Scotts are weak... and here's why

[Sheogorath]

Awww, diddums get ums widdle fanny kicked?

Seriously, EVERY faction is weak if you dont use them right. The Scotts can OWN the English if used correctly, especially the AI English.
I almost always push the English off the islands very early in the game.

Like Ive said in the Scotts tactics topic:
Use your pikes to pin, then flank with your nobles. If you do this right, you will own every army that comes your way.
This is a problem with horse-archer based armies, but the Scotts are far enough away that they dont have to worry about that.

[CountMRVHS]

I'm trying H/VH Scots, no patch, with Carl's problem fixer. As usual in the British isles, I wish the AI factions were a bit more aggressive. It's around turn 50 and the English haven't even made an attempt on York or Caernarvon. I've been wanting to play a defensive game against the English, so I only have Edinburgh, Inverness, and Oslo. Turtling makes the Scots more interesting as they're quite poor; but still, that's no excuse for the English to leave their backdoor open. I'm curious about other people who claim they have to pull out all the stops to beat the English. How did the war start? What provinces do you own? It seems the English campaign AI is just too passive to be any kind of threat. I'll give it a few more decades, but...

[tsu33]

no faction is weak in a good player's hand, scotland has her own strength and weakness. They have some excellent early infantry which will plow through all the spear militia/sergeant spearmen the AI throw at you early in game. A mediocre archer unit and the same knight all the other catholic gets at the beginning. If you play right u can build a stable economy base and conquer the rest of the world. With that being said scotland really dont have much good "elite" units later on. no offensive infantry, no "uber" cavalry, no HA, no long range missile troop or advance gunpowder units. Their best unit, the noble pikemen is only good at holding the other unit in place, and they tent to act more like swordsment than pikemen , a good calvary commander can easily flank them due to the fact most nations has better calvary than scotland; not to mention 2H offensive infantry just mow through the nobles with the 2H bug fix applied.

[zstajerski]

The scottish rule...

You have the best spears in the game plus fanatical infantry, and what consernes the cavalry:
every catholic faction can have hospitaler knights or any other religious knight order, and they all kick ass

And for eaven my surprise (since it is true that the english army is more well rounded and if you ask me "hardcore") in almoast every secund game i play (VH/VH) they drive the english away from the isles

edit:
not to mention the highland noble archers, they can stand their ground eaven against yeoman archers only with retinue longbowmen or Sherwood archers can you clearly defeat them...

[Carl]

All right, I'm an avid infantry fan, and thus love Scots.

First I'll address a point raised in a post just above this: If you apply a 2-Hander Fix you HAVE to make sure the Highland Noble are altered to fit the new 2-Hander balance, they where balanced to be competitive, (in relation to their price), with the bugged 2-handers and the shield bug in place. Fixing either of those requires a large power up of Highland Nobles to keep them in the same place in relation to other units in the other armies army. DEK will still win, but it will be a very close cut thing, AND the Highland Nobles are available a full 3 tiers earlier.


Onto The rest of it.

Another misconception is that the pikes are only good for pinning. Actually they are excellent fighters even without a Pike Fix if you put the micromanagement in. Do that and they will kill ANYTHING you put in front of them. The cheapest Scottish Pikes are Scots Pike Militia. They turn up a full 3 Tiers earlier than ordinary Pike Militia do in other armies and are identical in everything except name and models. Finally, Heavy Pike Militia and Noble Pikemen both have 8 defense vs. missiles, this is FAR more than any other pike, and partially eliminates the normal vulnerability of pikes to Missiles.


Highlanders are another excellent unit, effectively a slightly lower attack and much lower deference version of VHI. Not the bee's knees as it where, but still very impressive considering their tech level. Their sadly isn't a comparable unit in any other army. But they are loosely equivalent to some of the weaker 2-Handers that become available to some other factions at the 3rd or 4th tech level.

Next up is their archers. Are they especially good shooter? No. But thats because they aren't really archers at all, their basically a lower attack higher defense version of highlanders with the added advantage that they have a bow. Stop thinking of them as archers, and start thinking of them as defensive S&S infantry with AP and you are thinking of them in the right way.

Lastly, they actually have excellent heavy Cav for what they need. The DON'T NEED good Cav, they can get away with using their weaker Cav to pine the enemy in place and disrupt their charges whilst the Spear Militia/Highlanders move in. Border Horse are the best non-Muslim Light Cav and are excellent for attacking enemy archers and chasing down Cav that tries to run from your pinning Cav. If you have Light Cav as fast as Border Horse you simply don't need anything better than Mailed Knights 95% of the time.

edit:
not to mention the highland noble archers, they can stand their ground eaven against yeoman archers only with retinue longbowmen or Sherwood archers can you clearly defeat them...

