Pics & History of your Empire

[hr_oskar]

This thread is quite fun

Loved that one about the battle in Greater Poland -- 10000 Frenchmen! -- very impressive prince character there, made me want to play a game solely for training up legendary generals.

Anyway here's my current game. I'm only playing vanilla at the moment (VI, v2.00). This is my special campaign with the Papacy. Obviously I'm not trying to expand my lands or play a typical conquest game but rather trying to convert the whole map to Catholicism (95% in all provinces is my goal) and generally promote the Catholic factions.

In the early age the Byzantines conquered all of Russia and Eastern Europe all the way to Germany and Austria. Meanwhile the Catholics bitterly fought each other, though the Spanish did defeat the Almohads and eventually were at the border with Egypt. I was certainly in for a challenging game since I had to somehow unite Catholic Europe under one flag and roll back the Patriarch in Constantinople and his imperial bunch of invincible 8-star generals.

The HRE dissolved early on while the French came out strong so to begin with I placed my bets on them and had all my agents undermining their enemies. The English were at war with them so my inquisitors burned all their heretic generals worth a star.... eventually I killed off the English royal family and let them go rebel. Unfortunately the French continued to disappoint me and ended up losing all their homelands to Spanish and Italian invaders. By now the Spanish are my champions as their empire is stable and healthy and they're finally managing some great crusades.

The Golden Horde helped a lot with my situation with the Byzantines, which I was of course hoping for. The Poles and Hungarians re-emerged and finally after a long persecution of the Byz royal family I was able to kill off their last heirless emperor and make them neutral. The stage is now set for a Catholic east.... after I assassinate the Khan of course

Enough BS, here are the screenshots:



All the rebel territories in the east are basically the former Byzantine empire, after the tragic death of their last emperor



Most of the Middle East is around 70-90% Catholic, despite still being ruled by the somewhat estranged Muslim factions.

[PittBull260]

hey oskar, that's a very intresting campaign u got there man, hopefully u'll make the world catholic :)
keep us updated

[BAD]

This thread is quite fun

Loved that one about the battle in Greater Poland -- 10000 Frenchmen! -- very impressive prince character there, made me want to play a game solely for training up legendary generals.

Damn right, that was insane. The crazy thing was I thought that would break their back. So I continued with my advance towards the baltic. What greeted me at a siege in Pomerania a few years later? 14,000 Frenchmen!!! I had to retreat I only had 800 this time, it was beyond even Prince Manuel's abilities.

And my dang ruler went and had a new son who matured before Manuel could take the throne. Noooooooooooo_O after all that schoolin aswell. ¬_¬ Now I have to do it again with the new heir. . . Now where are those frenchmen. . .

Ahahaha but nice game you got going there oskar, I may try that with the muslims. Someone has to stand up for them. . . if you leave the AI to it the get creamed everytime. :(

[Patron]

Oskar's campaign looks really impressive, but I've still conquerred more territory and I'm only in the 1190s



It looks as though I might win, I have a new king in his early 20s and I'm all set to conquer the world in his lifetime. My training camps are churning out the best equipped and most up to date units in the game and are prepared to churn out the same amount of units once I get past 1205. The hungarians are sealed in, but I'm using a lot of troops to do this (can't attack cause of excommunication threat from pope) and the Germans will be wiped out next turn. The Byzantines are in a dire position now, they have a few good generals, but nothing I can't match and my conventional army outclasses their kataphraktoi now. A crusade is marching towards Constantinople and will pass through Hungary and my ex-crusaders + newly trained units and a troupe of elite knights trained up by killing egyptian peasants archers and spearmen is honed to blitz into eastern turkey. Once the byzantines are gone It will be easy pickings until I've finally conquerred the entire map, probably before the Mongols arrive. Though I think I'll leave ireland unconquerred or something, just so I can test my elite English armies against them in one glorious final battle to secure England's place as god's divine kingdom on earth (I'll have a puppet pope by now) for now till eternity!



Ahem.

I have 40 years to do this. Once I figure out how to use photo bucket I'll get some proper screenies in.

[PittBull260]

Oskar's campaign looks really impressive, but I've still conquerred more territory and I'm only in the 1190s



It looks as though I might win, I have a new king in his early 20s and I'm all set to conquer the world in his lifetime. My training camps are churning out the best equipped and most up to date units in the game and are prepared to churn out the same amount of units once I get past 1205. The hungarians are sealed in, but I'm using a lot of troops to do this (can't attack cause of excommunication threat from pope) and the Germans will be wiped out next turn. The Byzantines are in a dire position now, they have a few good generals, but nothing I can't match and my conventional army outclasses their kataphraktoi now. A crusade is marching towards Constantinople and will pass through Hungary and my ex-crusaders + newly trained units and a troupe of elite knights trained up by killing egyptian peasants archers and spearmen is honed to blitz into eastern turkey. Once the byzantines are gone It will be easy pickings until I've finally conquerred the entire map, probably before the Mongols arrive. Though I think I'll leave ireland unconquerred or something, just so I can test my elite English armies against them in one glorious final battle to secure England's place as god's divine kingdom on earth (I'll have a puppet pope by now) for now till eternity!



