I just won with the HRE on Hard/Hard on Turn 30, what about everyone else?
I think that for consistently easy winning, the Byzantines are number 1 since their beginning units are just so much better than everyone elses, and they are in a decent position, but if you are willing to take a little risk, the HRE has the most opportunity because you can expand in 3 or 4 directions at once.
But I must confess I never played a serious game with the HRE in M2:TW before this month because their units are just so generic. But halfway through I realized it didn’t matter too much if you are trying to win quickly because it’s just as easy to put your money into quick militia hordes supplemented by whatever cavalry you can scrounge at castles as it is to rely partly on specialized units. (I mean, I had figured out the second part but didn’t realize that it would NOT detract from playing the HRE. It was still fun even though most of the unit I made were either Mailed Knights or Town Militia.)
Tactically:
– Who cares about being excommunicated? Towns are small enough in the beginning that one or two turns at the max, you’ll be able to move on to the next one with all but the minimum garrison, even with the 25% excom penalty.
– Go on the offensive right away as soon as you have even a half stack with a leader per “territory-width” of the nation you will invade (so you can attack the beginning Danes with just one half stack army, or the Poles with 2-3, ideally attacking at the same so as to not ruin surprise.) Concentrate on rebels first, secondarily pound the people who attack you into the ground, if you already have enough production to do so don’t shy away from starting another front!
– Find out what turn you will likely win on and concentrate only on the economic development that will pay you back before this time. Even so it might not be worth it sometimes. Although roads and ports are still worthwhile, just not for their economic benefits.
– Trash Thieves Guild, Catapult factories, and Ballistae factories to bring you cash. Artillery is only useful if you want to avoid excommunication with a fait accompli since it’s so slow, and you don’t care about excommunication.
I think the fastest I’ve ever won a game was maybe 75 turns, playing with the Byzantines. They do have topnotch early units for field battles and a great economy, but cavalry archers are kinda weak in cities and that slowed me down. I never rush for early victories, though, so winning early with the Byzantines was a bit of a fluke. Normally I enjoy doing things with minimal losses rather than maximum speed, so I spend a lot of time trying to break the enemy at my own castle walls, at bridge crossings, or in ambushes. I usually trash catapult factories anyway, though; who needs one in every town?
I play mostly as either England, Venice or Byzantium.
You can guarantee yourself heroic victories against full stacks fairly easily, even on very hard, with same unit spam and the right place.
For England.
What you need - A decent general, about 4-5 units of Dismounted English Knights and the rest Retinue Longbowmen. Use cheaper versions earlier on.
What to do - Fight defensively, and make sure you aim downhill. Arrange your longbowmen so they make a rough semicircle facing the enemy. Take about 3 units of longbowmen and place them in front of your semicircle. Deploy stakes. Your infantry should be behind your longbowmen, and your general behind them. It’s crucial you disable skirmish mode, or it’ll be a total cock-up.
Start the battle - Immediately withdraw your 3 units of longbows behind your frontline, leaving a bunch of stakes for the enemy to traverse as they advance. This is your killzone. Enemy infantry are slowed down by stakes - when they charge through your second row, counter-charge with your infantry. Retinue longbowmen can handle themselves in meleé, but you’ll want to avoid that, since they’re more deadly shooting.
Using this method you will massacre pretty much any army you face. The only annoyance is artillery, which you can get your general to wheel around and engage (make sure the bulk of their army is well away, of course), while your bows provide cover.
This method is particularly lethal against the usual unstoppable Mongols and Timurids, although for engaging them I’d dispense with the infantry. You’ll have total missile superiority - missile cavalry make good targets for your bows. Their normally superb heavy cav and generals will impale themselves on your spikes.
I wiped out the Timurids stacks in about 5 turns using this method.
Another good tactic with unit spam - using Byzantium or Russia.
You’ll need; a decent general general, the rest - Vard missile cav for the Byzzies, and Dvor for Russia. Substitute Kazaks earlier on (avoid Boyar sons like the plague - they spend their ammuntion far too quickly then get butchered in melée).
