best faction to turtle with?

**ArtistofWarfare** · 07-09-2008, 00:26

Originally Posted by glyphz

Indeed, bordering the Milanese war factory is never a good thing, since they field very similar city roster except more devastating (or annoying

) crossbows, + it's 2 vs 1 (Milan, Genoa vs. Venice), unless your navy can quickly reinforce from Ragusa. If you ever secure northern Italy it becomes less of a hassle to defend

Well, I had a good Italian campaign going on MTW:VI back in February before I got my new PC ...which is a Vista and wants nothing to do with MTW:VI.

I would imagine in this campaign, I will approach the beginning of the game similarly. I do not need to flex muscle early, simply create the potential to do so. So I start with a digging in, getting an early start on fortifying everything that is mine to start, and making it impenetrable. Plus, with this campaign map I can go about doing so far more in depth.

While I'm doing this, I like to put the majority of my resources and efforts into establishing myself as a naval power...or "the" Naval power. I like to quickly get to the point of saying "yeah, you have the #1 Navy on the map". This way, in the situation we're talking about, step 1 of any war would be to completely destroy the enemy's entire navy and blockade all ports. Just reduce their sea trade and naval capacity to zero immediately.

At that point, planning for army mobilization and ground action would come into play. But in my experience, dominating the seas early is a trump card advantage that an enemy just can't do anything to negate. Once you control the seas, it takes a monumental effort from an enemy to remove you.

edit- I've also found that in doing this, and providing your allies/neutrals with massive amounts of trade that you are doing one of the few things to actually strengthens diplomatic ties between yourself and other factions.

**phonicsmonkey** · 07-09-2008, 05:09

Venice is awesome, one of my favourite campaigns in vanilla

You can avoid an early war with HRE (leaving you to concentrate on Milan) if you can secure Bologna through diplomacy - otherwise you'll find the Kaiser's men traipsing back and forth across your territory which can get annoying and mess up your turtling strategy.

I strongly recommend building a blacksmith as soon as possible so you can upgrade the armour of your italian spear militia - when fully upgraded to mail armour they are kickass, plus they look great on the battlemap too.

One thing to look out for is that there is a bug with Venetian Heavy Infantry and Venetian Archers which means they start out with plate armour on the battlemap - they don't have plate armour stats, but the models are wearing it and when you upgrade their armour it changes to mail / padded which is just weird...

**G^2** · 07-09-2008, 20:40

@ ArtistofWarfare

As phonicmonkey stated, buy Bolongia from the HRE then nock out Milan quickly (within first 10 turns). If done right you can take both Milan and Genoa without getting excomunicated. With Milan out of the way you can then afford to turtel for a bit. Keep your relations with the HRE good and keep an eye on the Sicilians which almost always end up attacking at some point. When turtling as Venice you have to keep your rep. up because you share alot of borders with many factions which will gain up on you. When your ready you can use Crete as a lanch pad into Greece.

Italy was also my favorite faction in MTW, Chivilric Spearmen with Crossbows defeated many an army. Thus, I was thrilled when M2TW had three Italian factions and more provences.

**Flavius Merobaudes** · 07-10-2008, 15:39

You can easily fix the graphical bug of the armour upgrades by changing their sequence in the EDU:

Code:

armour_ug_models Venetian_Archers, Venetian_Archers_ug1
should read:
armour_ug_models Venetian_Archers_ug1, Venetian_Archers

The same goes for Retinue Longbows or any other unit with this kind of bug.

**ArtistofWarfare** · 07-11-2008, 23:33

Originally Posted by Flavius Merobaudes

You can easily fix the graphical bug of the armour upgrades by changing their sequence in the EDU:

Code:

armour_ug_models Venetian_Archers, Venetian_Archers_ug1
should read:
armour_ug_models Venetian_Archers_ug1, Venetian_Archers

The same goes for Retinue Longbows or any other unit with this kind of bug.

1) is it simply a graphical bug , or are armor values of these units actually bugged?

2) As some have said about protecting against the HRE- This is entirely what I will be doing with a defensive border established to the north of my home cities...

I will place a couple of half stacks in ambush position, get some defences up and then begin focusing my efforts towards valuable lands south and east ...as I can't imagine I'll have much interest in Germanic regions.

**FactionHeir** · 07-11-2008, 23:56

1) Just a reference bug in the EDU. Except for visuals, it has no effect.

**ArtistofWarfare** · 07-12-2008, 00:03

cool...not too concerned about it then.

Either way, it's good information...I'd imagine that when I get a little more crafty with editing files I'll develop an interest in things like that as well.