| “ | I will strike you down. | ” |
| — The Wazir, taunting his enemies before an attack. |
The Wazir is a skirmish and campaign enemy in Stronghold Crusader.
Appearance and Character
Little is known about the Wazir. His face is covered, meaning his true age and appearance is unknown. However his character and personality is much clearer. In this regard, he appears to be a lord who is somewhat similar in character to the Caliph; a cruel ruler, who emphasises effectiveness and does not tolerate mistakes. He does not get angry as often as the Caliph does, and is perhaps not quite as arrogant as he is towards his allies. He often does agree to send his troops to his allies' aid, attack for them on request or send goods to them, unlike the Caliph. However the Wazir is cruel to his own people, working them to the limit of human ability, allowing him to generate more goods, which he sells for gold to fund his armies.
The Wazir always wields his trademark pair of scimitars, which he lifts and swipes if he is angry for a moment. He particularly likes to vent his frustration during his night-time walks in the desert just outside his castle, the Wazir not being a lazy lord.
Castle and strategies
The Wazir is an extremely cruel ruler. He can be somewhat weak starting out, especially if lacking in starting gold, but progressively becomes a dangerous force.
Economy
The Wazir is a good but not a great economist. While he has a good stone production and a decent iron and wood production, using negative fear factor to boost this further, his weakness is relying too much upon his bread production. Unlike the Emir and Nizar, he has no breweries and inns alongside his bread production buildings to boost popularity, meaning he has to use higher rations of bread than the Emir or Nizar to obtain taxes. Alongside this, the Wazir does not buy in food, only wheat, meaning if he runs out of bread, he will take a long time to replenish his supplies and popularity, which will decrease quickly as he has no inns.
Offense
The Wazir is fond of using horse archers and will not hesitate to use them in numbers. After he has built up an initial defense, he almost always focuses on building up horse raids and send them one by one. When not low on gold, the Wazir constructs numerous fire ballistae and rolls them slowly to burn buildings to ashes.
However, the true strength seems to lay in the siege attacks. The Wazir brings many Arab swordsmen and horse archers, backed up with a small squad of fire throwers. Slaves are also brought if an enemy moat is present. Engineers will construct fire ballistae, but also, uniquely for an Arabian lord, trebuchets which will pound any buildings to destruction. Swordsmen and horse archers like to break in, while the fire throwers burn any buildings they can reach.
Defense
Star-shaped and big-sized, yet well-defended castles are the Wazir's trademarks. Each castle has a varying number of points, where two lookout towers and a round tower is present with Arab bowmen and fire throwers. The interior is filled with the most important buildings, sometimes a huge number of hovels and bakeries are placed outside, which are protected by large pools of pitch. Fire ballistae are deployed in various spots due to the lack of defensive engines. Sometimes moat is also dug in small batches.
The Wazir holds a small squad of horse archers and a large number of Arab swordsmen to contain enemy harassments.
His horse archers also patrol buildings until he decides to send after the enemy. When his castle is under siege, the Wazir likes to send these horse archers, along with sometimes those inside his castle, out in big numbers, and these constantly move about in a few groups, inflicting damage on besieging forces. He can do this because he usually has multiple gates and so not all are closed.
How to deal with
Defense
The Wazir's armies may look threatening, but they are defenseless against crossbow bolts. So, a large number of crossbowmen (backed up with archers) will pretty hold back anything, even fire ballistae, but trebuchets may be a problem. For these, make sure you have a few square/round towers with ballistae on top and manually aim them at the trebuchets. Have some hardier troops in case the Wazir finds a hole in your defenses.
If the Wazir is doing particularly well, he may send a large enough number of horse archers in his attack that may pose a threat to even crossbowmen. For this make sure you have some macemen that can move out from your gates to catch them and kill them hand to hand. The horse archers should not move about enough to make it hard for macemen to catch them.
Offense
Crippling the Wazir's economy is quite easy. Target his wheat farms, as the Wazir does not buy in food and having no wheat will significantly impact his food production. Stone quarries and iron mines can also be repeatedly destroyed, ideally with catapults, to stop the Wazir from generating income and producing large armies. The Wazir will not take this meekly, sometimes defending his outside buildings with large groups of horse archers, so make sure you have enough missile troops, ideally crossbowmen or fire ballistae to counter these.
In terms of his castle itself, it is usually quite well defended. Not only he has patrolling horse archer groups, but he surrounds his castle with pitch, making it impossible (or at least without casualties) to get near. A good option therefore is to tear down his castle from a distance.
Gather horse archers, numerous fire ballistae, catapults and melee troops. Work your way through his wheat farms and territory until you get to the castle. Try to wipe out any overseeing fire ballistae with your catapults, hopefully demolishing some buildings in the process. Then target round towers and deflect the small waves of horse archers and swordsmen that may come to your catapults. You may also roll your fire ballistae in to pick off bowmen and fire throwers. When you can close his gatehouse, target units on the keep with your horse archers and fire ballistae. Finally, create a breach and move in for the kill.
This method is effective, however it is slow and will diminish your stone supplies (as the Wazir will try and rebuild towers and walls). If you want a quicker method, a group of 100 horse archers (150 if he is doing particularly well) and 20 assassins should be enough to kill him if you make sure the horse archers are constantly moving and make sure your assassins are hidden well enough away to avoid being spotted by the Wazir's patrolling horse archers. Once all the Wazir's wall and keep troops have been killed by the horse archers (you will need to be careful with range, only get just within firing range of one tower at a time), you can kill the lord with your assassins after climbing one of his gatehouses.
Quotes
For the Wazir's quotes see: Quotes:The Wazir
Trivia
- Wazir in Arabic (وزير) means "Vizier", high-ranking political advisors.
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