Byzantines, Early, Normal V1.00. 1230 and beyond...

The Golden Horde have been and gone. Khazar was bringing me upwards of 2000 a year in trade and crops but the advance notice you get of their arrival gave me the opportunity to apply 'scorched earth' and get half my money back on all the stuff I didn't want them to have for free and I evacuated all except a token retreat-to-castle force, so as to defend Crimea and Georgia, the latter receiving a separate set of GH stacks but lacking a fort for me to get trapped in.

Years previously, I had been annoyed by the HRE who had parked a Khazar-bound crusade in a neighbouring province of theirs for three or four years, without ever attacking and, the very year I attacked the rebels and won there, I come back to the strat map only to get a message about 'our crusade is to coming this territory, kindly hand it over to us', with unstated implications of dire consequences for not doing so.

I wasn't sure what to do about this, not being a Catholic faction but reluctantly gave it to them anyway. Like the Danes in this campaign, they then neglected to build up a fleet - just one port, TP and a ship would trade to three of my provinces straight away and soon pay for themselves. With just its farm income, it didn't look like that much of a loss to me at first. I retook the province in later years when their forces had been bled dry by the Almos monstering most of Western Europe. Still, I came to thank the HRE for the keep they'd built there when the GH turned up.

Instead of simply starving me out, those impatient idiots went and assaulted straight away. I had about 30 horse archers, Urban Militia for the general and some spearmen, which the interface helpfully split into two sections for me, allowing three units around the keep and spears at the outer gate. I stare out from there at an empty field, to await the worst. The banging and crashing starts up from behind me. Never mind the main gate and the front yard, a Mangonel and some Ballistas are attacking the rear side of the castel, where there's only one wall (now why didn't I think of that at my last sige attempt?) Horse archers were handy, moving quickly around the block to where they were needed. Took a few goes for them to get the range right. Simply clicking on the target made them begin to head off in the wrong direction, as if to march out of the castle and into the open. Click and drag got the desired result and the Treb/Mangonel crew and a pair of ballistas fell silent. Meanwhile a catapult facing one of the other sides had broken through. HA were out of ammo so I moved them and the UM to the outer compound and plugged the breach with the other half of the spear unit. They held out impressively against Mongol Heavy Cav and were down to about 7 men before finally routing. I then had to defend two gates at once.

Things started looking up when the attackers on the keep's side of the inner gate vanished whilst I was looking in the other direction. I brought all three units to the other gate but the horse archers could do little other than shuffle about so I snuck them out through the other gate and the branch and hid them in the woods, in hope of a time-limit win. They were found later but routed to safety.

Meanwhile, the fight at the main gate raged on and the troops weren't quailed by the death of our UM general, just the occasional bit of wavering. I was surprised to see that, by this stage, the Horde was already bringin in its reinforcements. Waves of archers and infantry. These obligingly parked themselves just yards away from the gate, well within reach of several of the arrow towers and were cut down at the rate of two or three a second, all the while firing at a target they couldn't possibly hit with walls in the way - not to mention their own men in the gateway.

By the time they abandoned the assault and withdrew, I had just 11 spearmen left and maybe 10 HA's lurking somewhere at the edge of the map. Scattered about the walls were piles of dead Mongol Heavy Cav, Infantry and archers. All that mindless circling and overcrowding around the gate cost them dearly.

They beat me on the field in a second province but their combined losses were so great that one counter attack caused them to retreat without a fight and the second led to the capture of the Khan. They refused to pay the ransom and they were off the map completely by 1234.

Now, if it had sent stacks into Novgorod territory and fought its battles using autocalc, it might have been a different story entirely. Then again, in my campaign as the English, I barely had the chance to get an agent to survey their troops before they were wiped out in a similarly short period of time.

So, who IS afraid of the big, bad Horde?

If anyone has any tales of a longer lasting Horde presence in the game, I'd love to hear of it. Bringing a stack entirely made up of siege equipment didn't seem to have helped them a great deal. Somewhat out of character too - I thought they were famed for 'travelling light'?