Sim Campaign: Mission 5 - The Crusader's Castle

By Lord_Chris

Mission Objectives:

• Win: Time Until Victory 24 Months
• Lose: Your Lord Dies
• Lose: No Food In A Granary

In this mission, you are tasked with feeding Sir William's population while he is away. If for even so much as a second his Granary is empty you will lose the mission. Therefore, it's important that you keep not just plenty of Carter posts, but also a fast and efficient food supply. And there's no better way of doing this than using your second estate to mass produce food. It doesn't even matter what type of food, because Honour is not an issue in this mission.

You can actually see his Granary food level represented on your screen by the red line, and the time until your victory is represented by the corresponding green line. Start by placing three Carter Posts at the edge of your estate with the two bridges. Feel free to restructure parts of your estate if necessary, including moving your Barracks if you need to. Next, place as many Apple Farms in your old estate as possible. Don't place any more hovels, though, unless you absolutely have to in order to produce workers for the buildings. Now, turn back to your current estate. You should fill up all available space with Apple Farms.



Now that's out of the way, you need to reconfigure the Carter Post from your old estate. By chance if you followed our advice in the preceeding mission, you should have a few hundred Apples in that Granary now. Start by shipping them all into your current Granary. Next, once you receive your first shipment, you should easily have over 100 Apples in your own Granary. Setup all three Carter Posts in your own estate to deliver 20 Apples continously to Sir William's Castle. These numbers can be increased later on, but right now your priority needs to be getting as many Apples as possible into your own Granary.

If you haven't already, ensure you turn your own ration level back to normal. This will prevent any excess food from being consumed by your population, and therefore make the mission harder. Also make sure that you reduce the tax level in your Treasury to whatever you can afford to have in terms of popularity- you must make sure you keep a positive popularity to prevent peasants from leaving the castle.

If you followed the earlier advice of only sending three shipments of 20 Apples to Sir William's castle, you can now probably amend these shipments, certainly two of them to send 50 Apples instead of the earlier 20. This should greatly help in planning ahead for further trips.

Tip: If you feel you have the time throughout this mission, you may wish to send some of your soliders to attack some of the outlaws. This is something you will have to do anyway in Chapter 7, and doing so now will save you valuable time- especially since the Outlaws are constantly attacking you anyway. Skip straight to our guide on Chapter 7 for a clear strategy to kill the Outlaws.

Eventually, the countdown will end and you will win the mission. Remember to save the game so your progress on mission 5 has been saved, or alternatively, you can download a saved game of this mission here from the downloads section.