France

[Guild_Fighter]

Since this is my favourite faction to play in MTW I thought I would give a rundown on how I use France to best affect......


Firstly I make sure to up the taxes to the highest in all towns in order to get as much money as possible. Then concentrate on buildings in the following order:

Walls, economic buildings, Religious buildings, stables including jousting arenas, other happiness buildings, Armour buildings then lastly siege and growth buildings.

1st Turn)

Diplomacy: After pumping all towns to maximum tax I like to send my princess towards Spain and Portugal to secure an alliance with both of them early to secure the southern border. Also building a diplomat in Paris to send towards the HRE/Italian/Papal States as well is a key. I like to make sure to secure all catholic nations as trade partners/allies ASAP. I do not bother with any orthodox/muslim factions as that is asking for trouble.

Military: It is important to take the Rebel settlements as soon as possible however I like to go for the towns before castles as their economic growth is very useful early. I start off by sending a spy into Dijon and sending the garrison just to the north straight down to lay siege. In order to minimise losses I go for the Wait and let them come to you option. The other town I go for is Renne bypassing Bordeaux (for now) and securing Rennes (the guild has always given me a mission to take this town worth 2500 gold anyways) however this time the rebel army is more cunning and will sally out but with the spear militias schitorium formation they can hold against their mailed knights quite well and you can use your knights to mop up their troops with ease.

5th Turn)

After these first few turns are over you get a few benefactors for your prince once can lead an army from Toulouse to take Bordeaux and usually by now Constance has been married off giving an extra general in Paris which I use to gather an army to siege Metz. Once again I am patient and siege the castles and wait for them to come to me. Metz will sally out on the 2nd turn anyway. After securing all of that you have plenty of money for mercs and troops in all towns keep everything reinforced as if all towns and castles have loads of troops then the catholic nations will not attack you. Once all towns are reinforced I go North to take Bruge. (The Danes normally beat me to Antwerp)

That is all I am going to write for now my strategy with Version 1.1 means that corsica/Sardinia gets swallowed by Sicily so you miss out but this should take you to where a crusade is likely and that would be the next best step.. It's your choice from here where you go as you will be the aggressor... Eventually it will be Milan who will break the peace if you leave it too long so that might be a good place to start.


Anyways hope my *First attempt* at a guide has helped someone

[ViolentRebellion]

I had a very different focus than most of you. I play H/VH.

With France, my top 3 priorities at the start were:

1.) Consolidate modern day France with Louis.

- Prince Louis is BADASS for this. Best general in the west. I play to his strengths and exterminate every town and kill every group of prisoners. Consolidate most of your troops from all of your provinces under Louis. Then use this army to do what I call the "BIG C". Start with Louis from Toulouse have a bunch of troops from other cities meet him at Bordeux and exterminate it. Then move on to Rennes, exterminate it. Then move to Cairn and exterminate it. Then move to Bruges and exterminate it. By that time Louis will be full dread/command stars when other factions are still moving around to take their first rebel city.

- The entire time you want to have a priest, preferably the Cardinal, with Louis. You don't want Louis at 35-45 when he's your faction leader get burned at the stake for heresy.

- After you consilidate France make Angers(or Cairn) and Bordeux into cities. You need one castle in the south and one in the north in modern day france. When you expand you can take over the plethera of castles controlled by the HRE.

2.) Kick the English off the Mainland - France has 3 great natural barriers. The mountains to the southwest/southeast, the Atlantic ocean to the west and the English channel to the north. Letting the English be that close to your capital is ludicrious. Get them out of there right away. Don't ally with them, they're on YOUR land. F 'em. You won't get Excommunicated for taking one castle. Don't waste Princess Constance on them. Save her for Portugal/Spain whichever is stronger.

3.) Develop an alliance with the Pope - spend your money on Priests/churches and get a diplomat to Rome immediately. Get an alliance and bribe your relations to them.

