The Turks

[turnip]

Starting as the Turks, you're in a mixed position.

You do have 4 regions - 2 towns (Iconium and Yerevan) and 2 castles (Caesarea and Mosul) - but none of them make much money and what little income you do have mostly goes to pay your unit upkeep costs.
Also, your settlements are horribly spaced out with so many mountains separating West from East you'll find 'yet another damn bunch of rebels' hiding around each corner. This distance - and the inability to march in a straight line anywhere means it's a real pain trying to move troops around to defend your borders... Something you'll be doing quite a lot.

Put simply, the Byzantines will harrass you early. It took 11 turns for the first half-stack to besiege Iconium and only 5 more for them to send an army across to Tbilisi, taking Trebizond on the way.
At the same time, the Egyptians will be steamrolling everything South of you.

My advice is to think very carefully about each mission your Nobles give to you. Get your Diplomat moving NorthWest as quickly as you can and hopefully you'll get a load of 500 florin missions to make first contact with a load of factions you probably won't fight for a while.
I also grabbed every spare unit I could get and headed for Antioch, ignoring Adana for now. The money you get from Antioch makes it a life-saver, even with Byzantium blockading it every other turn.

Another reason I would advise avoiding Adana early on is that the units defending it are an uncomfortable mix when the bulk of your army is Horse Archers of some sort.

Any veterans from MTW will know about the unit mix in general for the Turks (Horse Archers for breakfast, lunch and dinner) and in fact it's probably closer to the Parthians from RTW. The early infantry is dreadful and you'll have so little money for non-HAs that you'll probably spend what you can afford on Peasant Archers (bait for enemy archers).
The main problem with the unit mix early on is simply that the Byzantines have access to an equally wide selection of Horse Archers as well, so you'll be relying on the AI to field inadequate armies quite a lot.

It's also worth noting a couple of oddities. Firstly the Race Tracks let Towns recruit HAs and secondly both Janissary units are recruited in Towns as well, so don't be stingy with the Blacksmiths (or even Swordsmiths Guilds, if you're lucky).

[NihilisticCow]

I recently completed the Turks campaign (VH/VH) and quite enjoyed it. I pushed on the Byzantines relatively early, and was able to take Nicaea, which seem to distract them so I was able to expand a bit more easily. I also took Constantinople before the Mongols arrived (in force....). Holding Antoich as the previous poster mentioned would probably be a good idea, I didn't, and I wasn't able to displace the Mongols from there for a considerable time. The reason I didn't hold it was due to a crusade though, which you do have to be careful of...

I found the Sipahi horse archers very useful, as they do quite well in melee too, so they seem useful in chasing down enemy horse archers while continuing to shoot at them, especially in groups. This was especially important early in the game, as my enemies seemed to have significant numbers of horse archers. Foot archers, especially the non-peasant ones also will do the job against them when they're not in cantabrian. Getting too absorbed with horse archer numbers probably isn't a good idea though, I was finding 4-5 per 20 unit stack worked quite well, otherwise you're risking a bit too much in lack of melee power.

The basic spear militia aren't great but they aren't too shocking either, but the dismounted sipahis and saracen militia (and ottoman infantry, an "archer" unit) make quite a capable holding melee force and often can break infantry lines of their own accord even without the cavalry you should be charging with.

When the millions of Mongols arrived I got rather bogged down fighting against them, defending cities with decent numbers of the heavier spears is a must (and having a production line for retraining losses), but you can attack individual stacks in the open if you're confident with your cavalry or have a good position. I did though try to make sure I kept pushing on the Byzantines and then Venice with anything spare so that I was still taking some territories. When the Mongols finally burnt out, it was relatively plain sailing (except having to be quick taking the 45 regions).

As mentioned the 3 Janissary units are recruited from high level cities not castles, but it costs quite a lot of money to get there when for the early to middle part of the game you're better off with spears, cavalry and horse archers.

ps. Artillery is also very useful for taking cities in a hurry (i.e. just turning up and attacking), though this is true for any campaign, but it is highly useful to be able to take advantage of poorly defended cities instead of sieging and more defenders turning up.

[Subedei]

I am playing the Turks right now on m/h.

I know this is pretty much "common knowledge" but: in the beginning you´ll be pretty poor for most of the time. This is bad. Your bigger cities start to rebel [in my case Antioch & Constantiople]. This is worse.

After that both cities fell within no time due to rebellion, and this is good...if you had a decent force there. Reconquer the city and rob it....

Should give you a good 10-20k to solve your financial problems before the Mongols come knocking on ya door.....I know I am a crook!

[KhaderKhan]

Ditto what everyone has posted so far but I like to add a few suggestions:

1) Try to push (be it through force or bribery) south as far and fast as possible. Why? Antioch, Damascus, Edessa, Aleppo have the potential to become large money spinners. Capturing Acre is important as it can quickly be upgraded to a fortress.

2) To save money and to get the most out of your troops merge all your units to 2 or 3 full stack (that's if you have the money) and based at least one in each half [i.e. 1 in ME and another in Anatolia] of the empire.

3) Brace yourself for the inevitable invasion of the Byzantine/Egyptian/Crusades. Don't worry if you are outnumbered, provided your opponents doesn't have as many Archers and HA's as you your armies can roll-over full stack with relative ease because of your superior fire-power and mobility.

Btw: Has anyone else notice the fact that Turkish Archers have a defence skill of 6? The same level as JHI?

[MadKow]

Don't be let dwn by the apparently low stats of Janissary Heavy Infantry, compared to other heavy infantry (Western Dismounted Knights and such), they are in all tests i've done the BEST heavy infantry unit one on one. They have however to be protected from heavy cavalry charges and missile fire.