Medieval 2 Battle Report & Strat Thread (Super pic hvy)

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-11-15 07:11pm

Hell yeah! The Army of God's gotta eat!

I got a phone call today. I'm picking up MTW2 at lunch. FINALLY!

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-11-15 07:30pm

Nah, Constantinople is too much for my crusader army to chew- it's large but rather hastily thrown together and doesn't have enough Longbowmen for my tastes (6, minimum, is my standard).

I'll take some poorly defended heathen city in the Middle East ...

Anyone heard the pre-battle speech from a general whoose got a really foul mouth?

Hilarious!

The speeches in this game are much better than those in Rome.

Lonestar · Post by **Lonestar** » 2006-11-15 08:45pm

Picked it up today, already the Holy Crusading of the Army of the Reich is marching to loot and Pillage Constantinople...errr...to use that as the point of crossing into the middle east.

Emperor died in the siege of Florence. What a pussy.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-11-15 08:56pm

Does the royal line in the HRE still suck ass? I remember in Medieval 1 they had the WORST generals.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-11-15 09:07pm

Hotfoot wrote:Does the royal line in the HRE still suck ass? I remember in Medieval 1 they had the WORST generals.

In terms of loyalty? Not sure if that's still a problem, but I've seen plenty of generals from the HRE with a lot of command points ...

Lonestar · Post by **Lonestar** » 2006-11-15 10:26pm

Vympel wrote:
Hotfoot wrote:Does the royal line in the HRE still suck ass? I remember in Medieval 1 they had the WORST generals.
In terms of loyalty? Not sure if that's still a problem, but I've seen plenty of generals from the HRE with a lot of command points ...

My Crussading army is running around the Holy Land kicking ass and taking names, but the God-Damn Eye-talians(Venetians and Milanese both) backstabbed me and attacked my Italian possessians and Bavarian cities. And wheat happened when I turned them back and laid siege to Venice?

The Goddamn Pope blamedme for all the fighitng!

Pelranius · Post by **Pelranius** » 2006-11-15 11:17pm

Too bad you can't bribe Church officials to do your bidding. (expansion feature, anyone?)

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-11-15 11:44pm

There was a truly bizarre incident in a battle last night that I thought I'd relate- I was attacking Brugen, a Rebel town (referred to in an earlier post) when in typical fashion the AI sallied forth in the turn before the city was about to fall under siege. They were slaughtered by mass longbow fire and they ran back inside- the routed survivors of two units of Mailed Knights and a few Flemish Pikemen, Armored Seargants, and Crossbowmen.

My battering ram (yes, siege equipment appears on the map now when you sally forth, allowing you to destroy them and bide time!) broke the gate and I sent in 120 Billmen and 120 Gallogiach (you can retrain mercenaries to full strength in appropriate regions!) to finish them off.

The Billmen kicked the arse of everyone- until they got to the Mailed Knights. 20-30 of whom slaughtered all of my men. 118 Billmen and almost all the Gallogiach's!

What. The. Fuck.

Pablo Sanchez · Post by **Pablo Sanchez** » 2006-11-16 12:32am

Vympel wrote:What. The. Fuck.

Was there anything abnormal about them, like high experience or armor/weapon upgrades? Were they in the city center "no routs ever" zone? That's all I can think of.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-11-16 12:45am

IIRC, they had a chevron of experience each, no weapons or armor upgrades, but they were in the No Rout Zone.

Still, they were under attack from over 100 fucking Billmen! It was ridiculous. These are the same cavalry the majority of whom were slaughtered by the same men outside the gates minutes earlier!

I sent in my own Mailed Knights to finish them after this farce, but still ...

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-11-16 12:55am

How did you even get this game! The bloody EBs in Brisbane don't have any.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-11-16 01:05am

Dude, that sucks. I got a phone call yesterday from the EB in Adelaide saying they had the game. I just couldn't pick it up until today.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-11-16 01:16am

Stark wrote:How did you even get this game! The bloody EBs in Brisbane don't have any.

Err ... pre-order?

Archon · Post by **Archon** » 2006-11-16 02:53am

I am very jealous of all you M2TW owners. But I can't afford it until I get back from visiting Melbourne.

Glory to the Roman Empire!

wautd · Post by **wautd** » 2006-11-16 03:14am

Update:

Nothing much happened on the field of expending my territory, rather then bitterly defending my south, east and northern borders.

I succesfully defended my southern cities from the Spanisch hordes. They should be low on men right now, so I stacked my survivors and this army is now enroute to their capital to take advantage of this momentum.

The HRE was sleeping untill I took one of their castle cities. Two heroic victories followed where my weak garrison was able to fend of 2 large forces.

The Danes are stronger than I tought. They lost their capitol but next to some provinces in the east, they also hold all of Scandinavia and their fleet is dominating all the western seas, blockading my ports. I got a city that can build ships with cannons now, but its all the way down in marseilles so it'll take a while to build and get them there.
The defence of those conquered cities is bitter. They are far away from my closest castle, garrisons are getting small and losses aren't easely replaced. Occasionally I have to pull back my inner city walls and have to send my archers in melee for the final push.