Not to mention that they can outfight them in melee. In fact the only better composite Archer is the best russian one (Dismounted Dovor I think).

[Forward Observer]

It's a well known fact why the Scots wear kilts

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Sheep can hear zippers

[dacdac]

The Scots can be great if you use the AI stupidity and the English agressiveness to your advantage.
As far as troop use, use what Carl said^. I will give you tips based on my personal experiences.
They are going to send all of their troops to either the mainland, or to take the castle between you and them.
first turn, build a ship.
2nd turn, get on it, go south.
3rd turn, invade the wealy defended London from the south. Now you have them surrounded and cut off from the mainland.
After wiping them out, i usually try to re-establish relations with the pope, and go east above Denmark to take the rebels there.
In all of the games i have played, Milan gets ex communicated, use that to your advantage, and take the borders of France from the Milanese.
To get bonus money, declare a crusade on the milanese on a town with one of your armies within reach of it and take it. That should give you good enough standing with the Popeman.

Next, wait.
Eventually, France or HRE will attack you.
If France, then invade southern france from Milan, and once their troops are diverted their, come through the north from England and take Paris from behind, just try not to be excommunicated.
If HRE, build up your defense and let them assault you. Use troops from England and Norway to strike down through Denmark and Poland. Secure the Spanish and eastern borders and rebuild. Everything from Iverness, London, Paris, and Bolonge can be poorly defended as they are in the middle of your empire.

[Lorenzo_H]

Scotts? Scotts? Try going into any pub North of Hadrian's Wall and telling them you spell Scot with two 't's. They hate that just as much as being referred to as "the Scotch".

They didn't paint themselves blue and follow Mel Gibson to their deaths just to have some 21st century PC gamer misspell their nationality, you know.

Actually, they didn't paint themselves blue - anyone would go that colour if they lived on a mountain in the rain and wore a skirt with no underpants....

lol.

It's a well known fact why the Scots wear kilts

Actually a Scottish person once told me it was so they could hide (). Whenever they saw what they were hunting they simply pulled their kilt above their heads and it wouldn't notice them.


Anyway, I believe the Scottish aren't purposely weak, they just are there to provide a challenge for the more experienced player.

[DukeKent]

From what I can tell the Scots do not get infantry gunpowder units, or Longbowmen in vanilla (although the French do?). Seems like the game designers forgot that the "English" nobility were not anglo's but Norman conquerors (or Vikings if you will). If memory serves me correctly the Longbow came originally from Wales anyway. So it should be who ever held wales got the longbowmen. Be that conqueror the Normans, or who ever. Sounds like a great modding opportunity to me. Stripping infantry gunpowder units from the Scots also blows. ?A little prejudice here on the game designers part? These serious deficiencies kept me from playing the Scots much sooner. Shame, shame Despite these questionable decisions, I am finally playing and enjoying the Scots despite the questionable limitations placed on the Scots. It took some modding to remove some of the more ridiculous limitations like not getting the admiralty buildings I could go on, but I think you get the point.

[Moah]

1 thing to add: yes you can beat the Mongols with Scots.

Hvy Pike Militia are pretty arrow resistant. Noble Highland archers Ok, same range as HA and ok in melee (as long as not charged). Border Horse fast.

It's not cheap and it's not pretty but....

Put your Pikes in a horseshoe - i.e. make sure you have several units at flank and 1 to the rear. Pile your archers in the middle (with culverin if you have it). General safely in the middle.

The swarm come in: All your Pikes go red under fire. But they won't run and take fewer casualties than you first think under the hail. Meanwhile the NHA are returning fire. If you can turn your artillery on the mongol foot archers all the better.

Now here's the good bit: As long as you can hold firm the Mongols will charge you. Their big nasty general: Bam!! Shish kebab. Their HA, their lancers - all will just disintegrate against your Pikes. Once they've been sliced to ribbons, now you can send your cav against the Foot archers.

You do take losses but hvy pike militia are dirt cheap and available in Large (not even huge) cities.

Obviously if you're at a river or bridge then you can win with almost no losses at all. I had an entire mongol elite army charge into oblivion and didn't even rotate the two pike units holding the bridge (in a V to allow the mongols in a little, making the killing ground even sweeter). I lost almost nobody.

