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: The promise
This scenario is fairly easy if you cheat, but quite hard if you do not. The scenario has been designed so that a certain very bad event will happen at some point, but the designer gave you a break by setting the trigger in a particular way, assumed that you would act in good faith, and did not set a trigger to deal with people who act in bad faith. Anybody who feels the need to figure out ways to benefit from loopholes in the scenario design is gaming the system instead of simulating the conflict, and might as well enter the "I win" cheat code right away.

In order to win the scenario normally, you need to move at least one unit to three different locations, i.e. capture three flags. Be aware of the fact that this has no effect on the combat capacity of your enemies, except perhaps to annoy their home guards.

Opening Moves
Use your Mangudai to scout. They don't have a great sight range, so be careful, but at least they are fast. Your catapult has no use at this time. Your villagers start doing their own thing immediately. It's pretty reasonable to stick with that, with a slight adjustment to the hunters. (Check the tactics section for some hunting tips.) Start spamming villagers. Put at least a third on food. After that, wood, gold, stone, and construction are all about equally important. Be prepared to fight from the Town Center, because you may be attacked before you get any defenses up. There are no sheep or berries available in this scenario, so hunt and fish for food. Avoid farming until later, due to the overhead costs.

As you scout your home area, you find a pond with 1,000 food, a relic, 9 gold mines, and 6 stone mines. You do not lack for gold in this scenario. The stone is enough to get you started, and you will find much, much more, although you may wish for even more. It's definitely worth building a Mill right beside the pond.

You find that there are a lot of cliffs in this scenario. Strategic movement will be very restricted. This benefits the defender. You find that the route to Poland is very short, and that a Polish Tower obstructs you. You could probably run past it fairly easily, but don't do this yet. Very soon, you recruit a Scout Cavalry. This is not a recruit in the normal sense, because it doesn't exist until you get to a certain location. This means that it will get all the upgrades. You are informed that a "huge army" is about to attack you, and that you have to build a strong fortification in the middle of the map.

The first non-villager units that you should build are probably a couple of monks.

Head towards the middle of the map with your new scout, and send one Mangudai that way as well. Leave the other two Mangudai at home. A German castle dominates the heights. Don't let it ruin your day! There is also a German Tower in this area. Between them, they quite effectively block this area. However, if you are careful, you can safely sneak past them with fast units. Villagers and monks? Inadvisable.

If you try to head towards Bohemian territory, in the west, you are warned away. Heed this warning! The German territory is also inaccessible, due to strong defenses.

In the SW part of the map, you recruit a monk and 8 Huskarls. The monk will not get any of your limited monk upgrades, in particular the speed upgrade. If you care about that, the only way to differentiate him from your other monks is via his control group. You could disband him, but he's not that much worse than your other monks. The Huskarls will not get any upgrades either, so they aren't worth much in the long run. If you want to make this scenario easier, you could eventually disband them. However, this group actually has a very useful job to do right now, and that is taking out the German Tower in the middle of the map.

Poland will be attacking you relatively soon. At least one of their scouts will already have run through your area, and you have no way to stop fast scouts yet. Wall Poland in. With a safe area and a monk available, you can reasonably try to scout Polish territory. However, you won't get very far, because there are too many defenses. Poland is quite strong right now, and you really should block them off with a castle. It will turn out that Poland is just a flash in the pan, but if your defense over there is strong, it allows you to turn your attention to the rest of the map, which is where the main action will take place. As long as they are able, the Poles will attack you with melee units and catapults. This is no problem if you have a castle behind a wall, but will pose significant difficulties otherwise. Note that a Wall Maze Complex is not appropriate for this situation. Poland is simply too close to you for that to work.

The build-up
It won't be long before your Huskarl group has opened the road to the middle of the map. The German castle will still cause some problems, but your units can sneak by it if you are careful. Move some villagers and monks into that area and start developing it. You will need a trebuchet to take out that castle, and that has to be a priority, unless you want to risk having the Germans produce Teutonic Knights in the middle of your base.

There are only two openings into your victory area in the middle of the map. This makes it a good place to defend. You don't have to defend against the expected huge attack there, but you do need to build three castles there. Can you do both separately? Can you build a strong fortification somewhere and still have enough stone for the rest of the scenario AND build three more castles? Maybe, but if you factor in the time pressure and the explicit instructions, the practical answer is no.

Your first construction in the victory area should probably be a small gated wall to seal off the side entrance. This wall should be positioned to cooperate with a castle that will be built there soon. After that, start building the front wall of your fortification. The part that faces Bohemia should be two layers thick. Bring that wall around along the pond, where it can be one layer thick. Leave a narrow passage along the pond. Curl the wall around in a spiral pattern, and make sure that you leave an opening. The objective is to get the enemy force to walk down the narrow passage, heading for the opening, while castles and other units behind the wall pour a rain of fire into the enemy force. Hopefully, you can get siege weapons to not deploy outside of the range of your castles. Depending how much time and stone you have, you can later increase the thickness of your walls. You will need exactly two gates in your wall, one by the cliff, and one by the pond. Because gates allow many adjacent units to attack them, you need to add some additional stonework in front of the gates.

