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

[GuppyShark]

Just read over at Total War centre, there's going to be a patch soon to deal with the stalling sieges and "Let's stand here and get shot to death" AI bugs.

[Darth Wong]

I took Scotland and immediately got excommunicated. Then the Pope died two turns later, I voted for his replacement, and I got reconciled. Convenient! Then the French attacked me, and the Pope ordered me not to retaliate against them, which pissed me off because they were continuing to attack. But I did as the Pope ordered, and lo and behold, the French were excommunicated shortly afterwards. It looks like the French probably got the same warning about not attacking a fellow Catholic state, and they chose to ignore it.

I basically turtled after taking control of the entire British Isles, and built up my cities to be economic engines while building up my fortresses to build the higher-end units like Knights Templar and longbowmen. My economy is humming along now, and my power level is "Ultimate" according to the system diplomacy screen. The other powers fear me enough that when I took Henry's army to Paris and laid siege to the city, the French immediately shit themselves and offered to give me the settlement at Angers if I would cease hostilities. I took the offer, converted the fortress at Angers into a city, and now it's humming along making money for me too. At this point I've decided to sail around Spain and attack the Moors so I won't have to worry about Papal displeasure. The game has reached the point where my situation is pretty healthy on all fronts (diplomatic, economic, military) and I'm at or near the top of the rankings in every category.

It seems to me that you really need only one castle or fortress on the entire British Isles once you take control of the Scots, the Welsh rebels, and the Irish, so you can convert the others to cities. Then you can garrison them with the allowed number of free-upkeep militia units and turn them into pure income generators. This allows me to maintain a powerful field army away from home and keep my European settlements quite heavily garrisoned in case of attack from the other Catholic powers without hurting my economy.

[GuppyShark]

I'm curious as to what difficulties people are playing on. I thought I'd take the plunge and play Hard/Hard with governors required for manual settlement management.

Having to ship the family members around to take charge where needed is kind of cool. One thing I've noticed though... unmanaged settlements sure do love their Brothels...

[The Yosemite Bear]

Well everything goes better with brothels....

[wautd]

Well Spain is dead, they just don't realize it yet. Took their capital (which was beautifull, being on a hill and all) together with 2 of their princes and the bulk of their army. Only 2 or 3 mediocre defended cities to conquer left and the south will pacified. I will leave the Moors alone for now, since they are allies as early as I started the game (well, allies on paper. It's not like we're helping eachother or anything). I think I go to secure the Britisch islands instead.

The HRE can't seem to find its own ass so their sporadic invasion attempts are dealth with swiftly.

Still on the defence against the Danes. All my good units have to come from southern France so I have to hold out some more turns. On the plus side, the Pope ordered a crusade against Vilnius (off all places), appearanly a Danish city as well at the moment. They'll be expecting a my crusader army from the Middle East soon.

Speaking of the Middle East, looks like Hungary is wanting some more pieces of the cake and I am in the way. This will complicate things there.


Oh and I love cannons. With enough of them, it's very satisfying to almost/completely obliterate a wall in the first volley, decimating the defenders on top

[Lonestar]

I took Scotland and immediately got excommunicated. Then the Pope died two turns later, I voted for his replacement, and I got reconciled. Convenient! Then the French attacked me, and the Pope ordered me not to retaliate against them, which pissed me off because they were continuing to attack. But I did as the Pope ordered, and lo and behold, the French were excommunicated shortly afterwards. It looks like the French probably got the same warning about not attacking a fellow Catholic state, and they chose to ignore it.

I've noticed that it seems to be a-okay for you to fight field battles against another Catholic faction, but it's verboten to start seizing regions unless he gets excomunnicated.

It seems to me that you really need only one castle or fortress on the entire British Isles once you take control of the Scots, the Welsh rebels, and the Irish, so you can convert the others to cities. Then you can garrison them with the allowed number of free-upkeep militia units and turn them into pure income generators. This allows me to maintain a powerful field army away from home and keep my European settlements quite heavily garrisoned in case of attack from the other Catholic powers without hurting my economy.

Alas, I'm back to playing as the HRE(The Spanish economy being something of a Joke) and by the nature of the beast, I can't afford to have have a lack of castles in my core areas.

[2000AD]

while building up my fortresses to build the higher-end units like Knights Templar and longbowmen.