[Quickening]

*Is racked by the stinging jokes of the org lot*

FREEEDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM..... *dies*



But seriously, I don't really find any faction excessively harder than the next. As shallow as it sounds; they're all pretty much the same to me unless you are talking about horse archer armies which I find impossible to use.
But Scotland has an easy starting place at the corner of the world which was even easier before the AI started attacking overseas with patch 1.1.

[_Aetius_]

The Scots when controlled by the AI tend to survive in my experience but hardly ever expand by more than 1 or 2 provinces. The reason being it's imperative that the Scots expand very quickly otherwise they will simply go bankrupt or the English will become to powerful.

My most recent game as the Scots though has been a triumph so far, I believe the Scots have a great starting position, Inverness, Dublin, York and even Canaevon (sp?) can be swiftly occupied. The key is to steamroll the English before they have the chance to build up advanced units in England itself, I was able to conquer all of the rebel territories in Britain, reducing the English to Nottingham and London, thus badly stunting their growth. The English made early attempts on Canaevon and York but failed.

With an advanced army I was able to defeat the spear dominated English armies, take Nottingham and move onto London before the English could build up large armies. I ended up losing 800 men storming London which had a large garrison, i'd moved so fast that I was unable to develop siege equipment so had to storm as small english armies where starting to unite around me.

Once London fell I was rather rich and the English immediately sued for peace which I accepted. The problem that arises then is that because I was in close contact with the continent which I did not want to get involved with, the council of nobles immediately gave me missions in France and was eventually pulled into a major war in Europe.

Overall i've found the Scots to be a good all round faction, battles can be quite expensive in terms of causalties, but they are still strong which has pleasantly suprised me.

My favourite faction is still Milan at the moment though.

[vonsch]

The real issue in how strong a faction appears to be to YOU is your own play style. After messing about with the western factions, I am trying Turkey. Wow. I love horse archers. Yeah, the oncoming hordes have me a bit worried, but I have loads of time still (only turn 27). I thought heroic battles were rare in M2TW. Well, they WERE. Now they aren't. And I'm going against armies that use horse archers too, not the poor footsloggers from the west. My main maneuver armies are pure HA with a general or two. Once the morale is wavering on enemy units, the generals make sure they exit. The only limit to how large an army I can defeat is my arrow supply. I really hate charging turkomen into spears, even wavering ones.

But I agree that the Scots can be surprisingly strong. I haven't played them yet, but have run into more than one Scottish meatgrinder. Pre-longbows, English armies are asking for heavy losses in tackling a large Scottish army on their own terrain. Or a whippin. I outmaneuver them on the strategic level when playing England now. I prefer to avoid the early heavy losses. Even so, cleaning up the rebels can smart. Pays to cut off the supply of highlanders immediately.

And I notice them doing pretty well in most games when I'm not England. Haven't seen them hop to the continent yet, but they usually own more of the isles than England does. I've see pure blue at least once. More often it's only Nottingham and London red. I think the AI England looks to the continent more. Bad early strategy.

[_Aetius_]

I think the AI England looks to the continent more. Bad early strategy.

I guess thats abit realistic since the Normans valued their French territories more than there English, but really the bigger threat is on the continent and the biggest rewards for expansion to. So it's not that suprising really, I know it's more sensible to consolidate England by taking York, but in someways it can be better to break the power of the French and then mop up the isles later.

[dismal]

the AI Scots have fought their way all the way to Dijon in my Byz campaign, and have attacked me in Milan. Not as a result of anything I have done as I've mostly been busy on the other side of the world.

Anyway, I don't think there's any meaningful comparison between what the AI does with a faction and how easy it is for a player.

Every faction I have tried can put together a stack that can consistently whoop the AI in battles, including the Scots.

In my experience, the biggest determinant of how difficult a faction is starting position. Corner factions like the Scots have only one front to worry about. You can essentially defend yourself against England with the same army you are attacking them with. If you play Venice or the Byzantines, on the other hand, you are going to be attacked by everyone from all directions, and you will have to make a lot of difficult calls about how thin a force you can get away with.

[Marius Dynamite]

Well Im Scottish (Glaswegian to be precise, which is very hard to spell.) and I think it's only fair to say that Scotland are naturally in a difficult position, since England were historically stronger...

But then again, this is for one simple reason, we never let the Romans in and they did, right?

Anyways if all human players were playing then I think you must remember that France would probably be keen enough to ally with the Scots with the common goal being the destruction of England. I mean, France knows that it is surrounded with the only reliable ally being the Scots and the most definite enemy being the English. Effectively it would be half the power of France and all of Scotland against England, with England being in a good position but surrounded nonetheless.

