Russia

[IvarrWolfsong]

Early on, Russia is challenging, but by mid game, I found them to be incredibly strong.

First off, almost all your heavy troops use axes for the "effective against armor" bonus. You main infantry units, dismounted Druz and Boyars Sons have axes (don't recall if dismounted Dvor did or not). My Dvor Horse Archers could slaughter most knights without breaking a sweat... pepper them with arrows, tire them out by skirmishing/kiting them and then meleeing with a "can opener" axe.

I found Druzhina cavalry to be much stronger than their mediocre stats would indicate. They were more than a match for the most early cavalry. They have the bonus of having a lance for the initial charge and then following up with a good "effective against armor" melee axe. By mid game, they were still very good because, being available from very early on, I had 10+ gold chevron veteran units.

Your dismounted Dvor are great archers... long range, great armor, good morale and great melee. They also use armor piecing axes.

Boyar's Sons are similar to Polish Nobles: medium cav with javelins. They do a great job "assassinating" generals and peppering enemy heavy cav to weaken them so your axes can smooosh their heads.

Khazaks are good cavalry archers with light armor and fast movement. While not elite quality, they do good service until your Cossack Cavalry comes along. Aside form disrupting and killing enemies with their arrows, I love to use their very fast movement to dash in and kill siege/cannon crews, charge archers in the rear and chase down routing units (they will easily catch fleeing generals).

Cossack cavalry are like Khazaks Deluxe. They are stronger and tougher but I use them the same way.

Tsars guard are nice heavy cav, BUT they don't have a good charge (5). They are more like heavy infantry that moves really fast. They use swords and don't get the effective vs armor trait. They are expensive and, although viable as a small heavy strike force of 1 or two units, I wouldn't try to use them as massed European style heavy cav. On the other hand they are very well armored and so are their horses. They also have a kick@$$ armored mask after you upgrade their armor.

Cossack Musketeers are a lot of fun. I haven't invested all that much into them and I only kept 2 in my main stacks. They did a very good jobengaging from afar, and were VERY good defending walls. I am finding that when using more than 1 or 2 in the field, their long range flat trajectory missles end up killing a lot of my horse archers who dance around the battle field. I tend to use a lot of horse archers though, and if I cut down on them I could probably have a great army based on a Cossack Musketeer "fire base."

Spearmen... uhmmm ... uh... yeah. This is your greatest weakness. You never get pikes, but you do get a vanilla spearman that is blah. I almost never used them as I found my other favorite units to do better service in most types of battles (spears being worth taking only at rivers or castles I expected Mongol house guests). Against enemy cavalry charges, I rely on intercepting the cavalry with my own. This is painfull if done from the front, but great if you catch them in the side where they lose their advantage of high charge stats and your Armor Piercing axes rule the melee.

Against the Mongols, you should face them at bridges or in your cities. I prefer the cities where my missle troops can kill them from the walls and then defeat their infantry on the ramparts. Your lack of spears makes fighting them at bottle necks a bit more costly than when using other factions. I would increase by half the nuber of infantry you usually but at a river crossing.. ie if you normally use 4 spears, use 6 russian heavy infantry units.. if you use 6 spears, use 9 russian infantry, etc. Of course you could just bring some vanilla spears along, but I almost never recruited them so I used what I had. I had very good results with 6 infantry (dismounted druz/Boyars), 4 dismounted Dvor, 4 Dvor Cav, 4 Druz, a general and a catapult when defending river crossings. This gives you 8 great archer units that will slaughter the enemies as they get jammed up at the crossing. Should you infantry falter, you can rush the very melee-capable Druz up to help. I never had any Mongol army get past that, but should that not work, you always have your 4 dismounted Dvor and 4 Dvor Cav rush in because they are pretty impressive in melee. The catapult is really fun at the river, because with the enemies all packed together, you kill HUGE quantities when you get a solid hit.

Anyway the point here is that although Russia may seem weak at first, they are very, very strong by mid game. Personally, I would say they have one of the BEST rosters available.