Invasion from the inside

[rockoutloud1213]

I am playing as Aragon in early. It's been almost a century since the start of the game and I already firmly hold all Iberia, Northern Africa, the holy land, and pretty much everything the Byzantines had from Greece to everything surrounding the Black Sea and the Middle East, with the Biz cornered to (I think) only Bulgaria and Rhodes. Having newly (within the last 25 years) conqured all these provinces, every Byzantine victory seems to push loyalty into the ground, but I can easily put down these minor rebellions, and once I had defeated the Byzantines, everything would be smooth sailing for awhile. Then the Turks reappeared. Suddenly Edessa is filled with 5 full banners of pissed off Turks (the Byzantines eliminated you! Really! I just took your land from them! They don't seem to care.) Now loyalty is down all over the Middle East. I wasn't sure what to do. My forces were spread out a lot, so I couldn't get a reasonable fighting force there quickly. I decided to just leave a unit in the stronghold to buy time in hope they wouldn't assault. Now it's the next turn, and I'm not sure what to do. I've got a crusade in Morocco ready to be launched, but due to Byzantine ships it will take at least 2 turns for the path to be cleared to land in Tripoli. Meanwhile, every province bordering Edessa is at extreme loss to loyalty. I'm about to lose half my empire. Help?

PS

I'm not nearly as good with battles in Medieval as I am in Rome, so I usually auto-resolve. Any idea how 1 defender in Bulgaria killed 475 besiegers all by his lonesome?

[Brandy Blue]

I faced a similar situation recently. There were two things that helped.

First, moving my king closer to the low loyalty areas seemed to calm them a bit. Clearing the Byzantine fleet might help you too. The loyalty drop might be partly because no sea route links your king to outlying areas.

Second, I raised at least one peasant unit in every province I thought was likely to rebel, and built a watchtower or boarder fort if appropriate. These are reletively quick and cheap ways to push up loyalty.

These measures may buy you time until you are ready to deal with the Turks directly. If you are rich, you might also consider bribing one of their stacks as soon as they spread out. (It is harder to bribe generals who are right under their king.) Its expensive, but if you can swing it, you would get extra troops in the area and weaken the enemy at the same time.

By the way, beware of those Byzantine guys in the future. Sometimes it is easy to roll up their land forces, but then you find that their big fleet can cut your sea communications, while protecting their last outposts so you can't knock them out. As I already hinted, this may have something to do with your problem in the first place.

Finally, if you have a really good assassin, you might try to knock out the Turkish leader before he can get any princes (unless he already has some). Mere rebels would be easier to deal with.

Sorry, that's the best I can do.

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

Hullo rockoutloud1213,
If your empire's general's loyalty is terribly low, then you could, in addition to the advise provided by Brandy Blue, train some spies and keep them in the disloyal regions. They should help prevent dissent out of fear of been caught.

Alternatively, you could place a Grand Inquisitor in the province to force the local into loyalty out of fear of him. It also removes religious unrest as he preaches to the populace.

Hope this helps you, good luck, cheers!

[Ironside]

I'm not nearly as good with battles in Medieval as I am in Rome, so I usually auto-resolve. Any idea how 1 defender in Bulgaria killed 475 besiegers all by his lonesome?

They added a quite linear system to make sieges more expensive to auto-resolve. Simply put 472 of your attacker died to the automatic defense.

Otherwise you could take a well manned fortress with almost 0 losses by a simple huge overpowering.

[rockoutloud1213]

I understand the premise is that it is harder to take a well-defended fortress than to defeat an army in a field somewhere, but 1 man killing 475? That's not plausible, regardless of fortress.

[Ironside]

I understand the premise is that it is harder to take a well-defended fortress than to defeat an army in a field somewhere, but 1 man killing 475? That's not plausible, regardless of fortress.

You have to treat the castle defenders as somewhat neutral troops that surrenders and switches sides when all the loyal troops are dead. Sworn to location, not leader.
Gamemechanics vs realism you know.

[Zathernon]

I understand the premise is that it is harder to take a well-defended fortress than to defeat an army in a field somewhere, but 1 man killing 475? That's not plausible, regardless of fortress.

If your general at the time of the assault was a weak general, i.e. no-command, low or negative valour, low or negative morale and the opposing general had positive traits, consider yourself lucky to have won at all.

If perchance you had done a "quick-save" in the pre-battle screen, try doing it in 3D. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Once while defending against The Golden Horde, they had lost over 2800 in order to take the fortress. Sometimes the enemy will stand around as if drunk and be eliminated by arrow fire.

Most resurgent factions have no command or valour so their bark is much more than their bite. The Sultan/King may also be old and die-off as quickly as they appeared.

[Zathernon]

Sorry , double post.

[Bregil the Bowman]

I understand the premise is that it is harder to take a well-defended fortress than to defeat an army in a field somewhere, but 1 man killing 475? That's not plausible, regardless of fortress.

