The secret to taking the walls (Long read)

[Werner]

The secret to taking the walls (everytime)

This works especially well for large towns of dense population and a high amount of civil buildings, such as city watches, churches, taverns, etc.

First start out by picking a single enemy city that you wish to siege. You can do multiple at the same time but if your not good at multitasking or don’t have the funds to support two large armies at once, stick to one city at a time. If the city is close to one of your major cities it will make the process a lot easier to complete and the siege easier in the end. Make sure that you have at least an Inn at your hub city (the city which you plan to mount the attack from). If you have a couple other cities near by which have Brothel’s or Inn’s that will make the process all the more deadly. Start the whole process by building up your army but keep it garrisoned in your hub city until much later. Plan on making foot soldiers since they tend to have decent moral on the battle field and are the most versatile. At the same time start mass producing spies and assassins from your hub and/or other near by cities. Immediately send your spies to the enemy city, even at a low skill level they should be able to infiltrate relatively easy without worsening relations with that faction and gaining subterfuge points at the same time. Now come the assassin’s, send them up to the (already infiltrated) city, say 1 or 2 assassins per turn, and start attacking the enemy buildings with them. Use them repeatedly on missions but specifically target buildings which have an affect on the public order ratings in the city. Also after every mission note to see if the building was damaged or completely destroyed (indicated by the red shade line on the building icon when viewing the city). If its not destroyed, or 100% damage, continue the attacks until it is. Even with a building partially damaged however it still has a crushing affect on public order and you will notice it going down rapidly during the entire process. With 2 assassins per turn after 3 turns you will have 6 assassins working the same city over turn after turn. With each additional spy you place inside their city walls the public rating will go down as well. After you wipe out most of the public order buildings you will have gained quite a few subterfuge points for your assassins, or at least enough to make a fair attempt at some family members who may be stationed there. Start working over the family members, start with the easiest ones first to gain more subterfuge for your assassins and then work your way up the ladder. Continuously use your spies to spy on family members inside the city or nearby agents that don’t require your spy to leave the city in order to perform their mission. You will notice the subterfuge rating on your spies rocketing upwards. After every turn you should notice the buildings you attacked before are now repaired, this is good and means the enemy has taken notice of your attacks and is now investing valuable funds into repair efforts. Continue attacking the buildings in the settlement until they are no longer able to repair all of the buildings at once, attacking markets and dockyards can help this happen quicker since they probably account for a fair percentage of that cities income. By this time you will see a complete halt from production of enemy armies in that settlement and likely others near by. Now that the enemy army is basically immobilized and is unable to retrain or recruit new soldiers its time to send in your own army which you have built on the side. Station your army nearby the city, just out of reach of the enemy. This will decrease the amount of fertility the land has dramatically without letting the enemy attack you from the city. If they do decide to attack you it will further the rioting and public order loss inside the city due to lack of troops. They may try to send armies from other cities, if any, to help but they can easily be defeated with defenders advantage. When you feel that the enemy city has been depleted enough its time to start the siege. Your spies will have the gates open for you so there is no need to build siege equipment. Depending on how long you spammed the city with assassin’s will have an affect on troop moral and considering they were spending a lot of funds on repairing, they likely had nothing left over to retrain. If you are lucky there will only be a few units of town militia or some spearmen waiting for you at the gates when you arrive.

Congratulations, not only do you own a new city but you’ve amassed an army of capable assassins and spies for the next one. Have fun!

[Bullethead]

The secret to taking the walls (everytime)

Hehe, I thought this thread was to post a solution to some of the strange thngs that happen on and around walls during assault battles. But instead it's strategic tips for prepping cities for capture.

I use this anti-public order prep myself at times. However, it's only really worth it under special conditions. If those conditions are not met, then it's faster, cheaper, and MUCH quicker to go the brute force method. IMHO, the conditions necessary for the anti-PO prep strategy to work are as follows:

• The target settlement has a large garrison (if it was small, you'd just walk right in without waiting on the spy/assassin spam)
• The target settlement is one of the largest possible sizes. Only really big settlements have enough people to cause serious PO problems despite the large garrison noted above.
• You have the necessary time to devote to this project. IOW, there is no threat of enemy offensives against you, from this enemy or any other. This is because unless you already own an army of spies and assassins, you have to build one up first, and this is at the expense of building combat troops in that part of the world.
• You have the necessary money to build and maintain both armies: combat and anti-PO.
• The enemy in general, or at least the target city, is especially prone to PO problems before you put your oar in.

