Return of the Jedi (generals that is!)

[Tristrem]

In my current long campaign as turkey, I have seen the return of the jedi general. My latest is my faction leader Tutush the Mauler. He is a 6 star general the +2 star attacker trait, and +1 for night battles. He has four cheverons, (first silver one), and this a whopping total of 14 hit points. At the moment he can take on small armies all by himself .
Has anyone else groomed a comparable general?

P.S. I would have a screenshot but I do not know how to take them!!

[OMGLAZERS]

In my campaign i've got at least four generals that have maxed out or more stars and that is not including the attacking, defending, while commanding, or night battle traits factored in.

Generals can be uber if the player is good enough to use them properly.

[Bijo]

To take a screenshot, press PrintScreen. They appear as .TGAs in the tga folder, so you'll need a tga viewer for that (like IrfanView).

[Derfasciti]

I believe it was on my French VH/VH (or H/H) I had a prince of the royal family have 9 stars in regular battles and 10 at night. I didn't purposefully set out for him to get like that but I guess I used him a lot and he survived all of the battles he was in.

I was able to execute a good fighting retreat through the alps against the Germans when both them, the Milanese and the Venetians attacked his army.

[clairvaux]

I was wondering about hit points, is if for the whole unit or just the general himself?

[Durallan]

its the general himself although if he has enough experience and command points his bodguard can be freaking hard to kill with just arrows

[Rilder]

my generals always die when they fight hand to hand so I just set them off to the side to give moral bonuses :P

[Nakorite]

You can get generals with obscenely high stats so long as you really micromanage them in battle. I had my faction heir complete a crusade when he was 18, and shortly after survived 3 sieges in a row from Egypt.. He ended up with 10 command, but he was also a strong attacker, strong defender, genious (born with), wall talker etc etc. Oh and his body guard are 3 gold. Worked out he was at least 19 star general, AND he was brutally scarred (can any mortal blow fell him?)

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Artillery helps.

[katank]

I believe the original Jedi terminology is not concentrated on the number of command stars but rather how they can singlehandedly wipe out whole units and armies due to their strong hitpoints. Hence, practically unkillable in battle.

I've sent useless Byz princes on suicide missions against full stacks only to have them survive and become useful in original MTW.

That is now no longer the case. Generals fall fairly easily most of the time. Naturally, artillery ignores all hitpoints as do naffatuns' naptha bombs (long time fan favorite for dealing with generals).

In fact, I think that sometimes they die a bit too easily. In my Russian campaigns, my generals are made of paper! There's been 4 or 5 battles practically in a row now where the general drops dead with less than 20% casualties in his BG unit. One instance was particularly ridiculous. He was charging some archers at the beginning of the battle. I notice that one man in the BG unit dies. Who but the silly general with the plumed helmet all sprawled on the snow! Gah!

[Musashi]

Heh, if you've played around with the give_trait and give_ancillary cheats, you'll find that the max hit points is rather staggering, something like 28, with the holy grail and apothecary.

[LordKhaine]

I've generally found generals about right. Enough to use in battle but weak enough that you must keep an eye on them because it doesn't take much to go wrong to end up with a dead general.

Got a bit of a nasty suprise the other day when my heir to the Russian throne got killed by peasent archers. I pulled his unit out but somehow he got stuck within the peasents and kept fighting, and against an entire unit even a prince wont last long. To make it worse his name was Vladimir, so I suffered the greater loss of missing out on a monarch with such a great name. Probably ended up with someone called Jeff instead :(

[PureFodder]

Nothing in M2TW beats the time in MTW when I sent something like 400 Saracen infantry spearmen against a king and his bodyguards. Killed the bodyguards loosing about 30 men then the king slowly but surely kills his way through the surrounding mob of 370 till the last 50 fled in panic from his uber-Royal highness.

Made me want to cry in frustration.

In M2TW Javelin cavalry seem to do the trick very nicely.

[Doug-Thompson]

I ran into a Jedi heretic. Only two "halos" of piety on him and he resists two turns of attacks on him by five different imans, each with at least a 20 percent chance of getting him and two with more than 40 percent. Killed him on the third turn, though.

[Sheogorath]

I believe the original Jedi terminology is not concentrated on the number of command stars but rather how they can singlehandedly wipe out whole units and armies due to their strong hitpoints. Hence, practically unkillable in battle.

I've sent useless Byz princes on suicide missions against full stacks only to have them survive and become useful in original MTW.

That is now no longer the case. Generals fall fairly easily most of the time. Naturally, artillery ignores all hitpoints as do naffatuns' naptha bombs (long time fan favorite for dealing with generals).

In fact, I think that sometimes they die a bit too easily. In my Russian campaigns, my generals are made of paper! There's been 4 or 5 battles practically in a row now where the general drops dead with less than 20% casualties in his BG unit. One instance was particularly ridiculous. He was charging some archers at the beginning of the battle. I notice that one man in the BG unit dies. Who but the silly general with the plumed helmet all sprawled on the snow! Gah!

On a side note, I've noticed in my experiments (in skirmish mode, that is) that the AI general is almost ALWAYS the last one to die in a unit, or very close to it.
I recall a vision of an Egyptian general's horse standing on a pile of corpses watching happily as volley after volley of arrows and musket balls felled his bodyguards.

[Aelwyn]

Best thing imo is, don't be stingy with the babies and weak generals. Everytime I seem to send someone on a suicide mission, they come out fiending for blood. Its the people who start off looking good on paper that end up dying 'like paper'.

