Broken Crescent wild Turks.

[Robespierre]

The Turkish tribes. they start with a real problem family and like a lack of real direction. they are like not together man. any suggestions on how to play them?


[Edited to remove (possibly unintentional) racial/ethnic insult. -- Martok]

[PBI]

The Turks (I assume you mean the Turkish Sultanate, not the Great Seljuks) are very much a Late-Game faction; their early units are relatively lightweight, their starting provinces are poor, they don't have any equivalent of a Baghdad or Constantinople, nor do they have a clear great leader like Saladin or Baldwin, and they will almost inevitably be forced into a confrontation with the much stronger Romans before long. On the other hand, once the Romans are gone, they will have the wealth of Constantinople and a great map-edge position to expand from, and their high tech units are fantastic: Jannisaries, Naffatun and Sipahis.

I would suggest the best way to go might be to attack the Armenians, after a quick bit of expansion against the nearby rebels. They are definitely the weakest of your neighbours, so a quick strike against them should be straightforward enough and will net you the relatively wealthy cities of Cilicia. Sooner or later obviously you will have to take on the Romans; the key is clearly Constantinople. I strongly recommend using siege weapons to take it on the turn you attack, since the automatic spawning garrison troops are nasty. Plus, there seems to be a bug in 1.1 whereby if you take it this way the garrison troops will spawn for you instead, which is very nice indeed; half a stack of gold-chevron pikemen and heavy spearmen.

Once Constantinople has gone, mopping up the rest of the Romans should be relatively straightforward; I found their armies looked intimidatingly huge, but turned out to mostly consist of Levy Spearmen due to the fact that most of their cities are underdeveloped. Once the Romans are gone you should have enough money and developed enough cities to start churning out your high-tech troops, so I would imagine it'd be plain sailing from there.

An alliance with the Ayyubids might be a good idea, so that they will keep the Kingdom of Jerusalem occupied while you deal with the Romans.

[Robespierre]

Excellent stuff on the Sultanate, thanks, but Imeant the Seljuks in fact
:wall::wall::wall::wall::wall::wall:

[PBI]

Ah, I see. Well then, horse archers and Ghulam lancers FTW. I would heartily recommend crushing the Abbasids, Baghdad is a very sweet prize indeed, it's making around 15000 a turn all by itself in my game.

[Robespierre]

Do you mean as the SWT (Seljuk Wild Turks), PBI?
I do heartily agree about Baghdad, it is the centre of the world, there is no other place quite like it to conquer. however i have avoided the fuss by playing as the Abbasids this time. I am more infantry-conscious anyway and the rate of breeding for Abna spears and desert bows is phenomenal, and they are at least as good as what nearly any other faction can field.
The seljuks still look a challenge though.

[Shahed]

I have some EOT (end of turn) savegames from the 1st 5 turns here. These are not "complete" but they can give you some direction,, check em out (link valid 14 days from now):

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ejv4mp

I did these very quickly and they are not perfect. Basic idea is to get all of Iran and as much of Iraq as possible, and those three northern cities south of Merv as quick as possible, use these are core provinces and then build up from there. While you are doing this you also need to send at least one full all cavalry army to help out the Rum Turks to save them. This will give you some interesting battles against ERE and provide you with some veteran troops. Be prepared to have one or two armies permanently stationed in Rumelia if you want to save the Rum Turks. If you do save them it will generally be a much more involved game actually acting as an ally, though you can easily just let them die and then face a stronger ERE later.

Quick sketch of core empire using spray tool in paint:

https://img253.imageshack.us/img253/4804/seljukempirecoreprovincme2.jpg

Keep in mind my playstyle is to have a rich, developed core first before marching on the world. I like to see things develop and I play real slow. Others will have their own ways but I like to play like this. I'd also be using only all cav armies as Seljuks except long siege armies and garrisons which would have infantry. Once you have your core secured, you should ally everyone you can so you can build up your income base and your armies. If you don't go for the above core, you can use "AOR Iran" (AOR = area of recruitment) as your base, as shown in yellow here:

https://img153.imageshack.us/img153/4638/aorpiecesmapho6.jpg

Once you've got your core sorted, the second step I would take is to expand to all of AORs Iraq & Khorasan.
This would give you all your AORs i.e Azeri, Iraq, Iran, Khorasan. From there... you can go anywhere.

Hope that helps.