[Werner]

Im on my first scotish campaign right now and think its a really good faction so far. The lack of gunpowder units is lame and their special units aren't that special, but whatever.

[Marius Dynamite]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ICGjffAfh98

Slightly off topic but it does explain the diplomatic situation Scots find themselves in the world...

[_Aetius_]

In my experience, the biggest determinant of how difficult a faction is starting position. Corner factions like the Scots have only one front to worry about. You can essentially defend yourself against England with the same army you are attacking them with. If you play Venice or the Byzantines, on the other hand, you are going to be attacked by everyone from all directions, and you will have to make a lot of difficult calls about how thin a force you can get away with.

Yeah Byzantium etc have a rough time, it's not unusual for the Venetians, Hungarians, Turks and Egyptians to declare war on Byzantium early on and it can be hard to fight on all fronts at once. However the empire is vast after you expand abit so it isnt as bad as a really small faction like Milan.

Your right though the Scots really only have one frontier to defend, so their small size isnt as relevant.

[dismal]

Yeah Byzantium etc have a rough time, it's not unusual for the Venetians, Hungarians, Turks and Egyptians to declare war on Byzantium early on

You left off Sicily and Milan. Sicily was actually the first to attack - in turn 5. And for reasons I don't quite undertand, the Moors seemed to really want Iraklion so they attacked too. I think I had 8 enemies by turn 35 or 40.

Even the Pope was landing troops on me.

Eventually I got attacked by Russia, Poland, HRE, Portugal, and Scotland too. And of course the Mongols.

[hellblazer]

First I'll address a point raised in a post just above this: If you apply a 2-Hander Fix you HAVE to make sure the Highland Noble are altered to fit the new 2-Hander balance, they where balanced to be competitive, (in relation to their price), with the bugged 2-handers and the shield bug in place. Fixing either of those requires a large power up of Highland Nobles to keep them in the same place in relation to other units in the other armies army. DEK will still win, but it will be a very close cut thing, AND the Highland Nobles are available a full 3 tiers earlier..

What do you suggest their values be changed to for single player? I am new to the game. I think that an expertly trained greatsword weilder should beat a polearm weilder like the british dfk. Granted the brit has better armor so I guess it means they should be roughly equal.

[PrestigeX]

Definantly it depends on what type of a general you are. I can easily see how the scottish faction has an army that isn't the best rounded. but i found them to be very reliable, pike units are my favourite, and the border horse are very fast and decent light cav. What i do for field battle is recruit a bunch of peasant archers cuz they are cheap, but with 5 units of them, they are a pest. I deploy them just to shoot up the enemy while in loose formation, doesn't relaly matter if they are getting whooped ny enemy archers because the idea is to draw out the enemy closer to my own troops. Usually all u have to do is get the enemy all tied up with ur pikemen, and send the border horse or highlanders to flank.

[pike master]

i have no trouble winning with the scots.

your border horse can outrun most horse archers and nerf most cavalry 1on 1

pikes can be used in any manner of ways to give victory against melee units.

dismounted fuedal knights will make excellent heavy infantry

even though the noble archers dont have long range missiles their arrows have good damage points.

[Kaiser_Johan]

The egyptians/turks/russians are the weakest imo, and the Danish are the best (by far the best units).

[Didz]

I'm playing a documented Scottish Campaign even as we speak, so this will give people a pretty good idea of just how weak Scotland is a starting faction.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=85754

So what does Scots have against their neighbour England? Nothing. They start out with one city, and outclassed in all of their units compared to England. Again, I know that if you play against AI, you can beat anything... but imagine if all the factions were played by human players. That's why I think Scots are the weakest faction in the game.

These points are valid but they can also be considered strengths as well as weaknesses.

True Scotland only has one city at the start of the game, but at the same time it has almost unchallengeable access to Inverness and Dublin which means that provided the player gets his priorities right it should very quickly have three cities.

It also has quick access to York and Caenarvon which ought to be reasonably easy to capture unless the English make Scotland their main opening target.

The big bonus for Scotland in the opening game is that it’s only viable opposition are the English, and the English have the big problem of having to defend on two opposing fronts and so can’t effectively mass their forces against the Scots.

This issue would not disappear even if the factions were player controlled, and in fact the problems for the English player would be even worse than those suffered by the Scottish. Imagine playing England with a Scottish player waiting to pounce on York, a French player waiting to pounce on Caen and a Danish player poised to land a besieging army on Nottingham and reclaim Northumberland.

Personally, I’d rather be the Scottish player, the victory conditions are pretty straight forward, its geo-political situation is simple and all you need to do is stab the English in the back every-time the French distract them.

