The knights I used are concentrated in Konigsburg and Cologne. As I mentioned earlier, I both upgraded the knights this turn and used them to attack, which you can do by having a city finish building something on that turn, then hitting the "Zoom to City" button and scrolling ahead to the city where your units are located. You can then upgrade the units as long as they had any movement points remaining on the previous turn and are in a city with a barracks. This is a very minute detail, but can be useful at times. I used it to save a turn on the attack here.

I attacked with two columns of knights, sweeping through the Russian heartland in a very short period of time. Their cities were poorly defended with spearmen, which put up absolutely no fight whatsoever. It only took 5 turns to punch through the cities on my border and reach Moscow:

The fact that the Great Library was there was an added bonus; I had been neglecting tech to have enough money for the upgrades (which at 80g PER knight had cost a cool 1840g), so this was a major boon for my conquest. The Library gave me 4 techs, including some past Education, and then obsoleted itself. I could easily have gotten the techs anyway by purchasing them, but it was nice to get this stroke of luck.

I snapped another picture 10 turns into the war in 620AD. By this point in time, Russia was well on its way to collapse:

I was conservative again in my attack on Russia, stopping to quell resistance in each town before moving on, starving each captured city to size 1 to reduce flips (Tblisi did so once, that was it), and so on. It made no difference whatever Russia did; the massive upgrade is too powerful a tactic when it works to be stopped. Why is it so good? It converts gold, which is easy to stockpile in the ancient age when you can't rush buy things, into shields that cannot be acquired easily. It only took me roughly 20 turns to build 23 horsemen at 30 shields apiece; how long do you think it would have taken me to build 23 knights at 70 shields each? A lot longer, and too late for them to be used against spearmen. This is a great tactic to use if you can set it up properly.

I continued onward until I had reduced Russia to one city on my continent in the eastern jungle. At this point, I sued for peace and got their cities in the northern tundra islands in return. I observed the 20 turns to the treaty of course; anyone who doesn't do that is taking unfair advantage of the AI's unthinking nature. It certainly didn't hurt me in any way to wait a little while before finishing Russia off. In any case, here's the post-war map of former Russia in 670AD, looking much better under the German blue:

My territory that you can see on the minimap was starting to look like some kind of oversized, bloated monster. It probably doesn't need to be said that I was in first place by a LOT at this time vis-a-vis the other civs. I still had all these knights around though and nothing to do with them, so it was time for another one of the gals on the starting island to feel Otto throwing his weight around.

War with Russia: 520AD - 670AD Total Turns: 15 Result: Peace Treaty