Hi there to all fellow guild members.

i've been playing my campaign as England and am going great guns.Well I encountered the Mongols for the first time last night whilst on a crusade to take Antioch (which was occupied by them).

I had a General who had recently taken Tunis and Tripoli from the Sicilians and then this Crusade came up. I only had a small army with my general in Tripoli (3 Yeoman archers, 3 units of various knights, 2 units of dismounted knights and 1 unit of Levy Spearmen). So I used this army plus my general to go on crusade to take Antioch, going across Africa and Egypt as it was the quickest route for any general to get there.

I got past the 3 Egyptian cities and recruited merc units which were
1 x Nigerian Tribesmen (sorry going off memory may be diferent name), 3 x Turkoman mnted Archers, 4 x Kwazi Cav, and about 4 units of religious fanatics. In total I had about 980 men at my disposal.

As soon as I got close to jeruselum thats where I think my jaw dropped and realised that this General was screwed. Surrounding him after his moves for that turn was about 6 stacks of Mongolian infantry. The turn ended and then the action happened. I got attacked first by two stacks with aproximately 650 men in each, some how I got through this. I mainly attacked with my Cavalry while mostly staying steadfast with the rest of my infantry and protecting my own archers. I beat these first two stacks but payed the price of using my Cav as I lost nearly 40% of them, plus also as the Mongolians infantry drew near I attacked with my infantry, sick of being hit with a hail of arrows. By getting drawn out and spread too far apart this then caused me to probably lose a considerable amount of my infantry.

All up I won and still had about 600 men left in my army.

Then the next wave came which was another 850 mad Mongolians. As I had lost a good portion of my cav in the last effort I had to try and be more conservative. This proved to be futile as my whole army got peppered by an endless onslaught caused by their heavy Archer Cav. This again caused me to get drawn away from my original lines, scattering units everywhere. Again I prevailed taking heavy losses losing about 80% of my force plus my General was the only soldier in his unit.

Of course the next wave came which was another 800 or 900 Mongolians and of course 120 against that quantity is very hard to win, so I got slaughtered and my general is now pushing up the daisy's.

I've learnt a few things here (I knew the situation was desperate and I was going to finally be beaten by the AI eventually), especially letting my Cav perish at the start when I probably should have been more patient. But I am interested to know how you guys handle fighting the Monolians, and how you go about preserving the lives of your more important units.

(please do not see this as me crying for help - I had a ball just hanging in there! I just thought this would be good thread for listening to some good stategies by different members)

Have fun all.