Hardest, most challenging/frustrating faction to play as in your opinion?

[Escuratii va bene]

What's the one or you?

You'd thinking playing as say England if you're fairly new to the game with France and Scotland would be a pain in the ass. Well it is but I mean the faction that you're not even 100 turns into and you're just like forget this, you may have been turned on by your closest neighbour and they siege and take your capital in 2 turns.... not that this happened to me or anything with the Moors

You may have led small but strong enough ragtag armies to tiny rebel settlements to take future major settlements / cities but your army betrays you and turns into a rebel army over and over again and it may just take years and years to build up a steady economy and strong army in North Africa while fighting in Spain and NA simultaneously with your random rebel armies scattered randomly about the place

Ok I'm referring to my campaign with the moors, I have one with Russia to and I don't even find that as hard. The Moors aren't hard to play as, I find them fluid and fast (in battle) and I've breezed through a couple of turns but being a muslim faction from NA and taking a foothold in Spain isn't necessarily easy, earlier on anyway. You'd just say "Blaze through Portugal and spain" but with what? The armie's still building homey

I'd be better off just starting a campaign of religious conversion, convert the whole of the iberian peninsula to Islam.... then, yeah I only just thought that far, or I could convert Spain to Islam and call a Jihad on Portugal! (Yeah what a great plan lol) or somehow get all of their soldiers to rebel to the moors? Something like that

Anyway what faction have you found playing, been the hardest. Did you quit the campaign? Are you still playing? What's going on with it now? I'm genuinely interested

[KnightOfPortugal]

Hungary was the hardest for me. It was fun initially, but at turn 150 I was still nowhere. I thought sea trade on the black sea could be profitable, but I was wrong. Black sea is more like... an addition if you got major places like the Eastern or Western mediterannean.

[tudor93]

Egypt is fun, until the Mongols come .... so I think it is one of the hardest factions to play with, well, now I learned from some tutorials (here on this forum) how to kill them (Timurids too)
I don't like hungarians so I never played with Hungary, but I think it's also a hard faction
I like England , Byzantine Empire and Turkey (although Byz and Turkey are hard to play with IMO, but very very fun)
England is a really easy one, just ally with France from the first turn, pay them a little amount of florins and give them map info so you reach good relations (the chances of being backstabed drop, I think) and then go pwnd Scotland, Scotland sucks, their armies just sit there out of the city and you cand blitz Edinburgh and destroy them in just 1 turn

[Norwegian_viking]

Norway in Britania, very very hard.
In vanilla its probably Milan, as i usally get into a three or somethimes 4 or 5 front war against HRE, Venecia, France, Denmark, Sicilly

But Milan is by far my favorite faction

[k_Apollo]

Byzzies. The Turks, Venice and Hungary are tough as hell, imo. Same for the golden and black hordes.
And England is the easiest campaign there is, I guess.
Milan typically gets hard around turn 30 when I suffer like 4 big wars at a time.

[PrestigeX]

Not meaning to come off as smug, but none of them are hard in the vanilla M2TW - it's all too easy, more so just tedious after a while. I play the Darth Mod, and Lands to Conquer - which is basically the same exact thing as vanilla but with much smarter,harder, and better AI / battle dynamics.

Darth mod even has an option for "Harder Campaign" where the muslims begin allied, are non-playable, and given extreme power. Playing sicily was really hard because, in the mod you don't get Norman knights until the later building upgrades and you don't get to use Cavalry Militia either... It was a bit of struggle fighting the moors into africa, meanwhile hoping the Milanese (my allies) didn't betray me any time soon. I imagine the portugese or spanish might even be harder.

Broken Crescent is pretty hard, atleast I remember it being that way - played it on my old computer. I might go back to it again, but I just remember the battles in particular feel different ( cavalry units too powerful, infantry too weak, horse archers too hard to enage, and battles taking too long - mebe it's a diff version now and better)

[Silverheart]

I found the Turks to be the hardest faction, but that is just because I was pretty quick in trying them out, so I wasn´t really experienced by then.
Also, they have crappy militia, their HAs are kind of on the light side (armorwise), they get the Mongols AND Timurids head on right away and the Zagros mountains are a real PAIN. It takes FOREVER to move anything around there.

