A must to exterminate now and then?

[dopp]

You don't have to, but it's way more fun now to do so in M2TW (even if a little counterproductive).

You only really need to massacre if you capture a settlement and religious unrest is very great or your army is too small to maintain control. If you pay attention to religion, lower taxes, install good governors, site your capital well and build carefully, you can maintain content or happy cities anywhere in your empire. And if the settlement is a castle, you don't need to worry at all as long as you keep a moderate garrison inside.

Citybuilding has been vastly improved and is much more fun than in RTW. BI was pretty good too, but the way culture penalties worked it was difficult to control cities with maxed-out buildings.

[TevashSzat]

Yep, in rtw it was crazy, Rome was impossible for me to rule being the Britons and i had to exterminate it every ten turns or so which was crazy since the rebel garrison would always be a full stack of high quality troops, but hey i owned all of western europe by that time....

[Forward Observer]

An exception to this may be if you capture a lone Muslim city such as Jerusalem or Antioch while on a Christian Crusade to the Holy Land.

First of all you are going to be a long way from your capital.

Secondly, you are in the middle of large non-Christan area and it will take time to convert any substantial number to your faith--not to mention that there may be more Imams around than you can counter at first.

You are also probably going to be stuck with the Governor/general who lead your crusade for quite some time.

Lastly, it may just take too much time and resources at to build up enough of those facilities that counter unrest such as higher level churches, town halls, and cat houses.

In my first English campaign, I took Jerusalem and only sacked it. I built everything I could but just could not get it under control. I kept a full stack in it, but I constantly lost troops and had to repair buildings from minor revolts. It eventually rebelled and my army got kicked out no less than twice.

The first time I recaptured it, I only sacked it for the money and went through the same sad process again. On the second recapture, I exterminated the population. Of course the financial return was only half, but from that point on I had the city under control, and never had another problem. It grew back into a standard large productive, mostly Christian city with no unrest.

Cheers

[Garnier]

You cant hope to conquer holy land cities and hold them. I usually sack the crusade target and then disband my army and sail the general home. Gets me a good general, lots of money, and very little cost for the whole thing. And I also give the city to one of my allies to let them kill some muslims.

[TevashSzat]

Spies also become a very big problem once the campaign passes on since for me, milan and venice always become assasin and spy spammers and i would easily get 3-4 spies in my borders cities as spanish easily. I have spies to counter them, but they just have too many and some will always get in wreaking havoc with my public order

[Laconic]

Squalor is much better here than it was in Rome, which is good, because I used the gift-city exploit to exterminate my populations (sorry, I wasn't going to fight a bunch of high-tech rebels from my developed cities). In Medieval II that doesn't work, gifting them to another faction gives them a garrison in that city right off the bat.

[dopp]

Spies also become a very big problem once the campaign passes on since for me, milan and venice always become assasin and spy spammers and i would easily get 3-4 spies in my borders cities as spanish easily. I have spies to counter them, but they just have too many and some will always get in wreaking havoc with my public order

Even with the spies, I generally get only a few riots, never a revolt. Spy influence is also capped, for one thing, plus Italy and most of Western Europe will be Catholic anyway, so you don't have to deal with religion (except for heretics). Now, if you take control of Jerusalem or something and the Fatimids send spies, you'll be in serious trouble.

[Musashi]

Garnier: I've held the holy land before. It's not hard, even with a crusade being called on turn ten I pulled it off. But I had prepared ahead of time. I sent my very first priest to the holy land on turn one... and every turn after that I kept producing more priests and sending them (Until I hit my priest cap). By the time my crusade army arrived the target zone was 60% catholic.

[lobo76]

there is something wrong if you have problem converting pple in the holy land. In the first place, the most prudent thing to do was to send stacks of priests to the holy land for 'training'. How else can you dominate the 'pope' quickly?

When my first crusade in my Spain campaign was called, i had 1 stack (each stack = 4 priests) already there, and another 4 in my boat with the army.

[LordKhaine]

You cant hope to conquer holy land cities and hold them.

Nonsense. In my Scottish game I've used a crusade to claim the holy lands and I've held them well. But it is a struggle to hold cities there, make no mistake. I only kept 2-3 cities there and surrounded them with castles. No matter where castles are, they are very very easy to keep happy.

Shame once a city hits a certain limit you can never turn it to a castle. Surely if you entire a city with 12K+ pop and you slaughter them, you should be able to build a castle? Just means it's annoying if you capture a city in a vunerable position since you have no ability to fortify it.

[nheero143]

An exception to this may be if you capture a lone Muslim city such as Jerusalem or Antioch while on a Christian Crusade to the Holy Land.

First of all you are going to be a long way from your capital.

Secondly, you are in the middle of large non-Christan area and it will take time to convert any substantial number to your faith--not to mention that there may be more Imams around than you can counter at first.

You are also probably going to be stuck with the Governor/general who lead your crusade for quite some time.

Lastly, it may just take too much time and resources at to build up enough of those facilities that counter unrest such as higher level churches, town halls, and cat houses.

In my first English campaign, I took Jerusalem and only sacked it. I built everything I could but just could not get it under control. I kept a full stack in it, but I constantly lost troops and had to repair buildings from minor revolts. It eventually rebelled and my army got kicked out no less than twice.

The first time I recaptured it, I only sacked it for the money and went through the same sad process again. On the second recapture, I exterminated the population. Of course the financial return was only half, but from that point on I had the city under control, and never had another problem. It grew back into a standard large productive, mostly Christian city with no unrest.

Cheers

This is the problem also when playing a muslim faction such as the Turks. Taking Christian cities is difficult and requires larger armies to suppress religious unrest until the religious improvements and other order improvements take effect. Conversely, taking Egypt is simple. No religious unrest.

I have a trick that I play on the Tuscan peninsula with my armies. The three cities Venice, Bologna and Florence can be reached by one move from each city, a standing army with a general in each city is required for order and two armies are required to defend against Papal and Danish invaders (from Milan and Genoa). So my trick is to bring my stack out of one city to attack the siege at another city. After I win the battle, I swap the armies for each city since they can't make it back to the city they came from. This has been going on for the last 15 moves or so, almost every turn. If an army gets caught out of the city, I have a revolt on my hands. Wearing them down gradually as my Roman citizens are gradually learning how to be Muslims.

I've taken Rome now and as I wear the Papal States and Danes down, I'll finally take Milan and Genoa. Meanwhile another crusade against Constantinople has been called, so my enemies just took another increase and there were already eight including Rebels. The only one that worries me though are the Timurids. I wonder if I can interest them in a holy war against Milan, now that they're bearing down on Damascus?