Venice

[Eagletribune]

I really hate venice right now...I'm playing my French campaign and have all of north Italy in my pocession except for Venice and florence. Well for some unknown reason milan seems to leave me alone despite the acually large army they have in florance, but it doesn't matter cause I'm stuck with being able to only send one stack to seige Venice. The problem with this is that I can only use mercenaries to fight with cause Venice took back Milan once and it got demoted to a minor city. (losing it's garrison quater level barrack) Well I tried everything, even using a crusader troops to break in, but they have there best crossbows and a full stack of silver and bronze armor italian spear men.

[Samir]

bomb them from far away with Trebuchets and Longbowmen

when they are either gone from the wall, or when there are no more walls

CHARGE!!!!! NO PRISONERS!!!

[Vor]

NO PRISONERS!!!

Unless you want to keep a good rating. In which case, take prisoners and release them after.

[HopliteLysander]

I was having a similar problem in my French campaign. I found the best way to deal with those tough Italian cities was,

A)siege weapons, knock the walls right out from under them and charge in with your heavy cavalry.

B)Spies, open the gates and charge in before they can react.

C)wait them out, if you do they will either have to surrender, or usually you will get to fight them in the open either when they send a relief force or sally out the gates.

D)Distraction, I sent an army around Italy and attacked their islands in the Med. they sent most of their forces East to counter this threat and left Venice poorly guarded.

E)Once you get inside the walls, split your troops up into 2 or 3 columns. this way you can hit them from behind with horsemen, or even rush the town square while they are fighting your other troops in the town.

Hope this helps!

[NobleNick]

Siege them with an all-cav force. When they sally, split your force into 2 or 3 parts and hightail it away from the gates in opposite directions.

The entire city garrison will empty out to follow one of your forces (typically the one with the general). When you have lured the enemy to the farthest corner of the map, run your other (unfollowed) cav into the city to take the square. Station some cav in the city streets to choke the passages.

The defenders, finally realizing their predicament, will all leave from chasing your first group of cav, in order to take back the square from your second. When that happens, use the first cav to charge into the fleeing enemy.

Meanwhile, the 3-minute timer will not be enough for the returning horde to get back to the square, if you execute correctly.

Another variation I like is to just run all your cav around the settlement, with the enemy chasing you until they are exhausted, then execute the manuever described above, or use your excellent (and still fresh) French cav to crush them.

[Pre]

Your not going to beat VHI head on with dismounted knights, and they have great archers. Best bet is to use heavy cav, as venice has no super heavy knight unit.

You can also use 6 or so spys in that one town for a sure thing with the gates, Also knock down some walls.

[crazedwombat]

that's kind of cheap although I've used that tactic once before. They were all fighting at the front gates and I sent 5-6 units of cav into the town center. They charged but suffering heavy losses i was able to hold them out of the town center by the time the timer ran out.

i was desperate at this point in the game, otherwise, its kinda cheap and unrealistic.

[Trajan]

Moved to Battle Planning.

[Eagletribune]

thanks for all the advice. Though I'm using units from previous campaigns and mainly mercs. So instead I'll keep my weak armies in the cities i own and build up a elite team from the mainland of france.

[SaintOfTheSword]

Archers are always archers, no matter how cool they look. If you have lots of cavalry besiege and wait, when they sally forth then your cavalry can easily run them down. If you are the impatient type of person however (which you seem to be in fact), use a combination of trebuchets and heavy infantry. Reducing the walls to rubble turns a city into just a set of streets, in which afterwards your heavy infantry can do work against the crossbow militia which are, after all, just archers. Once engaged in melee with heavy infantry, they will simply lose. Just place the trebuchet where they can hit the walls without the crossbowmen hitting the engineers.