corner of your base, and ultimately destroy the enemy footholds protecting the two shallow passageways to your corner of the map.
Once again, you have the choice of turtling and building a wonder, or destroying your enemies. Like the previous mission, I chose the wonder (killing the enemies is much harder in this mission then the previous anyhow); once you've captured the two routes towards your base (they mostly attack from the west, so I built a castle there to cement my control) you'll deal with only naval attacks and a few enemies from the north. They do have some hero cavalry units that are very tough, so always make sure to target them first. You can build Feitorias to generate passive income, which will be useful once you've exhausted the gold, stone, and eventually even wood available in your corner of the map. Remember you can trade surplus for gold and other resources at the market. Tech up and build your wonder, defending it to win.
2 Comments
if you struggle with the first mission on this u can kill the duke for the 500 gold and then buy some food from the market place and delete your army then train villagers at the town centre. buy wood from the market place as well to build some houses giving you a base to start with
By RockCiayton on 06 Jul 2021 00:11
For the 5th mission, there's a hilarious cheesy fun method I discovered. The mamluks are the only ones getting resources, everyone else is frozen until you convert the target. If you convert the patrolling soldiers, then build docks and town centers, you can gather loads up resources and start up a ton of trade cogs to trade with mamluks! You can even find some camels on the western shore and use them to explore the whole map! You can't build transports until after you've done the mandatory conversion, but you can stockpile resources so you can immediately research imperial then flood the ocean with cannon galleons to conquer the seas. I also prepped and built about 40 various boats to protect my cannon galleons. Fun mission this way!
By Shadow 00 Fox on 29 Jan 2022 02:10
Caramel, Cardinal
*Story related and can't be missed
Francisco de Almeida is the first Campaign of "The African Kingdoms" expansion to Age of Empires 2 and consists of five levels. Upon completing the final one the achievement will unlock.
The Friends, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears (20G) achievement can be unlocked during the start of the fifth mission of this campaign.
Some tips for the other missions are:
Francisco de Almeida is the first Campaign of "The African Kingdoms" expansion to Age of Empires 2 and consists of five levels. Upon completing the final one the achievement will unlock.
The Friends, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears (20G) achievement can be unlocked during the start of the fifth mission of this campaign.
Some tips for the other missions are:
- 1st Level - Retreat across the bridge at the start to lure the enemies into a choke point to minimise your losses, from there explore the map taking over as many red's men as possible then attack yellow bases. once you defeat yellows, you will gain a base, take the remainder of your army there to defend it, build up your economy and small army then go on the attack.
- 2nd Level - At the start, lure the attacking ships into the castle with your own ships, on the north shore quickly build a wall to defend from the greens. Take your troops to the far east then work your way south killing yellow bases to prevent them attacking you, if you put some troops in red's base using a transport ship he will go on the attack against your enemy leaving you free to build up your economy and base, cannon galleons are a good bet as red will turn on you once you defeat green so you could take your remaining ships and just quickly destroy his castle.
- 3rd Level - This could be a hard mission but can be done cheaply, at the start take your ships and explore the ocean to the south east until you find the transport ship with the bombard cannon, then sail northeast to Mombasa, land your bombard cannon and have it attack ground on the yellow wonder until it is destroyed, reload your ships and then land on the opposite shore to the red dock, take a couple of troops and your bombard cannon round the outside of red base until you can attack ground on the edge of their castle. once it is destroyed the mission will complete.
- 4th Level - Defend your base from the initial attack, its worth converting a couple of war elephants. Then rebuild the gate and also build a town centre so you can replenish lost villagers though you cant build much of an economy. use your bombard cannon to take out any buildings from inside your walls. Once you get the objective to destroy the enemy cannon galleon, build a couple of demo ships and take your navy to attack there ships, lure there main navy away then send the demo ships to the cannon galleon. Thereafter it is worth converting the dragon ship when you get chance as this will give you a hero who gives you twice as much gold per building destroyed, keep building your army and attacking. once you have more space you can build a Fetoria or two to help with resources.
- 5th Level - Before converting Afonso, build up your base and economy, this will allow you to quickly build the army you need once everyone else turns on you. Once converted you will need to destroy Diu's wonder, this is quite easy as you are given cannon galleons, then you will want to go on the attack. a mixture of cannon galleons /ships to attack by sea and a land army should suffice.