Your Favorite Faction

[hlawrenc]

If you like Hungarians, try Croatians in BKB mod. Unlike the XL mod they are Catholic in BKB so you can raise regular western forces and even throw in crusades, but have a real Balkan flare as well. You can go Western, Balkan or mixture. They get Sleskeys, can raise Abanian Warriors (axe) in Thessaly, Slavs of all flavors including Slav horse and javs, even a Croatian Urban Militia along the lines of the Almond UM, Mounted Cross bows and in high if they own Bulgaria get a heavy Bulgarian axe unit, and a Croatian Light Cavalry unit. Close to Bulgaria so can get there for Bulgarian Brigands if you want to improve archers.

They can be a lot of fun with an exotic flavor in early but as campaign progresses and you hit high you can include heavier Western Catholic forces pole arms, etc. Is really the best of both worlds for me.

Biggest problem is their location and fact they start out with only two provinces with one rebel nearby in Serbia, but to really expand you have to take on Hungary, Venice or Byzantium which can be a problem. Without any exportable goods in their two homeland provinces can't really try to turtle and build economy up so you have to go after one or the other big guys early on so as not to die on the vine.

But if you can get past the first few years they can be a fun faction to play because of the unit options.

[Knight Templar]

Thanks, I'll try Croatians when I get BKB mod

[NodachiSam]

My favourites are Byzantine, HRE, and Danes.

[Asmodai]

My favourite are Polish, HRE and....France.

France is very challenging, cos they have no exclusive troops. And in early, they have very difficult GAs. Crusading with English, Germans and Spaniards on the back is very hard.

I like polish for their choise of cavalry units. Thous cavalry battles in the steppes looks very spectacular.

But my presonal best goes to HRE. They have some difficulties in early like GA crusader goals, preserving their lands, having no powerful early units (except for swabian swordsmen, but raising the castle and 2 level swordsmith is problematic). In high, they have no special advantages over neighbouring fractions, but in late, gothic units rocks!
Also, swiss halberdiers and swiss armoured pikemens are very good addition to any german army.