How to keep interested on a steamroller

[The Electric Celt]

Now then comrades,my current campaign Scilly/high/hard/g.a V.I having crested the 60% shenanigans without much fuss and now at 1306 ,is getting a little bit beige. The goals are still unimaginativly 'keep control of malta'I Lead the HRE by 5 points and am dutifully 'giving them the good word'on 2 fronts No more competition worth mentioning since the Almohads went all Jihad and I've knocked'em back with 2 successive successful crusades.
I've right enjoyed this one and want to do it justice before starting another.Any ideas to keep my interest up?that still retain an air of realism.

[edyzmedieval]

Command personally all the battles.... Also, do some sieges with cannons and use Organ Guns on the battlefield.....

[antisocialmunky]

Play a faction, conquer their historical territories. Build as big of an army as you can and take over the whole without reinforcing your army(s).

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Just keep comparing your land size and army composition to famous empires, such as the Golden Horde and Rome.

Playing all the battles and excessively using cannon is good too.

[Sensei Warrior]

What I usually do to keep things interesting is, surgical strikes. You see I am not much of a battler. I do well enough but my timing is off and the AI typically catches wind of my battle strategies. So when I've womped the game into subbmission, I try to take land with the smallest force possible. If I am gonna attack a prov that has a 3* gen and a developed (peasants don't count) 1000 men. I send in a 3* gen and 500 men. I send 1/2 of what he has. Then I have to rely on tactics and positioning and all the things I typically don't bother with when I have an uber-army.

[Ironside]

Run the game with -ian.

Switch faction and face the behemoth you've created.

[mfberg]

Build all dead factions land up and make them rebel or re-emerge. Kill the pope, take all his lands and fight every re-emergence.

mfberg

[King Bob VI]

How exactly does this "-ian" thing work?

[Procrustes]

How exactly does this "-ian" thing work?

Add "-ian" (without the quotes) to the end of the command line in the shortcut that starts MTW. It's a kind of a debug mode that lets you do a couple of things, the most useful of which is that it lets you switch between factions. Once you start in -ian mode, press on of the number keys to switch to a corresponding faction. For example, pressing '1' lets you play as the rebels, pressing '4' lets you play as the Danes, and pressing _shift_ '8' lets you play as Novgorod (I think). This is nice because it lets you play as factions that are normally locked, and it lets you switch to another faction when you get bored of the monster you create with yours. (It can be quite a challenge to take out the super-power you create.)

There is a little more about this at the end of the "beginners guide" and the "unit guide" in the MTW Guides section.

HTH,


EDIT - I typed "shift" inside brackets, and it didn't show on the screen.

[professorspatula]

Hold down shift and then press number keys to access the other factions too.

It'll be a long and arduous campaign to successfully destroy your own super-power empire though, at least I imagine so. Unless it falls into a civil war early on and another faction re-emerges to nick more of their lands.

Although it goes against your realism suggestion, you could give a gift of a million florins to a pauper faction using the .deadringer. cheat and the -ian switch. It'll go crazy bribing armies and recruiting new units, so you'll have a fair few battles with them, probably many against your own turncoat armies. Can get boring and silly though. Still funny at times when you see the AI suddenly bribe half the map under their control, then go bankrupt with civil wars erupting everywhere.