Holy Roman Headache!

[yesdachi]

@ EYG – Sounds like a fun campaign you have going, cant wait to hear more!
You mentioned not building a fort in a province to save a leader from being trapped, good enough reason. I build forts ASAP to try and boost population loyalty. Am I wasting my cash/time trying to build them so quick? I could wait a few years for interior/non boarder provinces.

[ajaxfetish]

Ah, the wild ride of the HRE in early! One of the funnest games I had was with the HRE, with each of my neighbors in turn deciding to break their alliances and attack me. I used the papal warning limit to my advantage and shifted my offensive war from one to the next until I got a new warning and managed to get through the entire affair without getting exed once.

For EYG, I would definitely recommend pumping out Swabians as soon as possible. If I remember right, they require a swordsmith's workshop, so they're a little further off, but I'd dedicate Swabia to doing nothing else till it techs up to that level and then mass-produce those killing machines. Combined with archers and a decent general, you really don't need anything else for your main army in the early German game. Just stretch 'em in a long line and advance on the enemy across the front. Unless they've got an awesome general or some specialized troops (as the Byzantines tend to) you should be able to sweep virtually anybody right off the field with limited casualties.

During Robert Guiscard's conquest of southern Italy he was faced with a combined offensive by the Pope and the Byzantines. At the battle of Civitate in 1053 he faced the Papal army, which included 700 mercenary Swabian infantry alongside thousands of Italian troops. Two thirds of the Norman army of 3000 knights were fought to a standstill by the Swabians (while the other 1000 defeated the rest of the Pope's army!) That's 2000 of the best heavy cavalry of the day unable to defeat a puny force of 700 swordsmen. While the game doesn't reflect quite this level of ability in the unit, these are still some serious bad*ss's. Make the most of them! (see Warfare in Feudal Europe, by John Beeler, for more info on the battle and many others)

[EatYerGreens]

For EYG, I would definitely recommend pumping out Swabians as soon as possible. If I remember right, they require a swordsmith's workshop, so they're a little further off, but I'd dedicate Swabia to doing nothing else till it techs up to that level and then mass-produce those killing machines.

Thanks for clearing that one up, ajax. I double checked the VI leaflet to be sure and it's not that I misread it the first time, just that I forgot the significance of the workshop part, meaning level two, meaning full castle first. More on that in a moment...

In the meantime, my recent foray into multiplayer has got me used to FMAA's, so I'm happy to pump these out for the time being, with MilSerges coming out of Switzerland, I can put together 'attack' stacks and 'defence' stacks to make the best of their respective good attributes. Fortunately, none of the neighbour factions has these yet, so I'm ahead on tech.

I am however, broke. Well, almost. Full story to follow.

I build forts ASAP to try and boost population loyalty. Am I wasting my cash/time trying to build them so quick? I could wait a few years for interior/non boarder provinces.

Hmm, possibly. I got a parchment right after the very first press of 'End Year' in the campaign, which warned me about low loyalty amongst my generals. I suppose that's pretty standard for HRE's opening position? I set about fixing that asap by a frantic building programme of border watch towers (no need for BFs just yet) and at least one 20% farms somewhere in every successive year. After about 4 years, the Emperor got 'Builder' which is +10% happiness in all provinces and +1 loyalty on all generals, so it's money well spent, IMO.

The other thing with my style is that there is a natural tendency to accumulate troops in the border provinces and this alone will boost loyalty enough to get taxes into the Very High range.

I say wait with the BF's because I know that when my Builder king snuffs it, there will be an instant drop in happiness and loyalty. I need to have cheap, quick items still on the building shopping list to get my new king his builder virtue in as short a time/least money as possible. BWTs will stave off (low valour) assassin threats well enough in the meantime.

By treating a province as a 'fighting zone' and by not building a fort, I know that, if I do happen to lose on the field, at least the survivors and the general are forced out completely, not trapped and thus they can play an immediate part in the counter offensive. At a pinch, repeated take-backs gains the gen his first couple of stars. Entrapment either has him starved to death, killed in the assault, or sent back to you for a hefty ransom, befitting his star rating.

