So I recently picked up medieval 2 on sale, thinking it was just like rome. I started the game up as Venice (because italian heritage) and after about 40 turns in I'm poor as dirt, at war with the HRE, Hungary, Byzintine and Milan with everyone hating my guts to the point they dont want peace. Now Hungary is stomping my armies with dismounted feudal knights I have no clue how to get and I can stop the wars everyone wants with me.


So what did I do wrong and what should I do to make my faction stronger? I heard venice has the best militia but I seem to get slaughtered by other armies really easily and I dont know how to getsuch units. Also whatsup with the friggen politics and Crusades? the pope said to launch a crusade against Cairo so I sent over an army to Cairo and took it over, but then it said the Crusades were canceled and I had no rewards!


So completely different than rome.

First off;

What you're doing wrong? You're playing Medieval 2 Total War

More seriously, if I remember correctly, Venice as a state does have good militia, but militia are NOT as strong as standing military units, something that Venice has difficult access too. One thing to keep in mind is that Venice is a faction that benefits more from cities than from castles, as most of their good units come from cities. In fact, baring the innate defenses of a castle, there's little reason to have one as Venice. This will also increase your income massively.

You'll want to conquer Italy and Greece fast, as M2 uses the same basic map as Rome, and those two regions held together are a mountain of money. Do NOT attack the Papal states however.

The wars are unavoidable I'm afraid, as the AI in M2 is very aggressive.

Okay, but how do I get everyone to stop hating my guts?


and that explains one part. I had, like, 3 castles as I started out.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
Okay, but how do I get everyone to stop hating my guts?

The dark ages aren't really known for peace and love

Yep, Venice has some of the best militia in the game. Don't bother making the weakest variety, they have spearmen militia with about 7 attack and 13 defense or so, which is almost as strong as sergent spearmen that you make at castles. Upgrade the baracks fast. Consider making one of your cities have low taxes to get the next level for a better barracks that has Pavise Crossbowmen who are a powerful ranged unit that can fight in melee if needed. Also you don't need castles.

Each city can support a few militia unit with no upkeep, they have a different coloured unit card when they're in a city, bigger walls let you have more free upkeep units so check that out and try to always have at least that many units in the city.
Note: the city has to actually be able to make the unit for it to be free. Castles cannot do this at all.

To fight dismounted feudal knights, just let your crossbowmen skirmish them (flee & shoot) and don't let them get into combat, even with your spearmen, till you're ready... or they run out of ammunition.

You can make your own Feudal Knights if you really want to with a Castle with Barracks. Almost all Europeans have that unit type there.

To join a Crusade you have to select an army of at least 8 units or so and click the "Join Crusade" button. It's a little bright blue button with the Cross. it doubles the army's movement speed, gives them free upkeep (except mercenaries) but the HAVE to keep moving to the Crusade target. Also, if you've been excommunicated, well, problems can arise, such as the Pope launching a Crusade against Cairo that you control.

People like you depending on what you've done. Such as attacking their allies. Having a high Dread Faction Leader is also a problem. Being on good terms with the Pope can help you avoid war. When I play Venice I just keep a massive army (maybe 2) near the Capital and chase away other Christians, if they start it the Pope gets mad at them. Though it's annoying to have the Pope get mad in the middle of my sieges. I suggest attacking armies 'next to' their cities to draw the local garrison out to fight you. If you wipe out everyone you can take the city without a siege.

Also, when moving an army through neutral territory, try to avoid having them end their turn there, they hate that.

I never noticed the crusade button! thanks for that tip that makes a lot more sense as to why I didnt win that mission,


as for the dismounted knights, how does one get them though? I had a barracks and all I could recruit was spearmen. but it's good to know about the militia!

If you click a City or Castle and open up it's scroll, there should be three little buttons at the bottom. One of them opens the building browser. Click it, it might be wise to get familiar with it.

You can select 'Barracks' from the list and it will show you 2 columns, one for City Barracks, one for Castle Barracks. Right-click any barracks and it will display a list of the units it can make, which is useful to know which building chain you want to start on. Unfortunately, the only way to see how strong they are is to exit the campaign and go to 'custom battle' and compare stats there.

Though you probably already know most of this, since it's the same as Rome.

Oh, also remember to always have your Diplomat/Princess roaming and getting Trade Rights from every faction you can, or make a second and send one in each direction. Priests can also be a good investment against the Byzantines as they convert the population to Christianity quickly, the Pope likes this, he also likes high Piety/Chivalry Faction Leaders, try to make sure that your Leader and Heir don't go around butchering everyone. Priests can turn 100% Orthodox(Byzantine Religion) to 90% faster than they can turn 10% to 0%. Select a Priest and hover the cursor over some regions you control/want, if the level of Christianity is less than 50% it's highly recommended you do something about it. This makes your enemies unhappy and your own people much happier, which means higher tax rates for you. You start off with fleets, you may want to use them to tie up enemy ports, which gives you a tiny bit more money and stops some of their trade.

And the Crusades, they're not mandatory by any means. Plus that area will get very intense very soon, so I like to avoid it, at least in the beginning.

I hardly use the building browser in my games, so I'll look into that. It will probably help a lot more knowing what i'm getting.


also, I need more diplomats rather than soldiers I guess. I only had at most three and only used two priests, so I should get more I guess. man I relise I did a lot of things wrong.


is it good practise to ransom or release captured armies? slaughtering them makes everyone hate my faction so I don't want to do that, but at the same time they will have more guys if I release them.

When it comes to Slaughter/Ransom/Release it really depends on how confident you are in your situation. But Vinice is a city of Merchants, so Ransoming must be the most logical choice yes? If they agree to the ransom you get money and they get their soldiers back, if they refuse, you execute the soldiers but get no dread or bad reputation for doing so. I suggest ransoming every army you believe you are capable of fighting again and winning, though that's not to say you should chase them down again and finish them off... only if you want to...

2 or 3 Diplomats are fine. Try to get Map Information from them as well, you can give them your own Map Information in exchange if you're not worried about them knowing where you are. It's quite handy to know where all their cities are before you move into their land and lets your Diplomats know where to go next.

Also, I feel I should mention watch towers. When you have a large territory it becomes hard to see all your borders, so move a general out to the edge, click the big fortifications button (bottom right) and make a watch tower for 200 gold, they're permanent. It's good practice to have each tower be within line-of-sight of another tower/city because if bandit or enemy armies get there they go blind and bandits love towers. It's important if you take over a place like Tripoli or playing as Russia as you control very large pieces of land. They can even see into enemy/neutral land, so you can see a threat coming. Of course, these aren't useful with small territories, so use where appropriate.

Forts are also key. One of the biggest mistakes I made in my current playthrough as France is not having forts at key checkpoints.
Without forts, any army can just walk into your lands without you knowing about it.

Venice has a couple of choke points near the HRE territories that make great fort areas.

I read someplace that you could buy bolonga early on, so is that a wise strategy?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Forts are also key. One of the biggest mistakes I made in my current playthrough as France is not having forts at key checkpoints.
Without forts, any army can just walk into your lands without you knowing about it.

Venice has a couple of choke points near the HRE territories that make great fort areas.

The same can be achieved by having the Follow AI Movements (or whatever it's called) option turned on when starting a Grand Campaign and planting watchtowers around. Also, the game sometimes derps and, whilst following the AI, will give you a brief glimpse of their route by showing you the coloured arrows that plot movements on the map if it takes more than a turn. I've had a few enemy stacks walk near a castle, only for the game to briefly show me they're planning to bypass it completely and instead head deeper in towards a city, or an army from a neutral faction walk around their border and show me that they're going to siege my adjacent town next turn. It doesn't happen every time, but it's a nice little bug (I assume it's a bug, anyway) in an option that I don't think I could play the game without; following AI movements is immensely helpful.

I keep forgetting to mention the Merchants Guild, they're cool, they give a boost to your economy and they let you train light cavalry in cities, which is nice, since now you'll be able to train Medium Spearmen, Heavy Crossbowmen and Light Cavalry from your city. The only other factions that can make such powerful armies from cities are Milan, Sicily and the Turks.

Turks are my favorite faction but have the most dangerous starting area.

And in the building browser, you might notice that some buildings don't unlock anything that the lower level one can't. This may be because it's meant to make a gunpowder unit, which isn't available at the start

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
I read someplace that you could buy bolonga early on, so is that a wise strategy?

Only if you care about your reputation with the rest of the Christian club and if you like seamless borders. Bologna usually gets a strong army and it's nice to only have to fight the Holy Roman Empire from the north if they ever decide to attack. Naturally, this requires saving up a lot of gold and stunting your growth for the first few turns, I don't really worry since the Bologna militia can't beat your own, even if the army looks really big.

yea I like seemless borders, so I just might buy it and use it to boost my income. After all if I get another city It will probably give me more money.


Is it kosher to attack an excomunicated army? What happened with me is I attacked byzinteen that was allied to almost all my neighbors and they lost so much faith in me they attacked.

Sure, everyone loves attacking Excommunicated Christians. I always see the Hungarians allying with Byzantine, other factions less often. If any are excommunicated then you only need to worry about their allies getting mad, no one else... well, if they're allies with Milan and the new Pope is from Milan THEN it becomes a problem. But the Pope eventually distances himself from his home faction and it balances out again. Even if the Pope is from Milan he doesn't actually care if you attack Milan if they've been excommunicated. You only have to worry about newly elected Popes.

