Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (PC) - Achievement - Hot & Spicy

Prevent Tabasco from being defeated in the third Montezuma mission "Quetzalcoatl".

Your ally, Tobasco (orange), will be attacked early on by the Spanish. The attack can consist of Conquistadors, Bombard Cannons, Cannon Galleons and infantry. The size of the attack seems to depend on how well defended your ally is. If you have support in their base, the attack will be lessened. In this video, I attempted to get as much stone as possible early on to get a castle up near their Town Centre as well as constructing a forward base nearby. This leaves your town open to attack, but this can easily be countered. The main objective should just be to make sure your ally's Town Centre isn't destroyed in the initial attack. Once the initial attack is repelled, you can focus on resources, research, building up your army and defeating your enemies at your own pace.

Credit to cleverfool97 on Reddit who provided the following solution.
Link as follows: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/dxxy7y/how_to_achieve...

This is simply my take on it on their advice.

The first part is the key to it all, and you can save the game and reload if need be too.

The easiest way to do this is to send two villagers immediately to your ally’s TC, and build a monastery, train two monks, and build a watchtower.

Then when the enemy galleons are firing at something else, convert them using the monks. Be careful as there are up to five in the area.

Repair the ally TC if needed, focus on economy.
Then build units and take out the Spanish settlement to the NE of the map as soon as you can, or they will be a problem once they get to the imperial age.

Take out both enemies and the achievement is yours!

This achievement was glitchy in the past, and I couldn't do it, but it was recently fixed.
I just unlocked it with a combination of the solutions posted above.

First I put all my villagers on stone mining, until I got the 650 stones. In the meantime I built a monastery, and created 2 monks, then I sent everyone to Tabasco where I dropped the castle, and built another monastery.

Go with the left route highlighted by @Mac10goesBRRRT above, just in case.
https://imgur.com/a/EDjN5XG

Keep building your economy and getting the upgrades to the castle and units.

Use your monks to convert units from blue, and when the galleons start appearing, send those units and let them play interference to draw the galleons fires, and then sneak your monks and convert the galleons.

Rinse and repeat until you have a strong economy and start rolling over red, and then blue. I kept villagers in Tabasco for when the castle needed repairs.

Here is the location of my castle, I hope this helps:
https://imgur.com/a/zKc71kQ

I highly recommend using f3 (pause) a lot. This strat can work but if you agro too early or if Cortez goes after your villagers, you may have to start over, but with this being about 5 minutes, its hardly much of an ask.

1. Start by grabbing all 5 of your villagers, as well as the eagle scout at your barracks, and move them up the middle path to Tobasco. At the same time, spend all your food to create more villagers.
Kill the jaguars on the way or else they will just chase you.

2. Have 3 villagers create a tower near Tobascos town center and put your 3 villagers in it, and use two to create a dock. You can put it to the right from the shallows that Cortez will send troops, just as you exit the fog of war near Tobasco. When its done, put those two in the tower as well.

3. Have your newly created villagers collect stone (at least 200), with wood and food after.
When the dock is finished, start creating fire ships. Put them on NO ATTACK, because if they attack troops in the shallows, they can get destroyed, and you only have the gold for about 4.

4. Use your eagle scout to kite enemies that go under your tower. (In case you don't know, kite means to agro them and walk around, guiding them in circles). This is because you don't start with the murder holes tech and we don't have time to gather the wood/food/stone for the university/tech.
Keep a close eye out for cannon galleons, use your fire ships to kill them. There are about 3-4.
As soon as you are able, take villagers out of the tower and create a second tower near the Tobasco town center. Don't create it directly next to your first.
When you are able, create a barracks in Tobasco. The worst is now over but we most likely still have a few troops attacking lower Tobasco.

As soon as the initial attack is over, you can boom your economy.
The villagers are useful to heal Tobascos buildings as well as your towers, and you REALLY want the barracks because Cortez will occasionally send bombard cannons to attack, we want a few troops up here to defeat them.

The achievement will pop as soon as the mission is over.
I found an easy way to win was create an army of 50 arbalests and 4 trebuchets, stole Cortez's horses, and use that army to defeat red afterwards. Cortez has around 28 horses total so you have some wiggle room if some of them die. I went this route so I didn't have to hunt down all of Cortez' men.

Happy hunting (>*_*)>