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Thread: [TW Guide] MTW: The Northumbrians

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    Default [TW Guide] MTW: The Northumbrians



    Author: Morble
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    MTW: The NorthumbriansThe Northumbrians are a very slow developing faction, reminiscent of the Danes in the European game. What stands out most in the Northumbrian starting position is that it has great potential. You control the entire middle section of England, you've got great trade resources, some iron, and even mining. You can build the standard mix of fyrdmen, cav, and huscarles (your other special build is woodsmen, and they are dirt cheap) and you usually start with pretty good loyalty in your provinces and generals. On the down side, 4 potential enemies have immediate access to invade you, your agriculture is practically non-existent, and you have very little in the way of maritime development.

    Your first order of business must be to make as many friendly neighbors as possible. Since there are no ports nearby, you are going to have to wait for the Vikings to come calling, which they almost certainly will. In the meantime, the rebels in Reget are fairly non-aggressive, though powerful, and the Picts are not able to mount much of an army as yet. So, you must send your bishop to Mercia and then Pouis to petition alliances with Mercia and Wales. You will almost always get these, as well as alliances with the Scots and Irish, who will seek you out on their own. You must now send your bishop to Hordaland to try and make peace with the Vikings. In a few years, your first princess will mature, and you should send her to the Vikings, also.

    Peace with the Vikings is extremely important, because you must build your empire around trade. You have 5 trade resources to start, including 2 provinces with double goods. If you can instill a relatively peaceful game, your trading economy will see you to victory. But you will have a difficult, if not impossible, time if you have to fight the Vikings at sea. Unfortunately, you can't pay tribute or offer any other incentives other than your promises and your princesses. Nonetheless, you must continually ask the Vikings for alliance until you succeed.

    On land, start developing your provinces to build towards fyrdmen and huscarles, and build ports and shipbuilders in the trade provinces. The alliances with the Welsh and Mercians should hold them back for a while, so now is the time to take out the rebels in Reget.

    Reget is a rich province, and well developed. But it is also well defended with armored spearmen and archers, and usually, excellent generalship. It will take almost all of your early resources to conquer Reget. In fact, you should send your prince and a numerical superiority of 2:1 if you hope to win. (Leave the peasants at home--your army will rout enough times without their added panic.)

    Usually the rebels will set up on a hilltop. With your large number of troops, you will be able to almost encircle the hill before you begin to climb it. The AI will typically separate units and send them charging down the hill to disrupt your orderly climb, so you will end up engaging in your first melees along the bottom half of the slope.

    I usually try to enclose the hill with 3 sets of 3 spears/fyrdmen and 1 woodsmen. The woodsmen are your primary attacking force with a huge attack, but lousy melee skills. Fyrdmen are your best defensemen. Spearmen look useful, but you have to remember they have a base of -1 def, -1 attack, and 0 morale. If you have to put 3 spearman and a woodsmen together, that entire echelon will rout when a rebel armored spearman company begins to melee with it. So, try to spread you fyrdmen out among your 3 separate 4-company phalanxes. Reget is a difficult battle to fight so early in the game, but if you wait they will only grow stronger. And, you need the archers that Reget can immediately build.

    While you are building up your troops to take Reget, you are likely to be attacked by the Vikings. You cannot hope to defeat their invasion--Viking units are simply too strong at this point in the game for you to oppose them. I recommend fighting them as much as possible on the field, then retreating to the warrior stronghold (which you should have built on every province the very first turn). A second option is not to fight them at all; just retreat to the stronghold. Your people will not be happy with Viking overlords and, with luck, you will get a loyalist rebellion, instead of a popular revolt, and this will provide some much needed troops for you. When you get the rebellion, reinforce them with your regular army, and the Vikings will vacate, giving you a little more time to sue for peace.

    Once you have made peace with the Vikings, your little kingdom is fairly secure. Although surrounded by other factions, you can maintain a firm hold on your realm by posting troops on Reget and Lothene in the north, and Pec Saetan and Dere in the south. Since the AI builds very few ships, and you are allied with the Vikings, any invasion will have to come through one of these four provinces.

    Now you must begin to build your trade, while warding off any potential greediness in your neighbors. This means you will have to post troops in numbers equal to better than half the troops your neighbors have posted across your borders. You will not have to put new troops there every turn, but you will have to periodically increase their numbers so that the AI does not start to believe that your lands will be an easy conquest.

    In the meantime, you need to start building ports, ships, and trading posts. The Northumbrian lands yield very little funding on their own. You will have to limp along for nearly two decades on annual profits of 800 or so, until you can begin reaching the ports of other factions and can begin trading.

    Note that your kingdom is arranged very much on a north-south axis. The game always allocates funds to the northernmost provinces first. But most of your trading resources are in the south. This means you will have to spend quite a number of years forcing the game to develop your southern provinces--by leaving the building and training queues in the northern provinces completely empty. Otherwise, you will have well-developed provinces in the north, but no national income.