If a faction that's still in the christian club attacks you or sieges your city then you have the right to defend yourself, no penalties.

Keep in mind though, that if you kill an excommunicated Faction Leader, the Heir may be high in Piety/Chivalry and they may be reconciled quickly after. There isn't really much you can do about this, just felt I should mention it.

I played with Venice. Quite tricky to get started.

Here's what I did.

Convert Zagreb to a castle. It's easier to defend this way because once you upgrade it to a certain level you'll be able to train dismounted feudal knights. Hungary can then hammer themselves against it in vain as long as you keep it decently garrisoned.

Take Durazzo to the southeast before Byzantium does.

Convert Ragusa to a town. From experience, it won't come under attack because Zagreb and Durazzo are closer to the other factions, so they'll go for those. As a city it'll make you more money. Keep constucting buildings that'll improve your economy generally, and send your diplomat around getting trade agreements.

Milan will definitely attack you. HRE... not always. Keep Venice garrisoned as well as you can without breaking the bank.

Its difficult to take on Milan first, so I went for Byzantium. The AI tends to only keep a few units in the settlements it has that aren't under obvious threat so what I did was surprise them and land an army in southern greece to take Corinth. Byzantium will then send some units down to try and take it back so what you can do is either defend Corinth or march up to meet them (depending on how many there are). Once they're dealt with you can take Thessalonica. I'd go for Sofia after that, because you dont want heavy units attacking Thessalonica. Hungary will then probably start attacking that, so keep it decently garrisoned. You'll probably be generating enough income from these for you to take on Milan next, so build up an army and leave it in a fleet (so the AI can't see them and chicken out) near Venice. After Milan sends one of its huge armies to attack Venice, let them attack and when you've beaten them in the Siege land the army and take Milan. You can probably then go for Genoa.

You should be wary of HRE. But in my experience they only attack when you havent got a big enough garrison in Venice.

Hopefully this will help get you started. I had to try a couple of times as Venice before I got going and this strategy seemed to work.

Edit: Don't bother with crusades. They're too much hassle

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
yea I like seemless borders, so I just might buy it and use it to boost my income. After all if I get another city It will probably give me more money.


Is it kosher to attack an excomunicated army? What happened with me is I attacked byzinteen that was allied to almost all my neighbors and they lost so much faith in me they attacked.

Excommunicated nations are fair game. Whenever a nation gets communicated, take as much land from them before the pope changes his mind.

The only problem I have with Venice is keeping away inquisitors from the miscreants I have as a faction family
I haven't picked up the game in a while, but I remember I first expanded in Greece and in the mediterranean isles. I liked the Reign of Sicily cause they kept sending princesses and diplomats so I just allied with them.
Milan tried to betray me so I had to wipe them out. As far as I know, Milan will always betray you though.
Last time I played I was trying to buy Bologna from the Germans. Maybe I should merely buy their armies instead.

I found the AI to be beneath me in that game. I simply destroyed their armies because I quickly learned all the AI tactics on the field.

I ended up building 4 types of armies.

City defense which was stationed in all my frontier provinces.

Assault. Which included units suited for taking provinces.

Land war armies. Cavalry armies that simply destroyed huge armies by simply flanking and eating enemy units one by one.

Generic. These guys where my reserves. Whenever my armies had a bad match up they would stand in, or whenever I needed men immediately they would be there to die as a way of weakening enemies and so forth.


I play as Spain but playing the above even on harder difficulties proved easy. Simply crushed so many armies that where numerically superior to me over and over. Slowly expanding. Diplomacy was a waste of time as was the pope etc.

Just generate lots of cash first off and then support large armies and slaughter your way around. Im usually at war with the majority of factions, means I can attack whoever whenever etc.

Its a boring way to play though. Against humans is far better.

Vetril wrote:
The only problem I have with Venice is keeping away inquisitors from the miscreants I have as a faction family

Assassins. Lots of assassins. Assassins out the wazoo.

Also, load up on spies. Spies everywhere. In your towns. In their towns. In the Pope's sock drawer. Everywhere.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Assassins. Lots of assassins. Assassins out the wazoo.

Also, load up on spies. Spies everywhere. In your towns. In their towns. In the Pope's sock drawer. Everywhere.

I remember one of my first play-throughs. I was the Holy Roman Empire and I sent Assassins everywhere, killed diplomats for practice, killed Cardinals so I would get all the votes. The game let me see the list of Cardinals and gave me the exact location of each one. This eventually lead to one of my own Cardinals getting voted in by a large margin and giving me a perfect relationship with the Papacy.

Unfortunately, this give the Faction Leader a lot of Dread and that relationship quickly deteriorated. So much for that plan.

Inquisitors have not been a problem for me for a long time. My family is a beacon of faith that other people look up to as an exemplar.

 Lotet wrote:

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Assassins. Lots of assassins. Assassins out the wazoo.

Also, load up on spies. Spies everywhere. In your towns. In their towns. In the Pope's sock drawer. Everywhere.

I remember one of my first play-throughs. I was the Holy Roman Empire and I sent Assassins everywhere, killed diplomats for practice, killed Cardinals so I would get all the votes. The game let me see the list of Cardinals and gave me the exact location of each one. This eventually lead to one of my own Cardinals getting voted in by a large margin and giving me a perfect relationship with the Papacy.

Unfortunately, this give the Faction Leader a lot of Dread and that relationship quickly deteriorated. So much for that plan.

Inquisitors have not been a problem for me for a long time. My family is a beacon of faith that other people look up to as an exemplar.

On my latest England playthrough I completed a crusade on Cairo and set about stabilising the region and churning out priests as fast as I could, building right through the church line. I was blue face for the majority of the time and saved by making the races more often, loading up on garrison units etc.

A few turns later an Inquisitor appeared, killed my family member (crusading hero, pious, all that) which completely destabilised the region, then set about executing all the priests I'd trained there for heresy. I had to quickly take Alexandria and start retraining them all, but he was killing one for every new one I trained. So I had to train an assassin and have him murder a few rebels before he was skilled enough to off the Inquisitor, and even that saw several failed attempts.

Alright so a quick update on my restarted playthrough.


pretty much turn 1 I allied with Milan, HRE, Papal states, and got tradeing rights to everyone I could find. I bought bolona around turn 10 for about 10,000 gold, but at this point it was pocket change. All my cities are pretty prosperous except durzzwhatever, and right now I launched a crusade on Cairo.


I ended last night sieging cairo but should I continue going around conquering stuff before ending the crusade?

From personal experience Cairo and the surrounding lands are too volatile to hold unless you exterminate the populace, which damages relations with everyone. I recommend that you take it, sack it, knock down all the buildings you can in it to get more cash, remove your army from it, and gift it to the Papal States, since you can always use more influence with them. You can try taking the surrounding lands, but there's little point if you can't hold them without riots. That said, if there are any rebel settlements like Jerusalem still untalented, it might be worth having a go, or better yet the rebel castle around that area for the reduced issue of public order.

If you manage to take and hold one of the settlements then build churches, priests by the dozen, and set about converting the areas around you to prepare for your inevitable taking of the Middle East.

The only thing you should be wary of is the Mongol invasion, since it could happen after you discover gunpowder (which is fine), or before (which is really not). Rushing ballista towers in preparation to upgrade them to cannon towers (Cities only) when the gunpowder event rolls around is a sound strategy, but it means keeping your cities in the Middle East on low taxation for the population boost and hoping your city is big enough when the time comes.

Quick warning though - there appears to be a bug where cannon towers and ballista towers do not work.

At least they didn't on my first playthrough as England.
On my second and current playthrough as France, the ballista towers work and they are awesome.

It looks like they are shooting fire balls ^^

Also, in this same playthrough, the Mongols have set up base just north of Jerusalem, which is being held by the Polish.
I hope they take it so I can steal it with no reputation penalties xD

I'd advise only conquering the surrounding areas if you:
-Have a bunch of priest in the area
-Have more than 1 general with Chivalry or other traits to keep people happy
-Exterminate the populace

Any single one of these will do fine, otherwise it may be difficult to maintain public order as you take over more an more places. Speaking of having multiple generals in the area, when a son comes of age to become a general they will appear in the city that their father is in, but if their father is wandering the fields the son will appear in your Capital. Might want to keep this in mind if your empire is split and you want another general in a far off land.

Using any local racetracks that the Islamists have built costs you far more than its worth, not including yearly races, which are free. So don't rely on them unless you have to.

Also, the Horde likes that area... good luck.

Yeah, if you are planning on holding the Egyptian lands you better have a large army, cause those cities are just going to rebel. I had about 2 revolts before I gave up and sold Alexandria and Cairo back to Egypt for a Ceasefire and trade rights (though not before destroying all of the buildings).

Next crusade I took back Cairo, exterminated Alexandria and just started rushing priests and Cathedrals. That seems to have worked.

The cannon towers can take care of the Mongols through a trick I like to call "Giving the AI a taste of its own medicine", named after how annoying the AI can be at times.

When a city with cannon towers is besieged, sally forth. When deploying, ensure that nobody is deployed near the walls (very important) and that all ranged units have fire at will turned off. The AI then, for some reason, marches forward and takes up waiting positions within cannon tower range. This is where you march your units close enough to the walls to activate your towers, speed up time, and go and make a cup of tea or something to eat.

When you come back the Mongols should have lost a healthy portion of their armies, and hopefully even their powerful generals. The game counts as a draw, so you don't lose the city, but the mongols lost a LOT of men. Next turn, you can repeat.

