Well then, Beef would probably just finish up this episode with the existing build before patching up and starting the next one. Wouldn't be too big of a deal I'd venture.
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Well then, Beef would probably just finish up this episode with the existing build before patching up and starting the next one. Wouldn't be too big of a deal I'd venture.
great stuff - failure is deffinately a more entertaining read!
the poles are vrey tough to deal with. in one sicilan campaign i took them on in a forrest battle with a knight heavy army. having never encountered them (or any other spear chukkas) i was expecting an easy victory, i won but my full stack was reduced to about 50 men! the nobles skirmished and took out my knights whilst i was left a little lost in the woods.
the semi-cheating strategy to deal with them is to avoid their field armies and take out their cities - the ai often leaves cities poorly defended.
a good counterto thenobles is another misslie cav - but i dont think you have any as the germans?? that being the case i would suggest you avoid chasing them with you own knights and hope they waste the javelins on your cheaper infantry.
he has not updated for a while now.:viking:
Yes, I know mein Kaiser. :wink:Quote:
Originally Posted by Beefeater
It's just that I often get impetous and charge them in....it took me awhile to get accustomed to this new cav system. The better/proper way is of course to charge the flanks and rears of the already engaged line. I've made some progress in handling them yesterday and in one battle I absolutely dominated with my Mailed Knights. I had them hidden in a small forest with my main force+General luring the enemy down from his hill. When he had gone past my hidden Knights and engaged with my main army I completely annihilated a unit of Pavise Xbow which didn't even move and struck decisive blows to the rear ends of his Italian Militia (Venice) with my Knights.
I like how the terrain differs from my Venice campaign that I played before. In Italy it's mostly a landscape of rolling hills with little wood. In Germany there's plenty of forest and armies may lay in ambush everywhere. One of my Generals, travelling between castles was actually ambushed by rebels. Didn't happen to me before and was a nice change. My General recognized the ambush early, though and I was able to deploy. I hid all my troops (3 Spear Militia) and lured them with my General past the hidden units, effectively ambushing the AI in return and routed him pretty fast.
I've also managed to get Venice and Milan excommunicated but taking their cities will be difficult. The AI just blocked the path to Venice with its faction leader, alone. I wonder if its plan is to get him killed and thus reconciled?
BTW, we have a snack salami in Germany sold as Bifi (pronounce Beefy).
May we call you Beefy? :grin:
R'as
Edit: Have you also been approached by Milan and Sicily begging for alms by offering "Give us Tribute or we attack?" :laugh4:
Wonderland - absolutely right. I'll finish the Vignette and only then install the patch.
R'as - Beefy's fine! Although Beefeater's better half has now taken to calling him that, which he finds slightly disturbing.
I think your point about the terrain is interesting. Germany's quite a good place for infantry because the terrain permits ambushes - the most entertaining stack I've used has been mostly been dismounted Imperial Knights, who can tear up pretty much anything in heavily wooded areas.
Awesome topic, Beafeater.
It actually made me register to voice my appreciation.
I'm playing the HRE as well, and having great fun. They're one of the neatest factions in the game IMHO. :cool:
Glory for the Reich!
DRANG NACH OSTEN!
May 25, 1235
Another fifteen wagons arrived today. Must speak with Walfen about location of storehouses. Nuremberg now wealthier than Venice was. More wagons every week; they come from Riga, Prague, Krakow, even far off Helsinik and Novgorod. Not our wealth, theirs. The Knights’.
A new chapterhouse was completed this year. Great grey mushrooms, with black-and-white spores. Infesting the Reich, sucking its wealth. Violent men, with swords. Brutes with steel. Their time is now. My time.
I have seen the turning of things. My sixty-fifth year approaches, and know that soon I will be dead, and one with the Lord. They will not outlast me. Herr Baum’s factory will show that, soon. Such a wondrous thing, his black powder. From a sprinkling of dust, force that shakes mountains and levels walls. Walls cannot withstand the powder, what chance armour? No armour. No knights. No great grey chapterhouses and no arrogance masquerading as godliness.
