Tips for Bukhara

[Silver]

Thought i'd leave some suggestions to make the scenario a lot easier, cause if you dont do these things, the AI will quickly spin out of control and dominate the entire map.

Right after you are led up the pass to the starting town area and construct your TC, build a barracks and recruit some spearmen. While that is happening, build a blacksmith and research the infantry upgrades. Once you send the spearmen on the way, research squires.

The goal of these spearmen (10 to 12 in total) is for 5 or 6 each to be sent to the two allied persian town centers, one across the river and the other to the south of the river on your side of the river bank. The villagers there will otherwise be relentlessly griefed by white hun cavalry archers and light cav and their bases will quickly fall apart, leaving you without any allies (for now) and forcing you to weather the assault of 2 hun players.

So ideally you also want to send an accompanying villager who will then build a palisade (or stone, if you want to be thorough) gate to make it harder for the AI to breach these areas.

Remember that persian town centers have 2x HP and the enemy uses many horse archers, so keeping his melee guys away from them will greatly secure their longevity.

In a similar fasion you can also reinforce the persian castle in the south-southwest with gates to make it harder for the enemy to raze it, and this is also the area where Khosrau will arrive with his elephants.

Next you want to start sending over crossbowmen to garrison the allied town centers so that they will always be raining a hail of arrows without the allied AI always having to send their villagers in. Even tho garrison space is now occupied, leaving none for the villagers, the archers (and gates) should do a good job keeping attackers away.

Do these things and you will prevent the white huns from dominating the map within the first 30 to 45 minutes of the game because if they manage to, they will be right up your walls with their trebs taking potshots at your base and too many horse archers will make it difficult to sally out and destroy the siege weapons, with even heavy camel riders struggling to push through.

Since I didnt do the above things in my run, the only thing that saved me were my walls (for some reason the AI is stupid and gets stuck in front of them instead of making an effort to knock them down first), my two castles near the line of wall, and most importantly, my huge fleet of galeons I sent downriver. They have very good pierce armor and so can weather the hailstorm of cav archer arrows more than even the camels.

[jeffreysamson158]

I have another option. Just avoid making the initial first TC and instead boom bit by bit defeating nearby white huns on our own. The mongols will not attack our base so use it to boom . Although if this is how you play after making the TC expect the mongols to attack with a large force based on the time it took to do so. Also i managed to cripple their gold mines in the far east using watchtower garrison drop exploit to most past a cliff near the top most caravan area.