An example of when this strategy well: You're playing as Sassanids against the ERE in BI, AFTER you've already wasted the main ERE field armies in bridge battles along the Euphrates. You have jack for powerful forces, but the ERE can't move anything because it needs all its remaining forces to garrison its many huge, discontent cities. In M2TW, about the only place I can think of where the necessary conditions exist for this strategy to work would be late in the game where you're already huge and the enemy settlements are already quite large. But you're faced with wars on multiple fronts and one of them is against a weak enemy, you need your regular troops elsewhere, but you've already got a spy/assassin army built.

If you don't have ALL the factors going for you, then IMHO don't waste your time with the assassin spam. Instead just build up an assault force and beseige and/or storm the place as usual.

[Quillan]

I've used the induce rioting bit a lot, but not in preparation for an assault. It's to hurt an enemy I'm not going to be assaulting in the near future. If the city revolts, it's going to go from what may be a 6-10 unit garrison to an 18-20 unit garrison, mysteriously even though you may have destroyed every single building in the settlement that can recruit troops. In my current game, Spain did extremely well, in that they owned all of the spanish peninsula, all of France, and had taken Antwerp, Metz and Genoa. Genoa was their last conquest. The turn we shared borders (I owned the rest of Italy except for Milan, where the Papal States had been displaced), they attacked me. I made Marseille revolt. Then I shifted north, and caused Dijon to revolt. Then I made Paris revolt. He's too busy trying to retake the cities that revolted to send any more armies at me, and in the meantime I loaded an army on the boats, sailed west, and snagged Toulouse out from under his nose.

[Werner]

• The enemy in general, or at least the target city, is especially prone to PO problems before you put your oar in.

If you don't have ALL the factors going for you, then IMHO don't waste your time with the assassin spam. Instead just build up an assault force and beseige and/or storm the place as usual.

Not at all. First, the city does not have to be prone to PO problems for this strategy to work. It will take its toll after the first turn of damage to public order buildings. Second this strategy isn't just for the one city, its for their whole faction. See when you build a big army and siege a city, you capture the city (assuming you win) and most likely you get a fair amount of casualties yourself, no matter how good you are the spacing for besieging cities is horrible and you know as good as I do that even the most elite heavy infantry can get slottered because they are 10 meters apart from eachother. But aside from that bug, when you spam assassin's on a city, not only are you seriously weakening the structural integrity of that city, but your sapping the strength of the entire faction to repair it (which they will) and training an elite spy/assassin network that you can use for the rest of the game.

Here's something else I forgot to mention in my original post. When attacking the cities with your assassins, its especially entertaining and very beneficial to envoke religious problems. In other words, continually blow up the church and kill off any priests in the area. The inquisitors will come flocking, I've seen it happen Now they've got real problems. The assassin spamming does work and for a fraction of the cost of an army capable of taking a large well defended city.

[katank]

The title is still quite misleading. I thought this was going to be ways to make ladders/siege towers actually useful in sieges.

Is this really worth the trouble though? I can see this done on a smaller scale. A series of field armies with a wave of spies running before them to open gates and assasins to drop generals before battles to both remove a unit of heavy cav, reduce their commanding talent, and morale penalty for their troops seems more effective.

I see your guide as more of a cheapo subterfuge training/stealthily screw over a faction rather than taking walls.

As for high end shock infantry getting screwed in siege battles, the answer is to simply send waves of expendable spear militia at the enemy. Just as bad casualties but much easier/cheaper to replace.

[Werner]

I see your guide as more of a cheapo subterfuge training/stealthily screw over a faction rather than taking walls...the answer is to simply send waves of expendable spear militia at the enemy. Just as bad casualties but much easier/cheaper to replace.

No ones telling you to do it this way but it solves alot of the issues and 50% of the threads on this forum about spy's and assassins not ranking up.

[Somebody Else]

My method. Buy all the castles/fortresses/citadels the enemy has for 10,000 a pop. Then crush their militia in their towns/cities with your military.

Course, having in excess of 100,000 in the bank is handy. But hey, plundering Jerusalem usually yields about 30 thou...

[Bullethead]

Not at all. First, the city does not have to be prone to PO problems for this strategy to work. It will take its toll after the first turn of damage to public order buildings.

What I meant by the target being prone to PO problems is that the enemy is barely managing to keep the lid on the target province even with a large garrison and all the PO-buffing buildings. This could be due to religious differences, dislike of being owned by the enemy faction instead of its own or yours, and of course overpopulation, among others. I'm not talking about any particular province that's just hard-wired to be revolt-prone, if there are any in M2TW, although that would certainly help, too :).