Can I suggest you travel to Scotland, repeat all your comments in Glasgow on a Friday night.

I have actually been to Scotland and Glasgow. We took a holiday break at Hill House in Helensborough. My impression of Scotland was quite dissapointing in some respects. The scenery was astounding, but rarely seemed to be appreciated or respected by the Scots themselves, I was amazed to have dinner one evening in a restaurant overlooking Loch Lomond only to find that the restaurant had no windows facing the Loch that you could see through, which I found bizarre. I was also dissapointed that despite spending a day in Glasgow, I only saw one Scot wearing a kilt the entire week, and never heard a single bagpipe. I also drove past Glen Coe without even realising it due to lack of signage and ended up eating in a restaurant on the slopes of Ben Nevis with a line of Leylandii Cypress blocking my view of the mountain. Weird or what.

I hated Glasgow btw: very scary place especially along the river front. I was glad to get away from there, and I'm used to working in some of the bad area's of London.

I concluded that Peterborough on a Saturday is more proud to be Scottish than Scotland, at least there you can see a Scot wearing a kilt and playing the pipes, even if he problably comes from Northampton.

[crpcarrot]

I've always wanted to play as the Scots simply because I wanted to wage war with England. The problem is I just have a problem with continuing those campaigns because I just see Scotland conquering the whol Isle, let alone the world, as a tad too unrealistic.

HAHA

r u serious??

how can u ever play any faction then cos the whole concept of the game is not to conform to history but to change it

[Didz]

I've always wanted to play as the Scots simply because I wanted to wage war with England. The problem is I just have a problem with continuing those campaigns because I just see Scotland conquering the whol Isle, let alone the world, as a tad too unrealistic.

I know what you mean but the thing to remember is that the Stuart dynasty had as much claim to the English Throne as it did to the Scottish and so there is nothing outlandish about the idea of a Scottish monarch ruling a United Kingdom. In fact it might have happened if a double agent had not persuaded the Scots that London was heavily defended.

Beyond that point I found it hard in my campaign to justify an invasion of mainland europe. Historically, the French have always been good allies to Scotland and so I kept that alliance solid in my campaign to provide some historical credibility.

That does rather limit Scotlands options, but I found that by concentrating on trade in Africa and keeping in with the Pope I didn't need to invade mainland europe to survive and its only recently TURN 122 that I have been forced by papal edict to capture Toulouse.

[-Amon-]

BAH!

I love Scots and Scotland,that is it


Anyway,I don't think that Scots are weak,I played with them and crushed all Britain and north-east of Europe..Yes,England have good archers,but Scots have perfect pikemen !

[Kobal2fr]

I know what you mean but the thing to remember is that the Stuart dynasty had as much claim to the English Throne as it did to the Scottish and so there is nothing outlandish about the idea of a Scottish monarch ruling a United Kingdom. In fact it might have happened if a double agent had not persuaded the Scots that London was heavily defended.

Beyond that point I found it hard in my campaign to justify an invasion of mainland europe. Historically, the French have always been good allies to Scotland and so I kept that alliance solid in my campaign to provide some historical credibility.

That does rather limit Scotlands options, but I found that by concentrating on trade in Africa and keeping in with the Pope I didn't need to invade mainland europe to survive and its only recently TURN 122 that I have been forced by papal edict to capture Toulouse.

True.
There is however (well, to me at least) a "realistic" concern about building highlander units all over the place. They're called Highlanders for a reason, and how many sheep shaggers can there be up there, total ?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I could make believe that Highlanders recruited in Acre or Halych are really strong local peasantfolk taught to fight the MacWallace way... but where's the fun in that

@OP : Scots may be weak, but they wha hae, too. Whatever that means.

[John_Longarrow]

Hmmm...

So when is someone going to post how Scotland is weak?

Turn 1 they have a better army than the English have on the isle. They are in a better position to take York. They can move in and secure Caernarvon without much of a problem, but they do need to hurry up and take it before England does.

In the field, Scotland can pit its archers against the English archers with surprisingly good results. For some reason Longbowmen go down quickly to Scot archers that decide to CHARGE.

England does have better cav, but thats cav that has to face off against pikes. The Scots use their cav to chase routers and clear out missile troops that are being a pain.

Scots get good swords quicker than the English.

Scotland starts with 1 province and 1 boarder at the beginning. England has 3 and 2, respectively. Scotland though has 1 more rebel province that they can easily take, so the difference in starting provinces isn't much of an issue.

There is one area that England really dominates the Scots in. English pesants are far superior to their Scottish counterparts!