The MTW challenge thread.

[seireikhaan]

Play as Almohads, no AUM...

Ooh, that'd be interesting. Pretty much would have to rely on muwahid's for 'heavy infantry'(not that they're even heavy) at that point, and just use pure mobility to try and win battles. LOTS of Gulam cavalry/Saharan cavalry, Faris, and muwahids... Dang, I might just have to try this sometime! Winning battles with lots and lots of mobile but weak units. Those are some of the funnest battles of all.

[Max Power]

Having played the MTW for a while I have a couple of rules that keep the game interesting for me.

1. Don't use inquisitors to burn enemy generals. They quickly become immortal killing machines, capable of bringing down an empire with no real effort. The only exception is when the A.I. burns one of my generals, then
I burn one of theirs in exchange.

2. If an area has a unit bonus then build only that unit in that territory. It forces me to use units like urban militia or woodsmen that I might not otherwise use.

3. Only build units from historically correct areas. If I'm playing the Turks I don't build turkomen horse archers in Wales. I try to build 'local' units where possible. I do cheat a little as I can't build all of the local units though. It's much more fun to field a mixed army with a mixture of strengths and weaknesses.

One thing I have been considering is only personally fighting battles where my King is the commander...

[The Unknown Guy]

How about rising the cash demands of "uberunits", specially "fief holding" uberunits, such as knights, to make overproliferation be unprofittable?

[caravel]

How about rising the cash demands of "uberunits", specially "fief holding" uberunits, such as knights, to make overproliferation be unprofittable?

The issue there is that on a whole those types of units are not part of a paid standing army and as such wouldn't have actually cost the ruling monarch anything.

[The Unknown Guy]

those types of units are not part of a paid standing army and as such wouldn't have actually cost the ruling monarch anything.

they would have costed land (althrough in some cases they were hired as mercs and paid in cash, eg: the "free companies" in Italy, or the Spanish tercios later during Renaisse). In any event, since land-granting doesn´t get represented inside the game, imho, to "symbolize" those units they should be made them prohibitive (as in: the feudal lord loses the revenues of a significant part of a province, which now go to his knights instead)

[Heidrek]

There are some units that are unbalancingly good. Longbows for example have the first equal longest range, are armour piercing and fire almost 4 times as fast as Xbows as well as being able to shoot over other troops. A few of these units make short work of anything except for charging cavalry. There's really no reason to use any other archers but these.

Viking Huscarles are available super fast and carve through almost every other unit in Early - High without even having to draw breath. Try limiting yourself to no more than 1-2 units per army of any super troops you might have access to, just to give the other guys a chance.

Likewise, the Danes can simply spam vanilla vikings all day long. I'm in the late period now and these guys still kick some serious arse. The remain one of my staple troops. Granted I'm only playing on normal difficulty at the moment, but so far noone seems to be able to stand up to the viking flood.

I'm considering just auto queueing them in every sea side province with a port and dumping about 16 vikings into a new province every turn. some places might take a couple of these raids to fall, but fall they will.

I think I'll impose a restriction on how many I make of these guys in the future, or maybe only build them in scandanavia.