It might also help to have a few cannon units (preferably Basilisks if you get them, or Culverins if not) around to sally out and sit very close to the gate and snipe the generals, or any trebuchets the Mongols have (since they're gone forever until the Mongols have a technology to build them in whichever place they settled, vastly reducing their capability to siege your settlements). You might get the odd horse archer unit running towards your walls if you sally your Bassies/Culverins too far out, but stationing ranged units on the walls to cover them should ward them off.

You could also fight them bye using sharpened stakes. There are a few Archer units that can do this. The only ones I can remember right now are some varieties of British Longbows and the Turkish Janissary Archers. Sharpened stakes at a gate murderlize their cavalry when they rush through.

Though in my last game I just completely avoided the East, let them take over everything short of Constantinople, then just fought a conventional war against them, since their forces were spread like a normal powerful faction.

None of these anti-horde measures are very cool, are they?

I suppose it's because there's not supposed to be an anti-horde strategy; they historically tore everything they came across a new one.

I didn't know the mongols were going to come in and wreck everyone's gak! D=


anyways, another update: doing a lot better now that I have acess to dismounted knights and Ven heavy infantry! especially the latter, as they rip things apart like no-ones buisiness. I have wiped byzintine off the map and conquered all of italy thanks to Sicily attacking me and refusing peace. I just finished a crusade on antioch and planning on taking jerusalem for gaks and giggles

For hilarity, you can try altering the scale so that's it's 6 months a turn instead of 2 years.

You get about 900 turns to play with, meaning you can plenty of time to play with all of the goodies.

that actually works?!


and does it work halfway though a campaign?

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
that actually works?!


and does it work halfway though a campaign?

No. It gets bound to the save file, so your current save would stay as is.

darn, but okay, news for next time.


so now that I have ven heavy infantry, what do I have to look out for?

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
darn, but okay, news for next time.


so now that I have ven heavy infantry, what do I have to look out for?

Well for one Mongols, beside that I recomend caution when figthing enemy armies, that posses a lot of very mobile horse mounted archers. Or long range bowmen with a hard punch, like English longbowmen and the likes of them.

so what should I do to counter them?

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
that actually works?!


and does it work halfway though a campaign?

It involves tweaking with the data file things, so I doubt it affects the campaign half-way though.
Well, without bugging out anyway.

Instructions are here :

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090208174015AAZahTb

I find that it's a lot more relaxing with 200 years; you don't have to rush as much.
Of course, it does mean that the black death will last for longer :/


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
so what should I do to counter them?

Your own archers, or cavalry. Preferably light calv so you can actually catch the buggers.

iirc, Venice has access to Pavise Crossbowmen, who tend to have longer range than most archers, so you should be able to duel with longbow men and missile calv.

Anyone found any mods that make auto-resolving actually fair to some extent?

I would kind of like the TW games better if, when I'm not feeling like going through combat every turn, I could just auto-resolve with some confidence that I won't be screwed over.

 Melissia wrote:
Anyone found any mods that make auto-resolving actually fair to some extent?

I would kind of like the TW games better if, when I'm not feeling like going through combat every turn, I could just auto-resolve with some confidence that I won't be screwed over.

How do you mean? The only unfair AR results I get are sieges, which I always prefer to fight manually anyway.

AR results in Total War have always been wonky. With a certain army composition, you could easily win every AR (remember when Shogun 2 released and all bow armies could win ever AR by a land slide). If you end up building the armies AR favors, then you can win ARs easily. If you don't you will end up losing a lot.

Can you link to a guide on how to build armies for AR?

Oh I have no idea XD I never AR'd unless the fight was a forgone conclusion (like, really forgone). I enjoyed Total War's battles so I always fight them out

I don't mind sieges, but I find the game really bogs down during wars unless I do auto-resolves, the real-time combat, for me, feels like the weakest part of TW.

 Melissia wrote:
Can you link to a guide on how to build armies for AR?

My anecdotal experience is that cavalry - especially horse archers - suffer the worst in autocalcs.

Ok, some basic tips I have from playing Medieval 2 for years.


1) Diplomacy is all but useless as a mechanic in this game. It wasn't until Rome 2 that it actually became useful.

2) Merchants are very annoying to get to work, but the extra income is invaluable. Its very high maintenance though. Enemy merchants will always attempt to take over your guys, and until you get your guys starting with high enough levels its basically a sure thing your merchants will never win an action. Venice has some of the better merchants though, so you have that.

3) Do NOT get on the Papal State's bad side. This is best accomplished by basically having the max number of priests you can have and making sure they are high level. Basically confront every witch and heretic you find. And send them into areas with low Catholic presence. This, in a round about way, ensures the Pope likes you by making sure in each election the Pope comes from your faction. Again, Venice is in a good position to do this. If you are in good graces with the Papacy, you can "suggest" crusade targets on your faction's enemies. But beware if they also have high standing.


4) Manually fight sieges. They're heavily biased towards the defender for auto-res. Even when in manual you can practically win with no casualties. I also prefer manual resolution simply because auto-resolution just causes way too many casualties, and in this game casualties are much harder to replace. Simply because you have to retrain the units in a place capable of recruiting that unit, and the units take recruitment slots.

5) Don't bother trying to recruit any gunpowder units besides cannons. Venice does have the best gunpowder infantry, but unless they are on walls they just get engaged in melee too fast and don't cause enough casualties.


6) Mongols are a royal pain in the butt, but they have difficulty holding cities because their units are weaker in confined spaces. So you can dance around their guys in the field, take their cities, and make them flail against your walls. You can also try using cheap sacrificial armies of cavalry to suicide rush their units in the field to whittle them down. Focus on the light cav. European heavy cav is superior to theirs and they're easier to catch.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Ok, some basic tips I have from playing Medieval 2 for years.


1) Diplomacy is all but useless as a mechanic in this game. It wasn't until Rome 2 that it actually became useful.

2) Merchants are very annoying to get to work, but the extra income is invaluable. Its very high maintenance though. Enemy merchants will always attempt to take over your guys, and until you get your guys starting with high enough levels its basically a sure thing your merchants will never win an action. Venice has some of the better merchants though, so you have that.

3) Do NOT get on the Papal State's bad side. This is best accomplished by basically having the max number of priests you can have and making sure they are high level. Basically confront every witch and heretic you find. And send them into areas with low Catholic presence. This, in a round about way, ensures the Pope likes you by making sure in each election the Pope comes from your faction. Again, Venice is in a good position to do this. If you are in good graces with the Papacy, you can "suggest" crusade targets on your faction's enemies. But beware if they also have high standing.


4) Manually fight sieges. They're heavily biased towards the defender for auto-res. Even when in manual you can practically win with no casualties. I also prefer manual resolution simply because auto-resolution just causes way too many casualties, and in this game casualties are much harder to replace. Simply because you have to retrain the units in a place capable of recruiting that unit, and the units take recruitment slots.

5) Don't bother trying to recruit any gunpowder units besides cannons. Venice does have the best gunpowder infantry, but unless they are on walls they just get engaged in melee too fast and don't cause enough casualties.


6) Mongols are a royal pain in the butt, but they have difficulty holding cities because their units are weaker in confined spaces. So you can dance around their guys in the field, take their cities, and make them flail against your walls. You can also try using cheap sacrificial armies of cavalry to suicide rush their units in the field to whittle them down. Focus on the light cav. European heavy cav is superior to theirs and they're easier to catch.

I disagree with #2 unless you're willing to 'exploit' certain parts of the game. I've found that merchants are far more trouble than they're worth, with the enemy AI merchants always knowing where yours are, regardless of FoW or even if they've seen them with their faction's own units before. The game also heavily (and I mean heavily) favours the enemy AI in merchant acquisitions. I've had exactly one time where I've reverse-acquired an enemy merchant's assets, and every other time has been failure or my merchant's assets have been seized, regardless of skill. Even with failures the AI tries again next turn and usually gets you then, and if you try yourself then you usually get reverse-acquired, with failure happening notably less commonly and success even less so. Not factoring in enemy merchants, you have to find valuable resources to start with, and then herd your merchants over there. I've found that I don't discover valuable resources until I'm already rolling in money, and the extra 1-2k florins my merchants bring in each turn is a drop in the ocean. If all my merchants ran off or died in one turn, I'd still be making a huge profit. Merchants only start earning their keep when they've already become unnecessary.

The 'exploits' I mentioned earlier make them easier to use, but it depends on your own view if you consider them exploits or not. The first is placing a fort on the top-right corner of the resource (where a merchant would normally stand) and filling it with merchants. So long as a fort has either at least 1 unit, or 1 agent in it it will not disappear, and the merchants inside stack and can trade the resource safely. The only downside is that I've found that I can't place forts on resources, and Googling has only found one mention of resources being unfortifiable and tens of mentions of the fort 'exploit', with no mention of it being patched out or anything, so it may vary from game to game.

The other 'exploit' is a similar idea, but uses troops. If you merge merchants into an army and stick it on a resource as if it were a merchant, then all the merchants inside can trade it. This comes with more downsides, though, being that your army can be attacked and, if you lose, your merchants will die, and the fact that your army can rebel, also resulting in the loss of your merchants.

