Spain vs. the Mongols

[~Isabella of Castile~]

hi, I'm posting this for help on battle tactics against the Mongols, while playing as Spain, I've conquered France (and England's Caen, but re-Allied with England after then, while keeping Caen) and I've taken the Holy Roman Empire's Lands as well as Milan, Venice, Sardinia and Corsica, the farthest in Italy I am is Florence (not including the islands) and I half a tiny bit of Poland. the remaining Euro factions are: Spain (me), the Papal States, Sicily, England, Denmark, Hungary. and the Turks have taken Byzantion and the Mongols are just finishing up Russia. I've heard the Mongols are cavalry dependant, so lots of Spears?

[PaulTa]

I wouldn't know from experience, but I would say Musketeers if you're that far along. Pikes too, probably.

If you find any, try to snag merc elephants. :D

[Snipafist]

Mongols are pre-gunpowder, so you're left without those options. My suggestions are to field lots of shooting troops, as the Mongols are very missile-dependent (many horse and foot archers). Pavise crossbowmen do a fine job there, being good shooters and good at taking return shots with their high defense rating. Beyond that, I'd take a couple Tercio pikemen units to round out your defenses for when the Mongol Lancers come after you. A couple heavy cav units wouldn't hurt for counter-charging as well.

If the Mongols come at you in force, don't try taking them on the battlefield. Instead, sequester yourself inside a well-defended settlement (preferably a castle) and load up on sword and buckler men to hold the walls and pavise crossbowmen to shoot at everything else. A couple pikemen units to guard the gates would be advised as well. Mongols really suffer in sieges because they're so cav-based, so take advantage of this.

[~Isabella of Castile~]

what about Bridges? I've found out the Mongols aren't good swimmers. XD

[Skott]

Let them die assaulting your cities. Fight them on the walls and in the city streets. I prefer the city streets vs walls but thats just me. After a couple failed attempts they are too weak to do much else. Then mop them up with a couple of armies well supplied in ranged weapon units. Mongols lose in a war of attrition.

[~Isabella of Castile~]

yeah, so wear them out then attack them, but they have captured nearly all of Russia... so won't that help them?

[LordKhaine]

Probably best not to try and use missles against them. Virtually all their units have a bow, so you cannot hope to win a shoot out unless you also pack half an army of missles. And then they can just whomp you in melee.

Pack as many horses as you can. Try and tempt them into melee against heavy infantry and then surround them with horse. Their stengths are in missle fire and the charge, so you have to take both of these away and encourage a protracted melee. Also try to engage them in a forest. And of course as mentioned above a bridge is perfect. Get some pikes, muskets and arty at a bridge and you can hold virtually anything they have. Well I say pikes, but they don't seem to hold a charge at all in MTW2. I miss the phalanx from RTW!

[Forward Observer]

In my current Spanish campaign the Mongols appeared in the Holy Land somewhere between 1274 and 1280, which is post gunpowder, so I have been able to field both bombards and ribaults against them. I think they also get bombards and those multiple rocket launchers which I am not sure they ever had in reality. I've read here that they can re-emerge up to 3 times so you might run into them in just about any period.

If they invade through the steppes as they did in my English campaign, they may be diluted from previous battles with other factions. Your best bet here besides fighting fortification defenses is to try an fight them in heavily wooded areas--both of these situations put their highly mobile cavalry at a disadvantage.

If they invade through the Holy Land it is a whole new ball game. You have to be very careful about challenging them in level open terrain unless you have them out manned and out gunned.

In my current game they showed up with 12 or 13 full stacks and not a general below 5 stars. The top general has 10 stars.

As several have indicated bridge battles are good since the Mongols are forced to funnel their cavalry accrues the narrow bridge right into your waiting spearmen and archers. That and castle defenses are your best bet. I also followed another hint that someone gave of building up a hit squad of high level assassins to take out as many of their generals as possible and this has helped.

I have whittled their numbers down to only 4.5 stacks now, so it is only a matter of time.