I recently took on a citadel with 8 defenders, played it out in full and got horrendous casualties. Getting past all those walls and towers ain't pleasant.

Auto-calc will often give you worse casualties than playing out the attack. I once had a bridge battle where I had about 400 men and the AI had 2. Not to waste time I auto-calced - 250 casualties and I lost the battle! I went back and played it out - it turned out the bridge defenders were two "Jedi" Royal Knights. I hit them with two units of jinettes - lost two men in the melee and one to friendly fire, both knights went down with javelins through them. It's the biggest difference I have ever seen between auto-calc and a full battle.

[Roark]

The siege auto-calc is pretty damn generous. It's a total cheese play to auto-calc sieges, in my humble opinion.

Assaulting the big structures is tres painful.

[rockoutloud1213]

Today, I tried assaulting again with about 200 troops and played it out myself. Here's what happened. I figured last time, all my troops must have died from arrow towers. Not so. Only about 10 troops died from arrows or boiling oil. What happened was that the computer made the 1 Kataphraktos gaurding the castle a god. He himself killed almost 200 men, down to my one last soldier. Then, the Kataphraktos and my Urban Militia traded blows for about 15 minutes. THey would still probably be fighting now, hours later, had I not just routed the soldier to get it over with.


Simply put, the game hates me. Is this some glitch I am experiencing, or are Kataphraktos supposed to be able to kill that many people. IF so, why couldn't he kill my last man?


WTF?

[Agent Miles]

From the Numerology thread about hitpoints:
"The system looks like this:
Base hitpoints: 4
King: +6
Prince: +4
Command: Adds +1 per rank
V&V: 1/3 of Health bonus, rounding down. +5 to Health means +1 hitpoint.

So a king of Rank 6 with the Virtue Mighty Warrior (+ 10 Health) would look like this:
4
+6
+6
+(1/3 * 10 = 3)
= 19 hitpoints. Not bad at all.

I was told by a dev once, I believe it was Mike, that the max hitpoints lies at 30, but then you would need a good number of V&Vs."
Also, defenders with no retreat possible get an extra 8 points of morale.

The defender was most likely totally exhausted and couldn't finish off your last man. Javelins are great against well armoured defenders. What kind of units did you have?

[rockoutloud1213]

about 50 royal knights, let's start there. some jinettes, I believe. And a mess of other small units. But 50 royal knights could not have killed it? What about the rest of my army? It wasn't a King, not a Prince, nor did it have more than 1 command. Just a Kataphraktos who somehow killed a total now of 700 men.

[Tratorix]

Not that i'm doubting you, but are you sure the kataphractoi didn't have anything special about it? Unless your royal knights really sucked, it shouldn't have been able to do that kataphractoi aren't as good as most knights once the charge factor is done with.

[Martok]

Well as you can see from Agent Miles' post, even a vanilla general has at least 4 hitpoints. That can make a big difference when you realize that most troops only have 1 HP. Add to that his abilities as a Katank unit, and you can be assured that he can probably do some serious damage before he goes down....and that's not even factoring in any hitpoint-boosting virtues he may have.

In the end, you've simply been a victim of MTW's "Jedi Generals" phenomenon; even lesser generals like the one you fought can be tough to take down. It's a big reason why many players include specially designated "general-killers" their armies -- usually a unit that fires armour-piercing projectiles, such as mounted crossbowmen. In your particular case, rockoutloud1213, those Jinnettes you mentioned would probably have a decent shot at killing him.

[Agent Miles]

As I see it, there are four things you can do:
1. Send in a "Sith" team to kill the Jedi. One spear unit to pin him down and several Jinetes to shoot him full of javelins. (Although, this doesn't seem to have worked yet.)
2. Send in assassins to kill him. If he only has one star, this shouldn't be too hard.
3. Send in an emissary and bribe him. How much can one guy cost you?
4. Send in your best spy to cause a rebellion. Hopefully the rebels can kill him.

[rockoutloud1213]

Agent Miles, thanks for the help, the emisary thing never occured to me for some reason

[macsen rufus]

1. Send in a "Sith" team to kill the Jedi. One spear unit to pin him down and several Jinetes to shoot him full of javelins. (Although, this doesn't seem to have worked yet.)

Agreed - I've had some VERY unbelievable results from my "Sith squads". One Jedi general I was trying to kill (think it was either RK or Ghulam BG) managed to absorb the full ammo quota of two jinette units, two mounted Xbow units, and killed off complete units of woodsmen, militia sergeants, armoured spearmen AND held out against swiss halberdiers for over twenty minutes. That was one ridiculous assault result, he won single-handed, inflicting over 300 casualties on my army. It was only a fort as well!

I was so disgusted I reloaded and assassinated the instead!

[Agent Miles]

You gotta love plan B! Sometimes a dagger can do what an army cannot.