Dangit, how do you get Templar? I've only been able to get the knights of St John when playing as English.

[Vympel]

Ahhh ... the classic Total War Bridge Battle.

1360 men on my side, 1510 on the enemy (French).

Among those are shitloads of catapults.

I have only two ballista. It was enough.



The AI initially tried bombarding my Longbowmen, but pulling them back fooled the AI into sending the entire army- including catapults- across the bridge.

None survived.



I lost only 200 men. The enemy lost 1200. I executed all who I captured. Their general too.

Ballistas in this game are fucking awesome. They're accurate and devastating. Use flaming ammo for best effect.

[Alferd Packer]

Having figured out my keyboard woes, I finally got to play a bit of the game. I'm consolidating my powerbase up in England; I've allied with Scotland for the moment, and maintain standoffishly neutral relations with France. With Scotland as my ally, I plan to capture all the regions around Edinburgh, take the north coast of France all the way up to Antwerp, then crush Scotland. What I'm going to try to do is infiltrate with my spies and get them to open the gates, so I can take it in one turn. I figure the Pope won't be too mad if I do it in one turn. Also, I plan to keep a diplomat near Rome and try the aforementioned bribing tactic to keep in the good graces of the Pope.

It's a shame I'll be on vacation all next week. This game is looking pretty interesting.

[Vympel]

The Mongols arrived. Not my problem, though

The French have only two regions left, and no army to speak of after I crushed their main force at the bridge.

[Alferd Packer]

So, can you make like a shitton of money with Merchants, or are they just not worth it? I was playing around with my merchant, a Merchant of Venice (yes, I see the irony ) kicked my Merchant out! What the fuck!

[Arrow]

Hehe, I had a Scottish merchant buy out two of my merchants, pissing me off to no end. So I sent an assassin after him. This assassin was a total noob, and failed to kill the merchant four straight times (fricken peasant women, always screaming at the wrong time!). Fifth time was the charm! And the assassination movies are cool as hell.

[Dartzap]

You can tell your fighting French separatists when half their army gets captured

[Darth Wong]

So, can you make like a shitton of money with Merchants, or are they just not worth it? I was playing around with my merchant, a Merchant of Venice (yes, I see the irony ) kicked my Merchant out! What the fuck!

I find the merchants really annoying. Every single time I try to take over another mechant's business, I fail. And yet it seems like the enemy can take over my merchants at will. And for what? 8 or 12 florins per turn? Fuck that, I'd rather spend my time conquering and then sending the loot back home.

[Alferd Packer]

I find the merchants really annoying. Every single time I try to take over another mechant's business, I fail. And yet it seems like the enemy can take over my merchants at will. And for what? 8 or 12 florins per turn? Fuck that, I'd rather spend my time conquering and then sending the loot back home.

OK, at least it's not just me, then. the best I found was wine in France at 26 florins per turn. Then the Merchant of Venice fucked me. As soon as I can, I'm going to start churning out assassins. It'll be good practice.

[2000AD]

Yeah, merchants do tend to suck, though i was surprised when (as egypt) a venetian merchant took over one of mine and started making over 200 from what had been bringing in 50. That's got me scratching my head.

[Lonestar]

Well, all of Northern Italy is mine(except Venice), Prague, Bern, Magdeburg, uhhh...the castle to the Northeast, Antioch and Aleppo. I made the mistake of voting for an allied cardinal instead of the Spanish one(whoops) for Pope. Fortunately, I gave 'em a buncha money and they love me again.

Me and France are snapping and snarling at each other, and I think my illustrious "ally" Venice is heading for a Pee-pee smack as well. I'm using my Teutonic Knights Army 'o Death to clear out Central Europe of Brigands, and racking up xp for one of my Gnerals. Good times.

[D.Turtle]

Bought the game last week Friday, played as Spain and finished the game by Monday (on Medium/Medium). Second game now as Egypt on hard/hard.

Some notes on things I noticed:

Concerning the pope:When the pope tells you too stop attacking someone - do so!
If the AI attacks - let them, defend and quite quickly the enemy will be excomunicated (you can always strengthen your army, or rather - disband lots of your army - get money in, and one or two rounds before the papal order runs out, rebiuld your army) at which point you can attack them without being punished.
Do NOT attack the papal states. Once at war with them you obviously are immediately excommunicated (giving you a 20% unrest increase in all cities - which is a lot with a larger empire). Even conquering Rome and killing the pope does not help - a new pope is elected, but as long as you are at war with the papal states (who can not be eradicated) you will STAY excommunicated, no matter who the pope comes from.