Ahem.

I have 40 years to do this. Once I figure out how to use photo bucket I'll get some proper screenies in.

hey man if u duno how to use photobucket I can tell u, AIM me, my sn is PittBull260, or u can MSN me honor31@hotmail.com

[Mikemyers64]

Playing the BKB super mod

i started out with rhodes as the knights hosplitar and took greece while it was still under rebel control. eventually the turks took constantinople and destroyed the byzantines for me, which left me to invade the turks. after that i massed togher a huge crusade of mercanaries towards egypt. the army was undefeatable and the egyptions went into cival war from losing from it so many times. some how the italians got palastine from egypt which put a thorn in my empire, so since the pope asked for a crusade against them i figured why not, ill have everyones support. when i reach venice the italians are almost dead and the papacy took most of their lands, for some reason when i conqured venice the papacy attacked me and ive been at war with the pope for 50+ years. now i dont really care who i attack, ive got less than 30 years before the game ends and i want to conqure as much as possible.

[TheWingedVictory]

@oskar
How do you play the papacy? Is it a mod, what mod is it and where can i dl it?

It looks as though I might win, I have a new king in his early 20s and I'm all set to conquer the world in his lifetime. My training camps are churning out the best equipped and most up to date units in the game and are prepared to churn out the same amount of units once I get past 1205. The hungarians are sealed in, but I'm using a lot of troops to do this (can't attack cause of excommunication threat from pope) and the Germans will be wiped out next turn. The Byzantines are in a dire position now, they have a few good generals, but nothing I can't match and my conventional army outclasses their kataphraktoi now. A crusade is marching towards Constantinople and will pass through Hungary and my ex-crusaders + newly trained units and a troupe of elite knights trained up by killing egyptian peasants archers and spearmen is honed to blitz into eastern turkey. Once the byzantines are gone It will be easy pickings until I've finally conquerred the entire map, probably before the Mongols arrive. Though I think I'll leave ireland unconquerred or something, just so I can test my elite English armies against them in one glorious final battle to secure England's place as god's divine kingdom on earth (I'll have a puppet pope by now) for now till eternity!

conquering with one king's lifetime? How much territoy did you already have before this king? The furthest conquest I had with one king was the whole of western Europe, still with my best troops and numbers, I wasn't able to defeat rivaling large factions.

[hr_oskar]

@WingedVictory: minor factions can be made playable by editing the relevant campaign file (EARLY.txt, HIGH.txt, LATE.txt) stored in /campmap/startpos. In there you can find a list of factions with labels 'MAJOR' and 'MINOR'. Change the Papacy's (or the Swiss or Novgorod's etc) label to 'MAJOR', then they'll appear playable in the campaign startup.

Still playing my campaign and having surprisingly much fun - I'd sort of had enough of playing MTW with self-imposed limitations, but this time it's really working because I have some fairly clear goals (convert the map to Catholicism, promote 1-4 other Catholic factions to control the whole map).

After killing off an entire dynasty of Italian "heretics", I bribed a great 5-star Italian commander who was left behind as a rebel. To my surprise, he became my new Pope after the old one died....



Papam habemus! If some people today are disappointed with Benedict XVI, how'd they feel about this guy!?! His Piety was at 0 when he became Pope so I figured a couple of low-level Inquisitors could teach him some Bible Basics and bring him up to "Born Again". They went a bit too far however and declared him an atheist on the spot! Oops.... better not invite more Inquisitors to Rome then, things might warm up a bit.

So apparently the Papacy's best general becomes the new Pope upon succession... that's very nice to know, opens up lots of possibilites with choosing your own Pope. Which is why I've bribed myself two very nasty Byzantine royals to lead the church into the 14th century....

Pope Innocent, being a military man, decided to take Constantinople by force to symbolize the defeat of the Eastern Church. The city will be rebuilt to an even greater splendour than before, making Rome and Constantinople the twin beacons of international Christianity, under one Papal authority.

Crusades are going well, with three successful Spanish crusades to the Holy Land and one German to Khazar (Lebensraum!). I'm now promoting the Germans as my "Champions of the East".



'Tis the start of a Great Eastern Empire.... meanwhile, Inquisitor gangs are building up zeal in the steppes (and other parts of the map).



