Maintaining continuous army progress?

[Munimentum]

Ok first things first, I've been playing this mod for a couple of days now and my first reaction upon first loading up an Eriador campaign was literally "woah". Excellent work on this, and it's great to see such a supportive community with awesome sub mods.

Now for my question, which if I'm honest, I feel a little embarrassed about since I get the feeling it's something really simple that I'm missing, especially since I've been playing TW games for a long time. I read posts about people using single, 3/4 to full stack armies to conquer multiple fully defended regions, and I just can't see how. Against opposing full stack armies I usually lose about 100-300 soldiers every time, and since the regions you conquer won't have your culture or high enough building levels, you can't reinforce on the way.

Likewise, it's not really possible to continuously pump out units to replace depleted ones since travel time would be such an issue and the monetary cost would be HUGE. So how on earth do you guys do it?

Also, a side note, in TATW, are places like Moria and Isengard hardcoded to spam and spawn units they can't afford? Moria in particular I've noticed has like 5 full stacks around it at times, even when they have like 2-3 regions. And don't get me started on Isengards randomly spawning full stacks all over the place.

Anyway, bit of a tangent there. Hope you guys can help!

[Russian Gondor]

OK. This is the way I felt when I started this mod. I am used to it now. Yes, the enemy has no gold to support upkeep and random stacks of units.

This is the way I play. Let us say I am playing for Mordor and Gondor has about 4 stacks near Minas Tirith. My first job is to grab my best general ( Witch King ) and attack one of the stacks ( night battle so no reinforcements ). Then I try to kill the army using flanking tactics. Okay, let us say I have 300 losses. I say, oh well, I still have 2,000 more troops. And so, I attack the rest of the stacks. While I am doing this I am making more units in my military cities. Once my army is depleted, it has taken over 5 stacks with it. ( Note, do not throw away your general ). So I attack again.

I am still a bit ( no offence KK ) annoyed by this mods tactics. You cannot do anything to stop the stacks from coming. The best way to stop it is to usually use ballistas or catapults to get rid of garrison script and take a city. You need a minimum of 4 stacks to defeat a nation. Because each time you leave a city empty or with half garrison, stacks lay siege to the city.

So again, get used to it. Nothing you can do about it except kill, kill, kill, and again kill.

[son of romans]

Best way to take a city is to let enemy garnison to sail force to atack send a litle army but with good quality and city will be taken with minimal loses(if you use good tactic and all oportunities),for rebel setlements if you do all right you will get 4 best available units.Let say I just coquered Minas-Morgul and If I capture rebel city of Emyn Arnen I will get 4 units of fountain guard,I move capital to Minas Morgul,then conqour Emyn-Arnen and in Minas-Morgul appears 4units of Fountain Guard,then use them right on battle field,capital move back to Minath-Tirith but remember problem is to get this missions.In every city must be at last one garnison unit,you need to have an army or a spy near rebels.If mission reward will be 2500 gold then reluad and you get mission with units.

[Baywatch]

If mission reward will be 2500 gold then reluad and you get mission with units.

Well you could do that but, I consider that cheating in the same way as reloading when a spy/assassin fails. The bottom line is you simply need to get good at fighting the AI on the battle map. Otherwise you can't play the game on VH/VH difficulty. Mostly when people speak of beating full stack garrisons with 3/4 stacks they are fighting against an evil faction. Good factions tend to be about quality over quantity, so it isn't all that hard to accomplish. After you're inside the settlement's walls, you shouldn't have any trouble fending off armies many times the size of your own.

[Gimli]

Ok first things first, I've been playing this mod for a couple of days now and my first reaction upon first loading up an Eriador campaign was literally "woah". Excellent work on this, and it's great to see such a supportive community with awesome sub mods.

Now for my question, which if I'm honest, I feel a little embarrassed about since I get the feeling it's something really simple that I'm missing, especially since I've been playing TW games for a long time. I read posts about people using single, 3/4 to full stack armies to conquer multiple fully defended regions, and I just can't see how. Against opposing full stack armies I usually lose about 100-300 soldiers every time, and since the regions you conquer won't have your culture or high enough building levels, you can't reinforce on the way.

