My tips on efficient campaign play

[Maeda Toshiie]

You can actually do this Afrit. Take an army or naval unit and place it where you whant it to be in an province or seazone then left-click on this province/ seazone. In 90% your unit will then be in that exact location the next turn. One exception though, if you build a unit or ship in that square your "placed" unit will automatically be moved to the default location.
I find this technique very useful when I´m moving units back and forth through my realm or setting up a shiplink when there´s alot of other vessels in the seas. Usually I tend to put units that are "going away" in the far end of a prov and units that are going "home" in the nearest location.

You can have a stack or strategic agent automatically find its way back to a distant province. Just drop him/stack onto the target province (which would be un-highlighted). Dont touch the stack again. When you press enter to end the turn, the stack would move (along with the AIs' stacks.) Leave the stack/agent on its own and it will find its way back. If you pick it up and drop it, the pathing is cancelled.

[Duke of Gloucester]

Origninally posted by Maeda Toshiie
You can have a stack or strategic agent automatically find its way back to a distant province. Just drop him/stack onto the target province (which would be un-highlighted). Dont touch the stack again. When you press enter to end the turn, the stack would move (along with the AIs' stacks.) Leave the stack/agent on its own and it will find its way back. If you pick it up and drop it, the pathing is cancelled.

Works fine as long as you don't pick the unit up next turn. If you do, then it forgets its orders.

Originally quoted by Katank
0 dread govs shouldn't be assigned to new territories as it actually lowers loyalty.

I wasn't sure about this, so I tried it out when I conquered a Spanish province - Castile, I think. I made sure I was taxing on "very high" and assigned a zero dread, four acumen governor. The happines rating went from 125% to 127%. Of course, when I re-loaded the game and used a four dread governor instead. happiness was a lot higher! However I can say for certain that using a 0 dread governors doesn't always make a province more rebellious. In some circumstances it may, fewer troops, more rebellious province etc.

[Maeda Toshiie]

I wasn't sure about this, so I tried it out when I conquered a Spanish province - Castile, I think. I made sure I was taxing on "very high" and assigned a zero dread, four acumen governor. The happines rating went from 125% to 127%. Of course, when I re-loaded the game and used a four dread governor instead. happiness was a lot higher! However I can say for certain that using a 0 dread governors doesn't always make a province more rebellious. In some circumstances it may, fewer troops, more rebellious province etc.

+5% loyalty per skull. Have never seen a drop in loyalty from assigning a 0 dread governor. That 2% *may* be due to his piety, though I havent seen a concrete and exact corelation b/w piety, zeal and happiness.

[Blodrast]

Maeda Toshiie is right.
Even though dread is the main factor that influences loyalty, piety & zeal also account for some.
i.e., if your province is overzealous and you name a horribly heretic governor, you may notice a decrease in loyalty.

A couple of things that I noticed during my campaigns:
- if you appoint a low piety gov to a province and then try to increase the zeal to that province, it will be capped around 75%. I've tried this with lots of imams and alims, in 100% muslim provinces, without any change in zeal throughout more than 100 years. Once I got them a high zeal gov, zeal rocketed to 100% within a few years.
- The problem with high zeal province/low piety gov fixes itself over time; since your province has relatively high zeal, most of your troops that are produced in it and its governor will soon start getting plus piety/zeal vices.

[katank]

try it on a newly conquered province. a 0 dread is sure to drop the loyalty 5 or so.

I've often forgone a gov for a turn or two if I don't have decent acumen sufficiently dreadful fella around.

It's a tough decision as more cash always helps a rush but a big loyalist rebellion or the like can stop your rush cold.

so you captured a reasonable income province and have a 0 dread, 4 acumen fella around but not enough troops to garrison as you need to push on. what do you do?

[Blodrast]

hey, K., is that a rhetorical question ?
If I were you (i.e., blitzing), I'd forget the 0A 4D guy, and just appoint some geezer with 2-3 dread and noe significant acumen. This way I can happily whip about in a blitz of glory.
What I usually do (unless it's beginning of the game, when more or less everyone needs to rush), is just churn more troops and wait until the province is happy with a decent acumen gov and its peasant garrison. If I'm particularly bored, I'll let them rebel and see what funny VnV's I get from training a jedi...

