there's also a glitch where gaia towers will fire a single arrow at the unit discovering them, and even do damage! This can be seen in the "I'll be back" scenario in the greek campaign, when your transport boat first discovers the towers of the gaia village. The "war horn" will sound immediately before discovering the gaia tower.

Actually, for birth of rome, all of the other 7-8 civs have anemic economies, and tend to send most of their villagers (usually villager high is no more than 5 for each enemy team) scouting. Last time I played the mission, every other civ (except for possibly the one that builds scouts, that town I raided) sent all their units, both villagers and troops, to my base, and my population screen became all blue without requiring to hunt any units down. Of course, the map is the largest possible, so hunting down buildings was actually quite time consuming.

Canyon of death can probably be conquested without too much headache, since you get access to stone throwers later on, and can even convert two more stone throwers for a total of four. I suppose the lengthiest part would be going back through the old continent and destroying all the towers.

Assassins would definitely be a pain in the neck, may take 2+ hours.

for great hunt, it's actually pretty easy to avoid triggering early victory, since the artifact is at the very top corner of the map. The Sumerian catapults must then be killed, not converted, and any sumerian heavy cavalry close to the northern corner must also not be converted. Otherwise, avoiding the northern corner in the line of sight should not be too hard.

Also, I mentioned in my original post that crossing the alps may be very, very difficult, if not impossible. There are two red villages, and given enough time they will boom to the iron age and create tons of troops. Also, there's the village at the very end which has tons of guard towers, and they too will boom to iron and spam centurions and catapults.

Additionally, what about the Greek scenario Wonder? That one might be actually impossible; you would need to either kill all the yellow villagers before the wonder gets completed, or finish the conquest of all three enemies before the yellow wonder's 2000 year mark. The former may be possible, but the latter I think is not.

actually it's pretty easy to confirm conquest; simply look at the "survival" column in the post game achievements, and if conquest is successful, there should only be a single blue "yes"

in battle of tunes, there is often a yellow "troll trireme" parked right outside the east walls of carthage that I had to hunt down even after the yellow base is completely annihilated.

also, ironically in oppression the Tang is quite technologically backward. Even though they start out with phalanxes and catapults, they are actually still in bronze age, and at least in my playthrough don't even appear to be too interested in upgrading from scout ships to war galleys!

some of the runs on bigbassie30's youtube page appear to be faster than the actual listed world records on this site. I went through and compared the times manually; the list is below. Hopefully it's complete, though I may have missed one or two.

third greek war 1:28, beats 1:43

spartacus 15:15, beats 19:49

queen zenobia 6:45, beats 7:59

caesar vs pirates 13.46, beats 15:31

phyrrus of epirus 9:54, beats 10:01

farming 4:18, beats 4:47

siege in canaan 9:02, beats 10:17

xenophon's march 6:14, beatts 6:19

i shall return 14:24, beats 20:46

mountain temple 21:31, beats 22:03

canyon of death 2:44, beats 3:19

a friend in need 9:34, beats 10:14

syracuse 9:28, beats 12:50

metaurus 9:14, beats 12:58

additionally, I guess one could think of this as an individual scenario 100%, as opposed to just beating the scenario, which is sort of like any%.

also, some more scenarios where it would be really interesting to see the strategies involved are Oppression, Ninevah, and Crossing the Alps. Interestingly, Ninevah is not that hard to conquest, since the single villager working on the wonder can be killed and they will make no attempt to replace it. Crossing the Alps in my opinion may be the hardest mission to conquest (I've personally never done it nor seen any videos), since it takes around 10 minutes or so just to get villagers, the tech tree for that mission is nerfed, and also both the red and yellow team spam tons of fully-upgraded troops and siege weapons.

A majority of the campaign scenarios can be won without destroying all enemies, and hence involve making the fastest beeline possible to the goal.

I've been doing some "conquest" runs lately, in which I simply destroy all enemies (excluding non-war boats, which don't count toward survival). For the vast majority of campaign scenarios, doing this automatically wins the mission, even if the explicit goal is something else. There are a few exceptions, for example in Tigris Valley you still must deliver the artifacts even if you destroy everyone.

I'm curious as to how quickly some of the campaign scenarios can be done with "destroy all enemies", e.g. conquest, particularly scenarios like Coming of the Huns (which would involve killing not just red, but also yellow and orange) and also Battle of Tunes.

For example, here's a Battle of Tunes hardest/fastest conquest in about 37 min RTA, played on the demo version: ... Of course, I'm not nearly as good as the top players here, so I have a feeling if someone much more experienced took a shot at this, they could get this one down to say low 20s.

More generally, I think conquest runs of campaigns (of course, not counting the ones whose official goal is already conquest, like Lord of the Euphrates) would be interesting, since the strategies involved may be completely different, but equally, if not more, interesting.

current leaderboard says record is 8:44, but this video by big bassie is 6:28

or have I missed something?