Playing 1.3 Vanilla M2TW M/M Turks, 2 years per turn.

I found the Turks to be a very difficult game like many people. The biggest reason would be that you are incredibly poor for much of the beginning, and although you are surrounded by rebel settlements for the taking none will help you much with the financial situation. My first priority was to gather armies to take Nicaea and Smyrna to drive out the Byzantines. Nicaea is important because it has a port. Smyrna because the Byzantines can use it to generate their early castle units (nothing spectacular, but why waste troops and upkeep defending Iconium and Nicaea when you could be using it for better purposes?) Another town I went for was Acre. In my game I took Tbilisi early, though in retrospect I could have ignored it for a while. Castles I kept were Mosul, Tbilisi, and Caesarea.

Acre and Gaza are two very important castles. They are very well upgraded and will be vital for defeating both the Egyptians, the Jerusalem garrison (when the Crusade is called) and the Mongols. I kept both as castles because I knew they would be two major unit factories against the Mongol threat.

I probably played this the wrong way, but I didn't take that many more settlements until the Jihad on Jerusalem was called. Especially Antioch, since the Pope will call a Crusade on that or Jerusalem, whichever strikes his fancy. Then I got every general I could to join the Jihad and used Acre as a factory to take Jerusalem easily. I love Jerusalem - it is where you will produce your first Janissary Heavy Infantry and Saracen militia. After this, I sent one and a half stacks to fight the Egyptians (Gaza first), and another stack from Acre and half from Caesarea to snap up Antioch, Damascus, Adasa, Trebizond, Edessa, and Aleppo.

Egypt is a tough nut to crack. Luckily I'd stopped them from getting to Jerusalem and they were stuck at Gaza. I took Jedda with a small force, then I concentrated on Cairo since it was better developed and could probably produce Saracens at the very least. After Cairo Alexandria fell with no real problem, and Dongola was another peace of cake. Dongola I turned into a city, as well as most of the cities in the Middle East. I called jihad on Baghdad for more exp points.

I found that I typically had very little money to make any agents apart from a few spies here and there. Also, I had accidentally agreed to trade rights with the Byzantines, landing me a Dubious rating for diplomacy (no one wants to ally with me). For any other faction by now I'd have about eight priests (or other religious figures) with about six or seven piety. For the Turks I had to extensively focus on beating down my foes. I'd finished off the Egyptians relatively late (turn 65-ish), which meant till then my agents were pretty much about three spies, two imams and two diplomats.

Now, I never had a big problem with Crusades in my game. The secret is to use the port in Nicaea. Build two pretty decent size fleets and block the land bridges. Crusading armies can't cross them then, and very few if any factions even dream of using boats to get to the Holy Land. Sooner or later the Crusade will fail, and once you defeat Egypt and consolidate your Middle Eastern territories you can even leave the bridges empty. No one will want to Crusade against you.

A problem I had was Poland. Either Poland or Russia will become strong in the northeast part of the map. I'd taken Sarkel and Caffa (two undeveloped villages north of the Black Sea) early on and was waiting for them to gain wooden walls (it take forever). Poland by then had taken up to Kiev, and eventually took both settlements defenseless. I suppose I should have dealt with them using the castle at Tbilisi, but I didn't have enough resources and just left them be. Well, fast forward about fifty turns, and what do you know - the Poles come in with a full stack, take Tbilisi and Trebizond, and now I'm stuck trying to beat back the Mongols and the Poles at the same time.

Combat is pretty simple for horse archer nations. The Turks are most similar to the Armenians in my opinion from RTW. They have a very strong infantry unit (the Janissaries, plus the Sipahi dismounteds and Saracens - very good anticavalry troops), plus incredible horse archers. The only weakness horse archers have are other horse archers. While you should indeed turn off skirmish mode and fight without it whenever you can, in my game I didn't even have to do that. Against Egypt, which has no notable horse archers (or indeed chariots from RTW), I just turned on autofire and skirmish, gave my General two Bedouin cavalry to take down archers, and let the horses do their magic. Very rarely did I lose more than twenty units per battle, most of them in the General's bodyguard and Bedouin cavalry.

The Mongols, Poles, and Russians will be big problems. They are all horse archer heavy factions. Poles and Russians will tend to use javelins, so you can outrange them with bows, so they're less of a threat. But the Mongols for me were incredibly difficult. They for some reason would refuse to engage in bridge or river crossing fights, so I was always forced to fight in open terrain (they'd never fight in sieges either). Horse archer battles will eventually turn into who has the better melee stats and numbers, and since I had very little cavalry to deal with the comparatively HUGE number of archers they brought, and my horse archers would eventually get slaughtered once their arrows ran out, I opted to fight with infantry. I brought over all the infantry I could - Ottomans, Naffatun, Janissaries, dismounted Sipahis, and Saracens, as well as crusading and normal mercenaries. Big mistake - at best I only killed off some of their melee cavalry and some archers using my Ottoman infantry, while the Mongols poured arrow after arrow at me from far across the screen.

It eventually came down to just building full stacks and trying to engage as few Mongol stacks at a time. Luckily they never took any settlements, so I left their numbers dwindling further and further in a savage war of attrition. I'd almost beaten them back, however, when BAM! four more full stacks arrive south of Baghdad.

That's where I quit. I could probably have mustered the forces to beat them down again, but it would take too long and I'd undoubtedly be vastly unprepared for the Timurids (who I could at least force the elephants to rampage, but then there are the rockets). Something that annoyed me about the Mongols was that they had rockets. That just seemed a bit unfair - here we didn't even get gunpowder yet, and they come at us blowing rockets.

However, better players than me could probably contain the Mongol threat far easier than I could. The Turks are an amazing faction to play and their late armies could probably take on anything, but it take prodigious skill to overcome their rocky beginnings - and the Mongols and Timurids.