Bertie’s Quest

Overview

The ultimate out of the box scenario!

Scenario Info

  • Victory: Lead Bertie and Extrañita through the scenario, they must not die!
  • Way to victory: Solve the puzzles along the road, using all your aoc knowledge.
  • Players: 1
  • Civs: Celts

Setting up the scenario

When downloading the scenario, make sure to put the AI files in the AI folder of your aoc installation. The scenario won’t work without these files! When starting the scenario in single player, make sure to use the following settings:

Download

Download

Solution

It is possible to solve the scenario in little over an hour, however you can safely play the game on fast speed and do it in 45 minutes. It is very possible however that at one point you’ll get stuck, so I’ll write down the solution of the puzzles below. Spoilers ahead!

Puzzle 1

Bertie is stuck in the forest and there is only one way to get him out: cut him out. You must cut the tree in front of you and when you’re holding too much wood (which you can’t drop off anywhere) you must right click on the boar to hunt it. You will drop all your wood and are now ready to cut the tree again. Repeat till the tree is gone.

Puzzle 2

Down the stream you’ll find yourself 3 unbuilt fish traps. You can delete them and recover the wood. Which is enough to build a dock with a transport ship. You can cross the river now.

Puzzle 3

The first harder puzzle. You must manage to gather 50 gold to pass the tollguard. There is no other way than paying because the tollguard is simply too strong.

You only have 60 wood left so that is not enough to build a lumbercamp. However, 60 wood is enough to build 1 farm! Here’s how you can use this handy feature: make the 5 villagers cut wood till they all hold 20 wood. Then gather them and let them all build on the same farm. When the farm is done, they’ll drop all the wood in your repository. You now can build a lumbercamp to chop trees. Later you can make a market and trade 100 wood for gold. You can safely pass now!

Puzzle 4

A little trick that is sometimes used in RM games now. Killing enemy hunt. However, when villagers kill a boar, it’s still edible. If soldiers kill a boar, it’s not edible! So put the archer you met between palisades and shoot the boars.

Puzzle 5

You can safely pass the town now and you’ll find a siege onager to help you on your quest. Siege onagers have the most known special feature in the game, namely, cutting down trees in the blink of an eye. The trick however is to knock down the trees on the cliffs, because cliffs with cut down trees become walkable.

Puzzle 6

An easy trick/puzzle now. Crossing the cliffs made you lose all your resources, but there’s an unbuilt house which you can delete to receive 30 wood. You’ll also notice a piece of bamboo in the middle of the tree. This is a so called straggler tree. Like the trees you see around your town center in regular games. You can chop them down and put a building on top of them to quickly erase them off the map. So putting a palisade wall will make you easily pass this obstacle.

Puzzle 7

Wall/Tower hopping now! Simply garrison your villagers into the allied tower and let them out again to cross the wall. You can’t go back now but if you have about 25 wood left from the house, you have enough to complete the quest.

Puzzle 8

Time for the reverse trick now and above that a nice arena trick! The gate out of the mines is locked, but there is a stone mine with a mining camp next to it. You can use it to gather 125 stone to build a tower next to the closed gate and do a hop.

Puzzle 9

A little déjà-vu now. Explore the sea a bit to find the unbuilt fish traps and use the wood to cross the puddle with a transport ship.

Puzzle 10

Just a little scenario editor trick! Don’t worry, this will be the only time you’ll be playing Moses in the scenario.

Puzzle 11

A wolf guards the road, and he has an attack of about 300, enough to kill anything in a single bite. But despite popular children stories, they don’t kill wolves, so you can use the sheep to explore the road. There you will find a siege ram and a scout cavalry. Scouts don’t get attacked by wolves, but he’s not strong enough to kill the wolf before he bites back. However, wolves don’t bite back on siege rams! So you know what to do here.