I never seem to use forts in the way they're supposed to be used - small 'trip-wire' garrisons to hold up attackers at the border and a heavywieght stack placed someplace where it can strike in many directions, to retake the ground quickly. Much more efficient use of troops, as stated by someone previously.

My problem is that my early spending goes on farms and economic improvements and I cannot afford to do that AND build forts in 11 starting provinces, all at once, or however many it is the HRE get. [EDIT] The homelands list in GA mode shows 13 for HRE! [/EDIT] The Byz start with 12 provinces but only one training centre, which is just as much of a headache.

In fact, it may be habitual Byz use which got me using this policy. Their starting generals are 6,7,8 star, so I'm a tad over-protective with them and daren't risk getting them snagged up in sieges.

Now I think about it again, I suppose the idea is that you just rally him out of the castle and he's the leader, so it matters not a bit that the relief stack has a no-star leader. Hmmm.

[EatYerGreens]

HRE GA/Early/Hard/Default size ...continued.

My overall state of mind at the moment is that this is one of the worst botch-jobs I've made of a campaign to date. However, I may be being a tad harsh on myself. I think this may be the first time I've actually played any campaign on the Hard setting. I think all my STW successes were played at Normal and my one go at Hard with that went so badly wrong I gave up in (self) disgust.

After putting VI in place, I did start a Byz campaign on expert, had moderate success with rushing the Turks but ended up packing all the gamesaves into a zipfile for a time when my expertise can cope. A huge HRE crusade had just blatted Bulgaria and was one move away from a thinly defended Capital

My ongoing Byz campaign was back at Normal level again and I have to say it was really bad preparation for what I'm in now, seeing as how the Byz uber-generals make all the difference to winning or losing, not actual player ability. I got a false impression of both unit type capabilities and my own level of tactical skill. This bit me in the backside, as you'll see below.

Back to the action...

Friesland was retaken and held for long enough for a fort to go up. The French stopped attacking it and a garrison of 200 appears to be enough to keep them at bay.

The bad news is that they eventually shoved two stacks into Lorraine and I let them have it without a fight. Those stacks have not moved, so I still haven't got it back yet. No matter, it let me focus my attention on matters down south.

The really wierd thing was that they were somehow able to offer a princess to me on the same turn. As per that screenie I posted up a while back, the icons flashed to indicate that the alliance offer was in conflict with an ongoing war situation. I wanted them off my back and knew a retake battle was not on the cards, so I accepted the offer. So they've gained a province from me and achieved alliance with me in the space of a single turn. This alliance only lasted a year, since I opened up against Italy, who was their ally. Not a problem for me as both sons are now married off and more heirs are being born already.

I attack Genoa and Milan on the same turn and they retreat to the keeps, which was a pity. Some troops have to go back to guard Provence and I withdraw my better troops from Milan, so only some peasants and UM will receive losses in the siege. Two large stacks of Italians are in Venice and I attack it out of Tyrolia, with backup from the Milan stack, so that they can't pull off a siege-lift.

This is the first of a string of embarrasing defeats. I begin in a gully, with a medium height hill to my right and snow-capped steep hills to my left. The Italians are off in the distance, on the flattish section. They have two RKs, the rest all UMs and reinforcements due. I have fewer men but I have 5 archers and intend to shoot them to bits, as they have no missile units to fire back with. I go at running speed to the hill on my right, to maximize firing range. Fast forward on the speed control for a bit and was so busy concentrating on my own position and facing that I fail to notice they've gone for the steep hills on the other side of the map. GAH! Looks like a mile of marching back down, across the gully and up the steep slope. Fast-forward again. After the climb, my men are down to two bars, so yet more FF to freshen them up.

All goes well at first. I send some archers forward, they send UMs piecemeal to chase them off, only to be cut down to 40 men, at which point they turn back and lose some more. My front line is on a 30deg slope and they charge at my right side, which is lower down. Good, more archers come into play and my spears are down that end. I pin, I flank but it must have been their bonus valour UMs which did this as they carved up my men a treat. The battle log showed something like 31 friendly kills by my archers, which must be a record for me and not something to be proud of either.

