I played this for hours and hours, afternoons and afternoons, months on end! I became a sort of expert on it, even developed a few scenarios to be tougher to beat.
There's actually a few strategies you can use to beat the game.
If you want to take a fort, use at least 1 squadron more than the number that's currently occupying the fort. For instance, if 2 squads are occupying it, attack the fort with 3. Then only 2 will engage the ones outside the fort, and the remaining one will enter with no problem. - This takes away the only major difficulty the game could have!
If attacking a fort from outside, use squads with only archers, in a formation where they are in the back and in the front.
If you only have archers, attacking a squad that has barbarians and knights, get your archers as far back as possible. That will give them time to hit the enemy.
If attacking a squad of mostly archers, use knights and barbarians, in a formation where they are at the front, so they don't have to walk much to reach the enemy archers - otherwise they'll be murdered by the arrows.
If attacking a fort that doesn't resupply troops, invade all neighbouring villages - the tropps in the fort will starve, and you'll attack with no problem.
Archers and Barbarians are the fastest moving, knights are the slowest - if you need to reach somewhere fast - make a squad only of archers or barbarians.
If you refuse a surrender, all the enemies troops will just throw themselves at you, dying... Not much fun, unless you're feeling sadistic. Sometimes it's fun to just exterminate them all!!!
This game was my favorite for a very long time! It even influenced the kind of game I would find entertaining much later - the only ones I actually enjoyed as much as TAAW have been Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology!
I used to play it in the early 90s, in my Olivetty PC-1, on a 3.5" floppy. One day my floppy got corrupted and I lost the loading screen and the campaigns, but it would still play, so I created a number of more difficult levels. If I find them I'll send them to your GREAT site!
Since most stuff had to be loaded from disk (scene transitions to battles and menu screens), I also created a 'fast' disk, that used RAM as a RAMdisk and copied all the stuff there, before starting the game. Then the entire game moved much quicker from scene to scene! Great fun!!!
Finally, if anyone has this in Apple II or Mac format, I'd like to know, as I collect old computers, and the AII and Mac LC are among my favorites - I'd like to play this on those machines!
Keep up the great work, guys!
Miguel Lopes
http://miklops.redirectme.net
http://pwp.netcabo.pt