Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings/The Crucible

The nomadic tribes of the deserts and steppes north of China, after spending centuries entangled in their own petty turf wars, finally have the hope of unification. Genghis Khan, leader of a tribe that is so small even in the standard of Mongolians, is ready for his conquest of Asia and even the world. Within years, he organized a highly disciplined army of horse archers to challenge the dominance of cultured Persia and Eastern Europe, and the technologically advanced empires in China.

Ghenghis Khan 1: The crucible
This mission is very straightforward; visit the camps and do what they say. There are large amounts of Kara Khitai in the rightmost corner so avoid them. There are twice as many sheep on the map as are needed to satisfy the blue tribe's request, but to speed the process up, steal them from the Kara Khitai. They keep around 10 sheep walled in along with cavalry archers, approximately 8 castle lengths north and 2 castle lengths east of the blue encampment. If you lure the defenders out properly, you will not even need to fight the KK. Between the cyan and purple camps there is a relic guarded by wolves. This is the easiest way to satisfy the request of the gray tribe. Save the Kill the Tayichi'uds/Naiman mission for last when you have the most troops, then kill the Tayichi'uds as they lack a watch tower.

Ghenghis Khan 2: A life of revenge
Pause the game as soon as the scenario starts and have a look around. Certain things are important immediately. You have one cavalry scout skirting a Tayichi'ud (henceforth called Yellow) village, and a bunch of cavalry in your "base". Yellow has a very low score, and must be very weak. You have no villagers and no production buildings, but the scenario instructions tell you to conquer Yellow to rectify this. You will be told this again very soon. You have a Wonder, which you must protect at all costs, but it never gets attacked, and in any case, any reasonable course of action by you will make it completely inaccessible to the enemy.

A scenario like this presents a bit of an ethical dilemma. All of your troops are moving automatically at the beginning, but you can force them to move differently. The scout will move to your "base" and deliver the message that you should attack Yellow, but you can do that before the message arrives. It benefits you to do this attack early, but is that proper? The recommendation here is that you cooperate with the scenario design and not attack Yellow until the message arrives.

You have no way of healing any of your cavalry at the start, and it will be a long time before this changes. Therefore, it is imperative to use damage avoidance techniques in combat. At the same time, you need to conquer Yellow as fast as possible. So sweep into the Yellow village like a hurricane, but cautiously! Use Ambush tactics.

You need to kill five cavalry archers. Fighting archers, you cannot avoid damage entirely, but it should be minimal. Then you acquire seven villagers, a Town Center, and a bunch of Houses. Start cranking out more villagers immediately. You will need about fifteen before you produce anything else; keep in mind the fact that villagers are the only units you have in the Dark Age that can both fight and be healed. There are no domesticated food animals in the wilds of Mongolia, so you will be doing a lot of hunting. The downside to hunting is that it takes a certain amount of micromanagement to avoid winding up with a bunch of rotting carcasses. You also need to be collecting a lot of stone in the Dark Age. Wood and gold are not as important, but should not be ignored entirely. After producing the villagers, focus on entering the Feudal Age as soon as possible.

In the meantime, you need to be scouting aggressively. You will actually find a few sheep, but just park them somewhere for later processing. You will find 19 gold mines and six stone mines. The gold is adequate for your needs, but the stone is not. Unfortunately, you will need to do Market manipulations. You will find that half the map is inaccessible. You will find that you can easily enter the Kara Khitai camp.

The Kara Khitai
In the Kara Khitai camp, villagers are merrily collecting resources, unprotected by any obvious means. To kill or not to kill? That is the question. You should know in your bones that attacking these villagers will provoke a massive response, but ultimately, you want those resources for yourself, so you do what comes natural for a Mongol. When the massive response shows up, console yourself with the thought that they were probably going to attack you anyway. Run away to your Town Center and fight there. 10 villagers inside a TC is a formidable force; use your mobile troops only as necessary in this fight. Unfortunately, your cavalry will be seriously battered after just this one fight, and any further raids will have to be put on hold for now.

As soon as you enter the Feudal Age, throw up a stone wall to seal in the Kara Khitai. Commit as many as 10 villagers to this project. Use accelerated wall building techniques. There actually is an optimum wall. It has three gates and costs 220 stone. Build four supporting Towers to cover the entire wall; no more, no less. That costs 500 stone, and leaves you enough for two castles and some repairs. If you crush the Kara Khitai fast enough, you will pick up enough stone for one more castle. You will need those castles, and probably one more, plus a lot of stone walls, plus stone for research. There is a serious stone deficit in this scenario.