Whether these are 'exploits' to people or not depends; some view them as being, if not intentional, then allowable strategies, with forts acting like trading posts and armies acting like merchant escorts. Others think that they're straight up exploiting the game mechanics. I've started using the army one personally, but I couldn't get it lucrative until I was already sitting on 100,000+ florins and raking 10,000+ florins per turn. Currently I have about 14 merchants sitting on some sugar near Alexandria, and it totals 7k of my income. As I mentioned before, a drop in the ocean, but at least they're being useful as opposed to when you try and use them normally and the AI mercilessly hunts them down.

 Grey Templar wrote:
5) Don't bother trying to recruit any gunpowder units besides cannons. Venice does have the best gunpowder infantry, but unless they are on walls they just get engaged in melee too fast and don't cause enough casualties.

Unless you're the Turks, who have The Best gunpowder infantry in the game. Janissary. They have guns just as good as Musketeers/Arquebus (I forget which) but also have about 11 melee attack and 18 defense so they can fight other units in melee. I don't think there is any other gunpowder unit that can fight in melee aside fom the Hand Cannoneers, who have awful range.

 Lotet wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
5) Don't bother trying to recruit any gunpowder units besides cannons. Venice does have the best gunpowder infantry, but unless they are on walls they just get engaged in melee too fast and don't cause enough casualties.

Unless you're the Turks, who have The Best gunpowder infantry in the game. Janissary. They have guns just as good as Musketeers/Arquebus (I forget which) but also have about 11 melee attack and 18 defense so they can fight other units in melee. I don't think there is any other gunpowder unit that can fight in melee aside fom the Hand Cannoneers, who have awful range.

Russian Cossacks are also pretty good.

 Bromsy wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
Can you link to a guide on how to build armies for AR?

My anecdotal experience is that cavalry - especially horse archers - suffer the worst in autocalcs.

Mn. I'll try an army based off of infantry next time...

Here's what I gathered, in order of importance:

1: Size of each army
2: Relative quality of each troops', IE, statlines and experience
3: Command rating of the leading general
4: Morale level
5: Nuffles


And I know some of you enjoy the real-time combat of total war, but for me, most of the time I feel it's more of a bother and not worth the time in terms of fun factor, lol.

okay so the mongols just attacked near antioch, so I have to try and wittle them down with mounted sergeants and such? I just captured jerusalem too.

my war with scicily is going well, I just need to find their last stronghold and finish them off. other than that I'm in a good position to just hold places I think.

Yeah. Just send groups of 10 or so units at them, manually resolve the battle, and just kill as much stuff as you can.

okay. I also have the problem of jerusalem and the neighbor city revolting, so I wasted a big army on one freshly rebel city. any good way to stop camel archer spam besides the usual as posted above?

If you're having unrest in your middle eastern settlements, and races, low taxes, highest law & happiness buildings, religion, and garrison aren't helping, then demolish everything and abandon it. At the very least you can prevent the Mongols making full use of it.

If you can keep control of it, then one thing you might try is packing your excellent venician spear militia into the settlement, and sending an expendable force of cavalry and spies to find the Mongol stacks with trebuchets. Use the cavalry to target the trebs in an open battle, forcing them to use towers, ladders, and rams for siege. Mongol infantry is crap, and your militia can hold your walls all day, whilst a tight bunch of spear militia on guard mode can make an absolute mockery of the cavalry trying to enter through your gates once the ram breaks them open. Having a battle cross nearby gives your spears a much needed morale boost and, if the worst comes to the worst, pull back any units you can to the town/castle centre and stand your ground. If the settlement falls then it'll have been at huge, huge cost to the Mongols, who will probably have lost their generals in the fighting.

Is the stainless steel mod any good? Apparently its been around for a while.

This is what setting up a Theologian's Guild in Cairo and pumping out priests from there like it's going out of fashion gets you in the next Papal Election (spoilered for size):

 Avatar 720 wrote:
This is what setting up a Theologian's Guild in Cairo and pumping out priests from there like it's going out of fashion gets you in the next Papal Election (spoilered for size):

Spoiler:

Oh that is great

Anyway, I'm finding a 900 turn game of M2TW to be fairly enjoyable. I don't have to rush as much, and I can actually build up my infrastructure and diplomacy, just like RTW.
It feels like M2TW wasn't balanced for 200 turns, imo.

I might have to add another 20 regions to the long game victory conditions, because it's only turn 100 and I have about 20 regions.

That screenshot is from a short-length game; 33 regions after 76 turns.

I also got a chance to finally defend in a siege (as opposed to being the aggressor by besieging or by sallying) against a Polish stack made up of good quality cavalry, and piss-quality infantry. I was a bit worried until I realised I had longbows in the city, not the mercenary crossbows I thought I had.

One set of stakes set at the gate during deployment later, I let their ram break down the gate and the majority of the enemy army proceeded to kill itself on the stakes. Also works for Mongols

Their siege tower burned to a crisp, and their ladders drip-fed the crappy peasants and militia to my own militia on the walls, whatever cavalry got through the stakes fell to my guard-mode spears sitting behind, and whatever infantry tried to get through the gate got stuck in the mass of routing cavalry, routed themselves, got stuck on the stakes, got shot, or got stabbed by spears.

37 Casualties to 770+. Got to love a good massacre.

=D wow! is that only for longbow men? that sounds like an awesome strategy!

Stakes are awesome. Unfortunately they only kill cavalry. They do slow and break up infantry though.

And yeah, only Longbow units have the Stake ability IIRC.

Only the English longbow line (so Longbowmen, Yeomen, and Retinue Longbowmen) and Turkish Janissary Archers get them, AFAIK.

They're used during army deployment, so can't be used if you're laying siege and the enemy sallies out, since you don't get to deploy for that, or once the battle has already begun.

To place them you need a bit of space in front of the unit, and when placing them in settlements it's best you line the archers up against the walls in formation, and inch them further and further back until their Flaming Arrow ability changes to the Sharpened Stakes ability (you do get the Flaming Arrows ability back once the battle begins, though). Just bear in mind that you cannot deploy stakes and then try and redeploy the archer unit; the archers must be deployed with the stakes they place.

If you want to try getting the hang of placing them then do a custom battle where you're defending a settlement with longbows against anything, and fiddle around with them during your deployment.

I'm kinda hoping Medieval 3 total war changes how deployable defenses work more like Rome 2.

So Longbowmen would give you stakes you could deploy seperate from the Longbowmen themselves.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
That screenshot is from a short-length game; 33 regions after 76 turns.

I also got a chance to finally defend in a siege (as opposed to being the aggressor by besieging or by sallying) against a Polish stack made up of good quality cavalry, and piss-quality infantry. I was a bit worried until I realised I had longbows in the city, not the mercenary crossbows I thought I had.

One set of stakes set at the gate during deployment later, I let their ram break down the gate and the majority of the enemy army proceeded to kill itself on the stakes. Also works for Mongols

Their siege tower burned to a crisp, and their ladders drip-fed the crappy peasants and militia to my own militia on the walls, whatever cavalry got through the stakes fell to my guard-mode spears sitting behind, and whatever infantry tried to get through the gate got stuck in the mass of routing cavalry, routed themselves, got stuck on the stakes, got shot, or got stabbed by spears.

37 Casualties to 770+. Got to love a good massacre.

Oh that sounds hilarious. I love making death piles.
What unit size do you use? I go for Huge, because those numbers seem a bit more realistic to me. If not, it's still an impressive sight.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
This is what setting up a Theologian's Guild in Cairo and pumping out priests from there like it's going out of fashion gets you in the next Papal Election (spoilered for size):

Spoiler:

And that is how I managed to get a Scottish "secretly female" pope in power

Speaking of priests, I don't understand all of these modifiers.

What is violence? What is purity? The only stat that's visual is Piety; there's no Unorthodoxy stat, no violence stat, etc etc.

Those basically matter, IIRC, once that priest is Pope.

Violence makes that Pope more likely to call crusades.

Unorthodoxy, IIRC, makes you less likely to be a Papal candidate.

I think that's about right as well.

I also seem to recall Violence gives a bonus to success against Heretics and Witches too. Or maybe burning heretics just makes you more likely to become Violent.

Unorthodoxy also means the probability of the priest turning into a Heretic is higher.

At the same time, orthodox popes are probably less likely to put up with gak from you, IIRC.

Indeed. But if they liked you previously, they'll not like your enemies. And you can do whatever you want with people the Pope doesn't like. Although if Excommunication is lifted the Pope's relationship with a faction is reset and continued aggression will result in the Pope losing favor of you.

The Papacy is a very tough mechanic to play to your total advantage. Since typically you'll eventually only have 1 rival in Europe, who also is on good terms with the Pope, and you'll run into public order problems if you piss off the pope by attacking them. EVEN IF THEY WERE THE AGGRESSOR!

 Melissia wrote:

 Avatar 720 wrote:
This is what setting up a Theologian's Guild in Cairo and pumping out priests from there like it's going out of fashion gets you in the next Papal Election (spoilered for size):

Spoiler:

And that is how I managed to get a Scottish "secretly female" pope in power

I got one of those in once; nobody was any the wiser.

I've been looking through my screenshot library, and wondered if anyone had any M2 screenshots we could merge into this thread?

I've got a few:

The single greatest general I've ever had:


"Here we see the classic and much feared Danish Conga-Line of Doom as it achieves absolutely nothing whatsoever." - Seriously, all they did throughout the game was reshuffle that line a bit. Nothing else.


Presenting the world's most diplomatic person ever:


Pike fight:


"They looked at me funny."

Yeah, the Danes are fun. I've had some good battles against them as the French.

