Alliance Patterns

Are there tendencies built into the campaign?

Does the HRE more often than not ally with Papal States and/or Milan? Or is it just my imagination.

I need to map this out a bit in order to know who I can offend and not offend as France.

Right now I've allied with HRE and Papal State for the purposes of freezing out my right flank so I can worry primarily about heading south. But, in heading south I would prefer not to jeopardize my current alliances by say, attacking Portugal or Spain (something I plan to do unless doing so automatically blows my HRE alliance).

So it occurred to me the campaign may have certain hard wires built in it would be good to keep in mind.

I think like you. But there are other things to take into consideration. The alliance system is based on, in my opinion, two things:

• The enemy of your ally is your enemy if you want improve relations.
• If your enemy has only you as enemy, their allies (which does not have any enemies) will come after you.

Yes there is a trend, but it is purely historical factor. But I do not get certain betrayals.

I was playing with Scotland. A beautiful campaign against England. I (Scotland) and France fighting together against England. Later I extended my campaign for Denmark. Nevertheless, after destroying Denmark, I was betrayed by France, with a very good relationship. I really got pissed off with it and gave up playing because my balance was in alliance with France. I would lose anyway, because I spent a lot florin to move troops to Denmark, and I would get worn out to fight with France.

Ha, I'm playing Scotland currently, having fun, so far all I've done is kick the English off the island. I haven't had any luck getting alliances with anyone so far, which is a bit of a concern because I don't want everyone as an enemy when I hit the continent. But sometimes it just goes that way I guess, I'm sure something will develop. And if not, I'm taking provinces on the edge so I can maintain a united front and minimize exposure to multiple fronts for as long as possible.

As for behavior, I was really just wondering if anyone was of the opinion that CA programmed in certain tendencies, I suspected they probably didn't. But at the same time I'd seen some familiar behavior repeat itself on Shogun 2, I suspect it had more to do with the starting locations of clans and what they were up against initially that led to patterns developing mid campaign.

I do need to focus on attacking enemies of my allies more, assuming in this campaign I can get one going, I think I need to save up some money and throw it at the Papal State and get them on board. I find the Pope often a handy way to disrupt the larger powers, right now for example the HRE just got excommunicated, with sufficiently strong relations with the Pope I can probably get a crusade granted against one of their cities, we'll see.

Which Factions did you ended the long campaign?
Until now I finished with England until Venice (just remember the order).

So far I've only done England and France, currently doing Scotland. I tend to move through them slowly as I often get distracted and play something else at the same time (right now I'm also playing Rome 1 using the EB mod and they just update the original Xcom mod called OpenXcom just updated so I started a new game of that classic yesterday).

That said, I'm sure I'll keep pushing along as Scotland, assuming I don't get completely ganged up on the European mainland and obliterated, haha!

The worst thing about the Scotts is that they have awesome pike, but pike in vanilla M2TW without the fan fix quickly discards their pike weapon and breaks formation to fight with pathetic shortswords. Stainless Steel or the fan fix remove the shorstword, thus pikes only stay in phalanx formation and are infinitely more useful for it.

Hmmm, I'll have to fire up a campaign of SS then as Scots down the road to see that in action, the last couple I've been playing are just using retro.