In the meantime, build about five more villagers. You will need a lot of every resource type for a long time yet. In the Feudal Age, your only other production should be about 10 archers to defend the wall. These archers can be healed without monks, so try to use them to absorb some damage as well. You must be extremely parsimonious with your stone. Research only the most important items. After that, concentrate on reaching the Castle Age.

When the wall is ready, head back into the Kara Khitai camp and drive their villagers away from your resources. Their troops will probably not be amused, but you are ready for that. Run away when you must, and while their troops are being slaughtered in front of your wall, come back through a different gate and repeat the process.

As soon as you enter the Castle Age, produce a couple of monks. This will revitalize your cavalry, but the most important effect is that you can now maintain a strong military force deep in the Kara Khitai base, with only brief withdrawals for healing. The Kara Khitai have only one Tower, one Town Center, and a bunch of light troops. Pretty soon their gold stockpile is depleted, and then they can only produce the in extremis junk. But they actually only produce Skirmishers, and so, using only the handful of Light Cavalry you started with on the front line, you grind the Kara Khitai into oblivion. When they surrender, all of their remaining units commit suicide, and their production buildings and Tower become rubble.

Explore what remains of the Kara Khitai camp. Take possession of their farms, stone mines, and so forth. Do not destroy their Market! That would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs. (In practical terms, you will not need that gold, but you don't know that yet.) You will find that the western half of the map is completely sealed off. Actually, it is very easy to pass through the barrier, but your enemies cannot pass it before you do.

Kushluk
You will have known since the beginning of the scenario that Kushluk is hanging out in the middle of the map with a cavalry archer escort. When one of your units approaches, they all run away. Do not pursue them immediately. You need to recognize that Kushluk has been building up, unmolested, since the beginning of the scenario. He certainly has a maximum population and a substantial reserve of resources. You will find out later that he will not run out of gold for a long, long time. As soon as you breach the western Kara Khitai wall, you will be facing a flood of enemy units.

You need to map out a good location for a stone wall in the mountain pass. It will approximately follow the Kara Khitai wall. Replace the wooden wall section by section. But first, put up a castle there so you won't get swamped. You should probably also build up your mobile forces before making the first breach.

There are three main approaches to the rest of the scenario. The first is to put up some stonework in the mountain pass and then defend it until Kushluk runs out of resources. That will give you a quick introduction to the practical meaning of never. The second method is to start spamming units, weighted towards Light Cavalry, and fight a war of attrition. You will eventually win, but your casualties will be horrendous. The third, and recommended, method is to do what the British did to win the Boer War.

Kushluk produces sword infantry, Skirmishers, cavalry archers, Light Cavalry, and light artillery. None of this stuff is effective against stonework, but it is pretty good against the sort of mobile force that you can field. Accordingly, the only reasonable way for you to advance without taking forever or losing a lot of troops is to push your stonework forward. The only problem with this approach is that you don't have enough stone. Therefore, you will need to be building wooden walls and wooden mini-castles in addition to the stonework, because Market manipulations become extremely inefficient at some point. Kushluk also has a lot of static defenses (but no walls), and you don't really have a good way of dealing with those.

The basic approach is to raid and sanitize an area, and then to quickly seal it off with walls and static defenses while Kushluk rebuilds his mobile force and you heal yours. Repeat as necessary. Eventually, you would like to build a castle near Kushluk's Town Center. This will effectively end the scenario, although you still have to kill Kushluk himself. The process is straightforward in principle, but does require a lot of effort on your part. Do not be surprised if you end up killing more than a thousand units.

Ghenghis Khan 3: Into China
This scenario is harder than average. As is true for many AoE scenarios, your back will be to the wall for a long time, and then resistance will suddenly collapse. However, in this case, the pressure will be greater than normal, and it will last longer than normal. The only reason the scenario doesn't get the hardest possible rating is that, if you play well, there is no real risk that your enemies will ever penetrate to your home areas.

There are a number of specific problems.

- You are heavily outnumbered for almost the entire scenario. You start out with almost nothing, facing three fully developed enemies and two others. First you have to do a fair bit of searching before you can find a relatively weak enemy. Then you have to fight your way into their camp using advanced tactics, because this enemy is weak only compared to your other enemies, not compared to you. Then you have to quickly throw up minimal defenses. Then you will be facing heavy attacks by superior forces for a long time as you slowly build up. And, when you are finally fully developed, only THEN do you reach the happy condition that you are outnumbered 3.5 to one. After that, as you slowly, slowly try to advance, you have to deal with the hard problem of how to actually finish off players with an infinite supply of wood.

