Saved Games

[Mortimer]

Does anyone have any saved games with eastern factions in the era the Mongols or Timurids arrive? I'd like to see how other people built up armies and forts, and cities. Also how they were doing diplomatically.

[Flavius Gonzo]

I fought off the Mongols reasonable well in my Turkish campaign. Here were the key aspects of my strategy:

1) Built up Baghdad & Mosul as key military centers. (Since they're at the edge of the map, it's easy to think to use them as something else.)
2) Alliances with Poland and Russia to the north, military access with Poland, immediately to the north in Sarkel (my most northern province was Tbilisi at the time.) In hindsight, this didn't buy me anything, except possibly preventing a Polish invasion at an inopportune time. Good relations with the Moors, Egypt was already destroyed.
3) 3 full stacks deployed at river crossings near Bagdhad. (IIRC, you get warned 2-3 turns before the Mongols arrive where they will go, so you have time adjust accordingly provided the troops are there.)
4) Mosul and Baghdad near full stacks.
5) ALL of my night fighter generals in the Mosul-Baghdad area. This is pretty important I think, as it enables you to fight Mongol stacks one on one.
6) My stacks were mixes of Siphais, Ottomans, Janny Heavies, Trebs, and some Sacarens to protect the arty, perhaps a unit of Naffutun or two -- handy for targeting the enemy general. Battle Strategy was to wear down the tougher cavalry units with the arty, the duel it out with the archers, while moving the heavy infantry forward. Most battles I fought out in the open.
7) Rock star assassins on the eastern front. In conjunction with night fighters, this is huge -- if two mongol stacks end a turn side by side, you can fight them one on one by assasinating one general and then attacking the remaining general with a night fighter.

This made the mongol invasion pretty easy to deal with, but it came at a cost -- building up those armies crippled my economy making my western front very weak. Smaller armies cowering behind city walls might have been better in the long run, who knows, but with the eastern med cities being my economic strongholds, I didn't want to risk it -- if the Khans had taken Antioch or Alexandria it would have been a disaster.