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Quote Originally Posted by Grog
On a more serious note, I could certainly write a book or a least a fat thread on what I learned playing this campaign, so I'll just do a basic assessment of where I varied from the ATPG blitzkrieg Theorum.

Ok first off faction and difficulty. I used HRE on VH/VH standard vanilla 1.3 (1.2 with kingdoms).

Why HRE?
I wanted a castle-based catholic faction. I planned on 1:3 castle:town ratio for quick mailed knights everywhere. Also, they have good centralish position, can snag a lot of rebel land off the bat if you are quick. Once you have 15+ territories in western/central europe you are unstoppable.

However the main advantage is proximity to rome, but you start with no diplomat and princess is way up north. So turn 1 I build a townhall at bologna, turn 3 train diplomat, turn 4-5 get alliance/perfect then call crusade. I got lucky here as papal states diplomat approached florence (captured turn2) in turn 3 AI moves, so I grabbed alliance and perfect then and called crusade to antioch turn 3. (note: secure initial tribute: usually accepts 100/5 gift after gift 100 + gift map info, then incrementally increase gift to 100/10, then open offer provinces to perfect)

Why VH/VH? well I always play all my battles VH, so no worries there. I chose VH for stategic map as this makes the AI stupidly aggressive, which works to my advantage tbh. I'll expand on this later.


I never play on anything besides VH VH. What would be the point? Hurt me plenty.

Your biggest differences IMHO were the faction of course (I did 50 provinces by turn 16, myself with the HRE) and the destination of your initial crusade. You chose Antioch with HRE, I chose Cordoba with France/England.

I dont think I made any real mistakes other than the choosing of Cordoba for the crusade. I think if I had chosen HRE and done antioch I would have had more success.

You made the better choices; I feel our blitzing ability is rather even. There's only so much you can do in a single turn, and the maximum with the HRE clearly bests the maximum of England. They start with more and are closer to the Pope.

But again, congrats. I have changed my sig line to reflect your victory.