Late game advice?

[Crk416]

Hey guys, so I've been playing a Byzantine campaign for a while now and I seem to have hit a brick wall. The goal I set for myself was to reconquer the entire classical Roman Empire and things have been going pretty decent until the mid 1300's. It seems like the AI can just field infinite armies this late in the game. I'm trying to conquer Iberia and can usually take the eastern half of it but after that I can't advance anymore because Portugal can just produce litterally 15 full stacks of halberdiers, pistoliers, men at arms and sword milita. I on the other hand can only field maybe 5 full stacks in Iberia because I need troops on my border with Denmark (who conquered all of Germany), the Fatimids, Hungary and the Kwarmizrians. Basically do you guys have any advice for beating Portugal? General late game advice is also helpful.

[Duck of Death]

It can get tricky with logistics when your empire gets really spread out.
Have you already conquered the east and south portions of the empire?

Once you have most/all of the Mediterranian under your control, start converting fortresses to cities in safe areas (like north Africa, southern Greece, southern Italy etc...). This will raise your income so you can field more armies.
For example, once you've taken all of the holy lands, most of the castles surrounding Jerusalem can be converted.

Put temp forts at key choke points where your territory borders the enemy.
Even if you only put a single unit to guard the fort, consider it an early warning system (the enemy will stop there to assault the fort for one turn before it heads for your cities).

However, by the time I had all of the Med. sea, I was making enough money to field over 30 full stacks of top troops, so was able to surround my empire with a string of forts with 22-24 full stack legions in them and still have 6-8 stacks to use for conquest.


Finally, do the best you can to only fight one major enemy at a time.
You mentioned Denmark was a problem? Try making peace with them, while you deal with Portugal.
Even if its expensive (make sure you make a deal that you pay them on every turn for 10-15 turns, that way theyre less likely to break the truce before their tribute runs out).

[Crk416]

Hey I figured it out. The Portugese armies are numerous but once I fugure out how to beat them I’m routinely wiping out 4000 man armies and taking like 150 casualties. I changed my army composition to a think line of heavy infantry (like 3 units), two units of spearman, like 2 units of cav, 2 mangorels (the catapults that shoot the exploding barrels and the rest of the army crossbowmen. I turned their skirmisher cav into a weakness because without any melee cav they can’t just charge the crossbowmen. I usually wipe out most of them before they even reach my lines.