Challenge: Kill the Docks (Elite)

This is the second article in the series dealing with Greek capital city challenge quests on elite.

Early on in your AoEO career, you want to start having a crack at this quest on Elite, and even when you get to level 40, it's worth the occasional look at it because on Elite mode, you're receiving level 40 chests.

Plenty of people do this on co-op, which is fine, but try and get to the stage where you solo it. I wouldn't say it's a difficult quest (it's not), but there's a smart way to do it, and then there's, shall we say, the inefficient way to do it.

You should always (always) be aiming to get the second objective of finishing five minutes early.

Kill the Docks is one of two capital city quests available from the Port Master. The Bandit Armada is the other one, and I'll cover that one another time.

The Port Master is the Quest giver for Kill the Docks

Open the book to find out more!

Start Game

As you send your villies to nearby resources, you'll immediately get attacked by wolves, which you can kill with a combo of your scout and Town Centre. Most of them will be killed near a storehouse you've already built, and you can use them for additional food.

Start of Kill the Docks, I've set my waypoint at the bottom of the screen,
it's there where you should be able to kill wolves for food.

You only need to get to Age III in this quest, and as you do that, it's worth adding a couple of Hypapists to help protect your home base, keep you infantry close to your Town Centre, don't have them chasing enemies out of range (come back you idiots!).

In the early days, I used to try and complete this quest by building siege and a force to attack the enemy base. That's the inefficient way.

Later on I graduated to using triremes from a dock built near to our Town Centre - that's getting there.

The smart way is to avoid both of the above.

Middle Game

Get your scout to clear the way along the right perimeter of the map - kill the wolves along the way.

Send a villie to that far corner, and build your dock there - you only need one. Make sure you mark a path along the perimeter for the villie to follow - otherwise they will run directly into enemy fire - and give their life up for nothing.


I've built my dock at the top, got one trireme out, and have started queuing fire ships

At this point, you are probably aging up from II to III, so knock out one trireme, and attack the one closest to you. If you use the villie that's still there to repair your first ship, you will kill the one enemy trireme in that area.

After that, forget triremes. If you have not learned about the strength of fireships, you are about to learn that now.

Start pumping out fireships from that dock. Attack the first dock - even with only one fireship, that dock is history. By the time you're onto the second dock, you'll have three fireships in your fleet, and that dock will go down quickly.

I think you'll encounter one more enemy trireme, but by now you have four fireships, and they'll make short work of that trireme.

Kill the third dock quickly, keep moving around to where the bandits are, one more enemy tireme might be lurking there, kill it and wait there alongside the bandits.

Ok, three docks gone, five minutes early, easy as pie.  From the moment my first ship came out, to when the three docks were destroyed, it took less than 90 seconds.


Once the docks are done, collect your ships around the bandits

End Game

Now at this point, the enemy still has a bit of a force, you now want to start focusing on building up your infantry to make sure of getting the chests. Build a second barracks or an archery range. You can even consider sending around a trireme or two to attack the enemy from the water (they have better range than the fireships, keep them tucked away for the moment).

Use this force to work its way through to the bandits where you've parked the fireships and that should be enough to gather those chests.

Bring the survivors back, keep assembling your force, then grab the chests in the middle of the map - by this stage - the enemy forces should have been diminished to not present you with any problems.

Final action, take the bandits in the middle of the map

Advisers

Once you make the decision to complete the task using fireships, you are likely to want to favour boat based advisers.

Possible advisers, a couple of choices for Age III

In Age III you can probably choose from Explorer Pytheas  (reduces cost of ships) and Good Sailor Ammon (increases damage).

A quick, fun quest done and dusted!

Brawny Polecat