[afrit]

I don't have MTW with me right now to test this, but I think that moving a governor into his own province improves loyalty a few percent, regardless of his qualities otherwise. That's one reason I tend to station them in their provinces (other than getting building virtues).

afrit

[dimitrios the samian]

I hear you loud and clear Afrit , .. IDENTIFICATION is what you ARE SAYING the maps need moddifications done as they get very cluttered and annoying ..
you mention the word "REMEMBERING what province etc etc ,YES .. we shouldn't have to use a memo pad for this part of the game .
MARKING : armies , injured, artillery, etc : SO WE KNOW THEIR NEXT MOVE/HEADING etc etc , a flag would be usefull for this , i had the same idea many months ago .This requires modding skills , I have none do you afrit ?
How about anybody else ? ... I hope RTW has a joystick option as well
_________________________________________________________________

I invite you all to check threads/topics started by me ..

[Ulair]

Hey, thanks for the tips on the C, X and Z keys, Afrit. They're not documented in my manual (MTW 1.0) and they're darn useful...

[katank]

@D of G, precisely my point.

for rushing, it's often best to wait 2-3 years before assigning a gov if you don't want to micro and all you have is high acu low dread ones.

[Marquis de Said]

This is a really good thread. Nice little details that I had wondered about but wasn't completely sure.

Marquis

[Ulair]

@ D of G, katank:

Having read this thread I took note yesterday as I assigned a new gov on turn conquest+one to Portugal. He was a couple of dread, four acumen, zero piety and... Portugese loyalty did drop, quite significantly, enough to cause a drop in autotax rate from Low to Very Low and slip 2-3 points as well... Portugal was c. 60% zeal, so maybe it was the piety factor kicking in. It's also Portugal, of course - maybe that makes a difference?

I've also seen loyalty rise by the +5%/dread elsewhere too - clearly there's a wee function at work somewhere in the code...

[katank]

I usually don't have the time to muck with religion stuff and just mark the assignment of 0 dread govs as risky and quite likely to lower loyalty.

I can confirm that religion is a biggie and that a combination of king and gov's dread gives loyalty indications just as how king and gov's piety with latter's more gives weight to how a zealous or not so zealous population responds and what the religion is

[maestro]

I've noticed that the loyalty of a provincial leader has more affect than dread. If you assign a guiy with 7 loyalty and 1 dread, you'll get a good bonus, even though they're a nice-guy. But try assigning a 1 loyalty guy to a province and watch that loyalty go dooooown.

[ichi]

Good thread, afrit. Glad to see that you have changed your mind on auto-tax. Simply set each province - I try to never use Very High - and then check using the shift key before each turn ends.

I never use auto-merge units feature as I want to be able to manage the recomibination process. Remember that valor/morale is tracked by individual, whle armor and weapons upgrades are tracked by unit, so how unis are combined is very important. Once I have taken care of the important recombinations, I just hit M on the province and the rest recombine automatically.

Peasants as garrison. OK, but there are better options. Peasants are worthless in battle, and with only peasants as garrison you are vulnerable should an enemy break your main line. Never lose your main line??? Then you are probably overbuilding armies on the frontier, which quickly zaps your savings from leaving peasants behind.

I try to garrison interior provinces with a high acumen governor (unless he is a good general) and another unit. This usually means I have a 60-man Urban Militia or Archer unit along with a slightly depleted Slav Warrior unit or some similar group. I add an archer or other odd unit to those provinces that generally have loyalty issues (Portugal, Scotland, Arabia, etc).

My tip for a successful campaign is to build money first, the upgrade provinces, then build the best troops before expanding. Of course there are endless variations, but I find it best to get trade and province $$$ upgrades like mines and farms and trading posts FIRST. Economy is the engine that drives your empire.

Once the money is there, then upgrade the provinces. I like to use small armies of very high quality troops. The AI uses a Soviet style strtegy of buildings lots of cheap units. Properly used, a few high quality troops will sweep them fields of masses of rabble. And it is a less expensive army to maintain. I frequently disband obsolete units unless I think they can serve as garrison troops, and I rarely build peasants or other militia.

ichi