Puzzle 12

The longest puzzle in the game, but not the hardest one. First explore the valley a bit and receive your wood. Since Extrañita forgot the plans of a lumbercamp at the cliffs, you can’t build one. (Don’t try it, it will be deleted right away and you need all the wood.) Move your villagers to the bridge and delete some of the walls, then build a dock with a transport. You’ll notice a relic that blocks your path, but also a stone mine.

There was a mining camp next to the tower, so you can mine 40 stone and transport the villagers back to the other side to drop off their load. Use this stone to repair the tower and make the monk join your forces. He can carry the relic and unblock the path.

Puzzle 13

Lucky number 13! Well in fact, this is the most lethal puzzle if you don’t execute it correctly. And then the game is lost. You better use your sheep first to scout out the area to see what I mean. Luckily you still have a ram alive who can eat all those bombard towers if he uses his splash damage well! Just make sure the ram survives. It will be a narrow win, but a win nevertheless.

Puzzle 14

A more advanced wallhop here. The castle is fully surrounded by stone walls, yet you can enter the castle through a little glitch.

Puzzle 15

A band of longbows is guarding the river crossing, they will kill your current army, so you better send out your scout to find reinforcements. There you’ll find a dock where you can train a transport (to pick up your siege ram for future puzzles) and a demolition ship. You can buy some gold in the market to buy the demolition ship and repair your ram later on.

The demolition ship trick is also used sometimes in highland games, where the one controlling the river can use demolition ships to guard the shallows.

Puzzle 16

The most micro intense puzzle now. It’s a little trick that will help you in all kinds of battles too! Archers and towers attack what they see first, but what if they see a ram first? Then they’ll keep shooting at the ram, which means that you’ll absorb at least 270 shots before your units are in danger. So it’s a great trick to blend in rams into battles against archers. Here you must lead your party next to the towers, using your ram as an arrow sponge. Just make sure everyone survives!

Puzzle 17

Another little trick for you all, taking over hostile farms. If a villager is tasked on enemy farm that is currently not worked on, he’ll change the farm to your ownership, restoring it to full strenght too. Anyways, that way you can gather food for your transport back home.

Puzzle 18

Not many maps allow this trick to be used, but here you got it anyways, boats can fare through ice.

Puzzle 19

Last but not least, kill the hunwhore! This last one has multiple solutions however the easiest one is to protect your monk either by the forest or some palisade walls while he converts the hussar.

Victory!

Don’t hesitate to share other solutions!

Written by Cysion

  • blue525252

    With #15 I built a fishing ship from the dock and gathered the fish in the river and then sold that for stone and built a tower next to the archers and killed them all.
    Then on # 16 the towers only seemed to attack military units so I just walked by them with my villagers.
    On # 19 i just let the hunwhore kill my outpost and again walk right by it. It only attacked my military, just like the towers.

  • leatherneck

    How can i update my game?

  • scipion

    Hey guyz! Can someone help me out? I can’t download the scenario :( with what programer should I download it?

  • Tpojat

    very good and nice!i had fun!thx

  • JohnnyL

    Is “hunwhore” perhaps a little pun, referring to Hun war? :D

  • ????

    Wtffffff. I think 13 needs more explanation.. My ram keeps dieing if I just send it in, can’t distract them with a scout or dodge all of the bombards manually either. I don’t think it would be able to take down all the towers even if it was at their base and they couldn’t fire.. as it only takes about 3 hits for it to die.

    • http://www.cysion.be Cysion

      That’s because you play with the 1.0 patch. You must play with 1.0c because there, bombard towers are changed so they don’t do a lot of damage to rams :)

      • John

        I tried about 15 times, avoiding the cannonballs with a discracting scout cav, after i was facing the same problem. I managed to get the ram to hit once or twice. The damage dealt was puny! Then I came here, looked at the walkthrough, got even more confused then jumped to the comments. There, i saw this, so I quickly updated the game to 1.0c. The problem persisted though, I am not able to finish this awesome scenario…!! Any recommendations?

  • Corazol

    At puzzle 12 you can also make a fishing boat and sell the food for wood and stone.

