A few questions after finishing my first short campaign.

[Excalibur Bane]

Greetings,

Well, it's been awhile since I posted here. Anyway, I just finished my first short campaign as the English. I had tried the French on medium/medium difficulty, but I got slaughtered in relatively short order. Between the Inquistor running around burning the majority of my family members and agents, and all the foreign merchants destroying the local ones, it was very messy.

So, after taking a peek around here, I noticed you could change the amount of time per turn, so I changed to 2.0 (4 turns per year, I think) and restarted as English on Easy/Medium. I had a great deal more success this time around, since the Inquistors don't seem to be able to cross water. The foreign merchants seemed to leave my own alone for the most part as well.

The two most pressing problems I'm having seem to be combat and piety. No matter how hard I try, I simply cannot raise the piety of my family members. It always remains at 1 or 2, perhaps 3 at the most. I made a point of always having the best possible religious building and having at least two priests in every settlement or castle. This had no effect that I could see of. Alot of my priests ended up becoming heretics before too long. It would be nice to have a dialog box telling me this, it would be more helpful then wondering what happened to my priest in X town or castle.

Combat is something different entirely. My units don't seem to really try to surround the enemy, they space out no matter what I tend to do and most of them sit there while only a small portion of the unit is actually fighting the enemy. Is it designed to be that way or is that a problem that needs to addressed? Much the same applies for cavalry, they don't seem to pay much attention to formation. Now, I could very well be wrong about this but I had assumed that when one double clicks and has them charge the enemy, that they would infact close the gap as quickly as possible and then charge in for the kill. I've watched them, but they don't seem to do this. The lances are ready as they charge, but they lose cohesion and their lances never come down, they simply disappear and melee weapons are readied when they hit the enemy.

I checked out the stick at the top which says to have them walk upto the enemy and they will do their charge on their own. This seems to work, most of the time. It's sorta a hit or miss kind of thing and is truly making my cavalry useless, not that the English cavalry seems to be terrible effective anyway :)

The AI doesn't seem to have much problem making full use of their own cavalry, much to my dismay. In two seperate battles, I recall a unit of my Armored Swordmen being cut down by a single charge from French Feudal Knights. My general was considerably more capable then the French's general. Then in a different battle, I tried the same thing with English Knights on some Dismounted Feudal Knights of the French. My knights rode into them with only swords and promptly got cut to pieces to the last man.

Otherwise I'm having few other problems. Though a strange one popped up near the end. Freshly trained units would be available to be retrained over and over and there wasn't anything being gained. Not sure what causes that.

So, I guess my questions would be thus:

1) Is there any advice to better utilize my cavalry? Any way to mod the behavior so they always charge?

2) How does one build up Piety on family members? Leaving them in a town with a religious building doesn't seem to have much positive effect.

I'm gonna restart my French campaign on Medium/Medium and see if I do any better, now that I know a little bit more of the game mechanics. Perhaps observing the AI's use of cavalry might provide some insight. Any help is appreciated :)

[redstar1]

I'm by no means a veteran but I have played a very similar campaign to you. You aren't quite using the cavalry right. If you double click on a target, they will run to chargin range then charge, however the act of them running there will get them out of line and the charge may not even occur. Cavalry charges are, and were, fairly complex things. By all means run to the battle zone, but you must then stop and allow the cavalry to form up. One click to attack will set them in motion towards the target and when they are at charging range they will do so automatically. I discovered this late on in my game and it certainly does help to have a little patience with them.

I found that the only priests I could get increased Piety on were those I sent to the Muslim lands, and those who had vanquished heretics.

[Excalibur Bane]

I'm by no means a veteran but I have played a very similar campaign to you. You aren't quite using the cavalry right. If you double click on a target, they will run to chargin range then charge, however the act of them running there will get them out of line and the charge may not even occur. Cavalry charges are, and were, fairly complex things. By all means run to the battle zone, but you must then stop and allow the cavalry to form up. One click to attack will set them in motion towards the target and when they are at charging range they will do so automatically. I discovered this late on in my game and it certainly does help to have a little patience with them.

I found that the only priests I could get increased Piety on were those I sent to the Muslim lands, and those who had vanquished heretics.

Yeah, patience isn't my greatest suite. It doesn't help when catapults and arrows are raining down on my poor knights while they trot along without a care in the world to stop and try to reform. I'm guessing this a completely stupid question, but how can I tell when they are reformed and ready to charge? They seem to take a very long time to reform when I order them to a different position or order them to halt well short of the enemy to prepare to charge. I find it all very confusing :(

I'm not 100% certain that double clicking a charge from a distance, and letting them do the right thing themselves works at all. I've tried in at least a dozen battles, the lances are up and ready to strike, but they remain that way until they hit the enemy, they never come down and do a proper charge. I guess I'll have to try to perfect my timing. I've never been very good with cavalry, to be honest. I noticed even after a successful charge, the unit splinters off. I read another thread around here about the max number of units that can engage another at one time. I don't think it's very high, or I'm doing something wrong. I've had several hundred swordsmen just standing away from the engagement while only a fraction of them engaged the enemy. The AI seems to be doing it right, they don't seem to have much problems surrounding my men.