Likewise, it's not really possible to continuously pump out units to replace depleted ones since travel time would be such an issue and the monetary cost would be HUGE. So how on earth do you guys do it?

Also, a side note, in TATW, are places like Moria and Isengard hardcoded to spam and spawn units they can't afford? Moria in particular I've noticed has like 5 full stacks around it at times, even when they have like 2-3 regions. And don't get me started on Isengards randomly spawning full stacks all over the place.

Anyway, bit of a tangent there. Hope you guys can help!

Hey man, first off. WELCOME TO THE FORUMS

When you start a campaign you have weak units, and then you can upgrade better versions. The reason we win against a full stack army if were only 3/4 full, is that we have upgraded men which help a lot. Its really easy to win against a orc full stack army with only 2/4 full. You just need practice and what units to bring. For me, when i attack i usally bring 4-6 units of archers, 3 units of spear, and 3 units of swordsmen. For that i just attack a orc stack and just dominate them with only 1-200 casualties. Pretty much, you just need skill, and Practice.

Sincerely,
Gimli10

[A_Dane]

Eriador isn't good for slaughtering many enemy units without losses, actually they're terrible at it.

Try elves, i had some 2000 elves slaughter just about 6000 orcs (not in the same battle, was fought over 2 turns), and only lost some 200 basic swordsmen

[IrishBlood]

i think eriador is a TERRIBLE choice for a newbie like yourself, not so much because of its difficult position, but because the units are absoulutly substandard compared to every other faction, and as a result are being redone

you will enjoy the game much better using the high quality units of ANY other faction, seriously, i cant stress that enough

But if your looking for a good faction to get a proper understanding of how the Mod works compared to normal medieval 2, i'd say try either the High Elves or Dale, thats not to say their easy factions, far from it, but they have EXCELLENT starting positions and give you plenty of breathing space

and as for the problem of not being able to maintain your military, you should initally expand rapidly, to take settlements near choke points, such as river crossings/bridges, mountain passes, etc, and then turtle up for awhile, and focous your funds on building up your economy. Also always have the tax rate on your cities set to very low,, that way they will grow faster and make you alot more money in the long term, only raise the tax's if you BADLY need money.

[Munimentum]

Thanks for the replies guys, appreciate it

Funny thing is I actually switched to HE before reading you're posts lol. The difference is ridiculous, are HE sort of overpowered or something? Awesome starting units and starting position, so much easier than Eriador.

Also having far more success in battles with HE. 1-3 units of swordsmen/spearmen and like 6-8 archers, with like 3-4 generals and the rest can be optionally filled with lancers. Utterly annihilates stuff, especially the crappy orc archers which the Ootmm seem to spam. Started using Son of Romans tactics he mentioned in another thread where you use hit and run with your general units, since they respawn or something? Well, it works. I pretty much used all my generals as cavalry units anyway but using hit and run is far more effective than I ever realized. I think I used to just leave them in the fight after charging once lol. /facepalm myself

I have another question though, after something weird happened in my game. Eriador was at war with the Ootmm, and suddenly the faction died and all their regions (they hadn't lost any besides the crappy village near rivendell, forgot it's name at the moment) became rebel regions. How does this happen? Does the faction die when they have no more family members or something? This was the only reason I could think of other than a bug.

Thanks again for all your replies, like I said earlier, not only is this mod unbelievably awesome, but the community is great too. I usually only play 1 faction, maybe 2 in TW games, and only for a couple of days, but I'm pretty sure this is gonna keep me going for AGES

[Beregond]

Eriador is supposed to have poor armies,cause in fact there were no big armies and population was low, the very existance of Eriador is just to balance things in the North. HE are far more powerful, yeah, and Orcs are supposed to win using numbers not good soldiers

and OotMM died cause they lost all their family memebers, yes; I think this is fixed in 1.4, dunno what version you're playing

[Seleukos_I.]

They will always loose when all family members are dead. What was fixed was the fact that they wouldn't die at all and that they died off when the faction leader was killed.

