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Thread: [TW Guide] MTW: The Aragonese (Late)

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    Default [TW Guide] MTW: The Aragonese (Late)



    Author: Morble
    Original Thread: Not Available

    MTW: The Aragonese (Late)While the Early and High periods provide similar starting positions for the Aragonese, the Late period provides a very different situation. The Aragonese now own Sicily in addition to Aragon. However, there is no port in Aragon, so troops in Iberia cannot return to Sicily. Navarre, Valencia, Sardinia, and Naples are all held by rebels. The Spanish and French are stronger than in earlier periods, while the English mainland holdings have decreased.

    Aragonese homelands, on the GA option, include Valencia and Sardinia. These two provinces, in addition to Aragon and Sicily, are important to your game. However, neither of these provinces is conquerable at the beginning of the game. Sardinia, although you cannot see it, has only 100 rebels on it—far less than you need to hold onto the province after a successful bribe, and you cannot send men to reinforce there until you have at least 2 ships. Valencia has more men, but it is unattainable because of the impending Spanish invasion.

    You will want to bribe one of the rebel provinces around you. In reality, you do not have a choice of which to bribe. Sardinia, as noted, does not have enough men present to hold the province. The Pope will invade Naples on the first turn, and the Spanish will invade Valencia.

    You can perhaps delay the Spanish conquest of Valencia by invading there yourself on the first turn. However, you cannot win this battle. The rebels will have about 200 men, while the Spanish will send about 350. Because you invaded from Aragon, this is a bridge battle. But both you and the Spanish will set up on the same side of the bridge. You might hope to lurk about on the battlefield while the Spanish and the rebels duke it out, then swoop in to rout the exhausted winners of that fight. No dice. The Spanish will ignore the rebels and head straight for you no matter what you do.

    So, all you can do, if you don’t want a crushing defeat, is withdraw from the battle before the Spanish can close on you. The rebels will withdraw after you do, and the Spanish will gain the province, with the rebels holed up in their fort. In a couple of turns, Valencia will belong to Spain. Keep in mind that the Late period is a short game, and GA points may be your main route to victory. The Spanish presence in Valencia means that you will eventually have to go to war with the Spanish.

    Returning to the first move, it might appear from the map that you have numerous options. But you do not. Your only viable option is to bribe the rebels in Navarre. This is not all bad, since Navarre has iron, and includes a company of chivalric knights in the rebel forces. But Navarre does not have a port and will take some dedicated development before it can become a major contributor. It will take at least three turns for your emissary to reach Navarre and bribe it.

    In the meantime, build an armorer, then a metalsmith, and 3 feudal sergeants, 1 crossbows, and 1 feudal knight in Aragon. Build 7 spies in Sicily while you develop watchtowers, border forts, and a shipyard. As soon as your shipyard comes on line, switch to building barques. You need 2 ships to get to Sardinia, and a total of 4 to connect Sicily and Aragon. (Note, though, that you will need to build a port in Aragon to complete the connection.)

    I send my princess to the Spanish on the first turn, since they do not begin the game with any unmarried princes. This gets the alliance with Spain without losing the princess. I accept all other requests for alliance, except from the English. The English are your first factional target.

    Aquitaine is the only English province on the mainland. So, in a move similar to grabbing Toulouse from the French early in the High period, you will want to attack Aquitaine before the English can make much progress in shoring up their holdings. Once you have Aquitaine, the war with the English will usually terminate due to lack of contact.

    Send your princess and emissary to the French to try and get an alliance while the English are still a threat to them. After you take Aquitaine, it can be difficult to get the French to align with you. The French king is in Isle de France, but if you time it right, you can get a marriage with a French princess just as your first prince matures. You can then send your own princess on to the HRE.

    Build militia sergeants and an armorer in Navarre once you own the province. As you build your second and third spies in Sicily, send them to Aragon and Navarre. You should also send your 4th spy in preparation to enter Aquitaine in the year after you invade it. Low quality spies are easily discovered and destroyed by other factions, but the presence of a single spy, regardless of its valor, significantly increases loyalty in the provinces you own.

    You should try to maintain a spy and a bishop in every province you own throughout the game. You need the spies for loyalty maintenance, and they will prove especially useful during times of excommunication or the crowning of a new king of Aragon. Bishops prevent heretics, and also protect your generals from inquisitors. The Spanish will build an inquisitor early and send him to burn your generals at the stake just for fun. You can’t prevent inquisitors from messing with the zeal in your provinces (other than by assassination) but you can keep them from killing your most able generals and governors by maintaining a bishop, or cardinal, in each province.