God’s judgment on the Knights. God’s victory, to the Reich. Until then, the wagons will still roll.
https://img205.imageshack.us/img205/4979/mapuw5.jpg
The Known World at the foundation of the Teutonic Order
https://img185.imageshack.us/img185/...ingdomsyp4.jpg
Kingdoms of Germany
(Black with white cross – Teutonic land. Light Blue with a yellow eagle – Nuremburg. Imperial Eagle – Kaiser’s personal estates)
When last I posted, things were looking pretty grim for the Empire. As you can see from the above maps, Poland has encroached on the Reich’s eastern borders, I’ve been kicked out of Italy and France has now overtaken me as the largest nation in Western Europe (nine provinces against my seven). The one bright spot has been Mandorf’s war against the Danes, as a result of which the Teutonic order has been founded to prosecute the Empire’s wars in the North. This leaves Germany split into three parts: the Free City of Nuremberg, Kaiser Henry’s personal holdings, and of course the final piece to the German jigsaw: the fortress of Magdeburg, home to the first chapter of the Teutonic Knightly Order.
Finally, some good news (for us). First, the Mongols have arrived, and can be expected to be causing havoc in the East. This might keep the Poles occupied in the near future. Second, the Sicilians have noticed that we no longer share a border and are offering peace and trade rights. No reason not to accept, and so I do.
Das Reich Streiches Bäck
There are currently three armies in Germany. Mandorf’s army is campaigning in the North, and has just taken Magdeburg, having smashed the Danish armies in the region. It’s tempting to sit there and launch a raid against the Poles, but the Danes are on the back foot and Mandorf recognizes the need to put them out of play permanently.. Sacking Magdeburg has left the Reich with enough cash for two units of Teutonic Knights (900 fl. each): once these are recruited, Mandorf will head for Stettin, and then Hamburg. It is important to take Stettin first so that firm borders against the Poles can be established.
The second army is heading south through the Alps, and is composed of the survivors of the Italian Wars. I plan to rest it in Innsbruck, and take on new recruits; once that is done, I’ll hold it in reserve to use against Poland once the Danes are taken care of.
Finally, Kaiser Henry is building a third army, which will be sent either north to finish off the Danes or East to turn away the Poles, as necessary. However, the Poles have halted now that they have captured Prague. I’m not sure why - It’s a bit early for the Mongols actually to be causing them any trouble, but I am just glad for a rest from the attacks. Nuremberg and Vienna have large town garrisons and could probably hold off any attack for a while, but as recent events have shown there is no guarantee on VH/VH that the AI will roll over and play dead.
The Danish Campaign
https://img287.imageshack.us/img287/...utonicsjw0.jpg
Order Knights
Two turns later the first knights are built and Mandorf moves out. Stettin falls very quickly – the AI had only left two units of spearmen to defend it – and he moves on toward Hamburg, which puts up little more of a defence. There is however a large Danish army moving down from the North, and spies report that the Danes have taken Antwerp.
With the cash from sacking Stettin and Hamburg, I am able to bolster both Mandorf’s army and Henry’s with a few more units of Teutonic Knights. As Stettin had already been developed into a citadel (see how the AI wasted it?) I now also had access to Imperial Knights, and I built a few of those while waiting for the inevitable offer of a chapter house in Stettin, which came a turn or two later.
Henry’s army should do a fine job of mopping up Antwerp, but only if Mandorf can first crush the army marching south from Aarhus. Fortunately they were as keen to fight as he was, so he did not have to wait long for battle. The spot was a quiet and grassy plain, somewhat to the north of Hamburg.