[son of romans]

Yes,HE are very strong but gondor has good units and huge cities,Rohan can conqour Eriador and Dale and after 5 turns start recruitment of their developed units but with HE after crush of OOMM began war with Silvan Elves.

[IrishBlood]

Yes,HE are very strong but gondor has good units and huge cities,Rohan can conqour Eriador and Dale and after 5 turns start recruitment of their developed units but with HE after crush of OOMM began war with Silvan Elves.

what?? rohan can conquer eriador and dale?????

[Russian Gondor]

I forget, what does HE stand for? Harad?

[The Big Red 1]

I forget, what does HE stand for? Harad?

High Elves

[Russian Gondor]

Thank you.

[Kayyyleb]

As a fellow noob I can advise you to start off with high elves or dwarves. Dwarves *ahem* can win the entire game pretty easily with autoresolve lol and are damned invincible when holding a fort. High elves have no one hell bent on killing them unlike most other factions with mortal enemies (and Gondor with 2 and later 3 when rohan dies) and holding Imladris isn't too difficult because of the bridges.

It also helps to play through the game on a lower difficulty first so you know a little about what to expect as far as what the other factions usually do.

Don't play Eriador until the next update. Arnor changes everything.

[Benox]

i dont like much the way that the ai produce full stakes, even when they dont have any money, i mean, im with SE, and OoTMM dont have money since 20 turns, and they still producin full staks of goblins
without it, would be more easy but also more realistic, there's no way a bankrup faction produces so many units

[Baywatch]

i dont like much the way that the ai produce full stakes, even when they dont have any money, i mean, im with SE, and OoTMM dont have money since 20 turns, and they still producin full staks of goblins
without it, would be more easy but also more realistic, there's no way a bankrup faction produces so many units

Well technically speaking, the OotMM should have many many many more goblins even than what you encounter in TATW. So if we were talkling about any other non-orc faction, then sure. But, hordes of goblins/orcs running about burning and pillaging everything in their path (or at least trying) sounds lore accurate enough to me.

[son of romans]

I like watch how my armies kills goblins,800 against 4000,very epic battles and result are only some injuries,Dale is week to but definetly can say that Rohan have made seriose problems to me and to play with them is easy because are very many northmens.

[fatpaul]

yeah, I'd echo similar sentiments to the opening post as a new player to this mod (but long time total war player). The battles just are relentless but great fun if a little easy at times. Playing as HE also and am finding in the early years (where I still am) its best to just use the light archers and your generals as cavalry. The archers are good enough in melee not to even bother having skirmish swithced on since you're mostly up against goblin infantry or uruk raiders who are pretty soft, especially after running through the hail of arrows that 6 units of archers can put out before they get to melee. with a unit or two of cavalry (generals early on) you can mop up huge hosts with minimal losses.

the 2 main problems I have (and given the ease of despatching enemy armies they're probably essential to avoid the game being too easy) are financial and the rate of expansion. I've grown my towns on the west coast nicely to large towns with plenty of trade coming in but its still pretty difficult to field more than say 2 armies (of about half a stack each) to go round picking up new settlements. Problem 2 stems from that in that the conquering army then has to stay in situ for a quite a while until I can afford and move in reinforcements to garrison the city so I can move onto the next region.

Problem 2 might be solved by there being more mercenaries around while problem 1 doesn't need solving as it adds to the challenge.

1 thing that did make me chuckle though in the early years of this campaign was the speed at which isengard expanded. one of my first moves was to expand south and within half a dozen turns I'd moved a small army to the coastal town due south of my regions. I only just got there ahead of a half stack of (then neutral) uruk raiders. Then to my surprise I noticed that isengard already had captured not just every region between the coast and isengard but also all the other coastal cities further south. Now having had a quick look at most of the factions before picking the HE I don't see how Isengaurd could even produce a half stack of uruk raiders in around 7 turns, let alone march them accross to the coast while also capturing and garrisoning every other town on the way. Is this an example of the random spawning that people mention? I thought it only happened when you were capturing a major AI city?

In any event while it probably slowed down my expansion a little it does make war against Isengaurd more lucrative as there are so many more settlements to liberate.