Still playing
Age of Empires 3, now in the second (and last) expansion pack
Asian Dynasties.
The second mission (Uprising!) in the expansion pack felt quite damn hard at first. In the beginning of the mission you are supposed to rush with your starting party to destroy as many enemy town centres as you can, hopefully all three. The more you can destroy them, the smaller the enemy army will be that you'll be fighting at the end of the mission.
I just couldn't do it in the Hard level. There's only like 9 minutes to destroy the town centers, and I'd usually just lose all my troops at the second town center.
Anyway, then I noticed two things in the beginning of the mission:
1. The timer won't start until you free the first prisoners in the starting city (you need to free them to reclaim that city).
2. Small amount of "experience" trickles in even if you are not doing anything.
So it didn't take me long to figure out that I could really turn tables in my favor by simply waiting for a looooooong time before I free the first prisoners. The experience points that you slowly get will allow you to "buy" some more troops and also get some resources, slowly but surely. Also, there is a certain "card" that you can also use with the experience points, which will also give you a small trickle of all resources (food, wood, gold).
So what did I do? I kill the first enemies in the starting town, then put my starting troops to a corner to wait (not freeing the first prisoners), and then just let the game idle for hours. I went to sleep and got back like after 8 hours to see how it looked, and yep, I had received 33 "experience card unlocks" and lots of resources by merely waiting.
So where this guy destroys the first "prison" at around 3:40 in this Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5P25KyZvnU#t=220 I stopped right before that and waited 8 hours, before proceeding. :)
This made the mission to destroy three town centers considerably easier, but still not a cakewalk. I could get more troops and advance rapidly to higher technology ages at the beginning of the mission, and had enough troops to destroy the town centers, even receiving some artillery.
I just love it when I am able to fool the game engine, even if it feels a bit like cheating.