With this strategy, I'm at about turn 60, I have two generels with full command star, one with full chiv and one with full dread. Henry the Chivalrous is King Louis the Mercilouss' younger brother. I've used them as a two pronged invasion of the HRE. I have everything up to Vienna and I'm closing in on Bolognia and Innsbruck, the HRE's last 2 outposts.

I've also managed to take Jerusalem and Acre with a lesser general. Got that area to be 75% Catholic. Building a Cathedral in Jerusalem.

England/Scotland/Denmark have been in a war for the entire game. They leave me alone because they're scared as in negotiations my power is "Supreme".

Spain/Portugal are my allies and they've just eliminated the Moors. I bet one of them turns on me soon, but they shouldn't be a problem since Toulouse is my best troop factory.

The papacy is all mine. I got 7 cardinals and the Pope himself.

Milan has f-d with me a couple of times so I'm sending in a massive force to Genoa as we speak. They've only got two provinces, the same two they start out with, but they're scrappy and dangerous. I will exterminate their cities.

Make sure to use Forts and build up atleast 2 good generals.

Anyway, let me know if this helped.

[Boyar Karhunkynsi]

This stuff is amazing! I thought I knew my stuff about France, but I have learned a lot from this.

The biggest thing I learned; Get lots of Scots Guard: Fast!

Scots Guard, covered by some weak infantry will be an excellent supplement to your cavalry. The weak infantry (Spear Militia, Sgt. Spearmen) is just there to take a charge, the Scots guard can deal with any cavalry so long as they get no charge bonus.

I'd like to note that I defeated and army of over 3000 (Allied stacks from Denmark and England -- mostly comprised of Spear Militia, Billmen, Peasant Archers, Dsmtd Feudal Knights and Huscarls) with three green units of Scots Guard, and one unit of Mailed Knights.

Thanks again for these great tips.

-Max

[RoadKill]

I'm not sure if this has been said already but a little tip is to as quickly as possible build a large army and wait around caen, and then by about the 20 or 25 hit caen and take it. Why? I relized the other day the ai doesn't know how to transport troops through water ( well at least in my campaign ). After that you have no worries of england, they can't touch u.

[llewellyn]

alright so playing my first french campaign with great success i thought i would share my strategy with all. opening moves. combine paris and rheims army attack metz. take faction heir with toulouse garrison att bordeaux. angeh take rennes. then take dijon and bruges with the leftovers of the heirs and metz army. then take antwerp and bern if possible. no build roads and income makers becuz u will need them. take caen then sue for peace. fro metz and bern make spears and knights. have 2 southern castels garrisoned and tech them up constantly. now with men from metz and bern invade milan. this should be very very easy becasue they attack you first and the pope wont likethem for it. take both cities simulataneoulsy to avoid excom. then invade florence and caligari and ajaccio. turn both into cities. send diplomat to germany give them some money to buy a couple of turns. retrain your army in bern and metz. then train 2 full stacks of elites at bordeaux and toulouse. send them to southern italy. bribe the pope. kill sicily, retrain those 2 armies in palmero. march them up and take bologna. dont sack it. tech it up. thne invade germany FROM THE SOUTH. that is where all there castles are. after u take those its is easy to drive home to nothern germany. consolidate and take denmark cus they have probably tried to attack you already. after this you have more money then is imaginable and should think abvout simutaneaous invasions of the balkans and iberia. this way you will take you the remaining catholic facitons except for poland and the muslims and orthodox wont really bug you. but just incase they do garrison borber provinces heavily and have a large navy.

[Bongaroo]

Gave up on the first french campaign a long time ago when I realized most of my problems were due to bugs (and not seeing the gift button and wondering why no one would accept money, whoops! lol). Carls bugfixer and the 1.1 patch have made the game playable again but I have yet to come back to start another campaign as France.

I think trying to play the good and noble way with armies of large powerful cavalry will be fun to do. I think this will be my next campaign.