As you can see the missionary work is starting to pay off - the non-Christian factions are barely able to hold onto their territories due to Christian opposition.

As for the Golden Horde, I decided to let the Khan live for a while since the Horde posed no threat to the Catholic world and would mostly serve to deplete rebel stacks and keep the Turks busy in Asia Minor. Historically, the Catholics were enthusiastic about the Mongol invasion since they hoped for an ally against their enemies in the Middle East... this was very much the case in my campaign, except I wanted them to bring down the unstoppable Byzantines.

[PittBull260]

wow oskar that's a very nice campaign u got there man, I might try that myself :)

[Patron]

This is my progress so far. I'm taking around 30 minutes to complete 1 year, so I haven't progressed much since last time I spoke here. It's not boring, it's like playing lost of little games on one big map, with the added bonus of being able to distribute resources. The knight with the bronze weapon enhancement and silver armour enhancement represents the peak of my technology, with an attack of 6, a defence of 7 and armour of 8 and that's without the valour bonus from my jedi generals (+3 or +2) and by 1205 I shuld have the facilities needed to produce chivalric knights with the same bonuses!! Along with Longbowmen and billmen with the same enchancements all of them mass produced (I have 2 provinces training a unit because it takes 2 turns to produce 120 longbowmen etc.., I then send them to other provinces to get their upgrades, so 120 longbowmen are upgraded each turn).

How many mb is the bkb super mod?

[PittBull260]

it's about 130mb i think

[TwinMfg]

I was cleaning out my TGA folder when I came across this shot. I don't remember a thing about the particular campaign, but thought the kill/capture ratio of 17:1 was impressive- at least for my games it is.

[PittBull260]

I was cleaning out my TGA folder when I came across this shot. I don't remember a thing about the particular campaign, but thought the kill/capture ratio of 17:1 was impressive- at least for my games it is.

damn thats pretty impressive

[PittBull260]

Well I started a Catholic campaign aswell.

Faction:Teutonic Knights
Starting point:High Period
Current Year:1352
Goals:destroy all muslims and other forces who are against catholics.

History:
well I started off with 2 small provinces, I barely ahd any money, fortunently lithuania was controlled by the rebels, so I took over it, from there I started building farms etc. once I got the money I built an army to defend agaisnt the mongols who will arive soon.

The mongols came, the russians and Turks kept them busy for a pretty long time unitl they reached me. Once they reached me the first province they attacked was Lithuania, i had a good 2000-2500 men there to defend it along with my king a 6 star general. For the first few years that army by itself defended well against the enemy who outnumbers them, but they needed reinforcements, the tides then turned...

I had a large enough army to destroy the mongols, so I went on the offensive, expanded all the way into Muscovy and Volga-Bulgaria, and then at Khazar defeated the Mongols.

That's when I started making Crusades and Bishops and Inquistidors etc.

Whatever faction attacked a catholic country, I would send a crusade at them (notice the southern Muslim lands are all under my control :) )

My only danger now is the Danes, they've been excomunicated and their armies are huge, the borders between me and them are getting tighter and tighter, in 2 years his forces on the borders have doubled...suspicious..

[Patron]

It might be an idea to Garrison up prussia and focus your attention on the middle east, unless the ukrainiansm (or whoever those dark blue with red flags people are) get conquerred, the Danes shouldn't bother invading. I suggest taking Syria and driving west along north Africa with your Middle eastern armies, you appear to have a navy capable of dominating the mediterranean.

[BAD]

damn thats pretty impressive

Aye TwinMfg's is great but check out what you can do with a more advaced Turkish Army. Gold armoured Armenian Heavies, carried the day. Plus "That" Valour 7 unit of Turcoman Horse. 40:1 kill ratio.



Was only on hard though, not expert. . .

[PittBull260]

haha holy shit man that's crazy

[Patron]

This reminds me of this game I played once where the papacy kept on reappearing, except I never got my kill ratio up to 1/40. Except in small battles against rebels, where I can get my kill ratio to 0/infinite, cause none of my soldiers die.

[TwinMfg]

@ Bad:

Well, I'm suitably impressed. Mine was still in Early, and I play on Hard.

[PittBull260]

well here's one of my good battles, not as good as BAD's but the ratio is 25-1 so I guess its good :)


WHO SAYS ALL CAVALRY ARMIES SUCK?

[BAD]

Hahahaha! Now that's the kind of Bada$$ army I like to see. Nice to see someonelse using Gendarmes aswell. I love em. Give me two units of Gendarmes over one unit of Chivalric Knights anyday. Ahhhh I remember one of my earliar Spanish Campaigns, Gold weapons and Gold armoured Lancers. Man Lancers rock!