[FootSoldier]

Scotland for hardest. Slow start.

The Turks are hard because of the Mongols (and I get the Timurids through Baghdad with them too). Other factions aren't a problem for the Turks.

I have to disagree with Silverheart about Turkey (no offence) - glorious HA (Turkomans and Sipahi), brilliant militia (Saracen Militia and the awesome JHI), plus a good heavy cavalry unit, and great foot archers. Elephants from Jedda. Then in the end game you top it off with Janissary Archers (stakes) and Janissary Musketeers (best musketeers in the game, and they can melee too) ... a great fun faction to play with very strong units.

[Paok]

Egypt!While it's fun to fight the hordes and slaughter each other,it is difficult to have 45 regions in order to win!

[Somerandomdude2]

I don't like HRE. Too vulnerable early on.

Any Islamic faction because if you do well, the Pope will rain crusades on you regardless of how good your relations are with him.

Venice because of low morale troops, including their heavy infantry. If they wont fight to the last man; I don't want them in my army.


In other words, I pretty much suck and regardless of what faction I play; I run into a wall and decide I don't like something about that faction.

[KingofPoland]

I find the Turks hard. It takes a really long time to get them going. (side story) I was doing a campaign as Russia once and during my evacuation plan once I had landed at Inverness (turn 10-15) I received a message saying the Turks were destroyed. As the Turks I find that they have some kind of homing device towards Kiev or Antioch depending on which side of the mountains they appear (the ones that appear south usually turn Mosul into rebel when I'm not a faction near there.

[deadbone1961]

For me, the Russians and the Byzantines are ubber hard. For the Russians, forces seem weak with low morale, and there's a lot of ground to cover to the next city/castle. The Byzantines seem to also suffer from inferior troops for longer than usual, as well as having to defend against aggressive Christians to the West and Turks to the East (and their infantry uniforms look alot like diapers - purple at that).

[Jianadaren]

What's the one or you?

...forget this, you may have been turned on by your closest neighbour...

I hate it when I get turned on by my neighbour. Unless of course you live beside Elisha Cuthbert.

[Zvornik]

I hate it when I get turned on by my neighbour. Unless of course you live beside Elisha Cuthbert.

lol

[MJDreamWalker13]

The most challenging/frustrating faction to play as for me is France.
I love their varied and strong unit roster, starting position and the fact money is not never an issue, however all those things generate jealous looks from the neighbours. 5 strong neighbours. This is Medieval 2 TOTAL WAR, I get it, but it's annoying being at war with literally everybody around me for no real reason.

[tudor93]

This is Medieval 2 TOTAL WAR, I get it, but it's annoying being at war with literally everybody around me for no real reason.

that's why they created MODS !
Still, I only play vanilla

[Grenadier.]

The Turks

[eisx]

I have played with Mayans/America but I gave up my campaign. No cavalry, no artillery, no ships just huge native armies. I had 19 regions but stucked. Because of the lack of ships I had to attack my two allies so I left off.

[Zvornik]

The Moors
takes a long time, you cannot win a battle if you automatically resolve it
sicily and spain and portugal will send everything at you aswell.
To this day I have tried playing as the moors maybe twice...can't do it

[shikaka]

The Moors
takes a long time, you cannot win a battle if you automatically resolve it
sicily and spain and portugal will send everything at you aswell.
To this day I have tried playing as the moors maybe twice...can't do it

You can call a Jihad on the spanish castle at maybe turn 2, and easily defeat them.
Also, in the meantime, you can send a small army to Timbuktu-Arguín, where you can train many merchants.
Moors are not hard, just you have to have a bit bigger numbers then the christians, especially if they bring lots of knights. If you secure whole Iberia and Timbuktu-Arguín, even crusades will be a joke.

Actually the Moors were the first faction I won with. Jihad rules


For most challenging? Not many in vanilla. Maybe Scotland, because of the lack of unit options.