Sadly, in my current 900-turn HRE campaign, the Danes somehow managed to destroy themselves. When I explored their territory afterwards, I found they only had one well developed town, and did not capture Stockholm 0_o

 Grey Templar wrote:
Indeed. But if they liked you previously, they'll not like your enemies. And you can do whatever you want with people the Pope doesn't like. Although if Excommunication is lifted the Pope's relationship with a faction is reset and continued aggression will result in the Pope losing favor of you.

The Papacy is a very tough mechanic to play to your total advantage. Since typically you'll eventually only have 1 rival in Europe, who also is on good terms with the Pope, and you'll run into public order problems if you piss off the pope by attacking them. EVEN IF THEY WERE THE AGGRESSOR!

Sit a diplomat next to Rome and gift them about 1000 florins a turn, maybe the occasional Map Information. Build steadily up the church line and churn out priests to convert other lands. If you want to take out a Catholic nation then the best way is moving spies into their settlements, positioning 1 army per settlement close enough to be able to all besiege on the same turn, and let rip when you're confident that your spies will be able to open all the gates (I've had 97% chances of opening fail before). If you're high enough in favour then you may get another turn if one or two didn't open, or you misjudged the distance, but don't rely on it. Using that tactic is what got my the HRE and French lands in my first screenshot. The Pope can't do a thing, the enemy nation just lost a whole bunch of their settlements (I prefer to target their castles first, both to stop the enemy producing good troops, and to allow me to retrain my own during the downtime when the Pope tells you to lay off), and any favour loss with the Papal States can be fixed by gifting them a thousand or so florins before you end your turn.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, the Danes are fun. I've had some good battles against them as the French.

Sadly, in my current 900-turn HRE campaign, the Danes somehow managed to destroy themselves. When I explored their territory afterwards, I found they only had one well developed town, and did not capture Stockholm 0_o

That's strange, in my current one the Danes also managed to destroy themselves. I thought that the HRE had gotten them, but when I was leading an invasion of the HRE from the North I caught a glimpse of Aarhus and saw it was rebel-held. The Danes hadn't taken Stockholm or Oslo, either; they still had their original rebel garrisons.

Was it a super long game, or the normal 200 turns?
Maybe it's a bug involving the extra turns.

I did notice that the Danes kept their faction leader near Antwerp along with a huge stack. They did not try to attack it though, which was odd.

I did have control of Hapsburg, so maybe that broke the AI, due to borders or something.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Was it a super long game, or the normal 200 turns?
Maybe it's a bug involving the extra turns.

I did notice that the Danes kept their faction leader near Antwerp along with a huge stack. They did not try to attack it though, which was odd.

I did have control of Hapsburg, so maybe that broke the AI, due to borders or something.

Normal game; happened very early in. I last remember seeing a Danish force before I took Bruges and Antwerp, but it was only a general wandering around aimlessly. I remember because he was blocking the sodding bridge between Antwerp and Bruges for two turns before buggering off.

The only problem I ever really had was getting a decent income fast enough to matter. Really because in order to maintain good public order you have to have more troops then you can afford.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The only problem I ever really had was getting a decent income fast enough to matter. Really because in order to maintain good public order you have to have more troops then you can afford.

I have every single one of my cities, except those in the middle east, on very high tax. Have done since turn one. Even the middle East supports High on most of them now the populace is catholic and there are law and happiness buildings around.

The cities back in England only require the number of troops I get free upkeep for, and even though half my armies are Mercs I'm still stinking rich. Once I eliminate France I can turn Angers into a city, shift troops East, and disband the vast majority of what remains, starting with the Mercs.

I admit that my best moments came after editing the hell out of save files to give "secretly female" to certain English kings...

I don't have those screenshots any more though. I don't have the game on Steam so theyw eren't saved to a cloud.

Public Order is a lot easier to control in M2TW than in Rome. In M2TW you can get away with 6 garrison units, provided there is no religious unrest and you have a few Public Order buildings.

Good luck doing that in Rome.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Public Order is a lot easier to control in M2TW than in Rome. In M2TW you can get away with 6 garrison units, provided there is no religious unrest and you have a few Public Order buildings.

Good luck doing that in Rome.

I remember not caring much about taxes in Rome 1. Then I suddenly couldn't move for people, and if I wasn't upgrading the main settlement building then I was trying to churn out as many temple upgrades as I could. I've been a high-tax player since then; cut population growth down to a manageable size, actually be able to find time to build other buildings, not constantly having to shuffle peasants around the map to control population overgrowth.

In M2 it's better to have lots of people paying lower taxes, but having everyone on v. high suits me down to the ground; I can get everything built before the next level of walls, instead of having a large city with small town-level trade buildings. Leaving farms until last helps control the population a bit, too.

Always build farms ASAP in castles, though, and stick high chivalry generals in them for the growth.

Speaking of lady-popes



Purger of Heresy...
So, I guess she's a Sister of Battle.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Public Order is a lot easier to control in M2TW than in Rome. In M2TW you can get away with 6 garrison units, provided there is no religious unrest and you have a few Public Order buildings.

Good luck doing that in Rome.

Both are very difficult public-orderwise compared to Rome2. Rome 2 made the great change of grouping territories into provinces.

And there is ALWAYS unrest of some kind in M2. The biggest problem is squalor I think. If you don't upgrade your towns/castles, squalor increases. If you do, it only wards off the inevitable result on needing 7-9 units to maintain order. At which point the city will lose you money.

And that's discounting any need for a garrison that can hold off enemy attacks.



Another gripe I have with this game. Pikes and Halberd armed units are crap. Their formation doesn't seem to ever provide a bonus. The enemy just gets into melee and then the units just die. Spear militia seem to be the best defensively, even though I think the Schiltrom looks like crap visually.

What faction are you in M2? What's your preferred build order? What taxation level? Are you leaving Generals in your settlements as governors? If yes do they have any -public order, -trade, or -taxes traits? Are there any rebel armies in your lands?

I usually play Scotland myself, and I rarely have unrest...

 Melissia wrote:
I usually play Scotland myself, and I rarely have unrest...

Sort of linking into Grey's pikes comment, how do you find the scots pikes?

I've read various things online about how to use them (utter tosh given my own experiences with trying the 'advice'), how to mod out the bug that makes them drop the pikes as soon as so much as a gnat contacts them by removing their secondary 'butter knife' weapon (purportedly turning them into overpowered killing machines), and all that, and I've never found them to be of any use whatsoever.

It seems like half the players find them utterly useless, and the other half find them remarkable and if you don't then you must be gak at the game etc. etc.

Personally, every time I use pikes the enemy AI will just stop in front of them (that's how I got the pike fight screenshot; I laid my Tercios out and waited, and the scots pikes stopped a hair's breadth from my pikes, and in doing so brought out their own) and sit there motionless. There's no phalanx movement either, so if I want my pikes to move forward the spears come up and they all jog forward at their own paces, and then it's a pain to get them to reform and get the pikes down. Any brush with combat sees them drop their pikes and out come the butter knives.

So...the AI is being clever in my game. Scotland keeps sending over ships to attack hapsburg. They then call for a ceasefire so they can keep building forces on my shore, safe in the knowledge that if I initiate combat the Pope will get really annoyed.

It's a clever move, but I wish the AI recognizes that they are on my borders >.<

Also, scottish pikemen aren't great. I'm having no problems against them.

 Avatar 720 wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
I usually play Scotland myself, and I rarely have unrest...

Sort of linking into Grey's pikes comment, how do you find the scots pikes?.

I use auto-resolve for the most part, so I don't really need to use them outside of sieges, where they're useless anyway except when the enemy is sallying out.

I build mostly archers and swordsmen anyway it seems.

If you're playing medieval 2 then the retrofit mod is a good one to pick up. It includes all the kingdoms changes to balance and bug fixes in the base game. Makes the HRE playable in the late game (all those 2handed sword units were bugged in the base game).

In the base game I just spammed mailed knights early on, that was as both the HRE and france, the europeans don't have great early game units otherwise.

my basic army builds were

Siege forces- 70% Dismounted Feudal Knights (optimal, armored sergeants do the job as well) 30% Archers

Siege Defense- 80% Militia 20% Archers (cluster everything around the gate and create a bottleneck)

Open field Forces- 50% Knights (Teutonics for HRE, Chivalrics for France) 40% Armored Sergeants 10% Archers

Depends on which Europeans you're talking about, and how early you'd say early-game is.

Both Milan and Venice can field excellent early armies, and once Caen gets access to Longbows the English can pretty much murder everything (hell, if you can get a Fortress up quickly they get Armoured Swordsmen, which also murder everything for a fraction of the cost of the inferior Feudal Knights). Never played as France because I dislike the French, nor the HRE because I dislike the idea of being surrounded by France, England, Denmark, Poland, Venice, Milan, and probably Hungary too.

Spain and Portugal get Jinetes, which wipe the floor with pretty much everything they face and if you're not using them, or only using a small amount, then you're wrong and should be ashamed of yourself. Poland get Polish Nobles fairly early, which are basically Eastern Jinetes, just a bit slower but better armoured. Scotland and Denmark get their axe-wielding infantry that can annihilate most early units on the charge, and in the case of dismounted huscarls, stick around pretty well too. They also get highland and norse archers, which are probably only second to English longbows in effectiveness.

Both France the HRE, from what I can see, don't really start to shine until they get their late-game units like the French cavalry, and the HRE two-handers and, probably best of all, their Reiters. To say that the Europeans in general don't have great early units, though, is a bit of a stretch.