- You are seriously population-limited. A mixed water-land map always stretches your resources. An optimum population would be 10 warships, 10 monks, 10 cavalry, 10 cavalry archers, 5 artillery, 5 spare slots, and 25 villagers. You will be stretched thin in every category except cavalry archers. To be comfortable, you would need 5 more warships, better monks, 5 more cavalry, 5 more artillery, 5-10 more villagers, and 5-10 foot archers.

- You have a significant resource deficit. You can reasonably expect to get 14 gold mines, with one more in your starting stockpile, which is adequate, unless you take heavy casualties. You can reasonably expect to get 10 stone mines, with 3.5 more in your starting stockpile, which is enough to put together a very strong defense, but not enough for offensive stonework. And it should already be clear that, without offensive stonework, the scenario gets much, much harder. At the same time, the Jin get 23 gold mines and THIRTY-TWO stone mines, plus an unknown starting stockpile, and they start fully developed. The Tanguts get 14 gold mines and 9 stone mines, plus an unknown starting stockpile, and they start fully developed. The Hsi Hsia get 10 gold mines and 9 stone mines, plus an unknown starting stockpile, and they start fully developed. These three groups will simply not run out of resources any time soon. The Sung get 10 gold mines and 5-8 stone mines, plus an unknown starting stockpile, but they need to build up, so they are relatively weak. There are a further 5 gold mines and 15 stone mines in a "no-man's land" that you will want to grab for yourself. These are details that you will not reasonably have full access to while playing the game, but you can get some sense of it by looking at the scores.

- You will be facing heavy attacks by the most powerful units (monks, heavy artillery, warships, the Chinese special archers, and so forth) for a very long time, and they arrive in mixed groups, which is an important force multiplier. The enemy mobile forces are strong against your force, and there really isn't much that you can do about this. Because of these attacks, you will have some difficulty in accessing the gold and stone that are nominally yours.

- The Great Wall of China will cause you serious problems. Primarily, you have to stay away from it for a very long time, so the territory you have available to work with is quite small. This means that you don't have the space to build proper defenses, and you don't have the space in front of your defenses to properly deal with siege weapons. Accordingly, you will be so busy just trying to hold things together that it will be very hard to expand. The second major problem is that enemy attacks will only be marching while they are protected by the Wall; they deploy as soon as they cross it. You won't be getting a lot of free attacks against their attacks. The third major problem is that you will not be able to do what your force is optimized for, which is raiding, until after you have reduced the Wall, which is a slow and painful process. However, you are devious, you are Mongols! There are things that you can do to confound your enemies.

- The map is huge, and quite open. On the one hand, this means that it will be very hard to hunt down and finish off your enemies after you have defeated them, and be certain that they will be rebuilding very quickly at all times. On the other hand, it means that your offensive stonework will require special techniques.

- You cannot produce Bombard Cannons, which have very important mobility and other advantages compared to trebuchets. You will eventually find some lying around somewhere, but by then, you won't really need them.

- There is one more serious, serious danger, which will be discussed later on.

You do have some advantages. The main one is that a large part of the map is accessible by water. Only one of your enemies builds a navy, although that one navy alone will give you a headache. After you achieve naval dominance, you will be able to travel over almost all the map and nuke anything you want. It will not be easy, because your land-bound enemies do fight back strongly, and your small navy cannot be everywhere at once to prevent reconstruction, but it will be a lot easier than trying to fight them on land. Your second advantage is yourself, you devious so-and-so!

It begins
Start by scouting aggressively. (Where have you heard this before?) Scout forward with the light cavalry, and fill in the gaps with the cavalry archers. There are at least some hints that one specific direction will be the most rewarding, but the fact is, you shouldn't actually know what the map looks like until you've explored it. AoE has Fog of War for a reason. So be reasonable and find out what's going on by legal procedures. Anyway, the advantage to be gained by clairvoyance here is minimal at best.

In short order, you will find out that you are hemmed in by a massive wall with strong defenses. Be very careful near the wall. You will find a few sheep, and more than a few wolves. These wolves must be very hungry, because they actually attack your cavalry. If you get the opportunity to kill some of these wolves quickly and safely, do so. You will recruit a Transport Ship, and you now have no choice left but to cross the river. Note that sheep cannot be transported across water. The Chinese are already scouting this region, so if you want to hang onto your sheep, you will need to guard them.

