Age of Empires 3 DE - Chuvash Cape 1582 - Historical Battles Campaign

As the Cossack's we are travelling down the Tura River to aid our friends in Perm, who are being harrassed by the Tatars. I like that we start off with a bit of a mini-mission to travel down the treacherous Tura River, before we start setting up our base. it adds more of a risk factor, having only two small wooden boats at our disposal. It is immediately clear that we are deep in Tatar country by the sheer amount of enemy cavalry along the river edge. Once we arrive to a safe location to disembark, we can start setting up our base like in a traditional skirmish style game. The river cuts the map into two sections nicely, meaning we can focus on defending the one and only river crossing - but beware that there are enemy cavalry on our side of the river too. These generally will not attack us, but are worth fighting to gain control of the territory and the resources on our side of the river. This is the only mission in from any of the campaigns where we get to play as the Russians, making use of their unique style of training. We train our villagers in groups of three. our Strelets in tens, and most units in small platoons rather than individually. I quite like this little change, it makes it quite different to usual. First thing we want to do it build up a strong economy with lots of villagers and improvements. You can see I focus on the market and villagers, plus resource home shipments to start. Then we jump into placing a mixture of military buildings upfront to support the defenses. Once we have decent defenses and can clear our side of the river, we gain control of the two trade posts. now we can push over the river and start methodically emilinating the platoons of cavalry spread around. By destroying the Tatar camp to the northwest, we liberate the ally town from their raids, leading the town to join us and increasing our economy nicely. We have a lot of income at this stage and can build up some large forces to cover each crossing into the yellow fort. They have a small economic base just north of their fort that is worth taking out, so that you can attack the fort from both entrances. I like the steady growth around the map and gaining the northern town is a nice feature of the mission. It has a bit of stealth, a bit of base buildings, lots of fighting, an ally. It's a really well thought out mission.