The Dead Zone Defense

[Bearclaw]

Hello all,
Playing as the Turks, I expanded quickly with horse archers and pushed Egypt and the Byzantines back pretty easily, as well as expanding north and taking out Russia. I'm the kind of player who likes to pick his battles: I like having secure borders and fighting only when I've been able to build the army I want and get it into position. However, the computer is always against me, since the AI tends to attack as soon as your borders touch his, regardless of alliances. Around turn 50 Egypt's military power had been broken and the Byzantines had been dropped from #1 Enemy to Perennial Nuisance.

At this point, I felt secure in my southern border, with a vast desert between me and the Moors once I mopped up Egypt. In the North, Russia was a tiny nation that was already shrinking as two full horse archer armies swept through. However, at Constantinople, the Byzantines sent occasional armies at me and Hungary declared war as well. For me, it was simply unacceptable to have one of my best financial centers under siege most of the time; I also knew that most crusades would need to march through Constantinople to get into my homelands. So I devised a strategy that would bring cash into my economy, weaken my enemies and prevent them from attacking Constantinople, and also give me plenty of battle-map action and experienced units.

It should be noted that this really only works if you have no intentions of expanding in a particular direction. I hate getting tangled up in mainland Europe; far too many different factions with cities in close proximity. On to the strategy:

1. Decide where you want to stop your expansion in a prticular direction.
2. Build 1-2 large armies of capable units. The success or failure of these armies will not decide the fate of your nation, so if you're low on cash, weaker units are okay. For the Turks, I would suggest 19 Sipahis and one general (any horse archer would work, but Sipahis can charge better). This is the army configuration I use.
3. Sack all the cities along your chosen defensive line, destroy all the buildings, and let them revolt. I suggest also converting castles to cities so that it can't start pumping out knights if one of your Christian enemies retakes it, and also to make it easier for you to siege if he does.
4. Continue sacking cities until you have a 2-province-wide dead zone between you and your nearest enemies.

This has worked beautifully for me, as Constantinople hasn't seen a siege since I started this program. My personal dead zone consists of Thessalonica, Durazzo, Sofia, Zagreb, Iasi, Bran, and Bucharest, all controlled by large rebel garrisons. Enemy nations will not march through the dead zone to attack you; instead, they just siege the closest city. I have my original two armies that created the dead zone patrolling it now, attacking smaller stacks and generally beaing a nuisance. Horse archers seem to work best for this, since they can destroy many armies with few losses and move much faster on the campaign map, which allows me to patrol a larger area and use hit-and-run tactics. Minor maintenance is necessary, as your enemies would slowly reabsorb the rebel cities if left alone. However, the rebels do a very decent job of guarding your borders for you, since most of the cities have very large garrisons, and I have yet to see Hungary or Venice retake one of the rebel cities.

I realize that many people would rather occupy the cities they conquer, and won't be interested in this strategy. However, I think it's a very good option for those of us who wish that diplomacy would yield some long-lasting, reliable alliances.


Comments?

[Morindin]

I tend to do exactly the same thing myself (and in MTW), particulary if im caught up in Europe with too many wars and too large a border. I just send out rading parties to go demolish everything in sight with the idea of pillaging, destroying, and weakening. Elsewhere I expand in a more safe direction.

Trying to expand through central Europe can be a nightmare, so this strategy works well.

[PureFodder]

I've been having a go at this, an interesting tactic that can also help if you're Catholic or often kill lots of catholics;

Raid an enemy settlement, sack it, sell all the buildings, get your troop out, leaving one token city defender unit and wait till the enemy try to get it back. Now sell the settlement cheaply to the Pope for 3-6k.

You get a huge reputation boost from the pope, the attacking faction looses reputation for being on Papal soil and will often blindly attempt to attack the settlement anyway getting themselves excommunicated. Quite often the settlement will rebel anyway as the Pope can't reinforce the place fast enough. I suckered Milan and Sicily into this. I've sold the pope 4 regions now and all of them either fell to rebels or to the faction I stole it off.

Despite killing off the Spanish, the Portugeese, Sicillians, most of the French and Millaneese and despite being an Islamic country I've still got better relations with the Pope that ever did as the English.

[KARTLOS]

a good aproach for islamites - as a catholic donating the unwanted provinces to the papacy gives you a very relaible border

[Vladimir]

Agreed: If you're Catholic, it's better to use the Pope shield.

[Bearclaw]

Actually, I used the Pope Shield on my Sicilian campaign and failed to recognize the similarities. I suppose the Pope Shield could still work for Muslims, but in my Sicilian campaign I gave the Pope so many provinces that he started acting like a regular nation, wiping out the Venetians and joining a crusade. So I'm not sure that handing your border territories over to the Christian leader is a good choice. I suppose it would be more effective at keeping your other enemies at bay, although in a few circumstances the territories I gave to the Pope in my Sicilian campaign were almost immediately reconquered by their original owners, Christian or not. It might be worth it if it keeps crusades away from you, but crusades are called by the other Christian nations, and in my experience as Sicily it didn't take very many crosses on the Popometer to persuade him to call a crusade. If anyone has more info on that, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

[Whacker]

This is an outstanding tactic Bearclaw, I just started to realize the same thing inadvertantly in my current campaign as I had 3 towns rebel at the same time when I overextended myself. It effectively cut off the remaining Danes and HRE on my Eastern front and made a nice buffer.

Some comments and thoughts to add on to this:

1. Depending on how confident you are in your border patrolling activities, sometimes one can make do with 1 army. Make sure you have at least a castle or two in the area to help replenish stacks. I've noticed that later in the game the AI factions tend to roam around with much bigger stacks, sometimes multiple stacks.

2. As a logical extension to 1., I try to ensure that I only have 1 or 2 moving fronts at a time. Playing as the English makes this somewhat easy, I stopped after taking Iberia and planted a fort near the land bridge. So far after 20 turns the Moors have refused all my peace efforts (wonder why? ) but they haven't tried any invasions by sea. The AI in 1.1 seems to be much more prone to sea invasions, case and point Denmark showing up and sieging Edinburgh twice before I beat them off and they called a truce. The other logical barrier that I found in Europe is a N/S line starting with Flanders (or whatever that town is called that's SW of Denmark, straight south to the town that used to be Mediolanium (iirc). Sorry for screwing up and not remembering names. Change all these to castles and keep a solid garrison, and employ Bearclaw's tactic and you should be fine to expand in Africa. You'll easily need 2 stacks here though, 1 north and 1 south dedicated to keeping Milan/Venice/Pope-o-matic off your back and to maintain that buffer.

3. While I agree w/Bearclaw that making the barriers as cities makes them easier to take later on, making them castles tends to give the AI a much harder time, at least from my observations. It also makes it harder for you to take them back and re-sack if needed, but it does provide for a much, much stronger DMZ.

Cheers!