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Thread: [TW Guide] MTW: The Welsh

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    Default [TW Guide] MTW: The Welsh



    Author: Morble
    Original Thread: Not Available

    MTW: The WelshWhile the Picts start with an excellent strategic position, the Welsh are somewhat less fortunate. However, playing the Welsh allows the most open-ended strategy planning of any faction in the game. Many factions have a rather clear path in front of them as far as geopolitical strategy goes. But with the Welsh, you have the three largest English factions on your borders, and the Irish are just a hop away. The nuances you employ in dealing with the AI factions will alter the game you play drastically. Like the butterfly effect in non-linear dynamic (chaotic) mathematics, small changes in your input, in terms of how you answer the various challenges the game puts to you, can cause you to end up playing a wildly different variant of the game than if you had responded just a little bit differently, or at a slightly different time in slightly different circumstances. These chaotic turning points make the Welsh a very interesting faction to play.

    From their starting position, the Welsh can hold on to their 4 starting provinces with ease. Any attackers are promptly repelled by your archers, who can park their butts on the hills and mountainsides, and pick off would-be attackers as if they were shooting fish in a barrel. However, you are not going to win the game with only 4 provinces.

    The area of southwest England is rich with mineral resources, and you will find mining capabilities in pretty much every province. Also, iron is abundant in the area, and you have iron deposits in 3 out of your 4 starting provinces, as well as more deposits in western Saxony and the rebel lands west of you. So, you will have some rather low, but steady, income resources once you develop these mines.

    One problem hindering your development and expansion is that you start with 0 trade resources, and the closest one to you is in Saxon lands. Mining provides a steady income, it but cannot match the income you can get from a trade route. Thus, you are assured of superior troops by developing your iron deposits, but you will have to deal with constant budget shortfalls. If you do not expand outwards and conquer the lands of other factions, you will not generate enough income to keep up with the AI factions as the game progresses. How to direct this expansion is the crux for playing and winning with the Welsh.

    Welsh lands straddle the borders of the two largest factions in the game, the Mercians and the Saxons. Either one will be a formidable foe. In addition, you share a border with Northumbria. The Irish are across the Irish Sea from you, but you start with absolutely no shipping facilities, so you cannot reach them.

    The first order of business for you is to start building towards buffed armored spearmen and Welsh bandits (your special build). Note that the Welsh are cav-poor. You cannot build mounted sergeants or mounted nobles. You can hire these cav units at an inn, but with your mineral-based economy, you will have a hard time maintaining them without running a deficit.

    Once you have started building some units, you need to grab the two rebel provinces to your west. Your king starts out, at least on expert, with a v&v of rough justice, which decreases happiness in all provinces by 10. This means that you will need at least 5 units to hold a conquered rebel province after you have invaded it. Add to this the low general loyalties you start with, and you can predict that it will be a few years before you are ready to take on even the small number of rebels in Guined.

    An additional difficulty is your lack of a bishop or other strategic piece at the start. A daughter comes of age in a few years, but you will almost certainly have to marry her to one of your rebellious generals. This means you have no way of soliciting alliances or ceasefires until you build a royal palace.

    Fortunately, most factions will seek you out and ask for an alliance. Also, the Vikings rarely put in an appearance near your borders. Once in a while they might show up on your eastern borders, but they are always repelled by the concentrated forces of the faction they have been raiding. (They might also attack the rebels to your west, if you are slow to conquer those provinces.) Thus, after you conquer the two rebel lands, you can sit peacefully in your 6 provinces for much of the game, slowly developing your provinces, if you wish.

    The risk you take with a peaceful, economic game is that you may become trapped between the sea to your west, and an overpowering faction to your east. You must keep your eyes open as to what is happening between Mercia and Saxony. Eventually these two will go at each other. That much is good for you. The problem comes when one of them starts beating the other.

    Stuck in a corner with only 6 provinces, and no trade, means you must take pains not to let one of your neighbors get too big. If they do, they will have the economy, and the forts, to build an army that will overwhelm you. In fact, if the Saxony-Mercia war ends with one side or the other victorious, you will be the very next dish to be served up to the victor. So, you will probably be forced into the Saxony-Mercia war to keep the balance between your two juggernaut neighbors. You may either enter on the side of the losing faction, to shore them up and bring the two factions back into balance, or you may enter as an ally of the winning side, intending to capture enough provinces to replace the losing faction on the pecking order of political and military power.

