“Prepare my quill, little mouse. We have a crusader lord to teach… that his ‘brave knights’ are just slow, overpriced units with a fatal weakness to a 2-gold torch.”
The library fell silent. The Emir looked from the parchment to his own war tent, where he had just lost a siege because he sent 50 Templars into a chokepoint defended by 30 Macemen and 10 Crossbowmen on a tower.
“Exactly!” Al-Rashid’s eyes gleamed. “But the counter is not what you think. You would send archers. But archers have a pierce value of only 20. A Templar’s armour negates it entirely. No. The true killer of a Templar is the Maceman .”
Al-Rashid pointed to a column of tiny numbers beside a drawing of a hooded figure. “The Assassin. Speed: 18. Attack power: 40. Hit points: 50. The Lord’s Swordman, by comparison, has a speed of only 12, attack power of 35, but a robust 120 hit points.” stronghold crusader unit stats
The Emir stared at the scribe. Then he smiled, a cold, hungry smile.
“My lord,” Al-Rashid whispered, unrolling a massive, meticulously drawn parchment. “I have finished the calculus of blood.”
The Emir, a fat man more interested in his hashish pipe than warfare, sighed. “Speak, little mouse.” “Prepare my quill, little mouse
And that night, the siege began not with a horn, but with a multiplication table.
He rolled up the parchments and handed them to the Emir.
The flickering torchlight of the Arabian library cast long shadows on Al-Rashid’s face. He wasn’t a lord, a general, or even a soldier. He was a scribe —and his latest obsession was driving his Emir to distraction. “Exactly
He moved his finger to a sketch of a chainmail-clad knight. “The Templar. Cost: 40 gold. Armour: a staggering 5. He can take an arrow to the chest and barely grunt. But look here—” he tapped a footnote, “—his attack speed is glacial. One swing per 48 frames of combat.”
Al-Rashid shook his head. “No, my lord. It is won by a scribe who knows that a Horse Archer has a range of 8, a speed of 22, and the hit-and-run logic of a wasp. It is won by remembering that a Slave has only 20 hit points but costs a mere 2 gold—meaning a wave of 100 slaves is mathematically superior to 10 Swordsmen, even if every single slave dies.”