Pontos?

I gave a try to Pontos yesterday since they seem like an interesting choice, but the prospects are incredibly grim from the start: you start in a backwater without any infrastructure, your armies are incredibly expensive and on top of that when you finally think there will be room to breathe the AS comes with super-stacks of mercenaries with the intent to erase you off the map or die trying.

How can you avoid being overwhelmed by the silver death? I think that an early rush against them might be in order, but then debt will soar and eventually they will come for me and win by sheer attrition, even then Makedonia or the Epirotes will probably attack Byzantium early on and I will be on a hopeless two front war. Any succesful tips or strategy to survive as them?

1) Take Sinope with the nearest army
2) Take Trapezous with the nearest army
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What you could try then is to build a fleet (expensive) and assemble all your armies while leaving a small garrison in your starting cities and go for Pantikapaion and Chersonesos.

The two cities in the Crimea are garrisoned fairly heavily and there are two Eleutheroi armies hiding in the trees near them who will attack you when you lay siege, and the armies have quite a lot of horse archers.

It's doable, but once you get the cities what exactly do you propose he does with them? All they have are ports and markets with a low population, by this time he's gonna be in massive debt due to the upkeep of the fleets and the army, expanding north is pointless due to the horse archer tribes there who will be very difficult to beat with no money and only low-end levy soldiers for the armies, then when AS does attack him all he's gonna have is the beat-up army that has been mauled in the Crimea to fight them with, no money to retrain or hire mercenaries.

No, it's a bad strategy i think. There are a few ways to win with Pontos. The first way is to just get lucky and hope the silver death don't come for you for at least the first 15 or 20 turns. This is more unlikely than the pope converting to Islam.

The second way is force diplomacy mod. Force them to stay allied or neutral just until you have a little money coming in to be able to retrain and recruit some decent units.

The third option would be to attack them straight away, take their cities so that you can destroy the government and barracks for a little money to help with the debt, possibly then have a go at taking that large city (forgot its name) that sits just outside Turkey to the east and expel the people and destroy everything for an influx of money. If you can get that far, that money should be enough to get you on your feet.

From there just go about the game normally. It's extremely difficult though. It's one of those factions where playing on M/M instead of H or VH is acceptable

What i did was take all the cities in northern anatolia plus bizantion as soon as possible ( especially cause bizantion has very weak garrison, start attaking as later, if you don't have the backbone of anatolia you wont be able to stand up! trust me

I'm short of time so i'll be quick atm...
I would suggest merging your forces into 1 army to take the persian royal road settlements from Mazaka to Sardis. They are fairly lightly garrisoned no matter the difficulty level, and they will be your cash cow right from the start. Dont miss grabbing Ankyra for your galatian assault troops. You'll only be in debt a lil w/ this starting strat n fairly soon swimming in $$...and dont forget to put a fort w/ a few units in your East and /SE mountain passes.They can buy u time to raise armies when AS comes for you (they will soon), as well as inflict some nice casualties on em before they get to you. If you can safely hold or sack Antioch early it helps too.

I tried many times back in 0.82 as Pontus, and failed every time.

considering how little action this thread has had, either everyone considers it impossible or doesn't care

Old guide

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=69979

Hayasdan is harder to play but not impossible, neither do pontus.

I've played a couple of Pontos campaigns, and the first 20 years usually goes down like this:

1) Take Sinope
2) Take Trapezous
3) Take Nikaia
4) Take Ancyra
5) If AS have not declared war on you yet, go for Mazaka, Ipsos & Sardis.
6) Take Side & Tarsos to be king of the Anatolia
7) Antiocheia is the next goal for any nation out to cripple the AS.
8) ????
9) Profit!!

I've actually given this some thought in the past, as I've never played as Pontos before. Might give them a shot, after all:yes: Good guides mates:thumbsup:

Maion