Age of Empires: The Age of Kings

Aside from farms and mines, I think you should get a market and a church up ASAP. Get two markets and one church per town, if you can (two markets usually just ensures that you'll have at least one great type of merc available per hire). Markets can get you rare and otherwise unobtainable soldiers like Knights Templar, Persian War Elephants or Celtic Woad Raiders, who are some of the greatest units in the game. Between your elite units and your priests who can heal them, you should be able to take out countless armies (especially once they're all promoted from fighting so much). Make sure when researching you work on improving your Priests heal ability and defense. After that you might want to build a blacksmith so you can improve the quality of your fighters.

If you do this, you should be able to take out Lachish or Ramla (or both) by turn 10 or 11. This also means that you should be able to snatch up all the resources west of either of those cities. With all those resources you will be able to afford a castle or two (I recommend putting each castle adjacent to one of your cities). With all the structures you can have to stand on and heal, you might consider defending your territory while you build up a massive army for the final push.

One last note about taking out Lachish and Ramla... Once either of them fall, you can occupy the city with a turn and transfer any excess forces to the other side of the river via the ford to assist with sieging the other city.

For the final push, you should have several war elephants and celtic woad raiders (these guys will take out enemies without taking heavy casualties, and they're decent at knocking down structures), knights templar if possible, a few spearmen, and a good amount of catapults. You might want some archers as well, just to clear off units the enemy is training so that your catapults/rams can hit a structure every turn. Don't waste time making your special units from castles (mercs are better than the mumaleks), just use the castles to heal up to four combatants at once.

Units that are a complete waste of time are as follows: Horse archers, swordsmen, elite skirmishers, camels, longswordsmen, mumaleks, and a ton of other things. The basic rule is, if it isn't a priest or a unique unit, it's just a fodder troop. Units that are superior usually have any of the following special abilities: Causes Fear, First Strike, Skirmish, Zeal. Scare Horses is also nice if you're killing a lot of cavalry which uses horses and don't want spearmen (since they're pretty worthless against anything that isn't cavalry).

Anyway, I don't know if that helps, but I hope it does. Don't underestimate mercenaries or Saladin, and have a ton of priests. Also, remember that peasants aren't worthless. They can help destroy buildings or finish off weak enemies when sieging towns.

Wow! Thank you very much for your detailed reply! I have printed it out so when I next play the mission I'll give it a go! i think one of the reasons why I have so much trouble with this mission is the very small unit cap at the start of the mission.

I shall try building markets and churches (I do use alot of the monks in most of the missions anyway) instead of going for a castle at the start and build the castle when I've got enough funds. I think my main problem is instead of building a huge army and then attacking, I take what little units I have in to attack and they always end up getting killed. So it would be best to get as many units as poss, guarding my resources and then attacking the cities?

I shall certainly give it a go. Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply, I really appreciate it.