Age of Empires II
I restarted the first Attila mission ("The Scourge of God") more times than I care to remember. I didn't bother looking up a walkthrough this time around, as I was determined to figure it out myself. After my first few attempts went nowhere, I eventually discovered that an early suicide mission against the Western Roman Empire's base was the ticket to allying with the Scythians. I was worried that sacrificing all of my starting Tarkans would set me back against the Persians, but it turns out that my new Scythian allies were powerful enough to carry me to victory. By the time I belatedly researched shared vision, I saw that the Scythians had already landed a huge army on the eastern bank and were beating the Persians into submission. Interestingly, both enemies must have still been allied with the Scythians because neither one fought back. Needless to say, this latest playthrough was a far cry from my earlier ones.
Alien Nations
After taking great pains to reinstall the game, I decided to refresh my memory by playing the tutorial missions. First of all, to that one GOG reviewer who claimed that the tutorials are "meticulously thorough", what on earth were you smoking? Let's not BS here: aside from some very basic info in the briefings, this tutorial won't hold your hand. If you're new to the game (or, heaven forbid, the RTS genre), read the manual and some of the strategy threads on this site. If a guy pestering you to build Taverns and Newsstands sounds like a "meticulously thorough" tutorial to you, you're due for a lobotomy.
The fifth and final tutorial, "Armaments and War", gave me some issues. As the title suggests, it's the mission that introduces you to conducting warfare. If you attempt to build up normally, you'll get attacked by squads of Sajkhi hunters in the first 12 minutes. You can imagine my bewilderment when the initial wave of enemy hunters somehow wiped out my 3-4 hunters and 2 archers. I'll spare you an extended rant and just blame it on the game's clunky controls and bad pathfinding. I eventually figured out that the Sajkhi won't attack you if you quickly train around 3 hunters (in addition to the 3-4 you start with). This surprised me, especially since going the Barracks/archers route didn't work the first few times. I guess it's because hunters are faster to train than archers, and you can't even build a Barracks until you've researched it.
When my army consisted of 2 hammer soldiers and 2 archers, I sent them off to locate the enemy city. I should've known that a team of Sajkhi hunters would come knocking when my army was off exploring, so my city withstood a bunch of casualties in the final few minutes. Thankfully, my army reached the enemy base before my HQ could be destroyed.