[PittBull260]

Hahahaha! Now that's the kind of Bada$$ army I like to see. Nice to see someonelse using Gendarmes aswell. I love em. Give me two units of Gendarmes over one unit of Chivalric Knights anyday. Ahhhh I remember one of my earliar Spanish Campaigns, Gold weapons and Gold armoured Lancers. Man Lancers rock!

hell yea Gendarmes own

[Patron]

England can't build lancers , though I'd have to wait 150 years to start building them anyway.

The pope died and I blitzed into Hungary and am currently holding 4 castles under siege, the king escaped to Serbia and I can't attack him or I get excommunicated though.. My crusade has reached Constantinople and I killed the Emperor in a bloody battle in western Turkey in which a melee consisting of 240 of my knights, 120 of my viking huscarles, 120 varangian guards and 80 über jedi kataphraktoi was reduced to 30 or so feudal knights vs the Byzantine king. The byzantines brought a few peasants along with them aswell, but they were wiped out in the first few seconds of the battle.

[Patron]

1190^

[PittBull260]

impressive Patron, looks like u'll get 100% soon :)

[littlebktruck]

After dropping two easy campaigns (Spanish and English) and a once promising normal campaign with the English that turned disastrous, I decided to to revisit the Spanish for my second normal attempt. Things are going decidedly better in this one. I attacked Navarre but lost it to rebels. I then eliminated the Aragonese, but rebel reinforcements (from Valencia) kept me from taking the province. I bribed the rebels and then used them to take Navarre back. Meanwhile, the Almohads waltzed into undefended Valencia. They also took Portugal, but they couldn't manage it and it rebelled many times. After some more buildup, it was time to take on the Almohads.

My first move was to take Valencia, which I did without issue. However, the Almohads strongly reinforced Cordoba and my offensive was stalled. I built some more, but I still didn't have the strength to take it from them. In a desperate move to keep my offensive going, I sent all my troops from Leon, Castile, and Valencia into Cordoba. The numbers were quite a bit in my favor (2400 to 1600 or so), but I didn't trust myself with such a large battle, so I autoresolved. I won! This broke the Almohads' back, and I pushed them back to Tunisia without a fight. They looked a bit more formidable at this point, so I stalled. Then France, much to my joy, sent a crusade to Tunisia. They took it through my provinces, but the Muslim provinces had low zeal, so they didn't take many troops and lost quite a few. They attacked until they were exhausted, but they could not crack the Almohad defense. However, they were weakened to the point that, with the crusade gone, they retreated when I sent my stack again. I captured Portugal a little later, putting me where I am now.

It's 1156, and my economy is doing pretty well. To make sure that I don't make the mistake I made last time (letting my navy get destroyed, making my entire country open to attack), I have 4 provinces pumping out a barque every three turns. I'm also preparing an army that will crusade to Aquitaine or Toulouse, as the French have recently been excommunicated and are at war with almost everyone in Western Europe.

Here's a screenshot. Notice the Crusade marker and growing army in Castile.

[Martok]

Sweet, man. Who's going to command the crusade?

[littlebktruck]

Sweet, man. Who's going to command the crusade?

I have a five-star royal (not anymore a prince) who will take charge.

Crush the apostates!

[bretwalda]

Dont. I always read that it is not advised to take you king on a crusade. I believe there are more reasons but here is one: when attacking with the king the distance of your king is always considered to be the max from all provinces, thus it is very likely that your empire will revolt and crumble into civil war. It is the same effect as if you took your king to Ireland and never had or burnt the port...

edit: I case I missunderstood you and you dont refer to your king (on second reading it seems likely) then disregard what I have written /edit

[littlebktruck]

Your second instinct was right; it's not the King. It's a former prince that didn't accede to the throne. My king, as of this point, has only a son who is about eight (!), so I have to protect him well.

By the way, how can you tell which prince will become the King? Is there any way to affect the selection? It seems to usually go to a young one, I guess so he has time to have heirs, as it doesn't seem that princes have children. I could be wrong about that, though, as I have seen it where I had heirs after someone just took over the throne.

I train troops in France and England, send them to specialist provinces which build armourers, master weaponmakers and valour bonuses, then send them to spain to get their attack bonus. Currently my specialist provinces are upgrading to fortress and my training grounds are preparing for when I reach the high medieval period, in 1205. I am training feudal seargants and archers with a +1 valour bonus from master spear and bow makers, they also get a +3 armour bonus and just recently a +2 attack bonus. So my feudal seargants are the equivalent of men at arms -1 defense and +1 armour, I think.

I don't quite understand. What is the advantage to this strategy? Is it the ability to customize for desert warfare?