His RKs are on his right (my left) and one of the pair looks to have been shot up completely by my left-most archers, without it ever making the short dash required to send them packing. Good, I think that means a Prince of theirs is dead. Their other RK (king!!!) I find safely out of range on the downslope of the ridge they'd defended on. I don't think he played any part in the fighting.

The meleé action gets progressively more messy. I switch archer targeting constantly but this has them pursuing broken enemy UM units when I'm not looking and making my force spread everywhere. Archers are running out of ammo, my spears and UMs have vapourised down to 20 men each and archers are being called on to meleé. Half my units are routing at any given time.

Enemy peasants are coming up the gully, which means the reinforcements are here and I might just pull this off. My sole RK unit (Prince Conrad) has been sat back doing little, so far (daft to send him against AP units) and charges into the flank of some peasants just from sheer proximity, not an order of mine. He sets off in pursuit but I'm looking at 16 badly damaged units, half routing and unrallyable. Even peasants could mop them up as prisoners in this state and I consider pulling off a controlled withdrawal.

Before I could act on that thought the blasted battle ending screen reared it's ugly head. Dumbo, here, had left the battle time limit ON!! All that marching at the start used up half the clock by the time I'd marched twice and rested. The subsequent action kept me too busy to pay attention and it genuinely took me by surprise. Maybe I was going to lose anyway and it did me a favour?

EDIT: Typos...

[EatYerGreens]

..continued

The casualty bar was at the 50:50 mark at the end of all of that and it sunk home what a difference the Hard setting plus valour bonused Italian UMs can make. I had 86 prisoners and was mindful to execute them before pressing the proceed button. The ransom was small and affordable but, significantly, my 4-star Prince was now a three star.

On the upside, what was a pair of 3/4 stacks in Venice was now just a single, near full one and Milan was held for that year.

In the same turn came my second embarassing defeat. I'd left 1 archer, one v0 UM and two v1 (Provence's bonus) peasants to siege 2 v1 UMs and one of v0 peasants.

The swines only went and rallied out at me! A doddle, with the archers about, or so I thought.

I start on a low hill, they're on a higher one. They come down onto the flatland, I crab sideways, across a wide dip, hoping to get on top of the big hill they've just come down from, to use the height to fire down on them.

I left my archers in line formation, instead of setting them to square for the march. I put the 2 pez units on my left, my UM general on my right. A mis-click has my general moving by himself. I select all and move them together. I preview their arrangement at the first waypoint and fuss for a few seconds over the duff facing of the general's unit. A crucial few seconds, as it turned out.

Wherever they were initially headed to, the enemy units have turned to close with me, so they are more in column than in line. However, it does mean that, as I climb this hill I was so keen on, they're hitting my unit's flanks head on! Worse still, a couple of archers on the end of the line make a grazing contact with the front of their peasants. It's meleé icon comes on and they continue to climb, when this is all time wasted when they could have been keeping their distance and firing. Their pez follows through, causing one of my pez units to break and run. They refuse to rally and are chased into the distance. I turn and attack using the downslope. My archers are firing but against two UMs with boosted valour, it's hopeless. Instead of me being in their retreat path, they are in mine. Lots taken prisoner. Gah!

The force in Provence is large enough to retake Genoa in a later attack and the keep is reduced to a fort because they pulled out completely.

More wierdness now.

Milan has a stack of returned prisoners from the Venice battle and I cannot command them yet. I set the 3/4 stack of siegers to assault the fort. I only have one unit of archers and they fire-arrow a hole in the stockade. For some daft reason, instead of fighting through the breach, I use two peasant units on the left of my line to batter down another section of stockade and make it wider, while the archers use the 1/3 of ammo remaining on the UMs lurking on the other side. The pez must have tired themselves out doing this and the stockade failed to collapse on top of any enemy. A combination of bunching, being shot by the forts arrows and v1 UMs soon had them running. My own UMs fared no better once through the breach. Within a minute, they were coming out and chasing me all over the field. Later checks showed their general was valour 3!! I must have lost 400+ guys to very few of theirs. Another humiliating defeat and probably the only time I've ever stuffed up a simple fort assault.