This would be my first time using Teutonic Knights in anger, and I was keen to put them through their paces. The Danish are famed more for their infantry than their cavalry, and so it was with this army, which was composed mainly of spearmen and archers, with scouts (Danish light cavalry) screening the flanks. Since Mandorf’s men had more cavalry, I decided on a massed attack on both flanks with Feudal Knights and Sergeants. The Teutonic knights would trail behind and, once the enemy cavalry was ground down, lap round to engage and kill the Danish general.
https://img205.imageshack.us/img205/...stblooduo7.jpg
In the thick of it
The plan worked a charm: once they were in close combat, Mandorf’s Teutonics beat down the unfortunate Danish bodyguards and the general soon followed. A single massed cavalry charge was enough to rout the remaining Danes, and when the fighting was over, the road to Aarhus was open.
While this was happening, Henry had assembled a smaller army and marched on Antwerp. The campaign was short and predictable, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the city as it is dangerously close to the French and their large armies, although those are currently occupied in Caen. In the end the Kaiser sacks Antwerp, sells off every building except the merchant’s guild and the church, and retreats, leaving the city to any power that wants it.
The Danish faction leader is nowhere to be seen – I presume he is in Scandinavia somewhere – and so Mandorf encounters no more opposition on the way to Aarhus. The city falls and is duly sacked. Mandorf is rightly proud of his achievements – but his dreadful ways have attracted the attention of someone Up There. Disease hits Aarhus a few months later, and its fearsome governor spends his final moments retching up his innards before being trundled away on a plague cart.
The army remains in fine shape though, and once the plague passes it resumes its march towards the final remaining Danish settlement: Stockholm. Kaiser Henry sends a young general named Maximilian to take command, which he duly does.
https://img304.imageshack.us/img304/...ianwoodwl7.jpg
Norwegian Woods
The army is ambushed by Danes in a forest, but Maximilien’s Teutons see them off handily. As Stockholm has a largish army in it, Maximilien settles down for a long siege. With the city eventually succumbing to siege and starvation, the Danes cease to exist as an independent faction.
This leaves two of the three victory conditions fulfilled. All that remains is to conquer the balance of nine territories, and this war will be over.
Fall Weiss
https://img287.imageshack.us/img287/2060/polskpx9.jpg
Getting their retaliation in first
The reason behind Poland’s cessation of attacks soon becomes clear. I had carelessly left a unit of reinforcement mounted sergeants outside Nuremberg. The Poles were unable to resist such a tempting morsel, and their army pounced – earning them an immediate excommunication.
Not one to be stopped by an interfering cleric, the Polish King continued his attacks, with a large army of Polish cavalry marches west, to be met by my refugee army. This latter is composed almost entirely of heavy cavalry – mostly dismounted Imperial and Feudal knights, with a sprinkling of Teutonics and Sergeants. This is only possible because I’ve recently sacked three cities. However, having had the cash to field huge knight armies, I can report that they are pretty damn effective. This is only increased by Kaiser Henry’s decision to merge the army with his own victorious band, and so the force that counters the Poles in the woods outside Nuremberg is both large and well led.
It has to be said that the decision to fight among trees was, from the point of view of the Polish commander, a shockingly bad one. The Polish army was almost entirely composed of cavalry, supported by crossbowmen and catapults. In heavy woods like these, they were unsuited to a stand up fight against elite heavy infantry, and as you will imagine, Henry’s forces massacred them in the forests. Henry’s light cavalry is able to chase the pursuers back to Prague, and then to Krakow, both of which were captured and sacked.
https://img279.imageshack.us/img279/614/thechasexs1.jpg
You’re nicked, sonny
Meanwhile, Maximilian has led his force of Teutonic Knights, dismounted Imperial Knights and Crossbowmen over the Baltic and into Prussia. Their first stop is Thorn, which the Poles had left lightly defended. I definitely think that the AI leaves too few troops in border castles – a big Citadel like Thorn should have been better manned.