Cheers

[TevashSzat]

Get some all cavalry armies. When in battle, split up your army into two parts and send each part to run down horse archers. Do not worry if the ha just skirmish away, but they will enter melee eventually and die. Keep on doing that till of of the enemy cavalry is dead and then just sandwhich the infantry that is left

[~Isabella of Castile~]

If they invade through the steppes as they did in my English campaign, they may be diluted from previous battles with other factions. Your best bet here besides fighting fortification defenses is to try an fight them in heavily wooded areas--both of these situations put their highly mobile cavalry at a disadvantage.

yeah, they came thru the steppes, and I've been holding them back on bridges to my lands XD
I've been holding them back easily, the old combo of them running into spears and getting shot by archers after bunching up. it's fun to ignite the arrows on their crowded up arses >: D

Get some all cavalry armies. When in battle, split up your army into two parts and send each part to run down horse archers. Do not worry if the ha just skirmish away, but they will enter melee eventually and die. Keep on doing that till of of the enemy cavalry is dead and then just sandwhich the infantry that is left

I'm on normal because hard frustrated me (XD) normal is actually fun because the Mongols are hard and challenging but I can beat them if I plan well. and I tend not to include much cavalry because I don't do much chasing of them unless they bring lots of archers, or if they're smart with them. (all the times they've been dumb is when their archers got bunched up with their melee cavalry and got slaughtered XD)

[Merciless_Doge]

I'm the lead country (Spain) on a crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Mongols. I won two very close victories, propelling my leading general to 10 stars...but any attempt to actually retake Jerusalem has been a failure. The Mongols were even wise enough to assassinate my 10 star general before attacking my beseiging army. It's a great challenge to face them in open terrain - their reliance on missile cavalry is their weakness, but in doing so they are able to cut your infantry forces in half before they charge with their Heavy Mongol Lancers. Beware...I am starting to take the approach of not even worrying about setting up artillery, I'm just attacking brute force as fast as possible to push them back. Heavy cavalry, especially Gerdarmes (if you can afford them) pack a punch. Also be aware that the Mongolian general bodyguard units *must* be one of the toughest to bring down in the entire game.

[TevashSzat]

In my view, using infantry heavy armies against mongols is playing to their strengths which is excellent mobility and strong missle support which means it is better to have good cavalry to try to counter their weakness

[Doug-Thompson]

1. Killing them in bridge or river crossing battles is definitely the best bet. It negates their mobility and doesn't leave you penned up in your cities.

2. The advice to take them on in wooded areas is good, too.

3. Jinetes have a much higher melee value than regular Mongol horse archers, and jinete javelins are effective against lancers. Further, they jinetes can get in range to throw their javellins before triggering auto-skirmish on the HA. Consider putting some good melee cav and jinetes together in an all-cavalry stack and use them to fight fire with fire, especially after you've crippled some Mongol stacks and want to kill off the partial ones.

Attack, attack, attack. You can replace your losses. The Mongols can't, or not fast enough, anyway.

[RabidGibbon]

I beat a horse heavy Mongol army with a danish all mercenary force (admittedly not one of their super experienced ones) by forming 3 lines of archers and turning off skirmish, when the Mongols charged the first line I fired into the melee with the other two lines, and repeated when they broke through to the second line before counter charging with a couple of heavy cavalry. It was expensive but it worked...

[DukeKent]

Has anyone fought the Mongols in a Multiplayer hotseat campaign yet? I am currently on turn 61 playing a multiplayer hotseat campaign as the Spanish and the Turks. Adds extra flavor to the game playing multiple factions at once. One huge down side of the multiplayer campaign is that when the AI attacks one of the "human" factions the battles are auto resolved Is their a way to turn off the auto-resolve of battles/sieges when the AI attacks in a multiplayer hotseat campaign? This has not been a real problem in the game so far as I believe in picking my battles and battlefields by attacking, and I only auto resolve the trivial battles/sieges I don't want to be bothered with. Not sure my standard attacking strategy will be valid against the mongols when they clump multiple stacks next to each other. I don't trust the AI to control my other stacks, even if I could match the # of mongol stacks. I have also noticed that the attacker seems to win auto resolved seige battles with few casulties. So I don't trust the "beat the mongols in the city/castle streets" strategy in auto resolved sieges either. I have read in other postings that HA's are not very good in auto resolved battles. So maybe that brings some hope, but I really want to whip the mongols on the battle field, not in some auto-resolution. Am I just $cr3wed do I have to play cat and mouse picking off straggler mongol stacks while the main horde has its way with my cities, or should I just start a new campaign with out the multiplayer hotseat AI attacker auto resolve problem? Did I say how much I hate the multiplayer hotseat AI attacker auto resolve problem