[Lorenzo_H]

I decided to start a long campaign as the French, after completing one as the Spanish. The French have a far worse starting location to the Spanish, being surrounded by aggressive, catholic (so non sackable, Pope gets mad at you for being at war with) factions such as Milan, England, Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire.

Milan in particular for me is giving me some pain. They have a large military, and have succeeded in taking over most of Italy already (turn 43). They recently declared war on France, Venice and HRE.

Since the French are not as economically suited as the Spanish are, I am having considerable trouble with money. In particular, I cannot spare enough florins to upgrade Toulouse, my Fortress which is begging to become a citadel. Other settlements are having trouble because I don't have enough money to upgrade all of their buildings which annoys me. But at least I recently got promoted to "Best Production" which means that other factions are having the same trouble.

France is a challenging descision for a campaign. The tough start location and economic difficulty means that experience is needed. Thankfully, I do have quite a bit from my Spanish Campaign. For instance, this time I know how guilds work, and that there is gold in africa near Timbuktu which is really useful knowledge since there is no better place to send Merchants when you are a faction groping around for every Florin you can get!

I like the French unit selection, but sadly have not reached a level of advancement or economy to fully exploit the vast selection of melee and ranged infantry and excellent cavalry. I am surprised at how much better the French units are compared to those of other factions I have seen, like England. In my opinion, the French units are more varied and better than those of the English. Even the superb, allround Spanish unit selection is only slightly better in my opinion.

I'll see how it goes.

[Magraev]

I like to play as France. Gotta love that accent

In my latest (M/M) game i focused on securing the french heartlands (bordeaux, metz, dijon, rennes), and then sent a crusade to jerusalem.

I now hold Jerusalem, acre, gaza and cairo, and am sieging alexandria. The main reason for my rampage was, that my economy was destroyed when I had to start paying for all those crusader knights. I had to keep fighting and pillaging to stay out of the red.

In europe I only had trouble with Milan (as usual). I blitzed them quickly in retaliation and took Bern and Genoa on the same turn. They were eager to sign a ceasefire after that...

My main problem is money. It seems farming is essential for France, but I don't like to go above lvl2 - to avoid too much squalor later.

All in all I think I have it made now - only worry is the potential for wars with Venice, milan, spain, portugal, england, denmark and HRE at the same time, as I share borders with them all. Not to mention Sicily, turkey and egypt in the Levant.

Looking forward to the mongols...

[Soulforged]

I see that some problems still exist with the AI, and some of them are of the fun breaking kind. On Rome TW I could easily deploy a single stack of any heavy or light cavalry in front of a hostile enemy wich didn't possess more than 1 stack of the same and win the fight by luring them into persuing me (wich happens only when the odds START against you) and then I just drove them into exhaustation taking their cavalry first and then their infantry units one by one. The same is still true for MTW 2, the AI is more agressive on the Battle Map and on the Strategic Map, but that doesn't make it so much better when there's a clear problem of design.

This is what happened:
1- I start a new campaing on VH/M with France.
2- I build every comercial building possible and recruit every cavalry unit possible.
3- Move my agents to their respective possitions and recruit a merchant.
4- I take four separate cavalry units and order them to siege four different settlements (Dijon, Bordeaux, Metz, Rennes). Yes that's right only one stack for each one, even when two of them have a healthy stack of mailed knights.
5- Set all cities on very high tax level and pass the turn.
6- England offers me trade rights and map information in return. I ask for money.
7- Is the turn of the rebels. Everyone decides to attack my lonely stacks and one by one, as described in the strategy above I take on them and defeat them. No sweat.
8- My turn again, only one turn passed and I already have 4 more settlements with almost no loss (or at least not regreatable loss).

How cool is that!!

[grapedog]

A lot has already been said about expansion and whatnot, so I'll just mention how I managed not to get attacked. By turn 15 I had my starting towns and all the rebel towns including Antwerp under my control.