When the front wall is substantially complete, build a castle to protect the side entrance to your victory area. Start moving mobile units into this area. Focus on Light Cavalry and Mangudai. Don't bother with basic cavalry archers, because your Mangudai are better at present, and although the two types are otherwise roughly equivalent when fully upgraded, Mangudai are better against siege weapons. Start raiding the countryside. The Germans like to hunt in the SW, and you know what to do about that.

About this time, your first trebuchet will be available. Use it to take out the German castle near your victory area. Some number of Teutonic Knights will get upset at this, but they are too slow to be a real threat. Your second trebuchet should be deployed against Poland, but Poland needs to be treated as a sideshow.

Germany will be attacking you by now. They use Pikemen and Crossbowmen, perhaps as many as ten each at any given time. Eventually, they send Teutonic Knights as well. None of these are a serious threat, as long as you use good tactics. Germany likes to attack your monastery in the SW. This building is by no means important. Defend it if you like, but don't commit a lot of resources there.

About 30 minutes after the scenario starts, your victory area should be humming. You should have about 5 stone miners there, perhaps 5 more builders, and elsewhere about 5 each villagers collecting wood, food, and gold. You should have about 5 each Mangudai and Light Cavalry, 10 monks, several trebuchets, one other catapult, and the recruited Huskarls. Maybe you also have some other recruits, although so far you haven't encountered anything worth converting. You should have researched most of your upgrades, except the very expensive ones. Your bank balance will be close to zero, except that you should have about 500 stone.

About 31 minutes after the scenario starts, you are told that "the Bohemian cavalry will attack very soon". It's time to finish your fortification. Put one castle in the SW of your victory area and one in the SE. Add interior walls and gates in case there are breakthroughs. Move most of your army into this area, and keep building new units. Expect a very heavy attack, and prepare accordingly. Make sure that you save lots of stone for repairs.

For some reason, you may have been expecting an attack by a bunch of heavy cavalry. Surprise! What Bohemia actually sends is 25 Paladins and 25 Champions, but also 3 trebuchets, 9 Siege Rams, and 9 Siege Onagers. You have never seen a single attack of such enormous size and power in any 75-population AoE game. Prepare to die!

Gaming the System
You were explicitly told to build a strong fortification, including three castles, in the middle of the map. At some point, you were also explicitly told that you would be attacked soon. It turns out, however, that the Bohemian attack does not happen at a particular time, but rather is triggered when your third castle in your victory area is completed. Therefore you could ignore the threatened Bohemian attack for now, crush all other opposition, strip mine the whole map, set up humungous defenses, and only then trigger the Bohemian attack. This is called gaming the system, because what you are doing is exploiting flaws in the scenario design. In other words, it is cheating.

Beating Bohemia
Shortly after you finish the third castle in your victory area, you start to detect Bohemian units. First you see a bunch of heavy cavalry, and then a bunch of infantry. None of this should worry you, although you should move your units in the field closer to your fortification for safety. Try to lure some of the Bohemian cavalry over to the side entrance, although they seem to want to head over there in any case. Keep in mind that Mongol cavalry is faster than Teutonic cavalry.

Many of the Bohemian units head for the gap in your wall. Most of them will die on the way there. If it looks like some of them will get in, you might have to seal the gap.

Pretty soon, you start to see the Bohemian siege train. Now this should definitely worry you. Kill them, stat. Start with the trebuchets, because they can engage your castles without being subject to return fire. Take out the Siege Onagers next, because they can shoot over walls. They have a strong attack, but are fairly easy to kill. As long as the Germans are not attacking at the same time, wiping out the Bohemian catapults is fairly easy, because their cavalry is probably on the other side of the map, and their infantry has died in front of your castles. For some reason, the Bohemian battering rams don't do much. This is probably because, when they got their marching orders, it looked like a good idea to go through the gap in your wall, but when they got there, it didn't exist, and they can't decide on a useful course of action. Whatever the reason, it won't be long before only the Bohemian cavalry remains, and it just mills around aimlessly.

So far, you have just killed all the Bohemian units. However, you really want to possess those Paladins. Lure them into range of your monks in small numbers and start to proselytize. You have a good chance of recruiting about 10 of them, and then the Bohemian field army is gone. This should put you over the population limit, so make sure that you have all your core units before doing this.

You may wonder if Bohemia can mount any more attacks. The AoE expert will have noted that Bohemia's score was constant until they attacked you. This means that they had no functioning economy. After you wiped out their field army, their score dropped by 2269, and again it remains constant. This means that they are not producing new units, although that might change in the future.