[SnowlyWhite]

Jinettes(prolly around 12) and some heavy cav. - bgs and santiago/some other heavy cav.

You'll normally catch their ha's with your jinettes(only their light ones are fast moving, so you definitelly catch the heavy ones) plus you outshoot them anyway due to javs. being good against ponnies. And use the heavy cav. to plow his infantry(the light FAs are easy enough, the heavy inf. however is actually tough cookie despite their stats, but... no pain, no gain). Also, killing their general with concentrated fire from 3-4 jinettes at the start might help. Used this tactic as byzantium(vards instead of jinettes) and it worked flawlessly; and in my book, jinettes are unfortunatelly > vards(less ammo, however way higher punch/shot, especially where you're interested, that is against cav.)

If you want to go on foot... prolly many pavises and some heavy inf. to hold the line; but then you won't have enough room for both jinettes(those you need anyway, since with fast moving you catch the routed enemy cav. - if you don't catch their cav., youb basically left 1/2 of their stack be) and heavy cav. And without mobility... things might not be too fun. Dunno, I wouldn't go on foot vs them, but then I don't really like infantry anyway, so I'm rather biased at this point.

Also, luckily, the computer plays much more agressively then it normally does, so it'd be good if you'd be more or less on the ball all the time(be ready to charge, countercharge and run often - charging and letting the units do their voodoo won't work for once).

If you want the easy way... camp the bridges(here the ai is awful as usual) and defend in sieges(again, as awful as usual).

[Merciless_Doge]

In a more recent battle of the same campaign I mentioned before (as Spain, a crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Mongols) - I noticed that the Mongols are very wary of heavy artrillery. Now, I don't know if this is just me looking into it too much - but literally, they became "scared" as they approached the behemoths. At one point they left their army back as far as possible and each time my basiliks would put a dent into their numbers, they would move further back out of range.

[Marquis of Roland]

In my experience, fighting mongols with cav is not good. Their missile cav was too numerous and powerful against horses that are vulnerable to missile fire. Skirmishing with your own missile cav is difficult because their foot archers are long range (plus due to the Mongols coming out with triple silver chevron, their missile fire hurts more). Attempting to charge their foot archers will get you surrounded.

The best thing to do here IMO would be to bring lots of long range missile infantry yourself and, by using controlled selective firing, beat off their initial probing attacks with their HA and at the same time saving enough ammo for their main assault. Only fire at big concentrations of men and don't shoot at units already whittled down by missile fire. If you have pavise units, put them in front to draw the majority of their fire away from your other units (if you use a non-missile unit for this shielding purpose, the Mongols will ignore them and shoot your archers only). If you picked up some missile units that can deploy stakes, these will help you out during their main assault (bringing stake-deploying units can probably replace anti-cav infantry in your army, giving you more slots for missile units).

Since you'd want to put pavise units in front to draw fire, bringing musketeers, while having long range, would probably not be a great idea as they'll be decimated by higher volume fire from Mongols. I don't know if Spain has any other long range missile units, but if not you'll want to recruit some mercs.

If you're facing 2 or more armies (which you invariably will, as the Mongols travel in groups), you may want to bring trebuchets and/or cannon. Killing their general will help you save ammo for the upcoming armies and will reduce the amount of annoying 10-man units still lingering around the battlefield that you cannot waste missile fire on.

