The Camel Campaign

[Knight of the Rose]

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KotR’s Crazy Camel Campaign

After reading about a certain love of camels, and having (hopefully) served my time in the stables, I thought I would do something different. So I fired up a campaign with these settings:
MTW:VI, vanilla, 2.01, HIGH campaign, EXPERT difficulty, playing as Egypt
House rules:
• Can only train or retrain Beduin Camel Warriors
• No trade routes
• Can keep and fight with princes and kings, but cannot retrain them
• Cannot fight with any other unit, and after 10 turns (1215) must disband all non-camel units
• Cannot bribe
• Cannot Jihad
• Must capture, never kill prisoners, unless losing the battle

With these rules, we start the game:
1205: Egypt is rich, more than wealthy enough to pay the grand sum of 94 florins pr. Camel-unit. Starting training of camels wherever possible, starting a fort in Sinai, starting morale-boosting buildings in Egypt.
1207: Building keeps in Syria and Arabia to gain access to morale-buildings
1209: Well, how nice! France decides to throw a crusade at my camel-booming Khalifate, instantly bringing me at war with Tripoli and Antioch. I planned to take them out first nonetheless, so no big deal
1210: Instantly invading Tripoli with my hero al Din (three stars & countless acumen – cannot afford to loose him now) and 440 camels. The French field a mixed 812 men, but 500 are peasants. There are, however, also Order Foot and Templars. They get a good hill to defend, but I succeed in baiting out the crossbows and overwhelm them. The Order foot and some feudal knights charge in to save them, but they are flanked and charged in the back by my camels coming in from right and left. The templars wait at the extreme top of the hill, and when they finally engage, they are the last unit on the field, and they are overrun by camels. I loose 207 camels and kill 328 taking 192 prisoners, 70 thereof Order Foot

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

First blood of the campaign, the ballista was placed to far from the main army
The Templars thought they had a good hill, but waited untill the rest of the army was overrun by the camels
The templars are destroyed, though their general escapes, much to my surprise

1212: Tripoli falls
1213: Trying to take out the French by invading Antioch with a full stack (586 camels), this time against a much more substantial enemy of 972, and only 150 of them peasants. Though the battle starts well when I trap a unit of turcopoles between three units of camels, it soon turns to worse. The French field many spearmen and many Order Foot, and though I flank them and make them run after me to a good killingzone, the battle is lost when I fail to get al Din out of harms way. 40 Templars charge right into his unit, and as I try to save the pieces, the Beduins soon break. Luckily al Din survived (and without “good runner”) but I lost 445 camels effectively stopping my lust for expansion for a couple of turns or more. I killed 591 good Frenchmen, so I reckon I’ll get them in the long run.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Oh my God! Where did they come from?!?

1214: Three-star Prince Ali, with the reassuring *one* shield of loyalty, is sent to Tripoli to make sure the French doesn’t get any smart ideas. They stay put however, and I train camels like there was no tomorrow. Or perhaps more like there was a crusade coming my way…
1215: My ten turns are up, and I disband all non-camel, non-prince units, leaving me pretty thin on most fronts (counted 1100 camels total). In those 10 turns I only managed to gain one province and roughly lose 2/3 of my camels. Not a bad start. At least I produce 160 camels a turn from four provinces. Hopefully the Horde won’t come my way in 1230…

To be continued...