How do you enjoy the slow game?

[caravel]

The turtling game doesn't have to involve lots of agent use or bloated trade revenues. Generally as a turtling player myself, I tend to expand slowly in a non aggressive fashion. I do this by setting myself some basic rules. The foundation of this is to avoid attacking rival factions unless you're attacked first, never breaking alliances and lowering taxes to normal once you have enough income rolling in. If you set only these basic restraints upon yourself then your faction will not be sprawling half of Europe by 1200.

You can choose what you want to do as regards agents. You may decide to increase agent production and usage, or you may wish to apply the same rules; only using agents against the enemy. When turtling it can be tempting that once you've secured a decent territory, have upgraded to a certain level and have a decent income coming in, to start building a large trading fleet. You should really resist this however. The reason for this is that trade in MTW is not really fair. The player can amass over a million florins in the course of a campaign through trading whereas the AI is a useless trader and fails to maintain contiguous shipping lanes. For this reason you should build up your fleets steadily but slowly. Don't blitz them across the map because the income you get will be ridiculous. To improve this situation some modding is necessary. The ideal piece of modding is to tweak the import percentage. This will mean that those rival faction ports that you trade with will gain a larger income from the trade you are doing there. This effectively means that your massive fleets will do a good portion of the AI's trading for them.

Another part of a good turtling game is the rule of no razing. Razing can set the AI back hundreds of years and can end up with you having to rebuild everything once you finally take the province. The AI itself cannot raze either. It's a bad tactic, so avoid it.

Lastly get yourself the VI expansion. Even if you don't play the VI campaign the VI version of MTW, namely MTW v2.01, is a big improvement over MTW v1.1.