Legendary Walkthrough: More Mad Medians in Mesopotamia!

This is a follow up to my original guide, where I talked about the general requirements and strategy on doing a legendary quest. This guide is a specific application to the popular quest Legendary: More Mad Medians in Mesopotamia!, a.k.a. Mad Medians, a.k.a. Meso. While it is a bit harder than Legendary: Recapturing Marion, it is extremely popular due to the following reasons:

• The quest is immediately available upon reaching level 40.
• The quest starts at Age 3 with 1000 food/wood/gold/stone.
• The initial attack comes quite late (around the 5~6 minute mark).
• The base has only one entrance (Marion has 2).
• The quest has no unit restrictions. This means palintonons (only no walls or towers).
• The payout is insane.
  • 10000 gold, 60 Empire Points, 10 rewards chest from the Celeste drop table, and 5 treasure guardian chests.

I am going to be playing Egypt and assume that you have the advisor Khepri. While Khepri is not absolutely necessary, she is very helpful as she greatly simplifies your economic management. If you don’t have her or choose not to use her, you will have to build farms and balance your resources. I will also assume you have the advisor Dumnorix (of any rarity), as that lets you get out more caravans earlier. Aside from that, I would assume you have epic gear on your elephants, as well as increase train/research rates, reduce train time, or increase movement speed items on your villagers, caravans, town centers (TCs), and Markets. The beginning 10 minutes is mostly the same regardless of the civ you are playing, though timing on when you start building military buildings are slightly different. For other civs, you can substitute elephants with berserkers, lancers, champions, or whatever powerful units the civ has as desired, and mix in palintonons if needed.

Since elephants with Khepri only costs gold and I am using Dumnorix, I like to start with 2 Town Centers (TCs) + 3 Markets. (3 TCs and 2 Markets is OK too. If you are daring, try 3 TC and 4 Markets with epic Dumnorix to unleash the true power of macro.) I immediately queue 5 villagers with Shift+A, rally my TC on berries, and build a priestess of Ra. I send 3 villagers to build a TC near the wood line, and 2 villagers northwest to build 2 Markets about 3 screens away, just past the choke point in the northwest. I hotkey both Markets to “3” and TCs to “4”, rally my Markets to my TCs, and rally my second TC to wood. Both priestesses should be on duty empowering the TCs. When the first Market is up, I buy more wood and queue building the third market with Shift+click, hotkey them to “3” again and queue them to the TC. The initial few seconds are usually somewhat hectic, but in a co-op game, you can queue the actions while the two game clients try to sync with each other. Optionally, you can use your starting axemen and scout to kill the nearby elephant, and move your villagers to gather from it as they get crowded on the berries. If not, move them to the choke point.

For the first 3 minutes, I build no military or defensive structures. At about 3:30, I send 5~10 villagers to the choke point in the northwest to build fortresses there, and start building extra houses for elephants. (the better your gear, the fewer villagers you need to send, and the later you can start sending them) Don’t simply wait till you have resources to build these fortresses. Instead, trade resources at your market for wood + stone if you have to. Put these fortresses and the ones near your starting point on the same hotkey with shift+click (I use “5” for fortresses). Start training elephants out of them, using the market to trade resources as needed. If you are willing to use consumables and find that you don't have enough defenses, throw a Bandit fortress at the choke point at 4:30 or so. When the first attack wave comes at the 5~6 minutes, you should have:

• 2+ fortresses at the choke point (4 if you want to be really safe)
• 2+ elephants, with more being trained
• 60+ villagers + caravans (if your skill and gear is good, you should have 80+)

The attack wave should have a few lancers, slingers, and bowmen, though the exact size and timing of the wave seems to vary a little from both my own experience and from videos I found. Unless you are overly greedy (ex. Having 100+ villagers/caravans in 6 minutes), you should not need to look at this attack to survive. To reinforce, just press “5a” once in a while to build more elephants. The next attack wave comes 1~2 minutes later, with a bit more units. You should continue to build villagers and caravans even while being attacked. These two attack waves are the ones most likely to kill or cripple you if you haven’t had your defenses set up. If they start killing your workers, restart the quest instead of trying to drag on. Once you survived these two waves, your econ should be big enough to carry you as you churn out elephants like clockwork. When you have the resources, advance to Age 4, build 2 armories, more fortresses (~10 total), and get all the relevant upgrades from the following buildings:

• Armory
• Fortress
• TC
• Market

Once you reach Age 4, max population, and have at least 2 levels of armory upgrades, gradually kill off your villagers and caravans until you have 60 caravans and ~10 villagers, and replace the freed up population with more elephants. You can kill the priestess of Ra’s and Scout as well if you want. There are little optimizations you can do while eco-ing up, such as moving your priestesses of Ra from powering your TCs to powering your armory, but they are not super important in the grand scheme of things.

You should be maxed again at 15 minutes, if not earlier. Head right with your elephants, leaving ~5 elephants at the choke point with your fortresses to help defend the attacks from the top. Destroy any fortresses you came across and attack the base on the right. That base should fall easily if you continuously reinforce out of 10 fortresses. The only thing that would take time would be the general, so avoid the general until the rest of the base is destroyed. Then, leave ~15 elephants there to kill him and the treasure guardians, while you bring the rest of your units back home and start heading north. You can also build fortresses/barracks/stables near the general to train more elephants or counter cavalry units if killing the general takes too long.

Next is the middle section with mass priest. If you are playing co-op and have a partner that uses ranged and siege units, let them handle it. (If they are good, they would have finished that section by now.) Otherwise, send all your elephants that’s not in the far right base to destroy the fortress to the north of your base, including the ones on guard duty at your main base. Then, send your villagers to build ~10 fortresses near the destroyed fortress, just out of range of the priests. You will need to target the elephants on the priests and walls as you reinforce with the newly constructed fortresses. Try to move your elephants back and forth to lure them out of the wall if you can. Do not attack-move the priests, as they would attack the converted elephants instead, buying the priests more time to convert your units. You will likely suffer many losses, but as long as your economy is good, you should have enough banked resources to simply power through.

Head north until you are at the folk road with the treasure guardian. Kill them if you have time and build more fortresses here. Now, you can either push west or north, I will assume you push west. I don’t find much of a difference, but regardless of which direction you want to push, you should leave a few elephants to guard the fortresses. At this point, if you are banking a lot of gold, kill another 20 caravans. The rest of the mission should be straightforward from here. You hotkey your new fortresses and continuously build out of them while attacking the base. There’s a few more priests behind walls, so make sure you manually target the walls and priests as needed. Destroy the base while avoiding the general, then kill the general with your elephants. As before, the generals will take some time to kill with elephants, so you can train counter units or build elephant archers if you desire. (I didn’t recommend doing this for the first general because elephant archers walk very slowly.)

Finally, push north through the backdoor southwest of the northern base, be mindful of the priests that’s there. Destroy this base as before. Note that once you get Enemies defeated: Complete message, the enemies become inactive, so ignore everything and just kill the general. When you finished the mission, clean up the remaining treasure guardians. There are 5 treasure guardian camps on this map: 1 in the far right base, 2 between the top 2 bases, 1 at the top base, and 1 at the far west corner.

For a masterclass on just how greedy you can be with this map, see Vick's playthrough of Mad Medians.