Holy Roman Empire

[PaulTa]

I also believe that the starting moves will either make or break you, so here's my take.

wait for venice to contact you (which is actually pretty early on, first or second turn kinda early) and sell all your goodies (trade rights, map info, etc) but NOT an alliance. You want to remain reliable. Rinse and repeat with Milan, only use your own diplomat to contact them.

Wait for the papal diplomat to ask for trade rights, and then spring the big question (will you ally with me?). Gift them military access, map info, and enough florins to take you to the top of the papal list. If you attack any catholic faction before allying with the papal states, it's near impossible to do.

Once you have the pope in your pocket and a diplomat camped outside of rome for the occasional florin gift, use all that cash you've accumulated from selling trade rights and maps to buy some mercs with your faction leader, and then siege Venice. They're going to attack you anyways, so don't feel bad about it.

After you whipe out venice and any relieving forces in a bridge battle, set your sights on Milan and Genoa. Milan will attack you anyways as well, and you want to disable these italian superpowers before they can turn their piles of florins into piles of crossbowmen and militia spearmen.

Once you've secured Venice and Milan is out of the game, set your sights on Sicily. Here's another power that is hell bent on attacking you, and their fortress in Palermo hits citadel around 1115. You wouldn't want a citadel being wasted on norman knights when it COULD be making Zweihanders, would you?

Once Sicily is removed, probably with the help of mercs, you have a central med. base that produces some of your best infantry. You're in a prime position to follow any crusades that are called, and you can have at the southern bit of france in a few turns of sailing.

I prefer to keep some powers in the game that blossom, so that I have a bit of competition when I get my good units (because that's when the fun really starts anyways), so I don't bottleneck Denmark by taking hamburg (I bring the troops down to help with Milan, actually), and I leave all the rebel provinces becides Prague to the poles (who need it anyways). In my opinion, it's better to set up camp in italy and a bit of southern germany than to freeze one's arse off in the cold and poor northern germany.


Now remember, your starting units suck compared to merc spearmen and merc crossbows. Try to snatch these up whenever possible, and don't be afraid to make mailed knights up the wazoo for flanking those Italian spear militias.

[econ21]

This post is largely a placeholder for any lessons from a HRE PBM we are launching, but for now here are some unit stats (prerequisites incomplete):

Unit Stats


F= free militia unit
AP = armour piercing
2 HP = two hit points
PC = powerful charge (not sure if that just refers to the 8 charge stat)
Prequisites: C1 = level 1 castle; T5 = level 5 town etc.

[geala]

It is now 1506 in my HRE campaign. My conclusions so far are: playing HRE is rather similar to MTW. There is a peak of trouble you have to survive when most of your neighbours come after you. That peak for me was around 1250 when I had war with Denmark, Poland, Venice and Sicily and Milan join enemyship. If you manage to get through it nobody really can endanger you.

Spain, England and Hungary attacked later but that was only annoying, not dangerous. Nevertheless I have to keep at least 8 field armies at the borders because there are no natural barriers except against England.

Units
German units are of mixed quality. There is no really extraordinary performer. In the early and middle game you have Spear Militia and Armored Sergeants and the normal knights, nothing special.

Of course you need Pavise Crossbowmen (castle) and Halberd Militia (city) in the middle game. After I got the halberds I used Armored Sergeants only in second class armies.

Zweihänder are a bit better than foot knights but not that good as I thought in the beginning.

If cavalry would be easy to use and without bugs HRE would be much stronger. Gothic Knights (MTWs darling) are great shock cavalry (in theory) and Mounted Crossbowmen and Reiter are fast and deadly from the distance. But more often than not they failed to charge correctly so playing hammer and anvil is not always possible. If caught in melee Gothic Knights are as useless as every other cavalry unit I know so far.

There are a lot of canons available. With it, crossbowmen and arquebusiers horse archer/missile armies were no real match which was a bit surprising to me. You have substantial losses but invariably win the match. More dangerous (to my taste) are foes with strong infantry like the Aztecs for example. It's a pity that Landsknecht pikemen are only available as mercenaries for they would be a good core of the armies.

Cities/castles
Also in the late game there is only one thing you need: money. Therefore I transferred most of the castles I conquered to cities. My "military triangle" was Hamburg (castle), Magdeburg (castle) and Frankfurt (city). All were build up as fast as possible. Hamburg is for Zweihänder, Pavise Crossbowmen and Mounted Crossbowmen (which are not build in stables but in the archers lab), Madgeburg for Gothic Knights and Reiter, Frankfurt for Arquebusiers, Halberd and Pike Militia. You can form armies easily in the middle of the three. Cannons are build in Aarhus (you need a city with a harbour for building carracks to reach the new world, and the last building for cannons improves also your ships, so it's a good combination to build canons in a harbour town). Beneath the named strongholds I did not develop military structures. I only use what I find when I conquer foreign land. Let your enemy spend the money, you need it for the many troops you have to field.

[Bleda]

When I played as the Holy Roman Empire, I found that the best diplomatic strategy is to say damn all the rest and bend over backwards to please the Pope, his friendship is the only deterrent to numerous attacks from your neighbors. The best way to make friends with the Pope is to pay him to be your friend. On top of trying to get experienced priests to become cardinals you must PAY HIM OFF. I realize this is hard to do as the HRE because funds are in short supply. To do this, whenever I have a particulary good turn or sack a settlement I always give a nice cut to the pope. If it is your pope or a friendly country's pope that is in power, you can offer tribute of about 4000 to get outstanding relations. Otherwise expect to pay 8-10k for the same result. The Pope loves money, pay him, be his friend.