    This period takes quite a number of years, not only because you must build boats and traders, but also because you cannot completely ignore your non-trading provinces. You still want to try to bring at least one province each up to building armored spearmen, and valorous fyrdmen and woodsmen. You also need to develop the iron resources in Cumbri and Elmete. And of course, every few years you need to take a year off from development and spend it on training new units to reinforce your borders.

    Usually the AI follows your lead on aggressiveness. That is to say, if you attack a lot, then there are lots of wars all over the board. In this case, you are doing your best to avoid any conflicts with anyone, so it is likely that there will be no wars at all, and all of your neighbors will be developing their own lands as quickly as possible.

    I find this part of the Northumbrian game to be rather stressful, because I am limping along on my tiny economy, while always wondering if I have placed enough men on my borders to deter a surprise attack.

    It is surprising to see your economy suddenly spring alive once you can build a few boats and traders. In the space of a handful of years, you will go, from barely scraping together enough cash each year to build a single building, to earning more money than you can spend. Expand your trade route along the path of the most foreign ports, and soon you will be annually completing full development and training builds for all your provinces, while still putting 3000 or more into your treasury each year. You will have the largest income of any faction before your trade route is halfway around England, and you will soon field the largest army.

    Enjoy the perception, because you will soon be at war. One of your neighbors will attack you, and you will find that Northumbrians are not very good at fighting. However, while your individual units are not that great, you can still overcome your enemies by the sheer weight of your numbers and money.

    The beginning of the war produces some of the biggest battles I have played on MTW, usually around 10,000 men total. Of course, you hope to have 6500 to your opponent's 3500 men. You will need them.

    Because of your faction's long martial inactivity, and because you have likely gone through 2 generations of peace-loving kings while building your trade, your armies and generals will be neither valorous nor very loyal. To prosecute the war, you will have to go on the attack, and the AI will typically park its troops on a hilltop and force you to assault them--just as happened in Reget. Assaulting up a hill costs soldiers? lives no matter how good a general you are, and your individual units will not take many casualties before they begin to falter.

    There's not a lot of options open to you. You must fight as well as you can with your initial 16, then draw your undepleted archers, and whatever other troops you have left, back to a hilltop out of range of enemy missile troops. Let the broken bits of your routed army flee the field, then bring on as large a contingent of reinforcements as you can all at the same time. Get everyone lined up, then march forward and attempt another assault.

    You will typically be facing stronger troops commanded by better generals. So, the only thing you have going for you is your greater numbers. Throughout the hostilities, continue to train a full build in each of your home provinces every year, and keep moving them to the front. Don't forget to keep reinforcing your other border, too.

    Since, by the time you are attacked, you will have the most money and largest army, no one will stay allied with you. Without alliances, it is imperative to maintain a credible military threat on your "quiet" border. Otherwise, it is guaranteed that you will be attacked there, and will be sucked into a two front war--which you will lose.

    In battles, try to keep your archers from getting into melees. String them out 2 deep, but keep your battleline either close to them, or in front of them. Concentrate their firepower on single units. Aim for the enemy general when you can, but be satisfied to rip up a company of spearmen if that's what is in range.

    I generally do not engage in any sort of archery duel between my archers and the enemy's missile troops. Instead, I concentrate on shooting powerful foot troops, and just absorb the enemy fire. The enemy will do the most damage to your army with downhill charges by strong foot troops. This will not only inflict large casualties on your companies, but will do so in a short period of time, and thereby cause them to rout at the most inconvenient times. So, it is recommended to preferentially deplete these enemy attack companies, such as Celtic warriors and armored spearmen, first. Enemy missilers have no charge attack, and the AI rarely concentrates fire when it has multiple targets to aim at. So, you will lose a few troops in each company to enemy fire, but this is not enough to rout your guys. Loose formation helps a bit with protecting your troops from missiles, but basically, you just have to accept that there will be some losses to enemy missile fire.

    Archers are quite valuable in winning a big battle, so never send them up a hill naked; that is, never march them close to the enemy without sending foot troop protection along. When your archers get charged by an AI company tired of taking arrow fire, have them run back down the hillside and behind a friendly foot company, then turn them around and have them concentrate their fire on single enemy units. Since the AI is often reticent about leaving its hilltop until your full army is actually closing on them, you should be able to destroy several enemy companies with your archers before the main armies ever meet in melee. You should make full use of your archers, having them expend every arrow in their quivers before allowing them to withdraw.

    Archers have a lot of arrows, and because of their standoff, ranged capability, can kill and kill again. Every archer you can put on the field potentially means the death of ten enemy soldiers. You won't get that kind of killing efficiency out of any melee troops.

