Ciononostante

Those two issues with the mission are the key to winning it:

The enemy is incredibly defensive.

The enemy will direct all of its units up to the north-west town (Polis)

Unless you enter their attack zones, the enemy will not move towards you to attack. And in addition to this, you can literally be attacking an enemy town and they will send their troops away to Polis instead of defending the town.

There are four towns in the game: Limassol, Famagusta, Nicosia and Polis (going anticlockwise from the bottom left of the map). The result of those two key features of this map is that L, F and N are all incredibly easy to capture, but Polis is a nightmare. But we'll get to that when we get there.

You begin the mission landing in the south-west, right outside Limassol.

King Isaac will run off to Polis before your turn starts.

Do not build a town. Like in Richard's Jerusalem mission, I believe it is best to just attack the enemy town (Limassol) and capture it instead of spending resources building a town from scratch. I try to attack just one of the town buildings so I can capture the rest.

This should only take 5 turns at most to destroy the TC. I think if you're good you could even do it in 3. Make sure to use Richard's hero power that boosts your units' attack stats. Once that's done, get rid of the remaining units and bring in your villager to capture it. And once it is captured, take a moment to heal. Since there's no minimum turn goal, and because all the enemy towns will send their units to Polis, you don't really have any reason to rush.

With your strong units, including some archers, you should move towards the mountain chain in the centre of the map. Here there's a castle which is usually guarded by a lone throwing axeman (although there are some ranged units nearby on mines, so watch out for those). This is pretty easy to take out and I like to deal with it early (plus it's one of the bonus goal).

The map is really intuitive since you pretty much follow the road around in a circle. Crossing the river is the next step: there's a crossbowman on a mine there which you need to be careful of, but that's about it. Once you get over it, however, you are very close to the Famagusta units' attack zone. Try to avoid going too far unless you're ready.

The good news is, however, that (for some reason) the enemy's starting army has a lot of men-at-arms and light cavalry despite the fact they start off in the castle age. This means you can generally withstand the attack if you're unit is full health, so a misplacement isn't a huge deal.

Also around this time, I like to build a castle roughly where the enemy's one was. Longbows will be a huge help later on, so start training them. You can even use them now to pick off any units travelling from Nicosia to Polis (just make sure to completely defeat them so they don't heal and return stronger than before).

Once you've gotten everyone across, attack Famagusta. I kept botching up my sieges (bad unit placement, forgetting to use Richard's power), but it's pretty easy if you get your battering ram in position (and it doesn't get hurt along the way).

Now, this is the easiest part of the game: capturing Nicosia. It is on plains surrounded by mountains, so your ranged units can attack theirs without getting counter-attacked and even your normal units can get defence boosts while they attack. There's even a square perfectly positioned for you to send your battering ram up to attack.

In the meantime, you should build a church in Famagusta and send a group of units east, down that peninsula, since there's a relic at the end of it, but a couple of units are guarding the beginning bit (where there's a mill). They're not a serious challenge though. The only other relic you can reach at this point is the one right near Famagusta, to the south. To save you some trouble, send a monk up north towards Polis when you can, since the last relic is all the way up the top of the map.

After you've got your monk on its way down the peninsula and Nicosia is captured, we move to the final stage: attacking Polis. Note that you do not need to capture Polis to get the 'capture all towns' bonus goal. I think this is because it's so difficult to capture it without defeating Isaac first, which would end the mission (it is possible though, and I've done it a few times, but more on that later).

I'd like to note that by this point I think I only had two units get killed the entire mission. It's just so easy to get units to safety because the enemy won't chase you far. This is why it's such an easy mission too, because the only way to lose is if Richard dies. Even if you destroyed all your towns and just waited, the enemy wouldn't do anything. They'd just keep sending troops up to Polis to wait for you to attack, building up their defences.

And it's like a hornet's nest there. The only way to win here is to chip away slowly at their defences with ranged units and then press forward when a gap is available. It's a long and somewhat boring siege, but at least it shouldn't be too difficult.

Also, be aware that there's an onager on a mill across the small mountain range, guarding the path to Polis. It can only attack one road tile, but it's still worth getting rid of it fast to make your life easier. The enemy is also not totally defensive: if you place units on that road, they will attack you, but they won't send more than one or two and maybe fire at you with ranged units at worst.

Once you've got units across the river, you can really start doing some damage. I typically build extra castles to make it easier for me to cross the 'alps' and also to make a path so I can attack the town from its south side.

Just be careful when attacking Isaac: either defeat him and leave the TC intact (but destroy the rest of the buildings) or leave him and destroy the town. You need to wait until you've captured the last relic so you can complete the last bonus goal.

With that done, defeat Isaac (or destroy the TC) and you've won.

And here are the game stats. You can see that the general trend is 'Isaac starts out with a big advantage but then slowly plateaus or decreases while Richard steadily increases almost constantly'. This is not a mission where you can wait the enemy out and hope their funds dry up because they're not going to run out of resources easily, but by removing their mills and farms you should manage to reduce their unit cap (this is just me assuming, but it should be correct). There's also no reason to worry about stats this game: they'll be ahead no matter what. As long as you have enough units to defeat the next town, you'll be fine. By the time you reach the hard part (Polis), you'll naturally have the forces you need to win.