    Spies can be very important to Aragonese strategy in Late period. One of the most profitable ways to snatch a province from your more powerful neighbors is to drop about 15 spies, all on the same turn, into a low loyalty province. This is often enough to push the province into rebellion, and you can then have an emissary, or an army standing nearby, handle the rebels and take the province for yourself—all without starting a war with the faction that owns the province. When a province goes rebel with your spies present, every spy in the province gains a star, thereby making them even more likely to succeed in their next assignment.

    Later in the game, when you have the troops available to take advantage of it, you can also send spies to uncover damaging v&v’s of the generals and royals of a faction. However, it is rare for this sort of action to result in an actual revolt or rebellion. It must be considered as more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” sort of effort, and you must apply other pressures first, for it to have any actionable consequences.

    I throw everything I can into the invasion of Aquitaine, leaving only a spearmen or two in Navarre to keep it loyal, if I forgot to move a spy to the province, and nothing at all in Aragon. You will lose Aragon without some sort of garrison in place, if another faction decides to attack that turn, and you also might give the Spanish and French the idea that Aragon is not defended during the next turn. However, neither faction has ever attacked me this early, and you are going to move troops back into the province the next turn, anyway.

    You do need to move against Aquitaine quickly, because the French will also have a similar idea and will usually go to war with England early. Sometimes your plans get delayed because the Navarrans won’t take the first bribe offer or two. The ideal time to attack Aquitaine is just after your prince matures, giving you an added RK unit, although I usually wait an extra year or two to build extra crossbows. Wait much longer than this, and the French will sneak in to grab the province before you get a chance to put it in your clutches.

    Naturally, you should be making your best effort to ally with the French at this point, so that if you end up invading Aquitaine on the same turn as the French, you will be able to hold back in the battle and let the French absorb the casualties. Even with your maximum force, the French will likely invade Aquitaine with more troops than you. You need to avoid any casualties in this sort of battle, because the province will go to the ally with the most troops inside the province at the end of the battle. In an allied battle, your ally will not start to move until your troops do, but you can move your guys to all stand sentinel on the hills, loosing a few quarrels at the foe, while they watch your ally barrel down into the valley and begin to melee.

    Presenting the English with an overwhelming force is your intention in piling all your troops into Aquitaine. With your king and prince, the chivalric knights you got from Aragon and Navarre, and the feudal knights, crossbows, feudal sergeants and militia sergeants that you built, the English will probably decide they cannot win and retreat to their stronghold. (If you were delayed, and the English were able to build some halberdiers or reinforce by sea, then they will usually put up a fight. In this case, take extra crossbows with you, because halberdiers are deadly to cav, and tough on foot troops, but they’re slow and have no shields, so crossbows can chop through their armor and decimate them as they plod slowly across the field to melee with your battleline.)

    The English king has no heirs at this point, so it has happened to me more than once that he gets killed in battle, attacking the French, while trying to link up with Aquitaine. In this case there is the opportunity to bribe the men that now become rebels in Aquitaine. In practice, though, I never have enough money to do this, and the siege is usually one year long, anyway. However, this chance is worth the effort to put your emissary in Aquitaine on the same turn that you invade it.

    In Sicily, you need to build advanced boats, aiming for even better than caravels, to hold your own in Late period. So, keep developing the boatbuilders. Barques do a good job of connecting the dots to get your trade routes started, and with 3 trade resources, Sicily is an important trading center. But barques will not stand up to the warships the Italians and others will soon be commissioning. When your first boats are launched, use them to connect Sicily to Aragon through the Ligurian Sea, which is a major income center for you with as many as 4 ports. The Adriatic and the Black Sea are two other prime naval trade locations—which you can figure out just by counting the ports connected to the sea square.

    It is not unusual for the English to have invaded French Brittany and Normandy by the time you take Aquitaine. You will need to decide whether to continue hostilities against the English, or to move on to another target. Usually, the French are at war with the English, the HRE, and the Egyptians at this time. It is also typical for either the HRE or the Italians to be excommunicated around this time, or within a few years.