What to do: Deploy your horse archers into three groups along the battlefield, 6 units to a group, more or less, like this;
ENEMY
^ KILLZONE ^
| |
~~~ ~~~
~~~
~G~
The G is your general. When advancing, the AI always goes for your general. Advance your left and right flank behind the enemy to harass them. It'll either break up their formations as units break off to try and engage you, or cause massive casualties as arrows hit them in the back. Devote one of your flanks to the sole purpose of killing their general. Once their formations are suitably ruined, advance your 'General group' to hit units that have strayed off to chase your other groups in the flank.
Don't let your horse archers engage in melee, whatever you do. If you completely run out of ammo, enemy morale should be low enough for you to swamp units in melee without high losses, although aim for the flanks of rubbish enemy units (peasents, militia and the like) to set off the chain reaction. Once they're all routing, turn "fire at will" off to avoid friendly fire and mop up the prisoners.
Phew!
This is critical. I hate losing expensive missile cavalry when they’re shooting when they should be mopping up. Honestly, it’s probably a negligible loss, but it irks me to no end.
In the first ‘longbow spam’ method you’ll probably take few prisoners - routing units hit and killed by arrows, as opposed to run down by melee units, are killed outright.
Oh, and don’t impale generals on your own spikes! Any cavalry running against the spikes is killed instantly. You can walk them through against the spikes, though you can still lose units, as I found to my cost when the king of England galloped up to the rest of his walking unit and promptly impaled himself.
:smack:
Not completely related, but I remember one of my most glorious battles where I had a small amount of very elite infantry and cavalry and one ballista versus a huge horde of soldiers. When they came into range, the flaming ballista crashed into their ranks…killing their king with the very first shot of the battle. I swooped into the discord and routed the entire invading army quickly.
Mr. Kobayashi, your tactic works even better in Medieval 1 (even though there aren’t any wooden pikes) with handgunners. They’re gunpowder units, but they’re also abnormally good at hand-to-hand combat and I’ve routed heavy cavalry by hitting them from behind with handgunners that were out of ammo.
Oh, I remember once when I brought cannons into a city to bombard the city center and the enemy charged their general right down the narrow streets… allowing a cannonball to go right down a column of cavalry, killing the general and half his bodyguard in one shot. Hysterical.
In general that’s a good idea except if you’re playing the Vardariotai, who are right off the bat as good as a Western knight. If the enemy has a lot of archers of their own it might be better to rush them with all your cavalry causing them to break immediately rather than weather the missile fire. You have to balance this against the rarity of the Vars especially in the beginning.
If you’re going to mess with the Byzantines, make sure you do so very quickly and early. Those horse archers are mean as hell. They’re a LOT better to put up with when they’re controlled by a rebel army than under the Byzantine flag.
Playing the Britannia campaign earlier reminded me of some of the more traditional formations that work; specifically the time-honoured hammer and anvil. This works well with France (good heavy cav) and any Italian faction (good defensive infantry), as well as any other faction where you can cheaply throw together good heavy cav and expendable infantry (ah, mere infantry. Poor beggars.).
You need about half your stack comprised of solid defensive infatary; Italian spear militia do the job well. A couple of missile units to cover, and the rest heavy cav; including a general.
Two ways of doing this; Alexander’s method or Hannibal’s method.
Alex’s method consists of deploying all your infantry on the left flank and a solid block of cav on the right. The idea being that the enemy engages your infantry line, whereby you swing around your cav (the ‘hammer’) and crush the enemy between your lines. A good tactic if you can get it to work in M2 - the enemy will just as likely rush your cav (who should never be used to hold a line, their strength lies in charges). You can try and bait them with your general, but I’ve had mixed results with it. Expect your far left flank to take a beating.