HRE are France are very powerful and fight a lot of wars. I enjoy both.

Saying Europeans was a poor choice of words, I mean those tww really, they're the factions I have played the most.

oh god there are more mongols than i thought. wow. I have no clue how to defeat them. and Antoich just got a cathedral.


I have a full crusade army about to fight 5 full mongol ones.

Wait till the Timurids show up if you think the Mongols are bad.

I decided to see how cool the Greek Firethrowers from M2: Kingdoms - Crusades were:

The answer is: very.

As for those whom said Haleberds are useless, well they are my go to unit for dealing with heavy cavalry and heavy spears. But they MUST have good armour if they are to last in said role I have to admidt, when playing with Hungary I normaly use them in cooperation with pavasie crossbow men and hussars.

And the Danes are great to play as, so much good mele infateri but their ranged units leaves much to be desired I dare say.

Halberds are great. I always build garrisons out of them.
They do have pretty poor armor, but they are militia units, so that's expected.

Is there a way to make other factions stronger mid game? My HRE is currently dominating central Europe, and I have Russia as an ally and Poland as my Vassal.
If I feed the French money, will they build a super nation? I really don't want to end the game at only 200 turns out of 900.
Will it be a good idea to feed the Vatican? I mean, I will have to take Rome at some point. Might as well make it a good fight.

Halberds are okay (much better in Kingdoms) but then again, anything that can form a spear wall will stop a cavalry charge, so the cheaper the better. That said, I prefer to just throw spear militia at cavalry; the cavalry doesn't die as quickly as they do charging onto pikes, but they're a lot cheaper, available to pretty much every faction, and easily retrainable. For defending a city pikes are good in the narrow streets, but on an open battlefield they lose most of their usefulness.

I had fun as the Danes up until the HRE randomly declared war (no ports blockaded, none of their diplomats nearby, none of my spies or assassins tried to hit them, none of their armies attacked a settlement... it was as if the game went "Oh, by the way, you're at war now. Thought you ought to know."), Poland started kicking up a fuss, Scotland took offence to the fact that I existed, and my generals are being assassinated by an assassin none of my spies can seem to A) Spot, or B) Catch in the act.

The only plus side is that I took Inverness (rebel settlement at the time) and Scotland threw their entire army at me. 3 Generals, a ton of infantry, and some archers. Twice. I beat them back both times with a handful of dismounted huscarls and raiders, with my general helping out where he could. In both sieges I lost about 200 of my 400 (600 during the second siege; I'd trained a few more units for the inevitable pathetic second attempt) to their 1000+.

Huscarls on the walls defended against the ladder attackers, a unit of Huscarls on guard mode held the enemy at the gates and were slowly pushed back just far enough for the raiders on either side to charge into the flanks. As their generals pushed through the ranks, my general charged forward to kill the bodyguards as they trickled through one by one, and to toot on the battlehorn whenever it was off cooldown. They also lent a hand killing whatever tried to casually run through the fighting.

Two of the most heroic victories I've had, with the most heroic being when I defended Antioch from the entire Mongol horde on my Milan campaign. Cannon and cannon towers took care of most of their trebs, and every time they assaulted my Italian Spears would slaughter their cavalry as they came through the gate, and geneose crossbows would hold the walls and shoot whatever was waiting outside the gate. There was one siege, however, where a lone trebuchet survived long enough to knock a hole in the wall. At this point my army was woefully undermanned, with the near constant besieging disallowing me from retraining more than 2-3 units during the one-turn or so downtime I got between beating back a few stacks, and having them re-siege.

It got to the point where I was finally beaten back to the city square, where I just about held. The remnants of my spears (the max I had left in a unit was about 30 or so from a unit of 112; the rest were in the teens) held against charges, supported by the crossbows I managed to pull back off the walls. Because the road up to the centre is sloped, the horse archers had to fire upwards, severely reducing the casualties I took. My general was run ragged between chasing infantry and horse archers around the city and rushing back to the square to intercept flankers or lend a hand during an assault.

I can't remember how I won, but I have a feeling the siege timed out in the end. I finally got a relief force from Gaza at that point, and it was pretty much the final assault where the mongols had both siege engines, and enough men. Most of their generals had perished in the previous sieges, the only settlement they held was a horrifically underwhelming Baghdad, and their invasion force was reduced to scattered units that had fled the previous battles in enough numbers to stick around on the campaign map.

My most heroic victory was defending some East European castle from mongols with, they were using several armies and I had like half of one. A few units of veteran archers, a few units of veteran pikemen, and a unit of scottish nobles on foot.

The moment that victory was assured was the time the nobles charged after the enemy had finally chewed through one of my pike squads. Everything in their way died, and their morale had been reduced by the fighting thus far to the point where that broke them and they ran.

Mine wasn't in MII but in Rome 1 (Total Realism mod). I played as Scythia against the Selucides (I'd just finished off Greece and Macedon). Naturally, my armies were pretty much all cavalry. It worked well until I began staring down 8 full stacks of spear men with only 3 Horse Armies to face them.

So began a terrible bloody multi turn campaign of sieges (my cities were held by foot archers, sometimes with no walls) field battles, and lots of murder, with very little time to rebuild damage to my main combat forces (the horses who took 2 turns to build in TR). About 10 turns in, I'd refused 8 stacks to 3, but now had 8 more stacks coming at me.

The war only ended when Egypt began pushing into Turkey because the Selucides had sent everything at me for the past 40 turns in an endless war.

That bought me about ten turns to take a few more cities in Eastern Europe and rebuild before I got to repeat the whole bloody mess with Egypt. I was lucky that Rome was too busy the entire time with Gaul and Carthage to pick a fight with me.

What makes it amusing for me is that castle wasn't an important place... thus why it didn't have much defense. I didn't care if I lost it, I just put some units there to bleed the Mongols a bit.

The fact that I won that battle in spite of the fact that I conspired not to made it even funnier. That's where the spine of the Mongol invasion was broken-- and completely on accident.

I am currently playing as the HRE in Medieval 2. I had only played the Britannia expansion previously (I know, play the main game before playing the expansion! But I wanted to play as Ireland )

It's quite a lot of fun, but the Papacy element is new to me, because you can be as aggressive as you like in Britannia with basically no issues.

The Danes have Hamburg, and I'd really quite like to take it off of them (and maybe destroy the Danes as a faction at the same time). How much trouble will I get into if I just invade them?

Also, I've got trade rights with a load of factions. I'm starting to get worried that this is not to my advantage. What is the disadvantage to agreeing trade rights? I assume that if I go to war with them, my incomes will drop due to reduced trade. Will it effect how other factions see me as well? Is the diplomacy AI that good?

Early on, the papacy doesn't interfere as much because everyone has roughly the same influence. But win quickly.

I tried to do spain and hungary but couldn't really enjoy them for some reason. they seem very poor and the infantry don't seem that good =(

Spain has amazing late game infantry, but till then you are kinda stuck.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Spain has amazing late game infantry, but till then you are kinda stuck.

Agreed, they are stupidly good but until that point every battle will se a lot of dead spaniards,

yea, I can tell. too used to venice I guess! don't know how your supposed to blitz the moors first with all those weak soldiers


anyways, going to try HRE soon and hopefully they have better infantry

I didn't think Spain was THAT bad, but it was a bit of a rough start to be sure.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
I tried to do spain and hungary but couldn't really enjoy them for some reason. they seem very poor and the infantry don't seem that good =(

Spain are powerful from the get-go because of their Jinetes. They're stupidly fast cavalry and are loaded with javelins, which are absolutely deadly against pretty much anything, especially armour. They do take some getting used to, though.

First off is to exploit their speed to get behind enemy units before throwing javelins (believe me it makes a hell of a difference). Secondly, you want to be able to micro them fairly well, or have the hotkeys for auto-fire and auto-skirmish memorised if you can't micro very well (although don't be afraid to hit Pause mid-fight so you can go and give a few other orders out without abandoning your Jinetes). I prefer to manually order attacks and and move orders, but I can't be everywhere at once, so sometimes auto-fire and auto-skirmish (which unfortunately isn't the most intelligent of abilities, as I've seen skirmishers run anywhere from parallel to the charging enemy, to right into another enemy who happened to be standing around admiring the scenery) if I need to. Thirdly, don't be afraid to charge them into melee, especially against things like archers. You have a decent attack and good defence for light cavalry, and you also have more of a chance to charge them what with your Jinetes already being all up in the enemy lines throwing sharp sticks around. Fourthly, also don't be afraid to have them chase down other light cavalry. Cavalry archers especially can string along heavily armoured knights for forever and a day before they get caught, but Jinetes will have a much easier time of catching them, if only to hold them in place so your heavy cavalry can swoop in and finish the job. Fifthly, chase fleeing enemies down with them. Their speed makes this an easy job, and can save you the hassle of having surviving stacks roaming around your lands sowing devastation or being a general pain. They're also handy for killing or capturing fleeing generals.

The only thing you really need to worry about is timing. If you get the timing for a manual movement wrong then one or two of your Jinetes might be caught in an enemy charge (it's a fault of the game that happens with a lot of units - if you order a run move order backwards then most of them will turn and run, but a few will turn and move at a snail's pace for a few seconds), which triggers the rest of your running unit to suddenly swing around and, retaining momentum, run headlong into melee with the charging enemies. This is dangerous, especially against spear infantry. Your saving grace is that you're fast, so if it happens then immediately keep spamming run orders a good distance away, and you should get out with only a few casualties. Due to the range of javelins, however, and the fact that you want a LOT of Jinetes in your army, this sort of thing will be an ever-present danger.

