Talk:Tsar of the Bulgars/@comment-129.133.194.171-20200126085708

I replayed the scenario on hard difficulty today and I can verify that the strategy in the article absolutely works. Turtling with castles is viable but it takes 2x the time.

Here is a step by step guide:

As soon as the city converts to your control, feel free to pause the game so you can give commands. Now do the following:

1. Group all of your pikes, skirms, and crossbows and use these to delay the Mongols at the south gate as necessary. Don't worry about them dying.

2. Take all of your mounted units '''and hide them at the top of the map, behind your castle. '''Even if the Mongols break in they will not attack your units because your castle will draw aggro. Their trebs don't come in until later so just let your castle protect you for now.

3. With your vills, build an additional 2-3 stables.

4. Research castle age cavalry techs.

5. Sell all your wood and buy food.

6. Begin queuing up konniks and knights and research husbandry. You should have 50-55 full HP cavalry units by the time you're in Imperial Age.

And unpause.

As soon as you hit Imperial Age, get the final techs, cavalier, elite konnik. Run out the west gate with your entire army (don't bother waiting for upgrades to complete), past red's units and straight into red's base at the southwest part of the map. Red is still in castle age so their arrows will hit like wet noodles, ignore their units and just go right for their khans.

Once red is your ally the game becomes much easier because not only are they not attacking you, but they'll send units to your base to fight yellow.

Once you convert green it becomes a cakewalk.

The only difference for this strategy between Standard and Hard is that it will probably take you a second (or even third) wave of cavalry to assassinate green's khans, since red will probably kill most of your army. The principle is the same and you should be able to win in less than 15 minutes on any difficulty.