The wierd bit is that, right after the defeat screen, I pay ransom again, return to the strat map and am told that Milan's castle has fallen to my troops! Whaat the...? The fort itself has been blasted off the map and the enemy troops are nowhere in sight. Evidently my stack of former prisoners was enough to keep the province in my hands. One wonders if the programmers stopped to think of this eventuality, unusual as it is?

So, back to the big picture. I've lost Lorraine but I've gained - and held onto - Milan and Genoa. In spite of this string of embarrasing defeats, no civil war has broken out and I have generals loyalties up at the high end, with the lowest maybe 4 on the scale.

I have this feeling that stagnation - no battles being fought - can breed low loyalty and loss of provinces whilst in that depressed state is what sets the civil wars off. I have just lost a string of battles and an unacceptably high number of men (likely more than 1000 in total) yet the constant activity has somehow kept my generals' loyalties up. Okay, I've lost one province and gained two, plus my borders are strongly guarded, maybe those factors help too?

The biggest issue now is that I've been cranking out troops non-stop, to replace all these losses and it has cost me dearly. My building programme has virtually ground to a halt. Cashflow was down to just 340 at one point and the Treasury has been floating around the 1500 level for the past three or four turns. I had just enough to rebuild Genoa's 20% farms and with two new govs in place, cashflow is back up to around 750 a year. However, I've been cranking out FMAA and MilSerges for several turns and the maintainance squeeze will force me to demobilise the weaker troops very soon.

Trade? Ports? Ships? You're kidding me. Not even a trading post setup anywhere yet - 800 is half of what I have in the bank. Swabian Swordsmen would be great but 2000 for a castle is pie in the sky for about another decade and a 12 year wait after that. And another 6 years for the workshop. (grumble, mumble).

Okay, so Tuscany is down to walkover garrison size and there's just that stack in Venice. I want Venice first but it'll take a few years to rebuild troop numbers. Oh, just to complicate matters, I think the time limit on the Papal warning dating back to France's first attack must have run out because, just as Genoa and Milan had been caoptured outright, Popey raises his ugly head, tells me to stop fighting the Italians and get out within two years. Hmm, so I'll have to wait a while anyway, or else test those loyalties with a slice of excom pie.

The Venice problem kind of sorted itself out but not in the way I would have hoped. Out of nowhere, the Byz decide to drop a stack on them. There's been some siegeing, rallying, Byz forces coming and going and, after about 4 or 5 years, it finally falls into their hands. They are still neutral but offered alliance a while back. I declined so that my emissary could score some valour out of striking the deal but he and two Princesses have had to chase him via Georgia, Khazar, Crimea (he moved out that turn), Kiev, Carpathia, Bulgaria (the swine won't keep still now I want him) and finally back to the big C, which was the Em's first port of call. C'mon guy, I want that princess married off before she gets to nunnery age!!

EDIT: If lack of agents means you don't know where the other faction leader is but you can see one of their emissaries, drop your Em on theirs and then look at your Em's info parchment. The mission details give the current location of their leader. In this case, it said Crimea for several turns in succession but the nearest ports were Georgia and Constantinople. Like I said, he gave my Em and Princess the slip, attacking Kiev in the turn they moved in, leaving them looking at a deserted province!

Churches are up in Switzerland and Swabia and I'm going to need the morale boost from them soon, by the look of things. I have a 3 star Emperor, a three star Prince (winning provinces without a proper field battle did not get him his fourth star back, it seems) and a four star Prince with mostly low-tech dross up against a 6-7 star Byz Prince and those juicy units of theirs.

Oh and my mismanagement of both the army and the economy means I'm broke, so there's not a lot I can do about it, if they come a-marching in. Fingers crossed that it'll be Tuscany that they go after next, rather than me.

My eastern border has pathetically small forces guarding it at the moment. The Poles and Huns ought to be having a feeding frenzy on me right now but haven't budged. Maybe there's some kind of mutual distrust between them, or they see nothing worth stealing yet, or they're more worried about the threat of the Byz??!!??

