I just had a crack at playing the Turks. They were always my favorite faction to play from Medieval 1. It took me about seventy turns to really get on my feet and start thinking about expansion. Things were going well until the Mongols show up and ruined the whole thing.

The problem with the Mongols, and the Byzantines for that matter, is all the horse archers they use. I find it impossible to fight horse archers because they won't engage infantry, they just run away. So you chase them all over the field and they just keep running away and peppering you with arrows. The only thing you can do is chase them away with heavy cav. So you need one lot of heavy cav to cancel out each horse archer they have. And here's the kicker... the Turks don't seem to have heavy cav (except for general's bodyguard). I'm not 100% sure about that, but all I seemed to be able to make was about four varietys of horse archers!

So then I figured I'd just let the computer handle the battle, and I got thrashed. I lost about 600 spearmen to about 90 of theirs. So that's obviously not going to work.

I quit the campaign because of that. I gave up too easily but I just couldn't see how I could crack them with no heavy cav. I'd like whoever came up with the idea of the Mongol Invasion to tell me what to do. How the heck are you supposed to have enough forces in place to stop them? You'd need about five full armies just sitting there ready for them, and given that any army that's left outside a settlement without a general just get's bribed, I don't see how that's possible, AND fight the Byzantines or the Egyptians or both.