[Tristrem]

I think this was more common in MTW, because the general was just a random member of the bodyguard. Therefore you had to kill the whole unit to kill the general. With the new bodyguards, the general is one specific soldier. Therefore he is much easier to kill. However, I still miss the original jedi katanks, with 16 valour, lightsabers, and jedi mind tricks that allowed them to make you think you could kill them. Ahh... Those were the days.

[katank]

I remember being soo happy to play Muslim factions so I get naptha throwers. Cheap spear to pin, run naptha thrower behind the enemy general, fire away. Lots of explosions later, enemy general is down and half a unit of those spears are running away screaming. Great trade

Generals are pretty good. From personal experience though, it seems Russian generals die like crazy. Nothing to suggest it statwise. It just happens in my games. My roommate's playing a Russian game and it happens to him too. Some kinda faction specific thing? I've seen Mongol generals survive arrows storms before and living to tell the tale!

[Martok]

As much as I love MTW, I confess I don't care for Jedi generals one bit; they're simply way too unbalancing. They're great for those few factions that start with them (Byz, Spanish, etc.), but overall they're not worth it. They're too frustrating to deal with when your opponent has one commanding the battle. The only way to kill him off without huge losses is to pepper him missile fire, and that can take a long time if you don't have some sort of crossbow unit.

Of course, they died a little *too* easily in Rome--it went from one extreme to the other. I hope this has been fixed in Medieval 2, so that they're now balanced somewhere between "god-like" and "dies from a papercut". I haven't yet been able to play the game often to really tell whether this has been rectified, however.

[Musashi]

To be fair, the uber jedi type generals are hard to get. To get the scarred trait set started, your general has to actually lose a hit point in battle, and not die. And he only has two to start with...

And even if you managed to get the maximum possible 28 or whatever hit points (Which requires you to have gained the holy grail on a crusade) he can still be felled by a single lucky artillery shot.

They sure can mop the floor with a ton of troops in melee when they get like that though.

[Spark]

I always use my generals very aggressively. They often develop the scarred trait or die trying :P

It's an extremely good trait to have, though, since the bodyguards are extremely strong heavy cavalry that will replenish themselves as long as the general is alive. I always pay very close attention to the general in battle, to make sure he gets in the thick of it but is rarely in danger of dying. Usually when he gets quite bloodied after fighting (one of my generals with the top tier scarred trait gets almost completely covered in blood before I can't take it anymore and pull him out ), that's the sign to get him outta there.

[Ironside]

I think this was more common in MTW, because the general was just a random member of the bodyguard. Therefore you had to kill the whole unit to kill the general. With the new bodyguards, the general is one specific soldier. Therefore he is much easier to kill. However, I still miss the original jedi katanks, with 16 valour, lightsabers, and jedi mind tricks that allowed them to make you think you could kill them. Ahh... Those were the days.

For MTW, the general (or captain for that matter) is actually the banner carrier in battle, making the wedge a quite interesting formation as it places the general first. On the other hand, the focus point of the wedge in a frontal charge is on the general.

So you could instantly kill kings (or lose one if charging the wrong unit) in one charge in MTW, using the wedge formation. Was quite easy to do in v 1.1, after that, it was trickier to pull it off.

[sapi]

I've seen some true cpu jedi generals, the most startling of which was when it took two vollies form a full strength crossbow unit to kill a general and one bodyguard.

The general ended up with a trail of blood-red 'hit spots' in the air behind him and he was up to his dozenth hit when he died :P

[katank]

I've seen AI generals (1 man) standing up for quite a while to 6 xbow units focus firing on them. The amazing number of blood puffs in air can be hilarious. Mongol generals have also been able to survive amazingly long with 10+ of my horse archers shooting at his lonesome.

As for scarred thing, I think your general has more than 2 hitpoints to begin with. Probably 3 or 4 but likely no more than 6. He certainly dies a lot less than his bodyguards which have 2 HP.

[Rhyfelwyr]

At least there's no longer the constant suicide charges of the Generals and their bodyguards in RTW. To be honest, I think the M2TW balance for Generals is just right, shame that the charges of the bodyguards rarely work though.

[Blademun]

heh, I remember one time I was engaged in one hell of a battle. I forget exactly who I was and who they were, but I remember very clearly how bad the odds were stacked against me. It was a critical fight for some piece of open land. The balance of power bar only had 1/4 full of blue, maybe less then that. The army came and I did my very best defensive battle but of course for the most part my army was routed, except for....

My general, and one trully loyal unit of peasant archers. The main body of my enemys army chased after my peasant archer, who kept skirmishing away. Meanwhile, my general struck at their artillery. I took down 3 or 4 of their crews, and the chevrons began to pile on. Then some of their main units pulled away from the archer chase and went after my general. I repeatedly formed-charged them to break them, but I lost many of the bodyguard, until it was just the general. I kept him going after a few straggler units, archers, ect. The ragged army that had chased my lone archer to one end of the map, came all the way back, looked at the pile of bodys my general had stacked.....and routed. I was shocked. My general then proceded to run down the 200 or so men they had left.

I think by the end of the battle, he had singlehandedly taken down like 75 men, and his BG another 150....

On a side note, most of my generals are brutally scarred and have Shieldbearer/veteran warrior traits. I use my BG's alot ^_^