Are mongols supposed to appear with 17 stacks?

So this is my second medieval campaign. On my first one (no vanilla mod) Mongols came with about 6-7 stacks in Russia.
This time in VanillaMod, they showed up with 17 stacks and are now at that point where if I enter a war with them I can pretty much just abandon the campaign.

My question is, is this normal for them to spawn with 17 stacks (Timurids spawned with 7 stacks a few turns ago)?












Take a look at this.








https://i29.tinypic.com/2rc9ats.jpg

Most of those are FULL stacks. There's also several other full stacks and clumps of stacks scattered around their territory but not as concentrated as this. wtf can you do up to that:wall:

Yes, Mongols spawn with 17 stacks over several turns.

On your screenshot though, they have split up most of their stacks and also have taken over a lot of the ME already, so they've been building more troops too.

Not to worry though, they may well eventually go to war with the Timurids and the nature of VM allows fairly sturdy and productive alliances to be formed against them.

Admittedly, it is a lot of troops to face if this is only your second campaign - I designed the mod for a well seasoned M2TW player to give them a bit of a challenge towards the mid-end game. (I have thoroughly tested the amount of enemies spawned, and this amount seemed just about challenging to beat, i.e. took me a good dozen turns rather than the old 2-3 turns to wipe out the Mongols)

Note that in unmodded, Mongols still spawn I think 11 stacks, so you are only facing 6 more. Reason that they've expanded a lot is because I bugfixed horde behavior so they act intelligently now rather than sit around endlessly.

The stacks of Mongols just keep growing....in my France campaign I hold Acre, Adana and Gaza. I've killed about 20 stacks that have besieged me. And they have (visible in the FoW) another forty-five or so stacks around me, and they just keep coming. Who knows how many more are lurking out there? While I can beat them back, I almost never get a turn to regroup my troops or retrain, so eventually they'll wear me away. I've fulfilled all the campaign goals FTW except holding Antioch now, but I'll have to ship a couple stacks from Europe to take it because I can't get out of my Middle Eastern cities. :help:

The only thing that might save me is that I just got a message that the Timurids have declared war on the Mongols. The Timurids haven't even appeared on my screen yet, so maybe that will draw off a few of these many stacks of Mongols. Or maybe the Timurids will just come for me instead....

Anyway, kudos on making VM a faithful but more challenging version of the game.

45 :inquisitive:
How much land do they hold in your campaign that they can afford to buy all these :grin:

Mongols and Timurids aren't supposed to be a "kill a few stacks and that's it for them" thing anymore, they will kinda like historically be a great menace that will take some effort to beat back.

Its a lot easier to kill them before they manage to carve out an empire, because then you essentially are up against a player like yourself, just that they aren't quite as smart, but got quite a bit more firepower than you.

The way I play it usually is to not build huge stacks until the time I actually receive the Mongols spotted message (to make it fair I suppose). That's usually a cue to start massing your armies and prepare to go to an extended war. And yes, you do need all your castles and cities to be on high alert and you can't really rely on 1 or 2 stacks produced in ME to take care of it all. A bit like a crusade :wink:

Nevertheless, let me know how you get on. If its really too difficult, I'll tone them down a little bit.