Hardest faction VH/VH?

[Data78]

I've played England, Portugal, Venice, Hungary, Novgorod early campaign and Venice/England/Scotland late campaign VH/VH, I have found that England/Venice is too easy even with VH/VH on either campaign. Portugal is fairly difficult if you don't go all out aggressive against Moors. Novgorod is reasonably challenging due to the lacking of strong early game units/Lithuania/Cuman spam of pagan hordes, though due to the spread out nature of Novgorod, their reinforcement range some what makes up for the #'s disadvantage. Hungary is truly very hard early campaign, Byzantines not only spam Contoratoi and those spear throwing menaces, but they also get some units of Scoutiis/Varangian guard. The only method I have been able to survive slightly is by gathering every unit I have at the start of the game, mass micro Magyar cav, get as many generals adopted/born via princess human factories and constantly pillage all their early game cities, declare peace and return their lands, then rush in again and do it again.

[Lord of Shadows]

Try with Khwarezmians.LOL

[Scythion]

Khwarezm is one of the easiest in early era, but in late era: mongols.

[Larsel]

do you play with bygs mod? It increases difficulty by alot.
I always have loved playing ERE late era with bygs mod.
If you play by some of the houserules such as keeping blood lines pure (not donating or accepting man of the hour) and not reloading game if you lose an army or such, ERE is fairly hard.
If you also play with the most aggressive AI you will be under attack from both fronts by the Hungarians and the Seljuks and maybe Sicily too if you dont gain enough land fast enough.

Edit: I could imagine Teutonic order would be very hard to play if you play by the rules i just mentioned

[Strengelicher]

Teutonic Order late campaign. For an extra challenge, you should not only play on vh/vh, but also activate BGR, Gracul AI and longer assimilation. And never autoresolve battles.

[Shaun]

And never autoresolve battles.

Surely that makes it easier, though, as auto-resolve is often heavily biased against the player and can give you crushing defeats even when the odds are in your favour.

[Hidden Sage]

Surely that makes it easier, though, as auto-resolve is often heavily biased against the player and can give you crushing defeats even when the odds are in your favour.

Depends on the composition of the enemy army. Maybe I'm just bad at being Genoes, but there's no better way to beat 18 companies of French Seigneur than hitting auto-resolve. Pikes, crossbows, heavy spearmen in shield-wall. After a certain point, there's just too many cavalry in some of these AI armies to contain. Any army more than 40% cavalry is best left to the machines to fight out, as apparently the charge bonuses don't factor into autoresolve mechanics as heavily as they do on the actual battlefield.

[Strengelicher]

Surely that makes it easier, though, as auto-resolve is often heavily biased against the player and can give you crushing defeats even when the odds are in your favour.

It depends. There may be battles which become more difficult or even impossible to win by autoresolving. But there are also instances where autoresolving makes it easier. Take for example the Byzantine bodyguard units. If you do not have certain units which are able to deal with them, they will destroy even a huge field army if the battle is played out on the battle map. Or, even more importantly: You can take settlements which are heavily fortified, but lightly guarded, with sneak attacks and only a single unit of catapults in your army. However, if you play out the same battle on the battle map, you will find that your catapults do not have enough ammunition to bring down the walls in a single battle. So, in that case: easy win on autoresolve, impossible to win on the battle map (at least impossible to win in one battle or, in other words, one turn).

[MortalCoil]

Teutonic Order late campaign. For an extra challenge, you should not only play on vh/vh, but also activate BGR, Gracul AI and longer assimilation. And never autoresolve battles.

Word, you start with two cities and literally everyone wants your nuts in like 10 turns....

[Honors Bastion]

A pretty difficult VH/VH game is the Byzantine Empire late era when you start out divided, weaken, and pretty small. Add in BGR IV and the difficulty level increases greatly.

[AllianceDeath]

It's actually quite interesting, the Autoresolve Battles, in other mods like Call of Warhammer Autoresolve favors certain players to the point of insantiy, but in SS autoresolves are auto-loss for players.

