Looking at the OG campaigns and I found couple of exploits that the current runs haven't done.

Some of the sequence breaks involve bypassing the forced turnback triggers using right click spams. On 2.5x game speed, my mashing is sometimes not fast enough to do this trick. A workaround could be to lower the game speed setting, bind your right-click on the scroll wheel, or to use turbo if that's allowed.

Greek 4:

By going to the Thebes/Sparta border early, you can prematurely provoke them to attack before beating the first three enemy towns. But the victory trigger still requires us to do every objectives, so we can't just skip the first three enemy towns.

Prematurely provoking Thebes could be helpful though. Because they're going near the right town (Pallene) and middle town (Aphidna), we could pit the Thebes army against the Pallene & Aphidna armies, having them kill each other. Thebes will win without much of their army left, and Pallene & Aphidna armies will be gone by itself. Although we can't leave the remaining Thebes army alive for too long or they will destroy Pallene's Town Center, which will lost us the game.

After we've sent our bait unit to Thebes, we need to bring him back down. Because if we don't have a unit near the middle town (Aphidna), Aphidna's armies won't be provoked and they will just remain in their town when Thebes army is fighting Pallene.

Not sure if it's useful to bait Sparta though, since we still have to do the other story objectives anyway.

Greek 5:

The 10000 Food objective can be ignored, as long as we kill all the Spartan army. Although without 10000 Food, there's a small area near Sparta with a turnback trigger, so we need to use the right click spam to bypass that.

Might be a bit faster to ignore the food objective and use Chariot Archers to beat the enemy, instead of using Elephant Archers like what the current runs have done?

Although without getting 10000 Food, some of the enemies will stay behind on the Spartan town, and we have to walk further to reach them. So I'm not sure if ignoring the food objective is actually faster or not.

We can also use the starting Phalanxes to kill the 4x Spartan Stone Throwers straight away from the start, since these Stone Throwers are not protected by any other troops at the start.

English 3:

The victory trigger is simply to have William go beyond the London gate. Although the gate would be locked and we normally have to do all the battle sequences to unlock it.

We could also bring some Citizens and use the gate glitch twice to destroy some of the walls besides this gate. This lets William bypassing the gate while ignoring the actual battle.

The current run can do the battle rather quickly, so the gate trick might not be a lot faster than just doing regular battles. Although the gate trick should also speed up the first part where we have to fill our Pop Cap, since we don't need to care about our army composition, and could also use Prophets to fill our Pop Cap slightly faster. Plus, we only need to setup one Transport ship for this trick, instead of using multiple ships to send our army.

English 4:

We can win by destroying Calais Town Center straight away. The objectives at Caen can be ignored. The starting troops we got after finishing the naval battle is enough to just go to Calais straight away to destroy the Town Center without any tricks. But, perhaps it could be even faster to use this trick here.

The first naval battle part lets us build Transport ships, which normally would've been useless. But this trick lets us keep this Transport ship after the naval battle part, which lets us send our Trebuchets to the unguarded shore of Calais and blow the Town Center without dealing with the enemy units.

After finishing the naval battle, the game's trigger is supposed to remove all of our ships, by using the Scenario Editor's "Continental area" feature that's supposed to cover all the waters. However, this land bridge and the river right of it aren't counted as part of this "Continental area". So, any transports here will be kept after the naval battle.

There's two challenges for this trick:

• There's a turnback trigger when our ship is getting close to France, so we need to bypass it with right-click spam. When this trigger occurs, the game will also plays a Hurricane animation, but it's not a real Hurricane and can be ignored.

• The land bridge is right next to the green French Rurals enemy cavalries, and they'll attack our ship once we got close to it. To avoid this, we can either have the ship reach the bridge just before the naval battle is about to be finished, or we can also send a battleship alongside our transport to deal with the enemies on the land bridge.

English 6:

After reaching France, the game wants us to do the Harfleur objective first before the final Agincourt battle. There's a turnback trigger set up before destroying the Harfleur's buildings, but we can bypass this with right-click spam.

What's funny is if we go to Agincourt before finishing Harfleur, all of the Agincourt enemies will seldom attack and just keep running up and down. Because the AI will still want to go to Harfleur, but there's a turnback trigger for the enemy themselves if they went out of the Agincourt area.

English 7:

Just a small optimisation compared to SpagetiMetbul's run. His run fights the enemy on the yellow Salamanca town, but this could've been skipped as there's another path on the forest that lets you bypass Salamanca before heading to the final army.

English 8:

The victory objective is to kill Napoleon's cavalries and cannons. His granediers and himself can be ignored.

Napoleon's army is already on the bottom of the map at the start. We can just straight away kill them at the start while ignoring the actual objectives. Looking at SpagetiMetbul's run and how quick he could build his army, it seems very doable to just attack Napoleon's army straight away.

Also a small optimisation at the start when we control the Prussian army. It would be slightly faster to end this part by just mass suiciding most of our Prussian troops.

Useless Exploit Attempts:

• Greek 7: We can actually just skip battling the Persian Army and head straight to destroy Tyre Capitol. But the game won't give you Antioch's Dock or Meleager's Catapults without beating the Persian army. Trying to break Tyre walls without these is very slow and definitely not worth it.

• Russian 5: Just before our units switch sides, I've tried to use Hades' Time Warp on my Citizens on Cuba, hoping they can come back straight away on the island still under our side. But instead, these warped Citizens will just be gone permanently.

Found a new exploit for English 1, which isn't done on AD586's 43-minute run yet.

On the bridge to Falaise, there's two enemy groups. One on the front, and the other on the back of the bridge. To unlock the gate to Falaise, we only need to kill the second group.

If we save and load before meeting these enemies, the first group on the front somehow starts to move north away from the bridge. So, we only need to fight the second smaller group on the back.

Not sure why this happens. The first group is set to use the Patrol function around the front of the bridge. Maybe save&load glitched their Patrol function somehow. I first noticed this glitch by playing with the Asus Drivers map reveal cheat, but the exploit still works the same way without any cheats.

Can't think of any other levels where similar glitch can help. Don't think there's any other scenario where enemies with Patrol function can block you from getting somewhere.

Woah! First of all, I am glad to discover that this forum is rather alive than dead. It is always a pleasure to see the enthusiasts even a quarter of a century after the game was released.

Found a new exploit for English 1, which isn't done on AD586's 43-minute run yet.

Nice finding! Although I am not sure if save-loading would faster than simply killing the first group. Retaking the English campaign would have been too cumbersome anyway, as it is too easy to make a mistake in scenario 5 either by losing track of Sir John Oldcastle or by forgetting any unit in England before the script-driven 'departure'.

I see that you have also been inspecting the triggers in the scenario editor. Yes, it is cool that so many optimizations can be made using this information only, and it was the most exciting part to discover them. I can only add that Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is a game that essentially utilizes the very same engine, so speedrunning its campaigns was equally interesting.