The Engineers
There is a small village of "Engineers" just outside the main wall. You can recruit six villagers and some siege equipment there. If you are clairvoyant, i.e. if you cheat, you can get these units without actually fighting the Engineers. However, there are other resources available in that village, specifically, two sheep, six farms, lots of wood and some more food, some space to build, and access to the Yellow Sea, and to get those, you definitely have to defeat the Engineers.

Ferry your troops across the river and scout the village. If you just rush into the village with all guns blazing, you can't realistically lose, not that you know this a priori, but the Engineers have enough defensive potential that they can cause you significant damage. At this point, you have no idea how much fighting your little force will have to do before reinforcements and healing are available. Therefore you must avoid as much damage as possible. Use Bait-and-Switch and Ambush tactics. Put your Light Cavalry against their archers, and your cavalry archers against their melee infantry. Hide in the Transport if necessary. This fight is complicated by the lack of maneuver space. Furthermore, you need to avoid activating too many triggers at once, so your scouts need to crawl forwards carefully. At the same time, you must proceed as quickly as you can. If you do all this properly, you will probably kill all the Engineers' troops before recruiting anything.

As soon as you get your recruits, put them to work immediately. The battering ram should take out the Tower, gate, and Town Center, in that order, and then work over the rest of the buildings. The catapult should start grinding away at the Town Center, which is safe because it has a superior range. Your cavalry needs to stay away from the TC, but pick off enemy villagers when the opportunity arises.

The build-up
You have two reasonable choices of where to build your base: on the mainland outside the Wall, or on the Engineers' island. Choose both, but start on the island. There are other places you could build, but they involve cheating, because you haven't scouted them yet, so they are not being recommended.

Your villagers should start building things even before the Engineers surrender. Priorities are 4 Houses, a Town Center, an Archery Range, a Blacksmith, and then a dock. You do not have enough resources to deviate from this production list. Build the Town Center in the back, beside two of the farms. Later on, you can build a Mill where the Engineers' TC is as a depot for the other farms. This production list allows you to start building some important units, as well as enter the Castle Age. You have enough resources in your starting stockpile to enter the Castle Age immediately, but it is probably better to build a few more villagers first. Avoid capturing the farms until later if you can, because they are worth more if you do the Mill research first. You have enough meat standing around to permit this. Build your first dock as far upriver as you can (but not on top of fish!) for safety. As wood starts coming in, build something like 5 Galleys, and upgrade them to War Galleys as soon as possible.

Start producing villagers as soon as possible. One thing you could do to make this scenario easier is to overproduce villagers, even as many as 50, and then disband them when you can actually afford to produce troops.

Heavy attacks will start arriving very soon. You actually need to build your first stone wall as soon as the enemy Tower goes down. Wall off the east side of the river ford (with a gate). You will defend this primarily with your fleet for now. You will probably be unable to even knock down the enemy gate blocking off the island before the first attack arrives. Be prepared to extract your battering ram by water. You do need to knock down that gate, because it is the only way to collect your sheep from the mainland.

Don't bother building Towers in this scenario. Did we mention that the enemy attacks will be heavy? Consider an attack consisting of a battering ram, a catapult, some spear infantry, and some archers, including the Chinese special ones. Your light cavalry and cavalry archers won't even be able to approach this force, let alone beat up the siege weapons, so the attack will simply cut through your wall, knock down your Tower, and keep going. You have just lost 150 stone. This kind of attack is about the minimum that you will face. As soon as the enemy starts using heavy artillery, which is actually very soon, any Towers you build will just fall down like water.

As soon as you enter the Castle Age, produce a couple of monks. You have now spent 200+200+150+100 gold, and have only 150 left, with no more coming in for a while. Save the rest for ship repairs. If you find that you need ranged units, build Skirmishers instead of archers for now.

When you can spare a few villagers from economic duties, but not before they have at least one speed upgrade, start building a Wall Maze Complex on the mainland. It needs to be reasonably close to the Great Wall. Make sure that you don't seal yourself in fully anywhere, unless you can beat a direct attack on your wall. For example, your navy should be able to defend the river ford, so you can seal off the east side of the ford, but your army is still too weak to fight in the open at this time. The main reason for this is that you are facing fully upgraded units, but you can't afford to get many upgrades yet. You can start collecting gold and later, stone, once your WMC provides the miners some safety. Be aware that your miners could be extracted by ship in a pinch.

