Quote Originally Posted by Sun Tzu Sif
All hail, a great post. also i have a question, i've been playing for some months now and looked on this forum for quite some times, but i can't seem to find a effective guide for rushing on this massive scale.

do you even consider constructing buildings, i've seen like 1 shot with those mines, but do you get anything else like higher military, or economic buildings?

do you fight every fight yourself to get massive promotion of captains?

occupy for tax, sack for money, or exterminate for low garrison to continue to the next town. (in like 26 turns, i suppose sacking gives to max of cash)

do you use agents? (not even a single mention of a successful spy, killing trough assassination, or that priest that was uber converting)

diplomacy, do you actively search for allies in the begginning or just jump in if a diplomat of them comes to you?

also it's not stated, but is it correct that you seige always to attack the very next turn?

i thank thee for all the help

Patrick
To answer a few of your points:

Firstly the 'massive scale rush', a lot of the framework for a successful blitz can be read on this thread here

Buildings: I build a few on my rushes I have done, mainly churches and some public order buildings. I also knock down a lot of towns and make them castles, easier to control when moving fast.

Promotion: hit rebels/ai with a captain led greater army, frontload spears etc. Autoresolve is fine, the more territory you have, promotions gets easier. I didnt have much success promoting through sieges though. I found the larger the stack used, the higher the loyalty of the promoted captain, although this is just in my experience...

I always sack and ransom. You really need the sacking income to fuel the fire of the rush, especially in non-crusade times. No need to exterminate really, I can usually control the most troublesome settlement after a few turns, although in my turks game I had to build a fair few level2 mosques and have a massive Iman chain running across europe...

Agents: I dont really bother aside from priests and a few passive spies. Massive diplomacy on Rome is a must for a catholic faction because you will need to be in control of the pope to launch crusades. Basically every army should be fighting/seiging or moving between targets, agents get left a long way behind on the first crusade/jihad and your new territory will be building for control/troops for a while. ATPG successfully used multiple tiered alliance diplomacy for an early boost, selling alliance/trade/map/attacks to 5-6 neighbours.

Finally yes I will siege one turn/attack next as a rule, some exceptions may be same turn attacks in europe with ballistas, but generally siege engines are too slow to lug around on a blitz unless its local.

BTW top thread ATPG from what I can download of it, perhaps pare it down into a general campaign overview report and then add dedicated strategy writeups might make it a bit more accessible My broadband is fairly ninja and is struggling with it, or perhaps photobuckets bandwidth has a headache?