Having had a moan about 'Fire at Will' and horse archers, I thought I'd try and start a more positive thread, because all moans aside ETW has the makings of a great game.
I more or less completed the 'Road to Independence' campaign , I have the last stage to do but decided I needed a break from nose pulling for a bit. The best part of that campaign was deliberately ignoring the snooty woman and doing what I wanted to do instead. Which basically saw me building lots of sloops, loading them with seasick indians and launching naval raids all along the coast from as far north as Newfoundland. The French got so confused that in the end they left Quebec unguarded and a quick naval assault captured the town despite the armed mobs.
Maratha Confederacy
I decided deliberately to avoid all the major European powers to begin with in the Grand Campaign and started off playing the Maratha Confederacy. I've restarted that campaign three times now each time learning somehting new. The biggest frustration has been trying to win friends and influence people. Everyone seems to be indifferent or hostile and it makes it really hard to negotiate mutually beneficial deals with them. Portugal especially are being particularly obnoxious, especially considering that I have just annexed the Sultanate of Mysore and thus any future landward communication by the Portuguese is entirely at my discretion. Indeed, I feel that unless the Portuguese learn some respect pretty quickly I may decide having them as unpaid tenants on my land is a waste of resource.
In the north the Mughal Empire has proven to be a lion without teeth. It roars a lot and makes pointless gestures of aggression but seem to lack the ability to pose any real threat, except at sea where its pirate fleets constantly raid our trade routes. To over come this I have now adopted a policy of raiding and destroying all their ports along the coast, which they seem unable to prevent.
I am generally impressed with the quality of the Maratha Army. The Europen Trained line infantry units are steady and reliable and I managed to get the Dutch to teach them how to form square which assisted greatly in defeating the Mysorian cavalry. Cavalry is a bit lacking, but adquate and certainly enough to deal with enemy artillery and poor quality troops.
So, far the only real challenge I have faced (on Hard difficulty) is money, and that largely because of the Mughal pirates. However, I'm still convinced that investing in a fleet would have been a mistake and I suspect that simply destroying the Murghal shipyards will eventually put a stop to these raids.
Ottoman Empire
I decided to start a second campaign largely because I wanted to see if the game played different when you had more power and thus more friends, and so I started an Ottoman Campiagn.
The game does indeed feel different when you have a lot of land, and thus resources, and consequently a lot of friends. The Ottoman Empire is just big and its actually quite easy to lose stuff (especially agents) fortunately the list tab knows where they are. I actually found it quite hard to formulate a cohenent strategy for the Ottoman Empire simply because there is so much to do. I've tended to concentrate my capital investments on Instanbul and the surrounding core provinces, on the principle that the outlying provinces are the most vulnerable and thus the worse place to try and develop.
However, political and military events quickly took over the reigns and forced me to invest in the Crimean area where my protectorate came under early attack by Russia and had to be supported. This resulting in the building of a fort on the border and the investment on military buildings in the neighbouring province to improve the quality of local military units. However, Russia proved unable to match my strength in this area and eventually I not only put a stop to their incursions into the Crimea but actually succeeded in taking the war to them and capturing Kiev. This has left the Crimean Kaphiliate free to come up with its own idea's for military conquest and at the moment they seem to be having great fun burning Russian towns and have even built a fleet to raid enemy trade routes.
At the same time in the East I have been forced to deal with Georgia, which for reasons that remain a mystery suddenly decided to annex Armenia when I wasn't looking. IT took me a bit by surprise and I've had to invest a lot of money in Bahgdad and other local provinces to counter the Georgians superior military units. Fortunately, I've finally managed to get to the point where Jannissaries can be recruited locally and now at least I have something that can counter the Georgian Militia. Prior to this everything I had got pawned by Georgian units, even their armed citizen mobs were able to defeat my troops.
With the Jannissaries in place it was simply a matter of time for Georgia. Armenia was rapidly liberated and Georgia itself fell a couple of turns ago. So, things are pretty stable for the Ottomans at the minute and I am starting to turn my attentions to more long term goals such as economic investment and technology.
Sweden have been quite helpful in exchanging knowledge with us, as have the Dutch, however the French and British remain aloof. In the meantime, I have been blatantly supporting my allies the Barbary States and giving them all the best techologies I obtain in order to bolster their activities. They are doing a wonderful job keeping the sea lanes clear of unwanted guests and so far I have only suffered the loss of one trade route with Sweden, which I suspect is due their ports being blockaded in Northern Europe.
Whereas, I was pretty impressed with the quality of the Maratha Army, the Ottoman army is truly appalling. Basically, anyone with a gun in his hand isn't worth the money spent to train him, they are truly useless and Ottoman Line infantry will even fail to win in a fire fight with Georgian armed mobs. The fact that all the Ottoman cavalry also have muskets merely means that their cavalry are as useless as their infantry. In the end the only units I've found who can be relied upon to do anything worthwhile are the Jannissaries (who for some reason don't have muskets:dizzy2:). This resulted in the development of tactic's whereby usless skirmishers and line infantry would be used as bait to lure the AI into massing the Georgian Militia into the customary massed fire expliot columns whereupon my mass Janissaries would emerge from a nearby wood in the flank where I had kept them carefully hiddenand steamroller the whole lot into a big bloody pile of mush.
Lack of cavalry however, remains a big problem and somewhat a-historic as far as I can tell from reading about the Ottomans.
Anyway thats How I'm doing, so far.