You start with enough stone that you can afford one castle in addition to your WMC. You could incorporate a castle into your WMC. However, that is not really a good idea until you can be certain of destroying attacking siege weapons. On the other hand, a castle is very useful and pretty safe when used to support your navy. If your navy runs into too many enemy warships, just lure them back to your castle, where they automatically get sunk. Only Cannon Galleons pose a threat to the castle, and the AI does not use them properly. Build the castle as far east as possible, where it dominates the whole channel and gives you a safe harbor to the north. You might have to remove some trees first. Build a second dock in that harbor.

As gold starts to come in, you can start to build up your forces. Because you have to deal with ongoing heavy attacks, you cannot afford to focus on your economy alone. You will need 2-5 heavy cavalry, a couple of Mangudai, and a couple more monks. You will also need at least 8 War Galleys. Half will defend the river ford for now, and half can try to push into the Yellow Sea. At some point, the Hsi Hsia get Ballistics, and then traveling along the river becomes risky. You will also need just about every upgrade before you can even think about entering the Imperial Age.

You can't get very far into the Yellow Sea without encountering the Jin navy. Their warships are individually significantly better than yours. Fortunately, you only encounter them one by one at this point. Lure them back to your castle if you can, although they tend to not cooperate. If you find a fishing boat, show no mercy!

The Tower at the extreme seaward end of the Great Wall controls too much of the sea. You can actually take it out with your battering ram and navy, and should do so.

Jin's Wonder
About 40 minutes into the scenario, Jin starts to build a Wonder. This is really, really bad. Jin is so far ahead of you at this point that your prospects of taking them out are about nil. What you need to do is get into the Imperial Age, and you probably won't have any gold stockpiled yet, and then you need about 5 Cannon Galleons, about 5 trebuchets, and about 5 more monks, which should put you at the population limit. Then you will need to beat the Jin fleet and work over their strong defenses with naval bombardment. Then you will need to establish a beachhead and slowly push stonework into their city, not that you actually have any stone. The only problem with this approach is that you simply don't have time. The only other problem with this approach is that your 2.5 other enemies are trying to smash you on the mainland. In fact, the only problem with any reasonable approach is that it is hopeless. Well. Just do the best you can, and hope for a miracle.

As soon as you are notified about the Wonder, focus on entering the Imperial Age. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to overproduce villagers. You will need a lot of gold and stone very soon. You have to produce Cannon Galleons as fast as possible. You can build them all on the Yellow Sea, or half at each dock. Upgrading them to Elite is very important. Upgrading your War Galleys is also very important.

Build one trebuchet as soon as you can. Use it to start grinding up the enemy Towers along the river. This operation is safe. If you built some Cannon Galleons upriver, use them to help out, but note that they sometimes have difficulty hitting targets behind a wall. Leave the wall itself intact, of course.

As your naval offensive starts to develop, you find that the Jin fleet simply can't cope. The maximum fleet size that you ever have to deal with is five Galleons, and that is rare. On the other hand, you will have as many as eight Galleons in action, and you can keep them in top condition quite easily. Your heavy naval artillery should be in action nearly continuously, and they raze everything they can reach. Cannon Galleons are just devastating against an AI.

When you have wiped out all the enemy Towers on the river, redeploy your trebuchet and start grinding up the Towers on the inland part of the Wall. This is still safe, because your land-bound enemies don't use much cavalry. You may have to flee with the trebuchet from time to time, however.

With the Towers on the river eliminated, it becomes possible to scout some of the territory on the Chinese side of the Wall. Do so. Here and elsewhere, you will find enormous amounts of stone and some gold just lying around. Start to wall some of this territory off. Not only does this deny the enemy those resources in case they might want them, but it also gives you safe places to land villagers to support your navy.

Well before the Wonder is complete, you should have completely eliminated all naval opposition and razed everything that your Cannon Galleons can reach on the Jin continent. You should be at the population maximum, having disbanded the three recruited units. To recap, the optimum population is probably 25 villagers, 10 monks, 8 Galleys, 4 Cannon Galleons, 3 Transport Ships, 5 Light Cavalry, 5 knights, 4 Mangudai, 6 cavalry archers, and 5 trebuchets. It would be nice to have Camels, but they are less flexible than knights. You can't have any foot archers. Of course, you never buy infantry, right? You should have researched all of your upgrades except the most expensive ones. You should have large stockpiles of every resource except gold.