I can't say that I'm fully looking forward to what's to come but it certainly has been fun and interesting, so far. Like I said, it's all very well dishing out advice on strategy but actually pulling it off is another matter entirely. For now, it's a case of building up funds again to be able to put in place about half of the policies I suggested. I'll feel a bit more comfortable once I've got some traders in place and, money permitting, the port, keep and shipbuilder which I know I'm going to need to keep me financially afloat for the remainder of the game.


EDITS: Insert extra para and yet more typos!

[bretwalda]

I really enjoyed these stories so I started a HRE/Early/Hard campaign. This is living on the edge... I am attacked by every neighbour of mine except the Danes and Papacy (oh yeah, I kicked the Italians out of the mainland. I had to do it they managed to get Austria: If I have to be excommed for retaking it I might as well kick them out...)

Reduced the French to two separate provinces when the English attacked and fought them off in bridge battles. I really experience the might of the spearmen and mounted crossbowmen... they are battlewinning.

And amazing how much the v0 low moral spearmen can take. (I cannot afford many churches, nor any high tech buildings...) Princes with their royal knights can also start massrouting the enemy if they can flank. Cool.

However in the east the Hungarians and recently the Polish give trouble. Somehow it seems that nobody makes them busy on the other side of their border... If I could tech up I could roll over them but that does not seem too likely. Probably I try to reduce them and push them to be a buffer zone... Anyway: all plans are rewritten in each and every turn when something new turns up... I expect the Danes and the Papacy to turn on me and that is not gonna be nice... I want to get some ships in the water but they are so fragile and expensive... eh good game!

[EatYerGreens]

And amazing how much the v0 low moral spearmen can take. (I cannot afford many churches, nor any high tech buildings...) Princes with their royal knights can also start massrouting the enemy if they can flank. Cool.

Actually, I only have two keeps in all of my territory, which means just two churches - Swabia (FMAA production) and Switzerland (MilSerges). However, they both have archer and spear facilities, so when not busy churning new units, I can cycle old ones through there, to give them the morale bonus for no actual expense. It's a pity there's no indicator on the unit icon or its parchment to show this. Whilst one can generally keep track of how retraining is going during a series of turns, the next time I start a game session, I'll have lost track.

A better way would have been to wait until I had an armourer, get 2 upgrades in one go and a marker to show you've done it.

I'm steadily beginning to appreciate just how much discipline it takes to look after the HRE. Me and the Byz are taking turns at having the largest annual income and/or the biggest army but, in my case, big income is largely academic. So many troops are required to keep all the neighbours at bay that the economy is strangled by the maintainance costs. Worse yet, none of the provinces has an outstanding base-level crop yeild. It's a lot of cash to put in for what seems to be very little return and, of course, you never know whether you're going to be invaded right after you've splashed out half of your entire treasury on the next farm upgrade, or whatever.

I think a bank balance of around 1000 is about as low as I'll ever dare to go - that's enough to buy a bunch of troops for some dire emergency. I'm up to the year 1125 at the moment and my bank balance isn't a lot greater than that!!

So, running the HRE is rather like life. Bags of things you want/need but, instead of that, you end up spending on other stuff, simply because it's all you can afford.

If it wasn't for all the constant fighting they have to do and the troop replenishment which naturally follows, I'd have built quite a healthy infrastructure by now.

I'm seriously considering a radical, experimental approach, in my next attempt at starting HRE/Early (no plans to restart just yet). Basically pick 4 or 5 'core' provinces, withdraw the bulk of my troops to that area, leaving only token forces in the outlying provinces. Earn money from those for as long as they last. Let invaders take what they will but defend the core without fail. Let the other factions spend the money on developing what was my outer reaches. Meanwhile a small army and a good cashflow allows me to advance crops, castles and training facilities to the point where I can mobilise a tough force and start pushing them back. The money from pillage will feed further mobilisation and infrastructure repairs in reconquered lands. By this time, their should be some choice governor candidates available too.

It just might work!