[Quin]

This is somehow stupid. Cavalry never galloped 200 meters, then stopped, reformed and charged from 30 meters! They needed those 200 meters to gain momentum and speed, besides they were usually highly trained units who knew how to keep the unit cohesion. Unlike lower "ranking" foot soldiers whose formations tended to break apart (this was one of the main advantage of cavalry formations). In this game it is quite the opposite - cavalry formations become all messy and broken, while even the lowest peasents and militas keep theirs when running for 500 meters!?

Lack of proper cavalry charges is one of the gamebrakers IMHO.

[Excalibur Bane]

Well, that was something of a disaster. I restarted on medium/medium as the French. I was doing well for awhile, but my defensive playing style was working against me. I had about 10 regions in total. My generally prefer to build up the empire's infrastructure and then attack once I have superior units, but somehow the AI was managing quite easily to meet and beat my units even though I was diverting all of my resources to constructing new buildings. I finally decided that I simply wasn't going to get ahead of them by keeping only a minmal standing army and diverting all my resources to infrastructure.

So, I tried to use spies and assassins to slow down the growth of HRE, Denmark, England, etc. Try as I might, I just ended up wasting resources as assassin after assassin kept on expiring trying to kill this person or the that person. Sabotage worked well enough, but I never get a skill increase as the result of it. I tried my hand and maintaining a decent network of merchants but that flopped as well. Either my merchants would start with a good trait and a bad trait that would cancel each other out and he'd have zero merchant skill or one of the invincible Danish merchants would stumble along and seize his assets. I quickly gave up on that.

So, about 50 turns after that, I decided to grab Caen. The English forces there were very primitive. Mostly milita, nothing terribly challenging. I laid siege to it, and as is my standard practice, I waited till they starved to death. It took about 7 turns if I recall. The odd thing, was that the English had several full stacks just miling about. Either getting on a fleet or getting off it, but not challenging my siege force until there was one turn left and the defenders had been completely wittled down from nearly half a stack to about 50 men in various units. I captured Caen and occupied it.

A ceasefire soon came to pass after that, and the Pope and the other Catholic factions didn't seem to be too interested. There was quite a bit of covert action at this point. I noticed alot of unrest in several of my border settlements between Paris and HRE territory. It never occurred to me to check for spies causing unrest. So I quickly built a several spies from the Marsielles which had a Thieves Guild in it. Sure enough, they were riddled with spies and assassins from Milan, HRE, Denmark. Squalor was upto about 80% already on most of my towns, which made it difficult enough. This should be capped at a much lower amount for Huge cities that have no feasible way of dealing with it.

Anyhow, about 20 or 30 turns after the brief war with the English, everyone apparently decided I was a tempting target, and launched a number of suprise attacks. The HRE, Denmark, Poland, Milan, Portugal, Spain and God know's who else declared war, or simply attacked even though we had alliances. I had two standing armies at this point, a northern army to deal with any threats from the English and a southern army to deal with any threats from Spain or the like. Needless to say, it was a mess. I fended off most of the attacks from all of them. I was hastily trying to assemble forces to defend against the combined forces of Milan, HRE and Denmark. It's more or less been a stalemate ever since. I simply couldn't produce enough units to defend everywhere at once, and any attempts for a peaceful resolution were always rejected. They had all formed a nice, handy little alliance. I spent the better part of 10, maybe 15 turns running my armies to lift one siege right to another. The development in all my territories quickly grinded to a halt, because I couldn't afford to churn out units and build up structures at the same time.

Meanwhile, throughout the whole game the Inquistor was having a burnfest roasting all of my agents and family members that it could get it's hands on. I lost my most experienced army, the one travelling with my King, after he died. The entire full stack deserted and turned into Rebels a few spaces away from one of my towns on the way to attack Milan. Why that happened, or that it happened at all, was unacceptable. Half my priests and bishops tended to become heretics as well. After the loss of my fortress at Toutlouse to the Portugal, I quickly gave up hope and I'm going to restart again.