    For your initial 16, I recommend 5 archers, 5 armored spearmen, 4 woodsmen, your general's cav (usually a prince), and another cav unit. I always put my best troops, with the best armor and attack, on the field first--because they will be meeting the AI's best troops. If you are extremely good or extremely lucky, you can win the battle with this initial 16, but it's not bloody likely. Very probably, your initial ground troops will get smashed to flinders and you will have to rally a few remnant spearmen into a defensive line on a separate hilltop to protect your remaining archers. Then you will have to wait until your destroyed units leave the field, and you can bring out your first reinforcements en masse. Form them up into a new big battleline, and begin a second assault. I find that the game gives you a generous enough time limit in these big battles to perform 3 assaults, but the issue is almost always decided after the second assault. Either you or the AI will come to the realization that the battle is lost and will withdraw.

    In arranging your reinforcements, I assume most of my archers will still be on the field after the first assault, so I line up as first reinforcements about 4 cav and 4-5 spear-type units, along with 3-4 attack units, like woodsmen. I line up 4 archers below them, then repeat this configuration for the rest of the reinforcements.

    I bring more cav with the reinforcements because I am planning on the enemy position being somewhat loosened up by the first assault, and I am hoping for some gaps in the defense that will allow my cav to penetrate and charge. Also, with fewer, or at least less deadly, enemy troops on the field, I can allow my cav to chase some routers past the enemy flanks and into their rear--where the cav can further disrupt enemy missilers and peasants posted there. Your two cav units in the initial assault are there purely to scout and screen your flanks. (Screening your flanks means that you put your cav unit a bit detached and to the side of the battleline. If an enemy unit tries to flank the end unit of your battleline, they will have to present their rear to a charge from your screening cav unit.) A third possible role for your initial cav is to charge them in to counter enemy cav charges. Do not let your cav get impetuous and charge off after routers or other units on their own They must take only an auxiliary role in this first assault. Even so, they are likely to get chewed up and routed before the first clash is over.

    Needless to say, be extremely careful with your general?s cav unit. If you lose your general, even if he does not have that many command stars, you will lose the battle for sure. Your Northumbrians are not that enthusiastic about fighting in the first place, and they will all rout if your general gets killed. So, do not let your general get into melees. If his company charge did not cause the target to rout, then pull them out of the scrum.

    You can use your big bankroll to help yourself prosecute the war. If you have won a couple of battles, send emissaries into enemy lands to offer bribes to demoralized generals. If there is a rebel province nearby, you may be able to get an entire extra army (and the province) cheap by bribing the rebel general. You should have at least one inn in your homelands. Buy all the mercs available before your opponent can hire them. I typically try to sub in all my mercs into the initial 16 units in a battle. After all, I am paying the mercs to fight (and die, if need be), not to lounge around in the drinking halls.

    It is useless to try and make or repair alliances while you are at war. If a faction dropped their alliance because you and one of their other allies are at war, they will not ally with you until the war is over or their ally (your enemy) is destroyed. They will still marry your princesses, but will drop the marriage alliance immediately. The best you can do is keep your border well fortified, and hope your armies there look forbidding enough to discourage any incursions.

    Note that you will almost always end up in a war with at least two factions. If the first attack comes from the north, then both the Scots and the Picts will end up fighting you. If the first attack comes from the south, then both the Mercians and the Welsh will fight you. Often the Saxons will build a ship during this time and start a naval war with you--I suppose just because they can. Usually the Irish will not start a war, but will concentrate on the western rebel provinces in either the south or north of England, and the Vikings, alone of all the factions, will remain true to their word with you.

    So, your one big war will end with the destruction of at least two of the AI factions, and you will be very close to claiming a 2/3 victory. You will own central England and either the entire north, or most of the south. It is probably better to have to fight the war in the south, since the agriculture of the southern lands can help replace the trade income you have lost. However, it always seems to be the Picts or Scots who attack my Northumbrians first.

    No matter. Even the relatively poor northern provinces, when coupled with your trading resources in Northumbria, will provide you with enough income to dominate the rest of the game. Ship your victorious army down to your southern border, re-build your strength and economy for a few years, then loose the coiled spring of your armies to fan out into the south. A surprise attack against the Mercian and Welsh should be done with enough numbers to cause them to retreat without a fight, allowing you to gain 4 provinces immediately, and probably a couple more soon thereafter.

    If the big war was in the south, it is probably best to attack the Saxons, since you are somewhat bottlenecked in the north. Also, your access to Saxon lands (after finishing off the Mercians and Welsh) allows you to attack almost all of their provinces simultaneously, thereby wiping them out in one fell swoop. Before the Scots and Picts even have a chance to react, you will have conquered the Saxons and claimed your 2/3 victory.
    Last edited by Sir Adrian; December 07, 2013 at 06:44 AM. Reason: fixed author hyperlink

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

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