The main targets for Jinetes are armoured units like general's bodyguards, heavy cavalry, and heavy infantry. Getting around the back of and subsequently hurling javelins into AI units is surprisingly easy, and once it happens they start dropping like flies - even the 2HP bodyguards. If and when they start fleeing, chase them the hell down.

You might want to try some custom battles with them first to get a handle on how they play, but scenes like this (hijacked from http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?170823-How-to-use-Jinetes):


will not be uncommon once you get used to using them, sometimes to the point where you can obliterate the enemy without losing a single man.

The nice thing is that, while they are also vulnerable to shooting from other light cav, they are better in melee.

Don't waste their ammo on light units like archers. Use their melee on them. Save your ammo for the heavy units.

I havn't even given those guys a second thought! too used to lining up legionaries and charging them towards the enemy I guess. Might need to restart and try them again, only a lot more focused on calvary.

You like Jinetes? Try them in God Mode... Use Byzantine Vardarriotai. The best horse archers in the game.
The most epic victory... A campaign of annihilation against incoming Mongol Hordes in the narrow passes of Armenia. Byzantine Archers and Sperarmen to hold the line with the rest being Cavalry. Vardariotai are equal to Mongol Heavy Horse archers and can melle with the best of them.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
too used to lining up legionaries and charging them towards the enemy I guess

Yeah, you really have to unlearn some habits to play them.

konst80hummel wrote:
You like Jinetes? Try them in God Mode... Use Byzantine Vardarriotai. The best horse archers in the game.
The most epic victory... A campaign of annihilation against incoming Mongol Hordes in the narrow passes of Armenia. Byzantine Archers and Sperarmen to hold the line with the rest being Cavalry. Vardariotai are equal to Mongol Heavy Horse archers and can melle with the best of them.

I'm partial to Russian Dvor Cavalry myself. A bit harder to get hold of than Vardariotai but absolutely brutal.

I grabbed Hamburg, but the damn venetians declared war on me at the same time. Bologna is one of my most profitable cities, so I don't want to lose it, but all my troops are off in other places fighting and it's difficult to get that far south that fast!

Edit: Okay, Denmark is a smoldering ruin, so that's good. But when I responded to the Venetians attacks on me by besieging Venice (a fair cop, I thought), the bloody Pope was all "Oh, don't do that or I'll excommunicate you!"

So, I guess this is the infamous Diplomacy AI I have heard so much about. Venice doesn't seem to be a direct ally of the Papal States, so I can't figure why they're siding with Venice when they are the aggressor. Should I train up some diplomats and go make nice with the Pope? Or try to overthrow the Papacy?

Makes me understand why Protestantism caught on

yea the pope is strange when it comes to getting attacked. glad your having fun as HRE!

I started a new game as spain taking into account the tactics about the missile calvary, and decided to blitzkrieg (wrong nation?) Portugal. the war was over in a few turns and it ended with me slowly strangling it's last town in a siege. Now I'm gearing up to attack the Moors but the main footsoldier army just revolted and I need more ground pounders, but i'm doing miles better.


the only thing is france keeps asking for peace then blockading my ports! I even became a client kingdom for them and they still attacked me! it's pretty annoying.

The papacy are basically big jerks in this game. Doesn't matter if the other guy started it.

If you aren't allied with the Papal States by about turn 10 then you need to get on it. Dedicate a Diplomat to standing next to Rome and gifting them about 1k florins each turn, in addition to trade rights when you first meet them. You can also gift them map information instead of the first 1k after you meet. Keep doing this until your offers of an Alliance are at least a 'Balanced' proposal, preferably Generous/Very Generous.

Since most Catholic factions will be at war with other Catholic factions, having an Alliance with the only faction that doesn't arbitrarily go to war, and yet is the most important faction in Europe, is a Godsend. Having a high level of popularity with the Papacy also grants you some leniency when it comes to waging your own wars on Catholics, and at the highest levels you'll find most Catholic factions that attack you incur hefty penalties to their own papal rankings and subsequently are more likely to lift sieges and stop attacking you, giving you ample time to load their cities and castles with your spies (to open gates), train assault stacks, and position them to grab all the settlements in range in one turn.

Once you grab the settlements sack them (for quick income without the penalties associated with extermination) and if you can hold on to them, do so. If you think you'll be swiftly kicked out again in the next turn or so, demolish every building you can for more money (and to deny the enemy the buildings) and walk right out again.

At this point, you can choose to either leave it to be re-captured, or gift it to the Papal States. Gifting the city not only repairs any relationship losses you took from the attack and sacking of a catholic settlement, but also denies that settlement to the enemy without you having to babysit it. The only downside is that if you want it you have to try and get it to rebel, or war with the Papacy for it (or buy it off them, if you can). Gifting them settlements has also been noted as potentially giving the Papal States a taste of expansion, but I've yet to see them do anything except sit there in all my games.

If you do attack another Catholic faction, wait until the end of your turn to gift things to the papal states. This way you make full use of the relationship increase to repair any damage it suffered.

Also bear in mind that with a high enough relationship with the PS, you can request Crusades. If your sworn enemy finally gets excommunicated, request a Crusade be called on his ass. This means that your crusading army moves further, can move across catholic factions' lands without penalty, and has no army upkeep. Use it to conquer tricky settlements, or even just to force them to move troops away in order to fight off other Crusading factions. Also, take advantage of the exp boost that a successful crusading army gets, as well as the traits a crusading general obtains. You want high chivalry generals to govern your castles, since chivalry increases population growth and castles are notoriously difficult to populate, even with full farming upgrades, so having a crusader general (likely with max or nearly max chivalry) around will help you advance any castles you have.

konst80hummel wrote:
You like Jinetes? Try them in God Mode... Use Byzantine Vardarriotai. The best horse archers in the game.
The most epic victory... A campaign of annihilation against incoming Mongol Hordes in the narrow passes of Armenia. Byzantine Archers and Sperarmen to hold the line with the rest being Cavalry. Vardariotai are equal to Mongol Heavy Horse archers and can melle with the best of them.

Russian Dvor cavalry will like a word with you, because they will MURDER anything that is foolish enough to linger in their prenceses

Thanks for the advice guys! I've got a diplomat making his slow way down from Frankfurt to Rome at the moment, so hopefully I can mend the fences with his Hattiness before things get too hairy. He's called a crusade in the meantime. Maybe if I do well enough in that, he'll like me a bit more. Cairo is awfully far away though- I think I'm going to need a fleet to get across the med.

Assuming you managed to keep hold of Bologna, training a few cogs to get you across the sea would be nice, but if you're strapped for cash then have your Crusading army move to the shoreline in the Venice region (if Venice aren't excommunicated then they can't attack your crusading army, so you're safe) and purchase one of the 100 florin mercenary boats that Crusading armies get access to in the Mercenaries tab. Also load up on Crusader Sergeants (or Mercenary Spearmen in a pinch), and Pilgrims to push rams.

If you can, also try and get hold of some Unhorsed Knights; they're high upkeep after a crusade, but their statlines rival the English Armoured Swordsmen and beat the generic European Dismounted Feudal Knights, so they're deadly effective, although they're only usually found on the Mercenary tab around Acre, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Antioch. Around Alexandria (where your army will disembark) and Cairo, the only mercs you'll normally have access to are Sudanese Tribesmen, but despite what the name might imply, they're still very capable troops with good morale.

That said, Cairo has never had a large garrison whenever I've Crusaded against it, and I've always ended up with a full army stack against a handful of basic units. You'll need all the garrison you can get if you intend to keep Cairo, though. It might be easier to pawn it off on gift it to the Papal States, since you're only likely to keep hold of it through exterminating the populace.

I do recommend sending a diplomat over with the army, though. The last few times Egypt has asked for a ceasefire very shortly after I took Cairo, and I recently discovered I could get them to agree to a ceasefire in exchange for them giving me Gaza. It's a castle, so even with the huge difference in religion and culture you can keep the population happy, and it's usually fairly well populated to begin with, often close to a fortress upgrade off the bat. With the chivalrous general you have lurking around post-crusade, you can get Egypt to give you Gaza, gift the troublesome Cairo to the Papal States, and move in to your new fortified position in the middle east.

The chivalry of your general, plus farming upgrades, will give Gaza a huge growth spurt and allow you to produce your higher tier units quickly, allowing for a swift annexing of the Egyptian lands when required and giving you a strong base of operations for the Mongol and Timurid invasions.

Spam priests out of Gaza to convert the population of Jerusalem (the closest city) in preparation to take it, then use that to churn out yet more priests, making sure you demolish the thieves guild that the AI are so fond of putting in every one of their cities so you can build a theologian's (and eventually, master theologian's) guild there. With your super-charged horde of priests converting the lands, and with most of them being cardinals (or being promoted when a space becomes available) once you get a master theologian's guild set up, you'll eventually be able to start conquering the middle east without having to exterminate every city AND you'll have complete control of the papal elections.