For dealing with Timurid elephants, rocket carts work pretty well in getting them frightened; you should time the volleys to get the elephants to run amok with a lot of enemy units around.

[The Teacher]

This is something i did a week ago. The mongs appeared in Turkey as I was Russian. They wiped out Turks, Egyptians, Byzantians etc... They were starting to look threating to me. I sent in lots of Spys and Assassins to cause citys to revolt. Once this happens the stacks zoom into those poor citys and forget the war with me. Whilst this was happening I had a chance to tech up and get ready for them. You can hold them off indefinatly with making their citys revolt.

Might be worth a go ..

[~Isabella of Castile~]

1. Killing them in bridge or river crossing battles is definitely the best bet. It negates their mobility and doesn't leave you penned up in your cities.

2. The advice to take them on in wooded areas is good, too.

3. Jinetes have a much higher melee value than regular Mongol horse archers, and jinete javelins are effective against lancers. Further, they jinetes can get in range to throw their javellins before triggering auto-skirmish on the HA. Consider putting some good melee cav and jinetes together in an all-cavalry stack and use them to fight fire with fire, especially after you've crippled some Mongol stacks and want to kill off the partial ones.

Attack, attack, attack. You can replace your losses. The Mongols can't, or not fast enough, anyway.

nice advice, thanks.

In a more recent battle of the same campaign I mentioned before (as Spain, a crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Mongols) - I noticed that the Mongols are very wary of heavy artrillery. Now, I don't know if this is just me looking into it too much - but literally, they became "scared" as they approached the behemoths. At one point they left their army back as far as possible and each time my basiliks would put a dent into their numbers, they would move further back out of range.

so, would this be a good combo? (using both blocks of advice)
lots of Jinettes, some heavy Cavalry such as Gendarmes, and some heavy artillery?

[GuyofJerusalem]

See this link for all the life changing answers you ever need:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=79195

[KHPike]

If you get caught on open ground, try to deploy your army on a hill overlooking his approach. After that you only need about 4-5 archers (especially long range crossbows). Because of your AP ability, long range and uphill advantage and approaching archer unit will get massacred before it even has a chance to get off a proper shot.

[dph948]

If you play a faction that can get to the area where they spawn (Egypt, Turkey, Byzantines, Russia are the biggies), there is a helpful little note I came across. Their armies spawned with only about a quarter of the force as infantry, and no artillery. After successfully repelling a series of sieges, I came to the following key points.
Army Composition (based off my personal preferences, though usually I'd go heavier on cav, and while I'm not an artillery fan, some might find it helpful):
~8 Archers/Javelins (maybe a 6/2 split)
~8 foot troops (spears, heavy inf)
~4 cav (including general)
~1 misc. (Standard for italians, artillery, etc.)
1 Spy (not essential against the first waves, but helpful when they start using agents
SIEGE TACTICS
Deployment: all missile units on walls (unless you opt to place stakes in gateway, also a helpful strategy), keeping some missile units on second or third walls where possible, cav in reserve, 1/2 infantry on walls
the Battle
1) STOP RAMS AT ALL COSTS
This is the most important step, as letting even 1 stack of mongol uber cavalry into the city immediately turns the battle into a bloodbath. As all mongol infantry will be archers, they fall to your archers easily and destroying the ram shouldnt be hard.
2) With the ram stopped, there will usually be around 2 siege towers and several ladders headed to your walls. Here, you can either direct your archers to focus on the attacking infantry, or take potshots at the cavalry. either way, some Mongols will reach the walls, where your infantry should be able to repel them promptly. With only 4-5 infantry units per stack, the hordes can easily be repelled by removing them, leaving them unable to take the city except via starvation. After a few battles, they will be effectively declawed, enabling you to deal with them in the field at your leisure.

If they do get into the walls when using the above setup (the ram stubbornly refuses to burn, or a unit gets lucky and captures the gatehouse, i send all my infantry to the gates to stop them, and keep archers pumping in arrows until they run out. When youve killed off what you can, send in the cavalry and pray.

[~Isabella of Castile~]

thanks for the details ppl :)