    How you handle the Saxony-Mercia war is one of those chaotic turning points I mentioned earlier. It's not just which side you pick to support, it's when you do so, and which province you invade at what time, that makes the difference. Add to this the effects of which alliances you accepted, or chose to keep, and when, and under what circumstances, or whether you broke an alliance and cannot be trusted, and you begin to get a glimpse of the far-reaching effects your little kingdom has on the whole of England. The Welsh, because their lands span across the three major English factions, are the fulcrum to the balance of power in England.

    Of course, you won't win the game as just a fulcrum. You must expand to become the entire lever, and then the world being moved! The timing of your entry into the Saxony-Mercia war is one path to expanded territory.

    Another path may present itself to you, when playing the peaceful game, in the disintegration of Ireland. The Scots and Picts are too far away for you to have much interaction with them. It will take you a very long time to build a boat, even assuming you force Clywd or Guent away from their natural inclinations to build buffed armored spearmen. Events will overtake you before you can build a string of boats all the way to the north of England. But Ireland can be reached with only one boat posted in the Muir Eire.

    In general, a strong and united Irish are going to be too difficult for you to take on. You would have to denude your Welsh provinces of troops to have the chance of forcing a beachhead on a strong Ireland--which would then open the door to conquest of your homelands by one of the English factions.

    But the Scots, or the Picts (should they manage to take out the Scots), may very well invade Ireland. Even the Vikings may raid an Irish province or two. This can destroy Irish unity and create an Irish civil war, leaving a number of provinces controlled by rebels. If you have managed to build even a single boat when this happens, you will be able to send troops into western Ireland. Even if you only have a port, but no ships, you will be able to send emissaries to bribe the rebels--assuming you have built a royal palace by this time. (You definitely need to build at least one royal palace, since you need it to build RBs and Welsh bandits, both of which are important combat units for you.)

    Control of Ireland, when combined with your holdings in England, will make you a dominant faction in the game. You will need to give immediate focus to shipbuilding in order to give yourself mobility. Ireland only has a single trade resource, in Laigin, so you will not have huge trade income in any event. But with shipping resources, you will be able to directly interact with every faction, and the rich resources from both Ireland and Wales should be enough to see you to ultimate victory.

    Another strategic game option is to eschew the peaceful route and go on the attack. Mercia is likely to have a scary number of troops posted on your borders, and both provinces are land-locked, anyway. Northumbria only has a single province bordering yours. There is a trade good in Pec Saetan, making the province very desirable, but you are likely to be swarmed by armies from every other Northumbrian province if you should invade this one territory. The Saxons have two provinces on your borders, and it is their holdings that have cut off Corniu from your other provinces. In addition, there is both iron and trade goods in Somerseate.

    My preferred choice is to attack Somerseate (And possibly Defnas, from Corniu at the same time, if it is lightly held.). If you attack the Northumbrians, you will have displaced much of your army northward, leaving both your center and south open to attack from the two largest factions. You would gain little unique for your kingdom by successfully attacking the Mercians, other than the inland provinces and their development. Attacking the Mercians will not help your sea or trade development. Attacking the Saxons in Somerseate, however, (in conjunction with a conquest of Defnas) allows you to begin forming a trade route, while allowing your armies to freely travel between all your provinces.

    You need to be aware, though, that this is another of those critical chaos junctures. Regardless of what your diplomatic standing was with the Mercians and Northumbrians, they are virtually certain to attempt to invade you once you attack the Saxons.

    This is the strategy for you if you like lots of battles, often being forced to attack or defend with inferior numbers. The game will turn into a huge dogfight between you and the entire south/middle of England. It's what fighter pilots call a "furball", with attack vectors, alliances, holdings, and everything else, flying in all sorts of crazy directions.

    Attacking Somerseate will lead you to war with the Saxons, Mercians, and Northumbrians simultaneously. At the same time, two or more of your enemies may be at war with each other. Throw in the Vikings, who will likely raid parts of eastern England, or may go on an expedition of raiding to cut a swathe of destruction across the breadth of England--or may even attack your homelands in Wales--and you can see that the whole of south/central England will be churned into one big, hairy, cauldron of war by your invasion of this single province.

    You must have prepared your homeland development properly in order to survive this extreme sort of game. You must be well on your way to producing buffed armored spearmen in at least Clywd, buffed archers in Pouis, and buffed Celtic warriors in another of your iron provinces. You also need inns, or a royal palace, so that you have access to cav units (and siege weapons). You must have developed your economy to the point that you can produce a full build of units every turn--although you can stop building any province developments during the war, if turns out that you need the additional money for your military.

    Before invading Somerseate, you should have enough troops at ready that you can prosecute the initial stages of the war without mercs. This is because you will eventually need a merc army or more before the wars end, and you are very unlikely to have the income to pay their maintenance for very long.