My princess was married to the English forming a very strong alliance there. Somewhere in the first 5-10 turns, the Danish had sent a princess as an envoy. After reading someone elses guide about keeping your heir un-married until a good offer comes along, I grabbed the Danish princess cementing an alliance with them. That should pretty much take care of those two factions bothering me for quite some time.

That leaves Spain/Portugal/Moor on my South-West front...with HRE and Milan on my South-East and Eastern fronts. With the rebel towns, that gives you easily four castles. I have Tolouse and Bordeux watching the Iberian Penn...and the two castles on the Eastern Front(can't remember their names) keeping an eye on the HRE/Milan.

After I knocked off all the rebels, I worked/am working on my economy. Getting the basic structures up and running, and tuning my castles to either Cav or Archer with regular militia in both. So far, so good...except the Pope is asking me to drop my alliance with the Danish...fat chance of that right now while I am still re-inforcing my towns.

A number of my towns were completely un-defended early, but they were inner towns, and I had alliances set up pretty quickly. It was dicey for a few rounds, but nothing happened.

[TheLastPrivate]

One thing I didn't like about French campaign too much was that their early-medium units were dull and unoriginal. The problem is that due to so many expansionist neighbors you have hard time teching and defending your own, you end up expanding with feudal knights and stuff and by the time you get lancers most of Europe is finished...which is ironic in a sense that i never got to use my "best cavalry power in the west" during the most heated times.. (feudals and mailed don't count as the "best cavalry" because all other factions have access to them)

[HolyGateKeeper]

Haha, nice work Paul. I'm getting extremely well with France.

[Viking Prince]

I have never commented in any of the M2TW Guide threads previously, so why not start here. I had just reinstalled M2 Gold Edition on a new hard drive. Why not play a short campaign to unlock the factions? It had been a long time since I had played without using a modifcation, so it was nice to just take a fresh look (doing so with vh/vh).

As many have already stated, France is surrounded by Catholic factions and will be involved with warfare from the very early turns. This means diplomats, lots of diplomats. I place them on 4 stations -- near the English, Italy, Baltic, and Toulouse. Constance started out by taking florins in exchanage for trade and alliance with the English. I had plans for her to do a tour for a series of alliances, but I had an offer of marriage too good to pass up. A 4 star, 4 chivalry, 4 piety, and a good amount of loyalty that would max out with the marriage. Goodbye Constance and hello to a new family member.!

The diplomats are the key to early survival. The Sicilians and the Moors attack Marseilles and Toulousse respectively. The attacks are trivial, but only if you have good garrisions and diplomats to cut the deals. Let them attack if you think the odds are favorable and try to get a ceasefire if not. Do not bother for longterm tribute deals though, since they will simply return and break the tribute deal.


Continued:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I had 4 shots with Sicily early in the campaign with 5000 florins on the first three ceasefires. On the fourth ceasefire, I was happy to get 3000 since I was still at war with the Moors and the English. I did lose the starting General in defense of Marseilles on one of the defensive battles, but otherwise it seemed to work well. On the fourth war, Sicliy was finally excommunicated. My alliance with Rome and good standing finally paid off. I called a Crusade on Sicily and that seemed to have solved the problem. They remained distracted with Milan and Venice (which also seemed to keep Milan busy as well)

The Moors were a differant story though. They always seemed to arrive when the Toulouse garrison would send off reinforcements to Marseilles. I was lucky to simply get ceasefires, but I never did have to fight a battle to hold the castle.

The English broke their alliance thorugh my own fault. The Council had advised on strengthening Angers and I ignored the advice. On the last turn to provide the reinforcement, the English attacked. Paris was well stocked with the usual militia plus a couple of mercenary crossbows, two balistas (build this building as a priority, you will not regret it), plus a couple light cavalry and one unit of heavy cavalry. The Pope must have given a cease combat order because the English withdrew back into Caen. The army from Paris followed up and sealed the English in for a long seige. They weathered out the seige which gave me time to fill out the army with more castle infantry. The Pope never intervened (maybe the continuing tribute had a hand in this). Caen fell when the English finally sallied. They were crushed.