It is time to start pushing your stonework into the Jin city. You can do this for a while, but once you cross an invisible line, it will seem that you have poked a hornet's nest. No problem. Just get back in the boat and build elsewhere. Pretty soon you can bring over some monks and start possessing the Jin cavalry. Don't expect your recruits to survive at this time. Don't try to possess archers!

Keep doing the Mongol thing - raiding - to the Jin. Considering that most of your ground troops are needed on the mainland, this may not be very effective, but do the best you can. Whatever cavalry you have available won't be able to do much outside the city walls, but at least you can learn that nothing is happening out there.

Bring over most of your trebuchets. Build a wall compartment outside the Jin city, deploy your trebuchets, blow something up, and retreat. Repeat as necessary. Jin uses cavalry and archers and a few monks. Their cavalry is impotent on the other side of the wall, monks can't hurt trebuchets from range, and archers are largely ineffective against them.

Jin doesn't seem to rebuild anything. They certainly won't be able to rebuild their docks, but one wonders what they are spending their resources on. They do have a lot of workers. After they lose their castles and monastery, all they have left is cavalry, and then your monks can have a field day.

Eventually you will have to take out Jin's Wonder. In principle, you could drive right through their city and do it, but since you don't really have a large ground force available, it is more prudent to go all the way around their city, approaching from the south. Build a wall compartment, deploy the trebuchets, and kiss the Wonder good-bye. It turns out to actually have been quite easy to do this. At the beginning, we were hoping for a miracle, and we got one, in a sense. Jin only uses ONE worker to build the Wonder! It takes them about one hour, game time, to build it, and that is a lot of time. Bear in mind as well that you still have time to destroy a Wonder after it is built.

You probably don't want to kill Jin off entirely. They are producing heavy cavalry on contract that is a bit better than what you can build, and in any case, having more of them is definitely useful. You may want to set up some sort of factory farm arrangement, where you feed Jin some gold and take over their production. But make sure they don't use any stone, and make sure that they leave some gold for you as well.

In the meantime, you are still defending on the mainland. As you slowly grind away at the Wall, the operation is getting riskier the closer to the gate you get, because that's where their counter-attacks will sally from. The land-bound Chinese are starting to use trebuchets by now. This isn't really a problem, because the only thing they can reach is your Maze Complex. Your home base should be entirely on the small island, and that's just not accessible.

At some point, Jin is down to a handful of villagers and nothing else. The villagers stand around aimlessly, because you have sealed them off from any resources. You can be fairly certain that they still have a large stockpile, but they don't produce anything. Whether you kill Jin off completely now or later is largely academic. Your fleet and whatever ground forces you have over there are now available for other missions. At around this time, you have probably finished off all the Great Wall Towers and have cut through the gate. You should have claimed the area south of the eastern part of the Wall for yourself; this gives you access to an awful lot of stone and some gold. You should have seized more stone and gold on Jin's continent.

The mainland
The rest of the scenario can be considered relatively easy for a number of reasons. First of all, you are not under any time pressure, so you can take things as easy as you like. Second, you now have lots of resources at your disposal, and you will be finding lots more that the Chinese seem to have no interest in exploiting. Third, as you push your stonework forward, you will be defending further and further from any critical areas, so troops that used to be tied to defense become available for other missions. Fourth, your troops can now be used in a way that optimizes their performance, which is raiding. Finally, you will now be hurting the Chinese beyond just killing off their field armies.

The first thing you will be doing is pushing your Cannon Galleons up the river in the south of the map, supported by Galleons, of course. In this area, you will be nuking the Sung to the south, and the Hsi Hsia and eventually the Tanguts to the north. Beware of monks! Because you will be well over the population limit by now, any losses you take will be very damaging. The Chinese will also use artillery against your ships. Make sure to support your fleet with villagers, sealing off sanitized areas with stonework. Some cavalry, monks, and trebuchets will also be useful here.

The second thing you will be doing is scouting the mainland from the north. This becomes feasible as soon as you have sealed off the hole in the Great Wall with a gate. As you scout the fringes of Tangut territory, you recruit six Bombard Cannons way over to the west. Extract them immediately. You will find no defenses whatsoever in the north part of China. You can start raiding this area with almost complete impunity. The most dangerous opposition comes from monks, but Chinese monks are weak compared to other monks because they don't get the range upgrade, and they don't seem to get the size upgrade here.