    You must also have spent some time on shepherding your generals. Attacking and defending at short odds will gain your generals some excellent v&v's, but they won't get the chance to collect those v&v's if their men run off the field in the first few battles. You need to have increased the loyalties of your governors through marriage and kingly v&v's, because your king is likely to have to take the field more than once, and these governors will have to be trusted on their own to administrate their provinces. Finally, you should try to get alliances with the Vikings, Irish, Picts, and Scots, if you can. Allances with Mercia and/or Northumbria may help delay their attacks on you--but probably not.

    If you have done all this preparation, then you have a reasonable chance of ultimate success when you attack Somerseate. But success is by no means a given. This scenario is as wild as it gets in MTW--it's a real free-for-all, and the situation is extremely fluid.

    You will want to permanently capture Somerseate and Defnas, while defending your homelands. But in all other captured territories, you will be making decisions on the fly. Sometimes you will want to hold a province; other times you will want to put it to the torch, so that your enemies cannot gain from it when they grab it back from you. Sometimes you can afford to attack more than one province, other times you will need to hold off, even though you could send the larger army of superior troops into the target province.

    Small changes in the AI behavior can easily send your entire kingdom ignominiously down in flames. The Vikings will typically attack your enemies on their eastern shores. I do not believe the Vikings ever outright break an alliance, but if they were allied with one of your enemies when you go to war with them, they might choose to stay allied with them instead of with you. Or, the Vikings might decide to attack the one of the northern factions, instead of weakening your opponents in the south. The Scots, Picts, and Irish typically do not interfere in the war (and usually do not have direct access to your lands). Instead, they usually pass the time arguing amongst themselves. But if one of them should decide to get involved (and is able to), you will lose the game, because you will not be able to stand against 4 enemies.

    The Somerseate scenario is exciting because it is a lot like historical wars. Advantages, and provincial ownership and loyalties, swing wildly back and forth. One faction may appear to have insurmountable advantage in one year, and then appear to be headed for unavoidable destruction in the next. Your entire kingdom can hang in the balance of a single battle; a battle wherein your army is outnumbered and commanded by an untested general.

    The ramifications of each battle are huge, because you are balanced on the knife edge. A single crushing defeat could mean very little to your overall strategy--or it could mean the smashing of your dreams of expansion, and the ultimate failure of the Welsh as an independent faction. A string of defeats will certainly plunge you into civil war, while your king might die of old age before he can complete the tasks laid out for him.

    The situation in the Somerseate scenario is too fluid and too chaotic to plot an overarching strategy here. You must react anew to the shifting balance of power, and local troop strengths, each and every year. Very likely, you will have to use every trick and tactic available to you in MTW to survive and triumph.

    The ultimate goal, of course, is to vanquish your enemies and eradicate the three factions, most probably while ceding a couple of eastern provinces to the Vikings. If you accomplish this, you will own most of England, and will usually be blocked from expansion in the north by rebels centered around Reget. (It's a whole different story, again, if a major faction has conquered Reget--but usually they don't.) To get to your 2/3 victory, you will have to conquer a handful more of provinces.

    I suggest you take out the rebels, leave the Vikings in peace (assuming they let you), and then choose either the Scots or the Picts as your final enemy. Because of the narrow geography, and the fact that you will be invading from the south into kingdoms arranged primarily on a north/south axis, you must expect counterattacks. Because you are unlikely to have been able to develop sea transports during the war in the south, you will not be able to simultaneously grab 4 or 5 provinces in order to quickly end the game. Instead you will have to pick a remaining faction and slowly, inexorably, grind them into dust one province at a time.

    At this point, having defeated the southern factions, your ultimate victory is assured because you should have an overwhelming advantage in both economy and troops, but you will have to earn your win using a rolling juggernaut, instead of lightning strikes from all directions.

    In all, playing the Welsh provides some of the most exciting challenges available to those who consider themselves excellent field commanders or strategists. The Welsh starting position, wedged between the sea and three major factions, is odd in that it is so easy to defend, but so difficult to increase. The Welsh player must be either shrewdly opportunistic, or brilliantly aggressive (or both, more likely), if he is to guide his faction to the control of all England. He must combine sound judgment with the willingness to roll the dice and take risks if he is to climb to the pinnacle of ultimate success.

    Winning with the Welsh requires intense involvement and highly personal decisions. It makes the victory, when it comes, taste all that much sweeter.
    Last edited by Sir Adrian; December 07, 2013 at 06:57 AM.

    Patron of Basileous Leandros I/Grimsta/rez/ Aemilianus/Publius/ Vizigothe/Ahiga /Zhuge_Liang Under Patronage of Lord Rahl
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