Now, I've said this mission is boringly easy, but that I love it. Part of that is because I once challenged myself to complete it by attacking Polis first.

See, I looked up the real English invasion of Cyprus, and I learned that Isaac wasn't defeated in Polis, like it says, but on that peninsula where the relic is (the Karpas Peninsula is its actual name). So I wondered 'is it possible to force Isaac across the map and make things more historically accurate?'

I attacked Polis from the south, and then forced Isaac out. Turns out, he will move when sufficiently threatened. I then attacked Nicosia and pushed him east. I had to get rid of Famagusta so he wouldn't hide there, but in the end he pretty much stopped moving past the beginning of the peninsula. Which was a little disappointing, but better than I had expected.

I think on a separate occasion I tried attacking Polis without capturing any town first (for the 'moving Isaac attempt' I might've captured Limassol first). This was quite fun. It was long enough ago that I don't remember my exact strategy, however. But I think it was mostly just moving cautiously and ensuring I had enough forces to attack and avoid suffering much in the way of counter-attacks. I can't recall if, without Polis, the enemy stopped sending its units there, or if they still kept trying to send units there to attack me. Either way, I think I actually won faster than usual since the other towns aren't as well defended as Polis.

If you've read any of my other AOE posts, you'll know I believe in attacking fast rather than spending time building up my force. Well, this mission is the biggest exception to that rule: the easiest way to win it is to just keep on building your army, gathering resources and researching tech.

You see, I advise attacking fast so you can try to block your enemy from expanding and so you get two thirds of the map to develop on, after which you're almost guaranteed a win. In this map, you already have (almost) two thirds of the map completely free.

The map needs to be explored, but here's what it looks like at the end. It can be split into roughly four sections: the grassy forest you start in (right corner), the mountainous desert (bottom corner), the lake area (top corner) and the desert plains (left corner). Only those last two corners have enemy units, and the bottom mountain area is completely free for you to build on.

In addition, there is a river that cuts the main, central road (there's a bridge at the end of it). That river (roughly) defines the enemy's territories: after you cross it, you will get a message where the leader of each army warns you that you're not welcome.

The enemy very rarely goes over this line. They will eventually, even if you don't cross into their zone, but surprisingly they don't try to expand southward much. I had a few enemy villagers (from both sides) try to build mines in the southern mountains, but that was about it. I think they just really focus on attacking each other and get obsessed with fighting over he resources in the middle.

I did get an army from Khwarazm Shah (or as I like to nickname him K$hah) travelling down along the river and into the mountain area, but I'm not sure what their goal was. I picked them off before they did any real harm.

You'll start in the Dark Age and so will the other teams. This is also why a focus on development is key. Firstly, you fulfil a bonus goal by being the first to reach Age 4, but if you age up fast enough it'll give you a good advantage over the enemies. Keep Genghis on your TC to use Patron of the Arts so your research will be cheap. I wouldn't move him off until about the Feudal Age because after that you'll probably be earning enough resources that the savings aren't that useful.

Focus as much as possible on building and researching, but still spend a bit on units. You don't strictly need them right now, but if you have the funds you might as well get them for later.

As you can see in the picture above, I like to build a TC at the borderline bridge. If you can do it early, you'll probably manage it without needing to worry about your villager being attacked, but otherwise just station one unit on the bridge and you'll be fine.

I also put a few units near this ford that borders the Prince of Kiev's territory. There's a second one a few tiles to the left which is easier to cross, however, but it's also closer to the 'no man's land' that's between the two enemies, which can make it difficult to get a hold on the territory across it. But the ford shown above is in some ways worse as there are so many forest tiles (and another ford to cross) which makes it slow going. I mostly go here to prevent the Prince of Kiev's army from making any attacks this way, and to distract some of his units. I built a castle there as well, to help blockade it.

The Prince is technically the weaker opponent, but I always find myself defeating him last. I think it's because he is just harder to get to and K$hah has his main towns right near the bridge.

I don't really have much more to say about this: if you have a strong army and don't attack until you're ready, you can't lose. Unless you do what I once did and put Genghis onto a ruin and he gets killed from that. You'll need to go to all of them to get the extra star, and to do that will require you to go all the way deep into enemy territory since there are a few up there. Use your scout at the start to find as many near you as possible, and search for the relics needed for the third star.

The relics are also pretty annoyingly placed. I tend to build a town near the one in Kiev's territory, mostly just to save myself the trouble of transferring it, but you only need to get the monk to pick it up: it doesn't need to be stored at a church.

Because your enemies are fighting each other, you can count on them to help you out and stop each other from getting too strong. I don't think it's possible for one to kill the other without your help, but I've never bothered to wait long enough to find out. If they can, it'd take way too long for it to be worth it. Not to mention two enemies fighting each other is easier to beat than one unified front.