Re: Turkish "Delight"?
Sounds to me like you had a rebellion by your generals. That could happen if your faction leader takes a big hit to loyalty and you already have borderline (3 flag) generals. Spies help a lot with this. If you have a spy in the same province as an army, and the general is leaning toward rebellion (his loyalty goes below 3), then you'll get a message about his loyalty. When this happens, you can shift army leaders around until the disloyal general is under the command of some other general with a better loyalty and higher command. If you have no other options, pull the disloyal general back to wherever your king is and put him under your faction leader's command, in the same stack. You can also assassinate him, although this can lead to rebellion by itself.
As for handling the rebellion, that's going depend on what option you chose when the rebellion arose. It's not always the best bet to choose the loyalists. It also might not always be best to just choose based on who controls the most provinces. What you want to choose by is number of troops, if the number is uneven enough that you can quickly overcome the disloyal troops. If the troops numbers are close to even, then choose the side with the best, not necessarily the most, provinces. You could choose the side with the most provinces and suddenly find yourself without your richest and most developed.
In your case, it sounds like you should choose the side which doesn't control Constantinople. I know this sounds counterintuitive; but stay with me on this. Why keep Constantinople and thus tie down armies keeping the crusaders at bay, when you need all your armies to retake your rebelling provinces. Let the crusading armies do your work for you. They'll either tie down a bunch of rebels, or the crusaders will attack and whittle them down for you. By the time you get back to Constantinople, you'll have rebuilt your armies, and gotten some more high valor generals in the process. This seems a fair trade for giving up the wealth of the big city for a while. If the crusaders are strong enough to defeat the rebels in Constantinople, then they'll likely be much reduced in size, making them less of threat when you get there.
When you do get near Constantinople, if the crusaders are still there waiting outside; you now have a dastardly option to deal with both. Send in enough troops to make the rebels commit to battle instead of a massive force guaranteed to make them cut and run. Don't send in your valuable generals. Send in cannon fodder generals. The crusaders might decide to join in, and will appear as an allied force to the rebels. If so, call off the battle. If the crusaders don't join in, then send in your cannon fodder troops and take command of the battle yourself.
Now here's the tricky part...
Don't win. Just whittle down the enemy forces and then abandon the field and let them win. This is why you want to use cannon fodder generals. You don't want to lose the high valor and command points of your good generals. If you do this right, the rebels will still be in control of Constantinople with a much reduced army, and you'll have most of your armoy with all your good generals intact. The crusaders will then be more likely to take the opportunity to invade. Whomever is victor of that battle is then easily crushed, and you've killed two birds with one stone - eliminated the rebels and eliminated the crusaders.
Worst cast in the above tactic, the crusaders just wait it out and you'll be forced to send in all of your armies and your best generals for a second battle. Hopefully you'll have enough troops and good generals that the rebels will just give up without a fight. Now you're back in charge of Constantinople, with the crusaders right outside. That's where you were before, anyway. So, no harm done except the turns wasted fighting the rebellion.
Remember to use spies. Every game I play, I usually have one province pumping out priests/alims. I use these as my spies in other provinces, with the added benefit that they prepare the other provinces of the map for my eventual conquest by turning the populace to my religion slowly but surely. Over the course of the game, I put one of my priest/alims in every province on the map, including any of my own that aren't at 100% my religion. They keep me apprised of who is doing what to whom and where my chief enemies are going to be.
While the priest-maker province is pumping out priests, it is building up the tech tree toward assassins and spies. That's all it does - assassins, spies, priests and any financial benefit tech like farms and traders, mines, etc. As soon as the province can make spies, I make enough for every province I own. That isn't usually many more than 8-10, which is when I turtle up and begin building my forces for conquest. After that it's back to priests or alims, etc., and a few assassins to work on building up their valor for use against enemy. I usually only use assassins to destroy enemy agents and priests in my territory so they can't spy, and to take out the Pope when I'm playing a Catholic faction and the Pope gets uppity.
One more thought. Generally the AI will go after whichever faction has the most provinces with a vengeance. This is one reason to put cheap priest/alims in every province. You can keep an eye on the mini-map to judge how you're doing. If you can stay in 2nd place, then the AI will do a lot of your work for you by attacking the first place faction instead of you all the time. When the time is right, crush the 1st place faction. The rest should be a piece of cake.
Good luck on that rebellion! Pain in the butt, but they're fun sometimes.
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Originally Posted by Tony Furze
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