Not that that mattered to the Teutonic Knights. They had been offered any land that they could take, and take they did! The Grand Master of the Knights set up a headquarters in Thorn, a testament to the burgeoning power of the Order. As with history; so with the game: the Knights had taken on the Poles and beaten them in Germany, and now they were looking to do the same on Polish soil. The impetus to do so, however, did not come from Nuremburg – or even from Thorn.
I mentioned earlier that the Poles had managed to irritate His Holiness sufficient for him to demand their excommunication. He had promised at the time to do such things (though he knew not what) as should be the terrors of the earth, and in a sparkling flourish, he delivered, calling a Crusade on Vilnius. Augmented by cheap crusader troops, the Knights duly delivered.
https://img287.imageshack.us/img287/1047/drangmu8.jpg
Drang Nach Osten!
Knightly armies swept through Poland and Lithuania, annihilating all resistance. The Pope unfortunately died before the consummation of the Crusade, but that was little relief to the Poles, who were now reduced to Halych, Burgundy (Dijon) and distant Kiev, had no forces left that could battle the Knights. The Russians also made a brief appearance, battling with the Knights over a division of Poland’s spoils in an eerie prefiguration of later events, but they were decisively defeated (although the Boyar Sons gave one army a run for its money).
Magdeburg, Stettin, Breslau, Thorn, Vilnius, Riga – a small force had even sneaked over the Baltic to capture Helsinki, and each of these places now housed a chapter of Teutonic Knights, great or small. Thanks to the efforts of the Knights, I was now only two provinces from victory. Russia and Poland were exhausted, and I suspect beginning to feel the impact of the Mongol hordes. France remained thoroughly embroiled with England and an assertive Spain. Finally, an ageing Kaiser Henry could breathe easy.
End Game
There followed a long, slow period of peace. Many turns later, a Pope more concerned with the Holy Land than with punishing recalcitrant Europeans ordered a crusade to Jerusalem. For this, I was able to assemble an all-Knight force. They marched through Allied Hungary, took ship in Anatolia, and captured the Holy City in an easy battle, before marching on to Acre, besieging and capturing that, and ending the campaign, the Holy Roman Empire utterly dominant both in Europe and in Outremer.
https://img185.imageshack.us/img185/9251/endgameth6.jpg
This is the end
Well, that’s all folks. Here’s hoping that you’ve enjoyed the AAR. The next one will be as the Spanish - absent anything to change my mind, I'll continue working my way through from left to right. As a final little Christmas gift, here is a map of the world as of Germany’s triumph – enjoy!
https://img185.imageshack.us/img185/...inalmapoz1.jpg
Mission Accomplished
https://img309.imageshack.us/img309/4383/victza7.jpg
Well done ! Excellent screenshots !
BTW can you please post your system specs and editing softare ?
Great AAR!
Really looking foward to your next one...
Wunderbar!
I've been reading your work since your first installment. I wanted to compliment you earlier than this but there was a problem with the "forum Deity" activating my account. You have inspired me to give it a go.
I enjoy the pace and length of your style. The juxtaposition of (the right) screen shot to accompany the text is superb. You seem to have an academic grasp of the Medieval period and you show skill in drawing one into the fortunes of your characters, Vielen Gut!
Thanks again for your work and willingness to share your exploits with the rest of us! I only hope mine are as interesting!
Very nice Beef, another one for the books. You should probably add the link to your sig now :2thumbsup: . And was that title of the third screenshot an intended Beatles reference? You just keep getting better and better.
It's over :(
But why do you do only short campaigns?
Because he's human and can only do so much... :grin: Even writers can be burned out after so long. Personally, I kinda prefer the shorter ones in a few installments, that way you get more gorey detail than if he did a long campaign and had to summarize it more.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Magus
MORE MORE MORE MORE!:yes: :book: :whip: :2thumbsup:
Great reading.