Finally, in the Middle East, I took one more city to sack (yay money) and soon will have a 3rd (standing at the gates and already killed half of the garrison in a previous battle). Civil unrest is pretty high so I got 2 priests converting the area to the one True Religion.
Got a kickass battle here. My rather small but hardened army attacked 2 Egyptian armies. Their first army consisted of 8 trebuchets, 1 ballista and 1 catapult with some light infantry support. I started in their flank so I rushed my units towards them to deal with them quickly. I decimated their troops in the following slaughter and quickly reformed my infantry towards the arriving second army whil sending my cavalry to their flanks.
It started well but because they were heavy on archers and had much more units, things quickly degraded in pure chaos with pockets of infantry fighting a desperate fight and my cavalry supporting or flanking where ever needed. I whiped out 99% of thir army while having like 10% survivors on my part, but enough to lay siege to their city with some fresh reinforcements.
I took a screenshot of the final battlefield because it was quite some sight (dead bodies everywhere and a wall of abandoned trebuchets) but elas, forgot to save it.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-11-16 09:06am

Started a campaign game tonight as Venice but let my friends distract me for most of the evening.

My first battle against the Rebels was pretty disappointing - one of their Axemen units stood and died to my archers without moving forward or retreating, was hoping that AI was improved. Then my general somehow got himself killed when I was mopping up.

I'm playing on Hard/Hard and somehow got Venice to a point where I can maintain #1 military power and still have vast piles of money coming in.

Can't seem to figure out how to switch my preferred faction heir yet. This could be an issue as the Doge's second son is better than the eldest.

The Byzantines seem to be the faction target for the Venitians. I guess they want to try and encourage history to repeat. The Emperor tried to provoke me early on by attacking my eastmost settlement... by himself! This confused me greatly as in his turn he first organised trade rights with me, then the Emperor swept down with his bodyguard and laid siege, which he promptly lifted by somehow declaring peace when my troops landed to reinforce.

My Crusading fleet just went past Byzantine Cyprus. I'm tempted to reinforce my Eastern border and divert the Crusade just a little. It's tempting, but I don't trust my Western neighbours (Excommunicated Milan and the Holy Roman Empire) not to try to take advantage of the situation.

A difficult choice... the future of Italy hanging in the balance. I think I'll sleep on it.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-11-16 09:15am

I got the game yesterday. Nothing much has happened so far. I'm playing as England, and so far I've only taken York, Rennes and the province between York and Ireland. I also did a custom battle, and Citadel sieges are going to be oh so fun! It was great to see the defenders abandon the outer walls to man the middle walls. The other beautiful thing was moving my trebs into the city to attack the middle walls.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-11-16 09:25am

Vympel wrote:Err ... pre-order?

By 'don't have any' read 'it's on the 'coming soon' shelf. It wasn't released on tuesday... or something. Bris-vegas sucks?

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2006-11-16 10:08am

You know what really sucks? I can't play the game with my keyboard. There must be something with the KVM switch I'm using that sends extra input when I'm using the keyboard to scroll around the battle/campaign map. This results, among other things, in the sound crapping out, the shell opening up, and the game spontaneously reloading from the quicksave. So, whenever I want to play the game, I have to disconnect my keyboard from the KVM switch and plug it directly in to my windows box.

Has anyone ever heard of this? I've never run into this problem with any other game, including Rome.

Dartzap · Post by **Dartzap** » 2006-11-16 03:17pm

Has anyone else noticed the triple-rank maneuver the various musketeers do? One rank fires, goes back behind the others while they reload? It's pretty spatty when they do it, since they just get in each others way, heh

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-11-16 04:07pm

Attacking cities is much more difficult and realistic now that the city defender AI has been improved. Now the city defenders move around the walls to compensate for the movements of your siege towers and ladders, and they can finally send more men up onto the walls if they need them. In RTW, the defender's men seemed to be incapable of moving up onto the walls once they were on the ground, so you could sometimes have a farcical situation where he would have a huge army inside the walls and one unit of peasants could capture the entire wall system by simply attacking at a point where there were no defenders, letting one unit of cavalry rush the city square (to draw the defenders off the walls) and then rushing the cavalry back out so that the peasants could leisurely stroll around the now-uncontested perimeter.

Lonestar · Post by **Lonestar** » 2006-11-16 07:34pm

After going under to a Red-hot Catholic Gang Bang, I decided to start over as a country closer to heathens (and would not have to worry so much about pissing the Pope off by killin' other Catholics). The Righteous Kingdom of Spain controls all of the Iberian Penninsula (except Portugal), Jerusalem and Acre, and chunks of North Africa.

I'm at the point where I have to wage war to make money to wage war. It's a vicious cycle.

Lord Woodlouse · Post by **Lord Woodlouse** » 2006-11-16 07:48pm

Played it first time today (I bought it a few days ago, but my computer is all arsed up and would explode trying, so I played on a friend's recently upgraded machine).

It's a ton of fun, and I have to agree with the attacking walled towns thing. I attacked with slightly superior forces against a Welsh wooden castle, and got pretty much slaughtered (not enough ladders, towers and stuff) because they really worked to man the walls.

One thing I miss is being able to assign titles to your nobles. That was always quite fun.

...and as playing the English, am I the only one with such a massive shortage of male heirs? I have about 5 or 6 princesses on the way but not a single male ready to come of age. It's getting worrying.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-11-16 08:17pm

Oh man. I was sending my veteran army, under the command of my best general, from England to take Antwerp for my nobles. While crossing the channel, my fleet of three cogs runs into three separate pirate navies. I got ping-ponged between all three during the AI's turn, destroying the fleet and wiping out my army. Fuck!

Luckily, I was able to raise an army of rejects from Caen and Rennes to take to Antwerp. I had just slightly more men than the rebels, but I killed their captain quickly, and their moral collapsed.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-11-16 08:24pm

That's one thing I'm loving about Venice. Pirates, schmirates!