The Tanguts are weak because they don't have any stonework. The Hsi Hsia are weak because they stay in a small geographical area. The Sung are just plain weak. You will probably be attacking all of these nations simultaneously.

There is a standard approach to defeating your remaining enemies. Raid. Push your stonework forward, aiming towards a Castle Attack. Repeat. The main thing to keep in mind is that they have so much space to rebuild that it becomes very hard to track them all down, so you need to make a serious effort to contain them before the final attack goes in. Also be aware that if you defeat an enemy by killing all of their villagers, if they still have resources stockpiled, their last act before surrendering is to tribute those resources to an ally.

Historical note: The map geography is wrong. Tangut and Hsi Hsia are really the same thing. What is called Hsi Hsia on the map in the scenario introduction is really part of Jin. Not that the game map corresponds particularly to the real world.

Ghenghis Khan 4: The Horde rides west
This scenario poses an unusual problem. You start with two bases, and there is no way to shift your forces between them until quite near the end of the scenario. Some people might suggest abandoning one position entirely, but this is unreasonable for several reasons. First, the northern base must be kept because Subotai is there, but your only source of stone and your best early source of food is in the south. Second, if you abandon the south, you are handing over all those resources plus a lot of gold to the Persians. Third, it really isn't necessary. You will be stretched fairly thin for a time, and there is one other difficulty that will be mentioned later, but that only makes the scenario harder; it doesn't make it hard.

Your first objective is to get some scouts out there. (Isn't that always true?) In the north, you have a bunch of cavalry archers. They are not ideal scouts by any means, but at least they are fast, so we are going to stick with them for now. In the south, you have very limited scouting capacity, so build a Stable immediately, which uses up almost all your starting wood stockpile. Put all other villagers on wood collection, and produce four more. Produce one scout cavalry in the south; now your food is also used up or allocated (but check the spoilers). You have enough gold for two monks, so don't bother collecting gold yet. You can start collecting stone when both food and wood are rolling in.

In the south, you have been instructed to assassinate the Shah, and it is suggested that you do this immediately. Since you have no way of knowing what will happen if you delay or refuse, just do it right away. You also have no idea whether your assassins will be ambushed, so send your two cavalry archers along as escorts. Kill two birds with one stone by scouting with them at the same time. The cavalry archers need to stay outside the Persian territory.

Spoiler alert:

1) There are at least two ways to sneak military units into the Persian territory. If you try to go in by the front gate, you are warned away. If you try the other route, you get no warning. Don't do it! You risk triggering Persian hostility too soon.

2) Instead of striking at the Shah directly, your assassins could run around and wreak havoc. Don't do it! That would be a dastardly exploitation of a scenario bug and cannot be condoned. You would need to be crazy to even imagine trying such a thing.

3) The clever AoE player will build a Market and research Cartography while you are still allied with the Persians. Don't do it! You are not allowed to research Cartography. You will waste 175 wood and the construction effort, and you will have misallocated 100 food, which you can ill afford to do this early in the game. It seems unreasonable for a scenario to punish superior play.

In the south, you start finding sheep immediately, and you should eventually get 10. The Persians are already scouting this area, but any sheep that they find before you must wander in through their front gate, and you should be able to intercept them. Your Outposts will help with this. The sheep will provide about 850 food, and after that you have other animals to hunt. Don't bother with farming until much later.

In the north, you find a small Merkid camp and a bunch of wolves. Don't fight the Merkids until you have fully scouted their camp. Avoid fighting the wolves for now, because you have better things to do. However, these wolves are hungry and will actually chase your cavalry. Not that they will gain by it. When employed properly, one Cavalry Archer can easily kill one wolf without taking any damage.

The Merkids and points west
The Merkids have no autonomous economy and only two cavalry archers. In principle, they could produce a lot of archers, and they may even have other things going on elsewhere. You should attack them as soon as you have fully scouted their camp. As a general rule, an AI will surrender when it has no units left. You don't know exactly how this will play out here (it actually makes no difference whatsoever), but you should aim to kill both Merkid cavalry archers fast enough that they cannot be replaced in time to save themselves. You can expect to have monks quite soon, so avoiding damage is not critical, but it's just good tactics to avoid damage wherever possible.

When the Merkids surrender, they hand over some Archery Ranges and Houses, as well as a few other buildings and access to significant gold deposits. By the time this happens, the assassins should have done their dirty work, and you will have finished exploring the SE area of the map. You now have access to 20 gold mines, which is plenty, and 5 stone mines, which is not. You may be able to claim some stone from the Persians, but don't count on it.

