Oh man, "The Horns of Hattin" has finally been beaten on Hard. It's not absurdly difficult, but surviving Reynald's attack in the opening 10 minutes can be really tricky. Reynald himself can be killed easily with 10 Spearmen, but then you'll need to defeat his retinue of Cavaliers and Spearmen that try to avenge him. If your Spearmen aren't positioned well, the Cavaliers will just run past them and throw your base into chaos. To further complicate matters, you'll have to destroy a Mangonel that sneaks into view while all of this is going on. Since wood and food are initially scarce and you have two bases to micromanage, this whole opening sequence can be quite stressful.

The rest of the mission was mostly standard procedure. All the usual AI-related annoyances were there, but they weren't anything I wasn't already used to. I must say, though, that one of the most tedious aspects of AOE2 is keeping enemy melee units away from your Rams. No matter how diligently you try to intercept them, a few swordsmen or cavalry always manage to close in. This explains why I racked up a huge number of saved games for this mission alone. Rather than winning by capturing the relic, I decided to repeat my endgame from "A Perfect Martyr" and eliminate everything. The ending body count kind of suits the theme of this campaign, but I won't elaborate on it...