Just be aware that you'll only be favoured by your own pope to start with; he'll waste no time excommunicating you if you start messing around, but any factions you're at war with *cough*Venice*cough* will have a huge penalty to their papal standings. Rigging the elections by controlling near every cardinal is mostly only to stop other factions getting one of their Cardinals elected; everything else is icing on the catholic cake.

ohhhh is chivalry part of the growth thing? because all my kings are evil bastards after I have been using all my assassins to kill lots of things...


anyways Reconquestia is completed 200 years ahead of time and now I need to flip a coin to decide if I want to finish off the moors or start killing frenchies.

speaking of popes the two I had in my game were freaken excommunication happy! in about 2 years they excomunicated milan, france, the HRE and I think denmark

Vardariotai are cheaper. And you don't have to wait until hell freezes over to be abl to train them. Boyar Sons on the other hand are interesting.

Update on my 900 turn HRE game

It's turn 305 and I still haven't gotten Gunpowder yet.
So far I have 58 territories and 3 vassals (scotland, poland and russia)

The mongols spawned about 20 turns before and started to kick the Russians asses, so I have to fight them with everything I have available.

The problem is that the Spanish decided that now is the perfect opportunity to sail a boat up from Toledo and try to take Rennes.

Also, do Mongol units cost no upkeep? I had a look on the stats of one of their infantry units and it was upkeep 0.

Phew!
Okay, finished the crusade, so my relationship with the Pope is outstanding right now. But he won't take Cairo from me because he's all "You're just going to take it back, bro. I know you!"

Feth it. I'll just hamstring it and then head and take Alexandria. I've already looted it. (Boy was it rich!)

On the other hand, I'm at war with Venice, Milan, France and Poland right now. To be fair, I didn't start any of those wars, but they're all jerks. My forces are stretched pretty thin, especially in the south, so I am glad the crusade is over and I can start dedicating more resources to the south. I've lost 4 nobles in battle recently though, which sucks, so I have to get some new leaders down south. Currently Venice, Bologna and Florence are all without governors, which means I've got to keep them on low tax rates to keep the population in check.

Thinking about building up some power and then just nabbing Rome followed by the rest of Italy. Even with an outstanding relationship the Pope is still unreasonable, and I figure we're going to end up at war eventually- capturing Rome is part of my win condition in any case.

Did you try gifting Cairo? I've never seen a faction refuse a gift.
Cairo is probably going to be captured anyway.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
do Mongol units cost no upkeep? I had a look on the stats of one of their infantry units and it was upkeep 0.

I'm not sure, but that's probably some legacy code left over from Rome: Barbarian Invasion, where hordes on the move cost no upkeep till they decide to settle down.

Like how javelin units are still super effective against elephants, even though it doesn't mention it any more.

Yeah, I've tried gifting the Pope money, I've tried gifting him both Cairo and Alexandria, or just map information. He's just not interested, even though I have an outstanding relationship with him. Go figure.

Under attack from Hungary and Poland right now, as well as Milan and France. It's a bit hectic- I might as well be excommunicated for all the good the Pope is doing me!

I feel like burning the world might be a viable alternative.

for some reason, the pope in my spain game was only aligned with the moors and no one else...

Welp, all this Medieval 2 talk has gotten to me. Reinstalled it with the latest version of the Stainless Steel mod, including Byg's Grim Reality and Meneth's Sub Mod Compilation.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?314-Stainless-Steel

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?106060-BGR-V-120719-Byg-s-Grim-Reality-%28Supply-amp-Command-Series%29-Guides-Updates-amp-Optional-Extras


http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?380006-Meneth-s-Sub-mod-Compilation-%28MSC%29-6-0


Only a few turns in... and man I have forgotten how to play this game. I forsee a short, grim future for Denmark!

alright update with my short game yesterday:

spain's two main armies are entirely composed of calvary, and after threats from france I wisely moved them to the mountains guarding spain from those smelly bastards. I was right! a few turns later my two calvary armies have annihilated 4 whole half banner armies before I finally moved on towards my own offensive. I took a french castle despite france's (and the pope's!) pleas for peace, and now i'm in control of 4 castles across my kingdom....


also got into a war with milan. eh.

Make it five castles. just captured another one of France's provenience in a surprise attack. cost me some good soldiers but eh, it was acceptable. I now hold most of southern france and have two castles on the frontiers of my conquest. about to capture a milanese town too, so they can eat it.


also, i have access to sword and buckler troops. are they worth it/ really good? what about mounted crossbows compared to jinnates?

Don't forget to convert any spare castles you have into towns and cities; it's no use having a castle at the far corner of your empire nowhere near any fighting, or in a cluster of other castles. A ratio of 1 castle to every 5 or 6 towns is usually fairly good, and Spain needn't worry too much about it since their cities get access to the Plaza Del Toro, allowing you to recruit Jinetes without relying on castles.

As for mounted crossbows vs Jinetes, there isn't much that the crossbows do as well, never mind better, then the Jinetes. The only real advantages they have are range and ammunition capacity; Jinetes are at least as good - and more likely better - in every single other aspect.

I have been yes, except for citadels. kinda want to keep those.

thought that the jinetes were better, but it still would be good to have at least some, right? and are knights good to use?

now that i have swordsmen, should I have more foot based armies?

 Bromsy wrote:
Welp, all this Medieval 2 talk has gotten to me. Reinstalled it with the latest version of the Stainless Steel mod, including Byg's Grim Reality and Meneth's Sub Mod Compilation.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?314-Stainless-Steel

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?106060-BGR-V-120719-Byg-s-Grim-Reality-%28Supply-amp-Command-Series%29-Guides-Updates-amp-Optional-Extras


http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?380006-Meneth-s-Sub-mod-Compilation-%28MSC%29-6-0


Only a few turns in... and man I have forgotten how to play this game. I forsee a short, grim future for Denmark!

What's stainless steel like? Does it increase the turn limit?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
Welp, all this Medieval 2 talk has gotten to me. Reinstalled it with the latest version of the Stainless Steel mod, including Byg's Grim Reality and Meneth's Sub Mod Compilation.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?314-Stainless-Steel

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?106060-BGR-V-120719-Byg-s-Grim-Reality-%28Supply-amp-Command-Series%29-Guides-Updates-amp-Optional-Extras


http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?380006-Meneth-s-Sub-mod-Compilation-%28MSC%29-6-0


Only a few turns in... and man I have forgotten how to play this game. I forsee a short, grim future for Denmark!

What's stainless steel like? Does it increase the turn limit?

Yeah, and its been a while since I played M2, but it seems to add a lot.

I been trying to get the stainless steel mod to work but it's being a pain in the ass. first off, I have the steam version that also has kingdoms.

the problem is when I try to launch it all I get is "is kindoms.exe in your folder?"

but after going through the entire game folder this is absolutely no exe files of any sort.

please help X-X

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
I been trying to get the stainless steel mod to work but it's being a pain in the ass. first off, I have the steam version that also has kingdoms.

the problem is when I try to launch it all I get is "is kindoms.exe in your folder?"

but after going through the entire game folder this is absolutely no exe files of any sort.

please help X-X

It's a problem with one of the newer updates to Medieval on steam, they integrated everything. Rename Medieval.exe to Kingdoms.exe in the main folder and it should work fine. That worked for me.

there is no medieval.exe, or any exe. there is only an application named medieval, is that it?

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
there is no medieval.exe, or any exe. there is only an application named medieval, is that it?

Yes there is, and that is it.

For future reference: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hide-file-name-extensions#show-hide-file-name-extensions=windows-7 (the same process on Windows 8)

You're only not seeing the .exe because the system defaults to hiding known file extensions.

...... Emperor damn it.


well, thank you for the info then, that was driving me nuts!

anywho, I should just rename and not copy/paste it and then rename, correct?

This thread made me dust off my old Stainless Steel and put it on.


Playing as the Crusader States is a total pain in the butt, but it is so satisfying when you get all five of your cities beseiged in one turn and then crush them all with superior units. The Knights Templar are a god send, so are the Knights of Jerusalem.

Alright speeking of it I made a new file that says kingdoms, and it launched!!!!


...for all of 1 minute. then it crashed of an unknown error.

what now? I downloaded the first file, and I think I have them all... else, I have all of the ss.3 files in my downloads but they cant open X-X

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?417435-Stainless-Steel-6-4-Released!

Did you run setup? Mine does that so everytime I play I need to run set up as administrator, select my campaign and then hit play that way.

I did, but now it just crashes without an error message =/

So what should I do for the mod now? anything I can?

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Don't forget to convert any spare castles you have into towns and cities; it's no use having a castle at the far corner of your empire nowhere near any fighting, or in a cluster of other castles. A ratio of 1 castle to every 5 or 6 towns is usually fairly good, and Spain needn't worry too much about it since their cities get access to the Plaza Del Toro, allowing you to recruit Jinetes without relying on castles.

As for mounted crossbows vs Jinetes, there isn't much that the crossbows do as well, never mind better, then the Jinetes. The only real advantages they have are range and ammunition capacity; Jinetes are at least as good - and more likely better - in every single other aspect.

Don't follow this advice in stainless steel or you will end up with only 1 or 2 of each professional type available. I did this with one of my many restarts of the eastern roman empire... jesus I cant remember the name atm..... the place with constantinople, and found I could raise not manyprofessional troops, tried it again with no conversion over and i could make real armies again.

The Byzantine Empire.

Technically it's imcorrect.

If you spoke to an actual Byzantine, he'd say that the empire was called 'Empire of the Romans'. We only call it the Byzantine Empire to distinguish the two.


Sorry, the Historian in me came out for a second.....

Eastern Roman Empire, to be precise.