[Shaun]

Interdasting.

So will auto-resolve help me beat large armies of Turkish horse archers with my largely spear militia and javelin throwing foot troop armies? I personally find HA armies very difficult to deal with, even though I usually win I also usually suffer extremely heavy casualties too.

[UglySori]

Interdasting.

So will auto-resolve help me beat large armies of Turkish horse archers with my largely spear militia and javelin throwing foot troop armies? I personally find HA armies very difficult to deal with, even though I usually win I also usually suffer extremely heavy casualties too.

Just recruit foot archers or xbows. Doesn't matter which quality really as you will out range them, your bow units outnumber their HAs manpower-wise on a unit to unit basis. The AI tends to skirmish first with the HA (plopping them right in front of you) so you don't have to worry about them crashing into your missile line too early with infantry before you whittle down the HA some. Just remember to set them into loose formation & turn off skirmish mode or put a unit in loose formation 2 - 4 unit widths ahead of your missile line to absorb arrow fire. You may have poor accuracy but both of those HAs go down easily to missile fire. If you are Byzantium, Toxatae easily beat Turkish HA or Maygyars. Mourtatoi of course are your bread and butter and allow you to mess around with making stake forts and w/ BGR become hugely important as they are easily recruited since they local troop type.

[Shaun]

Just recruit foot archers or xbows. Doesn't matter which quality really as you will out range them, your bow units outnumber their HAs manpower-wise on a unit to unit basis. The AI tends to skirmish first with the HA (plopping them right in front of you) so you don't have to worry about them crashing into your missile line too early with infantry before you whittle down the HA some. Just remember to set them into loose formation & turn off skirmish mode or put a unit in loose formation 2 - 4 unit widths ahead of your missile line to absorb arrow fire. You may have poor accuracy but both of those HAs go down easily to missile fire. If you are Byzantium, Toxatae easily beat Turkish HA or Maygyars. Mourtatoi of course are your bread and butter and allow you to mess around with making stake forts and w/ BGR become hugely important as they are easily recruited since they local troop type.

Okay thank you for that.

I was going wrong by recruiting large amounts of the basic spearmen and skirmishers. The upkeep on these units were cheap and I could make large garrisons of them, which helped deter attackers. And large stacks of them were also good in sieges too, as Turkish cavalry aren't too effective in streets.

[UglySori]

Okay thank you for that.

I was going wrong by recruiting large amounts of the basic spearmen and skirmishers. The upkeep on these units were cheap and I could make large garrisons of them, which helped deter attackers. And large stacks of them were also good in sieges too, as Turkish cavalry aren't too effective in streets.

Bows/x-bows are still very valuable in sieges. I recently got the bug to start a new SS campaign, so downloaded the default 6.3/6.4 package. I noticed someone in this thread mentioned GS5's ReallyBadAI mod and I don't think I installed it if it wasn't in the 6.4 default package and therefore don't know what changes it makes to AI decision making in regards to sieges. However standard 6.4 VH/VH, BYG, most aggressive/backstabby AI (gracul?), AI still fairly beatable in sieges and where your missile troops are worth their weight in gold.

I am sure there is a write-up somewhere on the board (pretty sure I wrote one in a random Real Combat testing thread 7 years ago) or if you are a vet you already know the strategy but quick overview is open the gates and let the enemy rush.

You can choose to abuse stakes at the gate if you have the option but for the most part you need to form an L shaped blocking force at the gate with spears on defend with units double or triple layered on top of each other. Now that you have a holding force in place you line up your missile troops parallel to it to get missile shots into side and rear of the occupied enemy troops.

Often there is a wall that turns inwards and is parallel to the gate. That is the best position for bows as they have angle of fire to get the entire unit's firepower into action. Bows also have the ability to shoot over your line javelins who need to be closer in proximity to the melee scrum as well as direct LOS because of low angle of fire. Bows/xbows also have the ammo to lay down sustained fire that will do good damage in these situations because Real Combat rewards you for shots to the rear and non-shielded sides.


