Strategy or Cheating without codes?

[Morte66]

There is a comment somewhere on the EB website: the AI has money, you have brains. If the AI is allowed to run armies three times the size their population allows, and magic fresh population out of nowhere, I'm allowed to fight river battles.

Blitzing: I blitz because it makes sense, because only a fool doesn't, because RTW and EBBS fundamentally encourage it. When your enemy gets free money and free population for every turn they exist, so anything you kill is replaced, it makes sense to finish them ASAP. The longer they live, the more free stuff they get. When they hardly develop their cities at all, just recruit, it makes sense to get any cities you will eventually be conquering into your domain ASAP. Then you can make with the sewers and markets they should be building. And EB's anti-blitz measures (making it difficult with build times etc) are missing the point: they don't affect the motivation to blitz, they encourage rational players to get really good at it so they can do it despite the hindrances.

Forced diplomacy: Sometimes I do the AI a favour that it won't do for itself, e.g. give them back their city which just rebelled to me in return for a ceasefire. This is rare.

Fog of war: I prefer not to remove it, it's such a huge advantage that any reasons for doing so feel like excuses.

One big advantage that I do feel a bit guilty about is having prior knowledge from previous campaigns. I know who's dangerous, who'll get dangerous after the reforms, where to send the spy to "discover" things, and so on. It's quite hard to get around this.

[Atraphoenix]

Sometimes the most common cheat without using any code is our brain.
Sorry men "War is deception itself."

If AI is clever(!) enough to send me 3000 men 3 times when I was ambushing in high terrain with my Horse archers and cataphract archers. I annihilate them whatever you call it.

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Zero Loses!

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[Scutarii]

One thing I do consider a cheat rather than a strategy is to play Sweeper against Saruo/Saka/Horse Archer types.

Taking an army of almost all combat cavalry (obviously lateish game) and deploying in a single long line stretched across the whole width of the field and just running forwards - they auto withdraw until they run out of room and are then squished. You can do this with Pike Phalanx as well if you spread them out a bit.

This only works because of the battle maps being defined areas.

Not EB but a similar kind of thing in MedII was to declare a crusade and then attack another Catholic faction - you never had to worry about being attacked en-masse as they can't declare a crusade against you. Similarly if on a crusade and about to take the target on your turn you make all of your family members join a crusade no matter where they are, take the target and all your FM's gain bonuses for being successful crusaders even though they never actually left home and were only part of it for less than a turn...