Since you'll receive very few attacks, you can focus on teching up and scouting around. The relics will be visible on the map there are two in monasteries, one with a trapped monk behind some fencing, and one next to a castle. Once El Cid's popped up, you'll be tasked with retrieving four relics and bringing them back to him. As you start, you can build your town center anywhere around this initial area there's a bunch of sheep to the east you can pull for your early food, there's plenty of wood, and a gold mine to the southwest (you can also set up a market a bit aways from the watering hole to trade with the allied forces here.) You need to talk to the imam, who you can reach via a transport to the northern corner of the map. This is another pretty simple mission where the main point of pain is that you have to schlep captured relics across the whole map. You collected all Relics in the first El Cid mission. Then, smash the castle (once you bait out their standing army, blue basically doesn't build any more units, so it's a simple matter of taking 2–3 rams to the ill-defended structure) and escort Alfonso and Cid back to the start to end the mission. Explore with your hero (unless you park him right with the enemy, you basically can't get him killed, but do note this mission requires his survival), build your economy, and garrison the relics. You can establish your base anywhere, but the easiest place is right in the center of the map, where you'll have access to gold, some stone, and there are some neutral farms you'll capture. You'll then be given control of a large army with some villagers. You'll need to kill a few tournament enemies. There are four to be found at the far west corner of the map (hidden behind a screen of trees that are in fact navigable), the last is in the enemy Alfonso's base. Your optional achievement here is to capture all the relics on the map.

There is one campaign-specific achievement in this sequence. In this campaign, you play as the Saracens and Spanish, to mirror El Cid's loyalties as the Spanish Reconquista rages on.

Age of empires 2 byzantine build order