Now looking forward to your Spanish Vignette:book:
brilliant ! another excellent edition ! well done
Your method of ordering differant parts of your empire to differant characters has helped me order my game to be not so random. Thanks Beefy! ~:thumb:
I was just wondering, Beefeater, how do you plan out your campaigns? Because you seem to know exactly what moves you plan on making next.
Hi Beefeater!!
Great work.
Cheers for the great reads while I'm at work.
Thanks and applause, Beefy!!
I've also almost finished my HRE short campaign. I've the 20 regions + Antiochia but have yet to kill the Danes and Milan.
I'll follow you to Spain, I think. It's quite entertaining to have someone playing the same campaign and you can compare notes. :2thumbsup:
R'as
Great work. Can't wait to read about concuest of mighty Spain. I love AAR and I find you storytelling style is just the way I like it. I don't want to nag but I think you should do long compaign AAR, I find the "empire mid life crisis" (after 15-20 cities) to be the most chalanging period. It would be a pity if you will not go to America as Spain, I think concuering Aztecs should be a long term goal of your AAR.
Thank you. It was a great read.
Sinan, all my editing is done with Photoshop. I am not really all that good at photo editing, which is why the pictures are all of slightly different sizes: were I a bit more disciplined, they would all be precisely the same dimensions as one another. My system specs are at post #53 in this thread.
Thalyrikalone, I wish I were that good! Actually my planning is very simple: wipe out any large AI stacks in my territory, then take a settlement or two as punishment. If the AI faction looks weak, I'll keep on taking their settlements until I'm either getting close to overstretch, the Pope threatens excommunication or they mount a good enough defence to make the cost/benefit of attacking less favourable. I tend to ignore small AI stacks wandering in my territory, or to mop them up with equally small armies.
As I suspect is the case with most players, I almost always win unless massively outnumbered, and sometimes even then. This means that I never attack with more than 1 stack - I've never had the need to - which makes conquest easy to the point of being a little dull as there's not much need to reinforce. That said, it will be interesting to see if the patched AI gives a bit more of a challenge in this regard.
Zverzver, I'm planning on playing Spain as a short campaign, but won't expand much (if at all) outside the Iberian Peninsular, except to raid, crusade, and raise cash for teching up. So yes, in all probability you'll be seeing Aztecs. I just haven't worked out how to make a long campaign a credible story yet - medieval states just couldn't grow that big, for a host of reasons. A long campaign might work for Byzantium or the Turks, but then it wouldn't really be a vignette, would it? :beam:
Spain will be the next Vignette, but I need a brief break from M2TW. So my next actual story on these boards will be in the Arena, and will probably be based on Dominions 3 (or possibly Hearts of Iron Doomsday). I'll start that, and try to wrap it up, before Christmas.
HOI Doomsday. Great game. Have you writen any HOI AAR, I would like to read them.
Wonderland, yes, it was the Beatles song that inspired the name. Hardly an original reference I admit though. Come to think of it I probably should claim that it was based on Murakami...more literary :beam:
Ras, glad that you are enjoying these! I absolutely agree about sharing notes - that is one of the nice things about this community.
Beefeater, how do you keep track of what you do? you write stuff after every turn?
I've been an avid reader of all your three Vignettes and just wanted to thank you here for the effort. I like to take notes with my laptop when I'm playing on my desktop PC and have done some AARs in the past, but you're spicing them up with those pictures quite well and also have a firm grasp on condensing the events of the game, so that it's fun reading about them.
Great work! :2thumbsup:
Lord Magus, I alt+tab to a word document every so often and jot down anything noteworthy. Then when I come to write it up I look for a pattern linking the events. If the AI is working correctly there should be a clear pattern visible - take and hold, aggressive expansion, fighting withdrawal etc.
Great stuff as usual. Can't wait for the next one.
This forum is a fountain of great knowledge, but I've just come across my favourite part of it. Fantastic read. I dipped into your English vignette and I have to say that you have improved with each story. Big thumbs up. (8-D