Overall of the hard factions to play Late Era, Byzantium is the most fun in my opinion as they have a fairly interesting roster that is difficult to balance expense-wise even when you economy is humming but has the most flexibility. You'll also be plagued by crappy spears for a long time.

[Shaun]

Bows/x-bows are still very valuable in sieges. I recently got the bug to start a new SS campaign, so downloaded the default 6.3/6.4 package. I noticed someone in this thread mentioned GS5's ReallyBadAI mod and I don't think I installed it if it wasn't in the 6.4 default package and therefore don't know what changes it makes to AI decision making in regards to sieges. However standard 6.4 VH/VH, BYG, most aggressive/backstabby AI (gracul?), AI still fairly beatable in sieges and where your missile troops are worth their weight in gold.

I am sure there is a write-up somewhere on the board (pretty sure I wrote one in a random Real Combat testing thread 7 years ago) or if you are a vet you already know the strategy but quick overview is open the gates and let the enemy rush.

You can choose to abuse stakes at the gate if you have the option but for the most part you need to form an L shaped blocking force at the gate with spears on defend with units double or triple layered on top of each other. Now that you have a holding force in place you line up your missile troops parallel to it to get missile shots into side and rear of the occupied enemy troops.

Often there is a wall that turns inwards and is parallel to the gate. That is the best position for bows as they have angle of fire to get the entire unit's firepower into action. Bows also have the ability to shoot over your line javelins who need to be closer in proximity to the melee scrum as well as direct LOS because of low angle of fire. Bows/xbows also have the ammo to lay down sustained fire that will do good damage in these situations because Real Combat rewards you for shots to the rear and non-shielded sides.


Overall of the hard factions to play Late Era, Byzantium is the most fun in my opinion as they have a fairly interesting roster that is difficult to balance expense-wise even when you economy is humming but has the most flexibility. You'll also be plagued by crappy spears for a long time.

Since like something I'll definitely need to try when Constantinople comes under the inevitable Jihad and I have to beat off stacks and stacks of the enemy!

My previous tactic was to put a some missile troops on the walls and gates and let them come at me with their battering ram. They'd suffer some casualties due to the missile fire. After they'd brake through the gate, I had some good defensive melee units in a |_| shape around the gate (where the gap is where the gate is to let them rush in). Since they had the enemy surrounded, even the basic spearmen (contratori or something) could give the enemy a fair beating - especially when having their armour upgraded multiple times. I keep most of my troops in reserve at any one time, so when one unit eventually breaks, I send in a fresh one against the demoralised and exhausted enemy.

Guess I'll have to start mass recruiting toxotai now...

[ash874]

early turkey

[Honors Bastion]

The problem with auto resolve is that the computer tends to favor infantry armies over cavalry ones. One of the factors here is that infantry armies have better numbers then the cavalry ones, which causes a skew toward the infantry. I'm not sure if this is implemented in SS 6.4 or not, but there is a fix. There is a thing called secondary and tertiary hit points in the game that only goes into affect during auto resolve. It has been discovered that the secondary hit points if increased for cavalry, allow the infantry and cavalry to be weighed equally in the engine so that troop quality and morale will matter more.

[Kataphractos]

Hungary is truly very hard early campaign, Byzantines not only spam Contoratoi and those spear throwing menaces, but they also get some units of Scoutiis/Varangian guard.

Found that out the hard way when I decided to play my first H/VH campaign as them. After a brutal spanking from the Byzantines, otherwise known as the first 22 turns, I dropped the campaign.

[Snakes]

Early era Hungary is pretty rough for the first 50 turns or so, definitely. You have to wait for the uprising to do anything significant (or at least, I do). I find the Seljuks to be very difficult as well. Their income isn't that great and the thin spread of your kingdom makes things tricky. Taking Edessa/Antioch is a real boost, though.

Late era Khwaremia and Mongol campaigns are also quite difficult. Byzantine in the late era is a real challenge, but it's loads more fun that the others.