Immediately after defeating the Merkids, scout to the west. That's where you will find the Russians. Pay close attention to your scouts. They don't have a great sight range, and the Russian castle can do a number on one of your Cavalry Archers. The Russians are active, and will be attacking you soon. Their attacks will be fairly powerful, but as long as you have some stonework and a mobile force, you should be OK.

One significant problem in this scenario is that, unless you do Market manipulations, you can only afford one castle for defense. It has to be in the south, because that's where you will be facing war elephants. This means that you will not have trebuchets in the north, and therefore you will need to work with lower-tech siege weapons. If you intend to take on the Russian castle directly, you will need five battering rams, and a couple of small catapults may be useful as well. However, you may be able to crush the Russians just by raiding their economy. In any case, you should be raiding the Russians. Continue to explore; you will be able to get all the way to the north gate of Samarkand.

The Persians
Most of the action in this scenario is against the Persians, and the primary battlefield is in the south. Fighting Persians means fighting war elephants. There are several ways of dealing with War Elephants, but we are only going to use the main one, which is possessing them. Basically, every second War Elephant produced by the enemy is a War Elephant produced for you, and the other ones are just targets. Of course, you do need a lot of monks, and you need to make other preparations.

You will need a castle, and you will need a Wall Maze Complex. You will also need other supporting units. Because you have so little stone, and because the south is so open, your WMC will focus on the maze aspect. That is, you will be using wooden walls. Your WMC doesn't need to be very sophisticated. Just build one long channel ending in front of your castle. Your monks and archers stand on one side of the wall, and the attacking force crawls by them. If necessary, the monks can hide in the castle. Nothing will penetrate this defense.

Other than that, there really isn't much to say. Grab what you can, raid when you can, defend when you must. Start building defenses as soon as you have 20 or so villagers and a viable economic base. Try to get to the population limit before you have to possess a lot of enemy units. Don't bother keeping any of the War Elephants unless they are fully upgraded. Once you have pushed the Persians back to their main gate, there are a lot of choke points, so you will be building stone walls in the SW part of the map. Eventually, one way or another, you will build up a stone stockpile, and you will need to build at least one castle in the Persian area.

There is one wrinkle in the north. There is a river leading into the north part of the Persian city. It would be very useful for you to have one Transport Ship and one Cannon Galleon operating on that river.

Ghenghis Khan 5
A very easy mission. Extinguish three enemies and capture the flags near their castles. Everything is covered by cliffs, you just have to use them for your advantage.

First of all: Don't hurry, take your time. The Bohemians have no villagers and will not expand their (impressive!) army. The Polish lack resources, and the Germans are far away.

The Polish settle at the right corner of the map. They like to tickle you a bit by sending knights and siege equipment, but that's all. As they only have access to 3200 gold, their decay is just a matter of time. And by the way, a relic can be found near your own town center. Combined with miners and trade carts to the Polish market your gold income should be quite high after capturing the first flag.

The Germans are on the lower corner, but they also have a castle and a watchtower at the middle of the map. It may take you some tries, but if both buildings are down, this plateau is the perfect place to be. Use the terrain to fortify your defense. A message will appear saying that the Bohemians are nearby and three castles are needed to withstand. Don't worry, they are triggered by the number of your castles (or being attacked by you), not by time. Finish the Germans off before that. An army of archers is useful against teutonic knights, as they have a huge armor against melee attacks.

After that, research spies (200 gold) to see the Bohemian army. If you think your defenses are strong enough, complete your third castle at let the show begin.

Ghenghis Khan 6
The final task is to destroy Hungary. Another easy scenario!

A partially frozen river divides the map. You aren't allowed to build ships, so the bridge is the only way for Hungary to send soldiers and siege weapons. Guard the bridge by a castle nearby (place it on an elevation), cover it with walls and a gate, and that should do the trick. Have some cavalry ready to fight trebuchets and rams, everything else can be done by the castle. You have to be quick on constructing your defenses because a massive attack will hit you soon after the game starts. Take about 4 villagers for building these defenses, or they will not be ready when the invasion starts.

Later on, Subotai appears and brings some petard reinforcements. Soon after, the bridge will be destroyed, so that no enemy units can come across the river any more. This is the time to go east. A thin path of ice will lead you across the river. Place another castle on the small hill near the gold mines and create a military basis over there. A siege onager will breach the forest, maybe about right the time when Hungary starts building a wonder. Stop them and take them out bit by bit.