Beating Poland
By the time the Bohemian field army is gone, Poland should be hors de combat. They only had 4 gold mines, plus their initial stockpile, and everything they spent it on is dead by now. Every time they see a clear path to some other gold mine, some of their villagers will try to get there, and they all die too. Poland still has lots of wood and food, but they don't build any military units once their gold is used up. You can eliminate Poland with a very small force. But leave their Market alone, and use their farms for your own purposes. Note that Poland seems so weak mainly because you invested in an early castle over there.

Beating Germany
Germany is still attacking you, and, although their units are mostly junk, they are quite powerful against your field army. However, they are ineffective against stonework. Therefore, the most efficient way of defeating Germany is to just push your stonework forward. You certainly have enough stone available.

Finishing Bohemia
When Germany is dead, you can research Spies for only 200 gold. You will see that Bohemia has a few units trapped by impassable (at least for an AI) terrain and some stonework. Your trebuchets will make short work of the static defenses, and you can even shell the trapped units.

The final group does pose a bit of a problem, assuming that you are aiming to take zero casualties. (Of course, you could simply swamp them by now.) One thing that you could do is to bombard the area with your trebuchets, which takes a while but should eventually work. You could also build a castle just out of their range, and then break open their wall and sit back and watch their last units die.

Historical notes: It is suggested in the scenario introduction that Genghis Khan died of old age. In fact, he died from falling off a horse, although that may well have been age-related. Germany and Poland, while allied here, have been hostile towards each other for much of their history.

Ghenghis Khan 6: Pax Mongolia
When this scenario starts, we appear to be in pretty good shape. We get some of the best cavalry in the world, and we already have a bunch of them. We already have significant static defenses, not that Towers have much value in the Imperial Age. We won't need to do much research, so our primary expenses will be to build units and buildings. We have 15 stone mines and 10 gold mines available immediately, and as it turns out, we will find a lot more. That is an extravagant amount of stone, and much more gold than we will be able to reasonably use.

Mongols do have certain deficiencies. We won't get any gunpowder units. Our monks are pretty weak; definitely not front line units. We also have 10 Saboteurs, which we will probably never use, but they will take up 10 spots in the unit roster, because we probably won't just disband them.

A good force composition would be 25 villagers, 10 monks, 5 trebuchets, 2 Siege Onagers (to quickly wipe out trees), 8 light cavalry, 10 Mangudai, and 5 Camels. There are certain gaps in the lineup, such as the lack of foot archers, but we should be able to augment this force with Paladins, for example. We do not consider battering rams useful if we can get heavy artillery.

Put the first 5 villagers on food. The next two build a monastery and then collect gold. The next two start building a Wall Maze Complex; the next two collect gold. The next five collect wood, and then four collect stone. The final five are allocated as needed. Use your gold to build two monks, then a trebuchet, and then use your judgment. Focus your economy on filling up the unit roster as rapidly as possible before you have to start converting enemy units, as well as building defenses.

Quickly scout the north side of the river, claiming 10 sheep as you do. You find that the bridge is blocked to the south by some Towers. There is another river crossing to the east, but it is sealed off by trees. (That's why you need Siege Onagers.) When you have nothing better to do, send some light cavalry past the Towers. With proper maneuvering, and considering the Mongol light cavalry advantages, this is easily survivable. Unfortunately, behind the Towers is a large force, all arms, so your scouts must retreat.

Kill all enemy scouts as they try to cross the bridge.

You should plan on building the maziest Maze Complex that you can imagine. Try to make the enemy attack forces walk all the way around the map, so that, by the time they reach your main defense line, you should have been able to pick off all of their heavy equipment. Do not be stingy; you have an awful lot of stone. As the first layer of your Maze, wall off the north end of the bridge ... but not completely; leave one small hole. This starts to channel the attack stream immediately. One problem is your existing Towers. Try to ensure that enemy siege weapons won't get good shots at them, but try to incorporate them into your Maze somehow.

By the time the Hungarians announce their first charge, you will be well prepared for them.

When you get your first trebuchet, start attacking the Towers south of the bridge. At the first hint of counterbattery fire, pack it up and flee. This attack will provoke a massive reaction as their home guard responds. If enemy trebuchets decide to camp out on the bridge, redeploy your trebuchets to the river ford and pick off what you can.

By the time 10 minutes, game time, has passed, you should have killed more than 50 enemy units. Most of these will have died on the march, meaning that they didn't fight back. That is fortunate, because a force of this size, including all arms, is more than you can handle in the open field at this time.