  • lDarKl

    Awesome! :D

  • †[Kros§]†»Interceptor

    I converted the hunswhore but it died :( a hussar in my team would be cool :D

  • †[Kros§]†»Interceptor

    I did the 2nd puzzle in a different way when I played after gathering 330 wood from fishing traps I built a mill gather food from both boars and one shore fish nearby and one farm that i built from remaing wood. then I made market sell all the food then buy all the wood and make dock and transport.

    • http://www.cysion.be Cysion

      Interesting, did that leave you with enough wood to complete the next puzzle?

  • Jigsaw

    At 6th puzzle, I just used berries to “remove” wood just like in the first one.

  • Anonymous

    haha awesome! and hey qiyamat :)

  • Qiyamat

    Couldn’t find the unbuilt house on puzzle 6 :(

    • http://www.cysion.be Cysion

      The unbuilt house should appear once you pass the cliffs and see the yurts. (The condition is: if you see the yurts, create the foundation for a house). I just tested it and it worked :/

      • Qiyamat

        I started it all again, and it was OK. I followed the game settings completely the 2nd time, the only difference was I locked teams. Odd!

  • anon

    Cysion, did you make this?

    • http://www.cysion.be Cysion

      Yes I did, the mainplayer is me anyways :D (Bertie)

      • anon

        Wow man, very nice, You rox

  • sletten

    u can walk past the hunswhore without fighting, he auto attacked my outpost
    11
    and the toll thing is bugged

    • http://www.cysion.be Cysion

      Yeah, I fixed the toll guard already. Made the palisade walls have 30K hitpoints, so you better not do that again :)

      The hussar, well, I didn’t want a straight path to the finish, so he’s there. :p

      • BlanketPI

        Please take what I have to say with a grain of salt. I was not in a great mood before I started, so that has a negative impact with how I experience things. I also know that it is a whole lot harder to make a game than to play it, so….

        Since your main characters are villagers, you don’t need the Siege Ram to get through the tower wall. The towers don’t target the villagers. I guess it’s because it’s on Standard difficulty or something. I sent my Siege Ram through, expecting to get something later that would enable me to get through, since I didn’t think of keeping my enemy preoccupied with my Siege Ram. (Stupid, but I expected to get a Bombard Cannon or Trebutchet, though a Cannon Galleon would work, too.) The ram couldn’t make it back, so I figured that either I rush through and make it alive or I die and go back to the checkpoint, however those work. I made it through and then since the Hussar attacks the Outpost, I got through unscathed in the most incorrect way I can think of, other than swamping the towers with War Galleys, though I don’t think you have enough food for that, considering they have Heated Shot.

        Another thing that differed in my method was the Archer and Wild Boar thing, where I used the main characters to block the Wild Boar, since there was that nice little forest patch surrounding him on three sides. (The villagers are enough to make a “wall” on the remaining side. The furthest Wild Boar required me to lure said Boar and quickly remake my “wall”.)

        I also used the trick for the first puzzle for the second wood blockade. (Hey, I didn’t kill the first boars!) I used War Galleys for the Longbowmen and, lastly I used Fishing Boats to get all my resources, so I could research Careening and Fletching as well as make more War Galleys. (I made 4 in the end, one in hopes of luring the Hussar at the end, since I read ahead and didn’t know of the Outpost thing)

        I had plenty of times where I checked this page. I needed help on 3 (I should have thought of that, since the manual even mentions it… sort of), 5, 7, (I knew that thing too) 10, 12 (I should have known…), 16 (after the fact) and 18. So I got things wrong where it didn’t work out, too.

        I don’t see how this is thinking outside the box, though. I mean, a lot of this is glitches and engine oddities. It isn’t making a strategy that deviates from the obvious or what is normally the best one for you. It’s just… following the expectations of you. It does teach you about some interesting glitches and oddities, though. …It must be almost impossible to make a scenario which does make you think outside of the box, though, so I commend you on trying.

        I suppose this is an old article and whatnot, but I thought I would share my thoughts regardless. As I said before, please take this with a grain of salt.