Baden campaign
Campaign difficulty: very hard
Batlle difficulty: very hard
Patched up to patch 4 (latest patch) and with the more aggressive campaign AI. There was also a slower assimilation of captured settlements and some small changes to make siege battles more difficult for the human player.
Margrave Georg-Friedrich of Baden-Durlach was one of the main Protestant leaders in the early part of the Thirty Years War and, because of its position and small size, Baden is one of the more interesting German Protestant factions, very much used in tests of the campaign AI.
This will not be a proper AAR, just a couple of videos with considerations of overall strategy. Baden starts with two provinces. With the more aggressive AI, the diplomat needs to use the first four turns fully, because after that diplomacy will become increasingly difficult. Diplomatic relations are usually very strong and can be long-lasting if diplomats actively engage with allies during the campaign. For a faction like Baden, alliance priorities would be with the Protestant Union, Rhineland Palatinate, Wuerttemberg, Hessen, Braunschweig and Bohemia. The quicker these alliances are sealed, the smaller the chance that the Protestant axis will become split via some accidental alliances of some of its members with Catholic factions. Saxony is a faction often making alliances with Catholic factions, and is best avoided. It is the black sheep in the Protestant camp. If an ally makes also an alliance with Saxony, there is trouble in the horizon.
In this campaign, despite my best efforts, the Protestants were eventually split because of the aggressiveness of the campaign AI. Baden was indeed invaded at some point by Wuerttemberg and the Palatinate, when the Protestant alliance was fractured because of some random treaty with a Catholic faction.
Baden was also invaded by less friendly neutrals, especially the Old Swiss Confederation and Mainz. These two factions mostly engaged in piratical attacks. For a while ceasefires were possible. Eventually, through their repeated attacks, relations worsened so much that it became impossible to call a ceasefire. For most of the campaign, therefore, Baden was at war with several factions, including the occasional Protestant faction, maintaining secure alliances only with Hessen, Braunschweig and Bohemia.
There were close to 500 battles in the 270 turns the campaign lasted (until 1640). About a quarter were sieges, with the remainder being open battles, the largest part of which involved at least one full enemy stack. The majority of the battles took place in the first 100 turns, when the campaign AI was at its most aggressive. The AI factions mellow out, once the player faction has become one of the strongest factions in the game. This is a general feature of the M2 engine, which naturally seeks to prevent AI factions from attacking the human player without sufficient strength.
The Imperialists invaded Bohemia early in the war and overran most of the country, causing a rebellion in Prague. Bethlen Gabor with his emergent Transylvanian army then appeared and took Prague. Following that, he parked his armies around Prague and stayed there until near the end of the campaign.
The Ottomans, the second emergent faction, invaded with their armies the southeast corner of the map, taking a couple of provinces and causing rebellions in several others. The Bavarians took Amberg from the Palatinate. In the meantime, the Baden armies had gone to war with the Catholic Leage over Bruchsal, following which they had also captured Strassburg and Rottweil. Then came the first major showdown between the Catholic League and Baden, when Count Tilly besieged Rottweil with a full stack. Rottweil was defended succesfully, but the Austrians and Catholic League became increasingly more aggressive, sending large armies to besiege the Baden towns. These attacks were constant and needed a flexible defense, with armies kept in reserve in the smaller towns and sent to wherever an attack came, as the defenders sallied out. This aggressive defense worked well, because dragoons and musketeers can fire from the walls while the melee units slug it out in the open. Pretend-sallies worked even better in enticing the besieging AI armies to battle where the human player has a clear advantage.
In the course of the campaign, one faction, the Old Swiss Confederation, went rebel when its family members died in a battle near Altkirch. Bremen was also destroyed by Braunschweig. Most other factions lived to the end of the campaign. Merchants were initially helpful, but their usefulness dimished until they became completely useless, when the economy script zeroed out all resources for the human player. That happened when a total of about 15 settlements had been captured. From then on, maintaining production had to do with building mines, breweries, farms and the like, and keeping taxes in order. This is an art, involving training good governors who are able to keep also good public order. This can be helped by two tricks: 1. Getting the governor out of the settlement once per turn, otherwise they have a high chance of getting drunk traits that decrease public order and movement points. Before taking them out, public order must ideally be at 150-175 or more, otherwise there may be a knock on order that makes this strategy pointless. 2. Therefore, it is useful to keep the public order high, ideally over 150, especially when building new buildings, but increasing taxes on the turn before a building is completed, to improve the tax traits of the governor.
There were frequent religious rebellions. If these get out of hand, they can cause a significant decrease in public order which can be difficult to remedy. The only advantage would be that budding generals can gain experience by fighting these rebels and a free priest is generated that way. However, the new buildings one has to build to restore public order tend to cost more than the 4000 Gulden one needs to pay to stop the rebellions from getting out of hand.
The main difficulty in the victory conditions is eliminating the Catholic League in the long campaign. This is a requirement for all German Protestant factions. Similarly German Catholic factions have to eliminate the Protestant Union. These two factions are spread all over the map, which means that the human player will probably need to capture more than the minimum 35-60 provinces required by the victory conditions. Achieving control over most of the large map in 360 turns is no simple task.
The Protestant factions also have the option of establishing a German Empire and having their faction leader named Kaiser. It is not required by the victory conditions but can be just as challenging, if not more challenging. This actually does not happen for the Baden campaign. Margrave Friedrich-Georg did not become a Kaiser, although Baden did eventually get the flag with the imperial double-headed eagle, which is about as good. Only the leaders of the Palatinate, Prussia-Brandenburg, Brunswick, Wuerttemberg, Hessen and Saxony have a chance of becoming a Protestant Kaiser. To achieve that, 7 out of 8 key cities need to be captured. Most of the cities are already Protestant, which could pose certain diplomatic difficulties. Seven are in modern Germany and the eighth is Prague. When the first one is captured there is an event that your faction leader has obtained the sceptre and crown of Charlemagne. It might be better at present to leave the identity of these cities clouded into a little bit of mystery.
There were occasional mishaps, rat infestations, poor harvests, bad wine, floods, bandits, diseases and the like all of which tend to affect tax income. Income losses can also be caused by enemy ships blockading ports and land desolation caused by rebels or invading armies. There were also outbreaks of the plague, fortunately never in an important city. No generals were lost. Plague can be managed by building hospitals and the like.
One important event in the campaign is the reform event. At that point the barracks that were producing the old units will stop functioning and the human player needs to start building new barracks. Moreover, the old-style musketeers, pikemen and cavalry will no longer get free upkeep and have to be moved to the smaller towns. The reform event happens sometime around 1628-1630. This is a difficult time for the human player, if he was relying on free upkeep in cities, which the AI factions do not rely much on. The new units will induce a shift in tactics to armies involving increasingly more musketeers and, therefore, require a different approach to fighting battles. Battle tactics evolve throughout the campaign, through the building of new types of barracks and the Reform event, in an attempt to simulate the historical changes in tactics during the war.