Which brings me to the next point - training of troops.

I LOVE that you can train several troops per round (and all troops only take one round to train!). This makes it possible to disband most of your army (leave one unit per city) during peacetime, so you get lots of money, build up your cities, and as soon as someone declares war, you can train a large army in one or two rounds.

Merchants: Either completely ignore them, or always build to the maximum. Then send them all to the same kind of resource (for example wine), so that you have a monopoly - which gets you a good bonus. I had a monopoly on wine which gave me between 30 and 60 gold per round per merchant (changing my capital to Rome had me suddenly make several hundred with some other merchants, but changing to another city and then back to Rome had that go down to 50-70 again :/.
Driving enemy merchants out of business depends on your merchants finance trait - so have some good merchants to kill all of the enemy's merchants.

Spies: ALWAYS build as many spies as possible - You need at least one spy in each of your cities relatively close to the front (to detect enemy spies). Placing spies in enemy cities of course gives a chance that the gates are open when you attack. Very useful: Spies increase the unrest in the cities they are in - several spies in one enemy city far from his capital can quickly cause them to rebel. Important: Every round move the spies out of the enemy cities and in again (when probability of success = 100%) and into the city again (increases the spies traits).

For cities: You can have cities (towns) or castles (fortresses) - Cities give more money, fortresses better troops (better infantry, cavalry, better archers, siege weapons). I usually have only one fortress, and the rest as cities (more money = more troops, which trumps less but better troops). Once gunpowder is invented you can build cannons also in cities, which reduces the need of fortresses. Additionally, built up cities also have cavalry.

For armies (and battles):
Siege weapons (especially Trebuchets and of course all cannons) are EXTREMELY effective. Not only in killing enemy troops, but especially killing their morale (especially Trebuchets with their cow cadavers you can toss, which infect enemy troops - and even spreads to those you didn't hit! - which greatly reduces their morale).
Archers: You need LOTS of archers. I usually havehalf my army as archers. The AI is hesitant to simply charge your troops, and instead first tries to attack you with his archers (which he always has less of than you, except mongols), which enables you too kill or demoralise most of his army by the time he charges.
Cavalry: You need at least two cavalry units to swing around the enemy and attack from behind to get the enemy fleeing.

Note: You goal is not necessarily to kill the enemy army, but to get his army to start fleeing, at which point the real massacre begins. So always set up your army and tactics to get the enemy to start fleeing (not possible against mongols, which is why they are hard to defeat).

During Sieges:
When defending: My experience is, that it is better NOT to defend directly at the gate (like MKSheppard shows in his screenshots), but instead retreat into the city a bit, and place your engage the enemy in the streets - this causes his units to be spread out and fight ineffectively.
When attacking (pre gunpowder): Stay out of the "no-routing-zone" - the city square - as long as possible. Once in it you usually have (comparatively) - massive losses.
When attacking (with cannons or bombards): Have at least 5 or 6 cannon units. As soon as the battle starts, blast the enemy walls to bit that are defended by units - you can usually kill 50-100 soldiers at once (playing with huge armies) per wall - anything less than the biggest walls are almost immediately destroyed by 3 artillery units shooting at them. After that, start demolishing the towers. Then the long part comes - start manouvering your siege weapons so that you can get clear shots (through the destroyed walls) at the enemy killing as much as possible with them before attacking with your normal units.

Altogether, as Spain it was very easy, overran most of western Europe, erected some nice crusader states in Israel, and was finished quite quickly.

Second game, which I'm still at, I'm playing as Egypt (on hard/hard). I wanted to try not to go to war with Europe so I didn't attack them (only conquered the orthodox Byzantines ), sent diplomats to everyone made alliances, gave them presents (maps only )and was very nice to them.

So what happens?
CRUSADE!!! Argh. (against Jerusalem my new capital)
So I build up troops, posted spies in enemy lands to watch for the crusaders. The Hungarians came first, with a full stack of good troops.
He boarded some ships in order to reach the Holy land quickly - which was the dumbest thing he could have done. I had several fleets patrolling the eastern Mediteranean all the way to Italy, and of course also the Black Sea. Needless to say his fleet didn't survive a single round, and his full stack army went down with the waves (and my reputation with all of catholic Europe went down too).

