The Turks and military academies

[tomrayner]

I don't usually play as the Turks, so please forgive me if I make myself sound incredibly thick.

However, I'm at about 1260 (playing from early XP) and it's Janissary time. It seems you need a military academy to produce Janissary units... which I have, in Palestine. Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to build another military academy in any of my provinces - which is something I've noticed when playing as other factions. However, when I was playing as other factions it didn't really matter so much, since they weren't reliant on the MA to train specific troops.

In short, am I stuck with crappy Palestine as my only Janissary producing province? Or is it back to square one, knock down the MA in the middle east and rebuild it in Sweden to benefit from full armour and weapon bonuses?

[Jxrc]

Well, if you want to relocate your MA in Sweden you will need to rebuild a grand mosque, an university and a MA in the new province (I assume that you already have a fortress in the new province ...) so that it will take you quite a few years (36 if I remember correctly: 16for the grand mosque, 10 for the university and 10 for the MA itself). You might also have to add the time necessary to build the Master Bowyer (for Janissary Archer) or the Master Spearmaker (for JHI) so that you have good chance to end up with no Janissary at all for something like 50 years.

The above is not correct if you can destroy your Grand Mosque and university while still remaining able to build JHI in Palestine thanks to your existing MA. In that case the gap would be 10 years (the time necessary for the new MA after you've built all other facilities required for JHI in the new province) and you just loose the morale bonus granted by the Grand Mosque for a while - no big deal for JHI. I cannot confirm whether that is an option but that something that you can easily check in your current campaign). Just check whether you can build an new MA without destroying the old one. I am quite sure that you cannot have to cathedral or grand mosque but I am not 100% sure regarding MA (might be tempting then to build/destroy Grand Mosque just for the purpose of completing a MA).

Do note that Janissary Archers get a valour bonus in Georgia while JHI get one in Bulgaria so that you might want to consider what is the best location for you new MA.

Hope it helps.

[HopAlongBunny]

Jxrc sums it up.

Why worry about upgrades? I always bee-line for Constantinople as the Turks; best developed and quickest to upgrade for Janissaries; w/o weapon upgrades JHI are still unstoppable.

Palestine is coastal; assuming you dominate the seas your killer unit is 1 move away from being where you want it :)

[yoyolll]

That does make sense to limit the JHI production I think because they can rip through just about anything. Although I wish they just made it harder to obtain but able in any province.

[Roark]

Yeah, there are pros and cons to both options, but I think the designers got it right this time as no player is able to produce more than 1 unit of JHI per year, which prevents spam and maintains their status as "uber-elites". Even if you make their training reqs higher (your preferred option), most players who can get to the stage of producing JHI at all would have the capacity within their empires to conceivably use 4 or 5 "safe" provinces just to build up for multiple JHIs. All you get then is a bunch of JHIs really late in the game when they don't matter.

They truly are a frightening unit to face on the field as they don't have any weaknesses whatsoever. They can be used for any hand-to-hand role you can possibly imagine. Even their relative costliness is mitigated by the fact that they don't get ground down in attrition fighting due to their absurdly high attack and armour piercing. The other guys will almost always die or run screaming for their mamas after a couple of "rounds" of fighting.