My initial expansions were Prince and company from Toulouse into Bordeaux, attacked, sacked, and converted to the urban line. The General and army (except a peasant archer) at Angers seiged and waited for a sally to take Rennes. The General and spears from Rheims oins the captain led army to attack and occupy Dijon. I had intended to then move onto Metz, but changed my mind. There really is not time to upgrade and develope before the HRE wants to take it. I redeployed and decided Bruges was a better target. I let the Bruges garrision to sally and the 4 spear, 4 cav including the general were sufficient. I also grabbed the rebel town of Zaragoza after Spain (or was it Portugal?) had softened it up to the point that there was only about 80 men left in the garrison.

That is the other reason for priests and diplomats. I use them as spies doing double duty. I find the chances of opening gates are not really a good use of resources. My spies are used defensively to help keep out the enemy spies (mainly in Touslouse, Mareilles, and Dijon)

You will notice that some settlements are attacked and others are seiged into a sally. There is always a play off between expending the resources to take the settlement quickly to balance the cash flow versus keeping the army intact to be available if needed. I always like to keep a force available near the English, near Marseilles and also near Toulouse. This requires florins to pay the men which also means slower builds to also maintian cash to quickly bulk up when the nearly continuous wars break out.

At some point, I had secured the borders of the French nation and stopped the southern boundary warfare. It was then on to take out the English. My final journey was into Iberian peninsula which ended the short campaign. I was never at war with the Scottish, the Danes, the HRE, and the Milanese. My 25 settlements were the basic french plus the low countries and related adjacant rebel held settlements except Metz, the English startng settlements plus York, the Iberian peninsula eliminating Portugal and Spain, plus a short Crusade into Cairo plus two other Egyptian settlements.

I took the advice of many of the other posts in this thread. The French are fun to play in the unmodified out of the box and fully patched game. They are fun because the combination of cavalry, weak missile units, and 3rd level castle infantry mean very even openfield battles. With the constant incursions, you will have more than your share of open field battles.

[Prussian to the Iron]

On campaign level VH, I can say that France really gets kicked around ALOT, at least in the early game. Pretty much all of Europe has it in for you (in the first 30 turns, I've been attacked by Spain, England, the Moors (repeatedly, and they make peace after I destroy their armies), Portugal, Milan, Sicily, and Venice. It wouldn't be so bad, but there is no shortage of places you can be attacked from; the Moors, Spain and Portugal typically attack through Iberia and up from the south of France (though the Moors are prone to naval invasions near Bordeaux), England and possibly the HRE can attack from the north, Milan, Sicily, and Venice usually either attack near Dijon or land troops at Marseilles.

I'm having a ton of trouble staying afloat in this campaign; I think if I was in a pinch I could retreat all my forces and defend my capital if need be, but typically I just end up moving armies back and forth between borders. If I take a Milanese town, I get attacked in the south. If I move to stop them, Sicilians ship some guys over and take the Milanese city back. And so on. I would just build multiple armies, but the income I'm stuck with won't allow it.



Aside from the strategic difficulties, I find the Frenchies to be very capable in field battles. the cavalry is top-notch, and the early spearmen can hold their own with some assistance (either an incline or a flanking attack by your cavalry). They don't get any good archers though, which I hate, especially since I don't like crossbowmen. Sieges are absolute bloodbaths: on medium battle difficulty (yeah, I know, but if it made the A.I. smarter rather than give it stat boosts, I would put it up to VH), assaulting a 500 man garrison with 2000 men results in 1000 casualties.


I do wish sometimes that I had picked hard instead of VH for the campaign difficulty. The A.I. is so freakin aggressive on VH, and you don't get a moments rest.