After that, the Turks broke their alliance with me, the first warning of the approaching Mongol hordes had come - and I still had Jerusalem as the goal of the Crusades. Finally, all the different diplomats came to me, I signed peace treaties with all parties concerned, started pulling away my army to attack the Turks and the soon to come Mongols. Suddenly, out of nowhere (those crusader armies are FAST) TWO enemy crusades attack me.
Bastards.
Turn around all the troops, train new ones, etc etc but drove them off too.
And the crusade was called of. Yay!
So I start attacking the Turks, and the Mongol hordes arrived two round or so later (directly in the Turkish heartlands - hah! - which I wanted to conquer - doh!).
At this time I start mass producing troops - mainly archers and spearbearers. I have not stopped producing troops since then (around 20 rounds or so later). I am currently paying "only" about 55.000 or so per turn for my army, as I had a small reprieve before the second Mongol Horder came.
The Mongol hordes are fucking crazy. The first horde to arrive consisted of about 6-7 full stacks of armies (50% cavalry archers, 30% archers, 20% light of heavy cavalry - ALL of them with 6-9 or so experience, each stack lead by a 6-10 star general!!!).
I have almost never been able to cause a single unit to flee - only when 120 archers of his get attacked by 1500 of mine, and even then only when they are down to 5-10 men!!!
I have just recetly been able to disperse most of this 6 stack army, so now the next horde (of only 4 stacks...) has arrived.

When defending against the Mongols (note: His generals can always attack at night, so you need good generals yourself, or each of your armies has to fight on their own.: LOTS (70%) of archers, some spearbearers (20%) and the rest cavalry (the first cannon units have also started arriving). Let the Mongols attack you (stay in the mountains)look for some tiny corner high on the mountain which is hard to reach, and then let them come (Screenshots will follow). This way you can kill the enemy army while (under optimal conditions) only losing 20% of yours.
The problem is, that this situation is rare

When attacking a Mongol army, it is a long and tedious affair - they avoid your army most of the time, and when you extend yourself a bit too far, they charge you immediately to death. Or if you want the computer to duke it out, you need 3 or so stacks for each of his.

All in all I love the games, though certain aspects grate (still no sea battles, and some other things mentioned by others).

Screenshots:
Defending in the city, and not at the walls.

Victory! Most of those losses were pushing the enemy back to the gates - I would have lost less only defending at that courtyard.

A great battle: The enemy is on the mountain and I can't reach him - I had to reatreat, which DISSOLVED the army - WTF?!?!

Killing one Mongol stack. Note the small entrance

The dead Mongol stack - note one of my units fled after having about 20% losses -WTF

The second Mongol army approaching - its AI acted as if I were the attacking army and it the defending one - I had to go out and be slaughtered... stupid no-limit no-limit-timer...

[Vympel]

Oh, forgot to mention, reason I could go to war with France with impunity- my Cardinal got elected Pope

[Dominus Atheos]

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

Shogun Total War did that too.

[Adrian Laguna]

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

Shogun Total War did that too.

As did the first Medieval. The only game that lacks it is Rome: Total War, because RTW has no guns. Incidentally, this is the reason why the Napoleonic 2: Total War mod was cancelled for Rome and is going to be made for Medieval 2 instead. Which is kind of fitting since the first NTW was for MTW.

[Vympel]

I'm quite annoyed that once again, CA took the cheap-ass route with the speeches- nice, custom speeches dependent on general's traits for the opening Catholic factions, and for all the unlockable ones- generic.

(I got this from custom battles, as I haven't finished the game quite yet lol)

Sucks. Because the Catholic factions are the only ones worth playing, right?

[2000AD]

Good news, as far as i can tell you unlock all the factions after completing one grand campaign. The only unplayable factions are the Papal States, The Mongols, The Temurids and the Aztecs as the Papal are a special case and the other 3 don't start in the game.

[The Yosemite Bear]

So do those men of norse get any bonuses?

like ability to sail anywhere, raid and pillage anythigng?

[Ubiquitous]

Has anyone fought in the New World yet, and if so what's it like?