Hannibal’s method (with cav or high quality infantry, dismounted knights and the like) consists of stretching a long thin line of relatively poor quality troops in the center, whilst keeping your higher quality boys and a mass of cav in reserve, on both your left and right flanks. Don’t bother with missile units. When the enemy engage, quickly sweep your higher quality infantry around yours flanks and attack the enemy from the side as they engage your front line, whilst your cav rides way out to the back of the enemy and repeat charges into the rear of the enemy, which should be trapped in a ‘U’ shape of your infantry. Use several units of cav to specifically target their general, and never retreat from a cav-on-cav melee without covering the retreat - enemy cav will massacre you as your cav attempts to fall back.
The disadvantage with this is that it is dependant on the enemy coming to you and what units he has - often the enemy annoyingly mixes up spearmen, heavy infantry and light infantry in the fray and your cav will end up engaging spearmen.
Since your enemy will hopefully be totally surrounded, remember to make the golden bridge for the flying enemy. Your cav should be able to swiftly mop up prisoners following the rout.
This also makes me realize that I’ve won some HUGE battles with some of the most unconventional methods known to man. Case in point is 1257 (I think), the year that the Mongols come out. I remember getting almost all my military in that one spot where they emerge in Medieval 1 and taking them all completely on in one 3-hour battle.
Yeah, the first time it happened, I crapped myself because I thought I was the baddest guy on the block.
The first time I encountered the Mongols they wiped my embattled crusader kingdom around Antioch off the map without a second thought.
Trick is to either use the longbow spam tactic, or play the waiting game - allow them to become a normal, settled power, then crusade 'em to death. Timur was right, their strength lies in being nomads, not soft settled fools!
Absolutely. Right now, I’m sitting back and letting them break themselves against my castle walls. My general in the castle has won three or four Heroic Victories in the last ten turns and now gets +4 when commanding a castle defense. Epic losses, but the Mongols always take the worst of it.
Anybody who even remotely enjoyed MWII should check out their mods. By far, Stainless Steel is the best out there, especially with tweaked with the various sub-mods available depending on your level of desired realism. It really cleans up the numerous bugs and dubious gameplay elements of the vanilla version - adds jillions of factions, expands the map, units, AI and tactics.
Damn, it’s starting to sound a little like a used car commercial, but I just started playing again (incidentally) and I’m blown away at what an improvement it is.
I was waiting for an ultra-badass mod to come along for that. I was waiting for the Total Realism patch because that mod for Rome was super-fucking-hella-balls-to-the-wall awesome.
Oddly enough, I use flame arrows at the beginning of a battle, against massive amounts of militia or peasants to try to cause disorder early. It doesn’t work too well for me, but at the end of a battle, my units are engaged with the enemy so they are ready to break anyway and the inaccuracy of the flame will kill lots of my guys as well. Plus, the accuracy of non-flame arrows tends to lower morale nearly as much as flame when concentrated on a heavily outnumbered unit (of course I only do this when it isnt SO outnumbered I’ll kill more of my own guys even with the added accuracy…)
One idle question: is there a mod that will let you play in a different time period like in M:TW1? I find that in order to use a lot of the units you all are talking about I have to purposely restrain myself to not win too early to use them, even if I only go to war with those that attack me.
The mod I mentioned previously has options to start both an Early and Late era campaign. Just make sure you have Kingdoms installed (a worthy expansion by itself). There is an optional submod bundled with the Stainless Steel download that significantly alters and enhances how recruitment works. Elite units now have extensive replenishment, and units are scaled on a system of tiers. Crossbowmen, for example, train faster than longbowmen of otherwise equal quality to reflect their ease of training. Militia units replenish several times faster than your elite heavy cavalry (oh, and did I mention cavalry charges are actually fearsome now, as they should be). Additionally, units are scripted so that they cannot appear before they should (if history hasn’t developed plate armor yet - no units with plate armor!) Mercenary units have reduced recruitment costs but expensive upkeep and have a dynamic of their own. It leads itself towards more realistic army compositions but also some subtle, really interesting gameplay elements. You’ll actually send in your peasants first to absorb missile fire - they’re much cheaper than those mounted and mailed nobles.
Sorry if I ramble - I’m a little tired. I was up all night conquering Britain.