    Since the English have the bulk of their armies already next to Aquitaine, I find it easier to make peace with the English and attack the French. With so many enemies already pressing on them, the French will not be able to muster much defense against you. I can usually grab 2 out of 3 of Toulouse, Burgundy, and Isle de France. (The Italians or HRE may grab the third province before I can.) This is usually enough to destroy the French, either through the loss of their king, or a civil war. Use emissaries and bribes to pick up any remaining provinces in the hands of rebels.

    You would love to snatch Flanders out of the French collapse, but the English are very quick to snap up this highly valuable province. The upside is that the English will have room to expand eastwards from Flanders, which directs some of their force away from you. However, you must remain aware that, as long as the English hold some northern coastal provinces, you will eventually have to go to war with the English again, and should not denude your northern borders.

    In the meantime, Isle de France is an excellent goal, because gaining this province will likely give you several titles with which to buff your best generals and governors. The province also typically allows you to build spies or assassins. You should be generating one spy for each province you own. You should also be training an assassin or two. The Papacy will conveniently provide you with a constant flow of emissaries to Sicily that you can use to add stars to your assassins. It is not hard to get a couple of assassins up to 4 or 5 stars by simply killing foreign emissaries on your soil. (Don’t let assassins linger on foreign soil, though, or they will get caught and killed.)

    You will still have your eye on capturing Sardinia and Valencia for your GA points. The Spanish are likely to be too strong at this point for you to have any hope of conquering Valencia. They are aided by the number of Crusades passing through Iberia that end up attacking the Almohads. It’s a bit of a stretch that, when you play the Hungarians, all the faction Crusades pass through Hungary, but when you play the Aragonese, all the Crusades pass through Aragon. But there is nothing you can do about this, so grin and bear it. The Spanish are strong and usually doing well against the Almohads, but the Italians often attack the Pope (or retaliate against His aggression) and get excommed.

    You really don’t want to get into a war with the Italians, because the AI’s ships are apparently endowed with godly powers that will totally destroy your fledgling navy and stop all your trade income. To beat AI ships, you need to match up with them at 2:1, and preferably 3+:1, odds. It’s much less expensive to try to match equal numbers of ships in each square. The AI rarely attacks when you have equal or better ships in the same square with it. This allows you to handle matters on more favorable terms through your strategic pieces and opportunism.

    As an example of opportunism, the Italians often lose control of Sardinia when they get excommed, which means you will have the opportunity to bribe the rebels there and gain the province for Aragon. This is usually after 1350, so you miss an important GA point-counting year, but it is better than nothing. With sea transport connecting your troops on the mainland to Sardinia, you can now reinforce the bribed rebels, or even invade directly, to gain the province.

    It is also not uncommon during this period (1350-1375) for much of Western Europe to collapse. This is due to a combination of factors, including constant troop depletion through warring between the factions, excommunication, and the Black Plague. The domino effect of faction after faction disintegrating into civil war and rebellions is often set off by a single faction resurgence. Resurgences are grotesque by historical standards, because they come without any warning and totally alter the balance of power in the game, but they are quite beneficial to the Aragonese game.

    When factions begin to lose control of their provinces, it behooves the Aragonese to eschew violent conflict and to concentrate on conquest via the purse. Stop building everything, except for emissaries and some spies, and send bribe offers to the rebels. In a general collapse, much of Europe will be using up their troops in combat with rebellions in an attempt to restore order. Up to this point, you have not had superior numbers of troops except in localized concentrations. By having your emissaries scurrying about, you can preserve your troop numbers, and add to both your armies and your holdings each time your emissaries are successful. By the time the plague has run its course, you are likely to emerge as a world power, with the highest income and the largest army.

    During this time, you may see a faction go completely bust. That is, the king dies with no successor, and all of its territories go rebel. If you had married a princess of that line, there is the possibility that you will gain some provinces from this. However, this is somewhat unusual, since the princess must apparently be of the current generation, and you have limited princes to marry. If you have good intelligence, primarily from the bishops you have scattered all over the map, then you can check to see what faction has no heirs, and try to marry into it. You cannot force an inheritance by killing the faction king yourself, so this is more or less a side bet that costs little, with poor odds, but which can pay off big if it hits.

    Even if you don’t luck into an inheritance, a busted faction provides an excellent opportunity for peaceful expansion. It also carries with it an element of danger, because at any time, the faction may resurge and claim many of the rebel troops for itself. So, when a faction is destroyed, you are more or less forced to move quickly and incorporate the nearby rebels into your realm. If you use bribes, you will not receive the income from destruction of buildings—although you can certainly destroy buildings once you own the province. Bribing the rebels, however, usually gives you enough troops to hold province afterwards.