Keep building up your forces, and keep killing enemy units. The best the Hungarians can do is to deploy a bunch of trebuchets on the south side of the bridge to blow up your closest walls, keeping all other units back to defend the trebuchets. They have no hope of successfully crossing the river. The best they do in practice is attack with the trebuchets from the south side of the river, but all other units charge across the bridge and die. Eventually they run out of front-line troops, and then you rush across the bridge with light cavalry and Mangudai and wipe out their trebuchets, although it may take several charge/retreat/heal cycles. Once they run out of trebuchets, you deploy your trebuchets on the north bank of the river and blow up everything they can reach, which is probably quite a lot. If the Hungarians switch to producing Teutonic Knights in their castles, you are laughing, because they are some of the most useless units in the game, especially against cavalry archers.

By the time Subotai arrives, you should be at 75 population, with all necessary research complete, except for a few of the most expensive technologies, and your Onagers should be on their way to the river ford. Your Maze Complex should be very complex. You are unlikely to have converted any enemy units, because your own units are significantly better. Maybe if the Hungarians upgrade their units, this will change, but they probably won't survive that long.

When Subotai's reinforcements arrive, after 40 minutes of game time have passed, you may die laughing. He himself is powerful, but he brings only 10 Saboteurs, which have no real value, and 2 pet wolves, whose only redeeming feature is that they don't count towards your population. If you were counting on those reinforcements, you're in deep trouble.

Park the new units somewhere and consider whether to go for the immediate kill, attacking straight across the bridge. You could probably do it, with 40 first-rate units, not including combat engineers, since the Hungarians are down to only about 10 weak units plus static defenses. But a more cautious approach is prudent. This means that you need to go via the river ford and try to find weak points in the Hungarian defenses.

Five minutes after Subotai arrives, the Hungarians blow the bridge. This will help them a lot, because they will not be able to charge suicidally into your fortified position for a while, and they will be able to build up their forces. You will need to build strong defenses at the river ford before knocking down the trees. You may or may not have units trapped on the south side of the river, but you have scads of all types of resource if you need to replace casualties, not that those units are necessarily in trouble.

Villagers can cut a path through a forest simply by harvesting the trees, but this takes a long time. There are also Slash-and-Burn techniques that allow them to cut a path quite rapidly, although a lot of micromanagement is required. A direct hit with a rock from a trebuchet also works, but it is a slow process. Another way, which is also the fastest way, to get through a forest is to hit the trees with rocks from a Siege Onager. As soon as you have that technology, you can start to expand out from the river ford. The big problem is that the Hungarians can reach almost anywhere on the south side of the river with trebuchets from the area they currently occupy. Therefore, any defenses you build on the south side of the river can be destroyed before you can do anything about it. At the same time, as soon as the path is opened, you will be hit by a flood of enemy units, so you need those defenses. Accordingly, you need to quickly and quietly expand your controlled areas so that you get some space that enemy trebuchets can't reach.

Move along the extreme edge of the map towards the south corner. You will find that this whole region is outside the Hungarian wall, and there are no gates in the wall. Put down some gates of your own to create several compartments of a Maze Complex. None of them would stand up long to enemy artillery, but the Hungarians don't yet know that you are here. Start breaking open the Hungarian wall in the extreme south. They may leave you alone for a while, or they may not. As soon as you get a chance, put your own gate in the breach. Again, you have no expectation that this gate will stand up long, but it will slow the enemy down for a while. Start scouting and raiding the Hungarian rear areas.

About one hour, game time, into the scenario, the Hungarians start building a Wonder. This is a pretty arrogant thing to do, considering that there are Mongols howling at the gates. You must punish them for their insolence! Unfortunately, the Wonder seems to go up pretty quickly, so you are under significant time pressure. It is also a lot harder to attack into an actively defended enemy base than it is to cut their troops down as they march towards your base. Furthermore, the Hungarians have used the respite they gained by blowing the bridge to expand their army to the maximum size and to fully upgrade their units. You are now facing Paladins, Elite Teutonic Knights, Elite Skirmishers, monks, trebuchets, and light artillery, all in large numbers. The only benefit to this is that some of these troops are now worth converting. Be careful, though, because you have very weak monks.

The situation has suddenly become a lot more challenging. You need to move fast, and you need to fight well. Advanced tactics are required; simply running forward and slugging it out with the enemy will not work. You need to think like a Mongol. Attack everywhere at once, do as much damage as you can, and use your high mobility to avoid threats. Push your Maze Complex forward at every opportunity. Allocate about 10 villagers to this; you don't really need to collect any more resources. Do these things, and you will find that you will kill the Hungarians faster than they can replace their losses. Once they run out of units, your horsemen can roam the map with impunity, and, more importantly, your trebuchets can go where they want and blow up any building they want in complete safety.

When the Hungarians have no production buildings and no units left, you win. You could even let them finish building their Wonder. After all, just because you are the Mongols doesn't mean that you have to destroy everything in sight.