I list this as a requirement because you want to take the province as quickly and cheaply as possible, so you decide between using brute force or assassin spam based on which does the better job. Time is money, so there's more to the equation than comparing the cost of the "terrorist cell" to the cost of an assault army (which you still need anyway--it just won't have to be quite so big). If the target province is not already a simmering cauldron of discontent, then it's either too small for the assassin spam to work at all (the garrison will maintain order even without PO buildings) or the loss of the PO buildings and all the other effects of assassin spam will take too long to produce results. During that time, you could have build up your assault army and taken the place the regular way already. Assassin spam will always help even in happy cities, but you often don't have the time to wait for its effects to build up.

Second this strategy isn't just for the one city, its for their whole faction.

I've always considered using assassins against a faction as a whole to be SOP :). However, you do this completely differently. Instead of spamming 1 city with many assassins, you send 1 or 2 assassins (and usually you need a spy as well) to many different enemy cities. Then you do coordinated strikes on the same type of building (such as money-makers) in each city. That's the main long-term mission, but of course you can hit targets of opportunity as well when they present themselves, and also key targets like the faction's only top-end stable or whatever.

You still take each city the old-fashioned way, although usually with some direct support from whatever spies and assassins are there. However, the main purpose of the assassins is to weaken the faction as a whole, so your armies have fewer forces and fewer high-dollar units to fight as they advance deeper into enemy territory. I think that's the best way of using the "special ops" guys--as a deep strategic support element, rather than a decisive difference-maker at each individual city.

[katank]

I guess I wasn't clear and I hope I didn't offend Werner.

This is a great way to train up your agents. As to quickest or most effective way to take a city, that's hard to say. A storming aided by a spy or two is probably the most direct (not too expensive and quickest). Note that you have to repair all the damaged infrastructure when you take over (it's a cost to you too) not to mention all the turns of lost profits when you wait around for your agents to do the work.

However, the way is certainly sneaky and could drain the power out of a fellow catholic faction without open war. This certainly has its benefits.

[Quillan]

I hadn't thought of it in that context, Katank, but that is a good idea. Park your army near the city you'd like to take. Send in the swarm, make it revolt. Now that it's rebel, you don't anger anyone by swooping in and laying siege to it. Not the Pope, not the target faction, not his allies, nobody.

[Werner]

I hadn't thought of it in that context, Katank, but that is a good idea. Park your army near the city you'd like to take. Send in the swarm, make it revolt. Now that it's rebel, you don't anger anyone by swooping in and laying siege to it. Not the Pope, not the target faction, not his allies, nobody.

Exactly

[Oaty]

Thats also the secret to getting the papal faction to expand

[Daveybaby]

Werner, good stuff, but that would be a lot easier to read if you broke it up into half a dozen paragraphs.

[Dr.Strangelove]

Some may consider this cheating, but save-reload when using this strategy will save you time(game time not real time ), money, agents, agents' skill and relations with factions whom you are not already in war with. It could be boring though...

Anyway as Katank pointed out, this strategy is the best when dealing with fellow catholic factions.

Interesting thread Werner .

[Beren Son Of Barahi]

this method is the way i deal with those annoying mongals, i tired them up for so long with spies and assassins that they start having having problems at home and with their family.

i also disable any nasty towers before i seige a city with an army. very effective. 2 spies and 2 ass. in front of your army can be very effective.

[Shahed]

Nice ideas !

I did this on Thessaloniki, produced a max skill assassin out of it. The dissent isn't worth much IMO, unless you are taking the city from a faction you are not at war with. but the fact the repairs drain the enemy treasury is !

lmao @ ur sig ! That's funny.

[katank]

@Beren, you could sabotage towers? Wow, that would be pretty nice. Cannon towers especially are a pain considering that they can outrange trebs.

[Quillan]

Yes, the improved towers can be sabotaged, and that has become a staple of my assault strategy. Scout first with spy, sabotage any ballista/cannon towers, then lay siege.

[DensterNY]

Although not exactly a strategy to take the walls, Werner you gave us a greate guideline on training up your spies and assassins and in general causing mischief to everyone friend and foe alike.

I especially like the idea of making a large city rebel and then taking it over and your plan works great when you have a neighboring nation and you both have that awkward standing truce.

King to King: "Listen, I have no idea why your neighboring cities and castles are catching on fire and your relatives are dying... must not be praying hard enough, shall I mention this to the pope?" - hehe

[Werner]

There are many different ways to impliment this strategy. The original thread depicted a more extream way of crushing an enemy city, especially something big like a capital or huge town...etc..

However, how you use your assas/spies is up to you and sometimes it helps to do this with less numbers all around the enemy kingdom. It just depends on how much money they are making at one time and what kind of army they are able to amass.