    An important point here, when you are moving quickly to prevent a troublesome resurgence, is that you must maintain 120% loyalty in each province to be sure of preventing resurgence. Although 100% loyalty is enough to prevent local rebellions and will cause the province to be shown in green when you hit <shift>, 100% loyalty is not enough to prevent resurgences. In fact, once one or more factions have been eradicated, it is best to always maintain 120% loyalty everywhere. Resurgences usually are centered in rebel-owned provinces, but additional resurgent troops can show up in provinces you own if the provincial loyalty is less than 120%.

    You should drop all development and training at this time, except spies, bishops, and possibly emissaries, so that you can generate the income you need to bribe a new bunch of rebels each turn. Try to gather together enough emissaries so that each rebel stack will be bribed twice on the same turn. Each turn after a successful bribe, you should move a spy into the new territory. Bishops should be used as scouts to locate all of the rebels. Your emissaries should be concentrated on presenting the bribes, since the first bribe is often refused and you will therefore need two bribe offers per rebel stack or more.

    You can offer all that you have instead of the demanded price. If the money you offer is 90% or better of the asked price, you have a chance of having your bribe accepted. However, if it is rejected, you lose both the money and the emissary. In general, it’s far better to just wait another year and gather more money.

    You should also move at least one unit of troops into the territory while the bribed (former) rebels are still blinking. If rebel forces counterattack you from another province, and the only troops you have there are the ones that are blinking, then you must fight the attackers—often at a disadvantage—or lose your men. However, if you have moved some of your regular troops into the province while the rebels are blinking, you will also have the option to abandon the province completely, thereby saving all the troops you just bought. On the next turn, you can bribe the new set of rebels in the province. In this way, you can build up a substantial army, while depleting the rebel troops in the surrounding territories.

    Following this strategy of picking up the pieces in Western Europe will almost always lead to two consequences. First, the Spanish will finish off the Almohads, and will attack you. Sometimes they play slap-fight with the Egyptians, but usually they just decide that you are the easier prey and sneak attack you. Most likely this is because the Egyptians have stacked several thousand men on their North African border, and your border looks less imposing.

    The Spanish will nearly always attack Aragon first. Unless you have kept a huge couple of stacks in that province, it is best to retreat to your stronghold, which by now should be a citadel or fortress, and then counterattack with everything you’ve got from the nearby provinces the next turn. You have to leave some men in Toulouse so the Papacy does not attack you. But you can start training units in all your provinces and walk them down through your border provinces to Aragon.

    When the Spanish attack, you will have to pause your bribe strategy, because you simply will not have enough money to both bribe and build new armies at home. I prefer to counterattack the Spanish into Castile first, because Valencia is a river battle from Aragon, but not from Castile. Once you have taken Castile and Valencia, the conquest of Cordoba splits the Spanish empire in half, thereby isolating their king, and signaling the end of the Spanish. I generally concentrate on exterminating the Spanish at this point, ending up with a large army on the Egyptian border.

    The second consequence of following the general bribery strategy is that the Pope will aggressively expand. The Papacy prefers to attack Venice first, and it is important for Aragon to leave Venice unconquered, regardless of circumstances, so that the Pope has this outlet. Otherwise you will find yourself at war with the Pope and under excommunication. It is generally easier to let the Pope expand out into southern and eastern Europe, attacking the Hungarians, Poles and Byzantines. After you finish with the Spanish, you can concentrate on the final conquest of western Europe, the HRE, and Scandinavia, including any rebels along the northern coasts.

    There is usually a territory contiguous to the Russians that has gone rebel. This province is your best entrée into Russian lands. You can subdue the rebels by bribery or force, then load up a large army in the conquered province. Typically, the Russians will attack you first, allied or not. In fact, you prefer that they attack first, so that you can preserve your honor in not breaking an alliance.

    A few victories, including Novgorod, Lithuania, and Muscovy will be enough to shatter the Russians, and by the time you take Kiev and Khazar, there should be little left in Asia other than a few rebels. Clean these up, then push into Asia Minor. If the Egyptians hold lands there, then attack that faction simultaneously with your army in North Africa. It should only take a few more turns before you have enough land to claim victory for Aragon.
    Last edited by Sir Adrian; December 07, 2013 at 06:00 AM. Reason: fixed author hyperlink

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