I autoresolved alot of battles, I simply don't have the patience to micro manage cavalry that should know how and precisely when to charge properly. The few battles I did fight, were mostly sieges. There is no doubt about it, the AI has indeed been improved in both campaign and battle. They actually bring proper siege engines to battle, instead of just going with ladders and battering rams. They are very surgical about it too, which is nice. If he had a catapult or the like, he would always make sure to take out several walls, target and destroy each tower that would pose a threat if he tried to move through the breeches, then he would move in and try to take the castle. A nice change of pace. Not good for me of course, but good for the game :)

I really don't see the point in having relations listed if they mean nothing, the AI has no qualms about being excommunicated, they were almost always as such throughout the whole 200 turns or so of the campaign. They didn't care much for alliances either, they tended to break them at will. They always refused my ransom of prisoners too. Thousands died because their empire wouldn't give me the florin for them. Still, I do get a chuckle over hovering over the three options and listening to the prisoners beg and whine. That's a very nice touch.

The battles are still a mess, regardless of how you want to look at it. Historical realism should never compromise gameplay, as may or may not be happening here. I haven't really looked around to see if the virtually useless cavalry or the units wandering all over are bugs or features. In either case, I always tend to get much better results from autoresolving then from doing it myself, except when the odds are close of course. I've simply stopped using cavalry for the moment, I'm not going to hold their hands for each and every movement, making sure they are in formation and making sure they charge properly. I suspect if this was the case in the day, any unit who tried that would been promptly executed for incompetence if they are knights and couldn't manage to do a charge without the general running beside them telling them exactly how to do it

This time around, I'm going to simply go with Easy/Easy for the time being until a few things are addressed and the unpacker becomes available. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but these things are severely detracting from the gameplay. I'm not a heavy gamer, and I like a decent challenege, but not when everyone and his mother's uncle are out to get the human player.

The first few things I'll be changing will be:

- Possibly remove merchants, or make them a little more restricted so they can't come and go from any empire they wish unless trade rights have been granted.

- Miltiary access will mean just that, no foreign armies will be able to cross into your territory unless they have a military access treaty or they will have to declare war first. I'm getting a bit tired of enemy armies roaming around my territory.

- Remove inquistors. I don't see any point for these units. A nice historical accuracy but they detract from the gameplay by running around executing people.

I'll probably do more when certain things come to mind. I'm sure you'll all burn me at the stake for my heretic beliefs :) but a game should be entertaining, and that comes before any historical realism.

[Myrddraal]

I think that to execute a proper charge, just line up your cavalry (as far away as you like) then single click the enemy. Your unit will walk towards the enemy, then trot, then finally lower their lances and charge.

[Kobal2fr]

Squalor was upto about 80% already on most of my towns, which made it difficult enough. This should be capped at a much lower amount for Huge cities that have no feasible way of dealing with it.

Realistic enough, I'd say. Urban poverty is pretty much what triggered every single Revolution after all... Any crowd consisting of poor people bunched up with very, very rich people needs half a spark to turn ugly, and I'd consider an enemy provocateur to be spark enough :) But it *is* too hard to kill off an identified spy, I'll grant you that - even with good assassins that had 30-40% chances to dispose of experienced merchants and generals, the most I've ever managed on even a newbie spy has been a measly 16% percent, and given the facts that a) spies exp ultra fast and b) a killer can go from 8 to 0 exp in one failure...

I really don't see the point in having relations listed if they mean nothing, the AI has no qualms about being excommunicated, they were almost always as such throughout the whole 200 turns or so of the campaign. They didn't care much for alliances either, they tended to break them at will.

I've learned from TW games that alliances shouldn't be taken as "we're not going to attack each other" but as "we're going to hammer that idiot over there". In MTW, allies would routinely stab you in the back whenever convenient and otherwise profitable, but if you attacked a common foe bordering both your lands they'd consistently send a sizeable force to help (which, of course, could be exploited by sneaky bastards like myself, who'd let my "ally" attack my foe's larger force all by himself and get slaughtered, and only then attack the now-tired ennemy. Two birds, one stone and a sinister chuckle )

Bottom line is : if you expect your ally to be trustworthy, let him be far away from your lands, and attack with him.

Also, you can't ever, ever ever trust allies weaker than you are. Turtling, building huge armies and teching up peacefully and/or faster than they do *always* leads to your neighbours feeling threatened by your power and banding together to try and nip the menace you represent in the bud before it's too late. Don't you do the same when one AI faction is starting to turn into a bulldozer ?

[Grifman]

This is somehow stupid. Cavalry never galloped 200 meters, then stopped, reformed and charged from 30 meters! They needed those 200 meters to gain momentum and speed,

Methinks you've seen too much Hollywood. Here's a quote from a soldier who actually led cavalry charges:

No distance can be laid down at which to charge, it depends on so many different circumstances. When the ground is favourable and your horses in good condition you can strike into a gallop sooner; but the burst, the charge itself, must always be reserved till within 50 yards, for in that distance no horse, however bad, can be left behind, nor is there time to scatter, and they fall on the enemy with the greatest effect.

British cavalry office, 1853