Good early strategies...

[Schleiden]

Hello, TWC-goers and M2TW players. I am a newb to this game, and I keep running into some problems in the Grand Campaign.

I choose the French, because I favor cavalry and the like. No matter how hard I try to keep my neighbors happy, they wage war on me, often when I am in the middle of a campaign against outlying rebel towns. Battles are relatively easy, and quite enjoyable, but it seems that the AI has little other campaign strategy than to declare war on any who won't become a vassal.

Now, I suppose the largest problem is that I am new and don't have the skill/know-how to build up well enough. I always find myself lagging behind in Finances. What is the best way to build up an early economy into something that can sustain a large armed force? I try to specialize all of my settlements, but it takes a boatload of money to improve every settlement.

Any tips?

[nodey]

Some tips on improving your economy.

-Build the first farm upgrade for all your towns, then road, market, port.
You can vary slightly depending on urgency, but those are the buildings that will get your economy started. Use one or two castles for military buildings and put the rest on economy (early on).

-Garrison towns with the free upkeep units like town militia etc, saves you a great deal of cash and you can use better units for the actual fighting.

-Send your diplomat from turn 1 to start getting trade rights, they will be useful both early on (immediate neighbors) and later (sea trade).

-Keep taxes high unless public order goes too low. One of my early mistakes was leaving towns with normal tax rate with public order of 120+.

-Tighten your empire, focus your military. A bit into the game, having your empire all over the place will require lots of armies that cost lots of cash. Making sure you capture the right province to create strategical "bottlenecks" will allow you to have fewer armies in the field. For instace, the entire penninsula of spain (modern day spain + portugal) can be defended with 2 stacks (armies)+ a couple of fleets.

- Early on, adopting too many generals may get you bankrupt, choose wisely. =)



As for strategical tips as france:

Early on i'd focus on allying with the spanish to the south and the milanese.
Assign one of your ports to build ships. You'll need them for when the english decide to invade you and you kick them into the sea. Expand to the rebel settlements to your west so you don't threaten HRE, denmark or milan. It's basically given that if you are at war with one of these, england will attack you.
So,
1. Ally with spain, econimical build.
2. Western rebel provinces.
3. Kick england out from the continent without getting excommunicated.
4. Blockade england from the continent, ally with the scots.

The excommunicated part is a bit tough. You can always send 1 solo ship to their waters and see if they bite. If they do, send one more and they will keep biting until they are excommunicated and you are allowed to attack them. Same method can be used with fodder units.

Or you can just ignore the pope and kick them out.

[Gabriel A]

What nodey said.

To this I would add, that it will be impossible to fight off all the enemies without gaining the disfavor of the Pope. So your best friend should be the Sack.

Do not exterminate or occupy anything past the low countries/Metz/Bern/Marseille. Just sack those cities repeatedly and sell all their structures , you can raise very significant funds in this manner to inject into economic buildings and merchants. This is similar to the policy during the revolution, the directory and such kept the armies in the field to plunder europe as they could not afford to pay them otherwise).

[Schleiden]

Yeah, I just put into practice what you suggested and I am playing better than I did before. I've managed to be the #1 faction since the 5th turn, and now it is turn 25. I've only stopped because the game crashed. When is a good time to attack the English? I have more favor with the pope than they do...

[nodey]

That wont matter, you'll still get excomminicated if you attack him a couple of times.
Although if you're really fast you can take his province out in one go, before you've even get a warning.

Most people underestimate the power of being good friends with the pope. Especially as france as you have to fight multiple backstabbing enemies. A crusade to your catholic anemy will make sure he has his hands full.

As for when to attack, if he still has only 1 province i'd go in whenever i have a decent decent army and a fleet to keep him from reinforcing.
If he's started taking lands on the continent then you have a bigger problem as you cant wipe him in one go. Try the "baiting" tactic i explained above and you might get him excommunicated.

[humvee2800]

Heres another tip I learnt in this game.

well... two tips

First, You should build all town unit armys or all castle unit armys with the sole exception of armys you build solely to kill enemy armys... but not to many of those.

there is two reasons for this, first if you have too many armys with both castle and town units as soon as you take casualties it can be very.. very hard to try and bring the army back to full strength, second, if you attack a town with a full town stack army.. . you can repair all your units quite quickly.. and since you will likely have more troops then is needed for garrison.. you can within perhaps 2 or 3 turns repair and add a few soldiers to quickly make a new army using peices of the old to attack a new town.. making for quite a fast advance. Same is true with castle unit based armys.


Second, it can be useful before a planned invasion of a neighboring country to build a few such town or castle armys aimed at specific key enemy citys. though be careful, you can only have so many of these armys unless you have a huge empire to spread the cost over. A Useful tip however is to use spys to scout the citys the armys are targeted at so that you may better know the required force needed and make better use of your men.

[Saibot]

Try getting trade rights with as many factions as possible and if you would get a war with Spain you should take Zaragoza and Valencia and the such this will greatly increase the trade income of Marseille etc.

[Samir]

another useful advise is focus your strategic campaign goals and include variables in your plan.

for example if you want to wage a war against a faction, plan ahead. plan what you want to achieve (destroy provinces, armies, family, economy) and then complete them. Take as many men as you need, not as many as you can. Include in your plan the fact that you may have to keep your back free (tribute, and at least campaign (military campaign, not game campaign) lasting diplomacy treaties).

[Dogman]

In addition to all the fine advice above, don't feel you have to have a building cued up in every settlement, either. Try alternating which settlement you decide to build in each turn, so you don't have giant lump sums of income going towards construction. Of course this means being more selective and thoughtful in your construction choices, but it will help even out your income. A good idea is to build in a few settlements while keeping an eye on your financial details scroll. Try to leave your net income few thousand florins in the black.

[NobleNick]

To all else which has been said, let me add:

Building something in each town, every time you have the chance *IS* spendy, but do not be afraid to do that *IF* you are building economy. Yes, it is a big drain on resources to build economy; but remember that it is your economy which fuels your war machine.

I have always (RTW and now M2TW) given high priority to economic buildings; and the only disappointment I have had is that I need to kick up the difficulty to VH/VH to get the game to be challenging.