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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.