Tips to streamline your campaign!!

[fokke85]

Hi guys,

I see a lot of threads where players are looking for tips to improve their play. Usually the tips are something a long the line like; "swords => spears, spears => cav, etc. Or something like; Put a champion in your army to boost your experience. While these tips are most certainly useful, I feel that most players who visit these forums are decent enough players to get all the basic strategies. Therefore I thought it might be nice to start a thread with some more advanced tips be it General or faction specific to optimize your campaigns. Anyone who got something useful to share feel free to put in your thoughts.

- How to get the best out of replenishment: Of course you can improve replenishment by various General traits and army traditions. But do you also know that being garrisoned in a town as well as mustering troops gives you a bonus to replenishment? So if your army took a big hit and you are able to get to a town, buy some troops, or ideally both you should do it. What I usually do is buy one of the cheapest unit available and disband it the next turn and than repeat the process. This way your forces should be up at full strength in no time.

- Bow ships, the key to a successful Coastal assault: You can take out an undefended town (or even a defended town for that matter) with a relatively small fleet. The thing is, while at sea, bow ships can replenish their ammo which means they have an infinite amount of it. Combine this with the fact that most units can't get to them and this gives you a huge advantage. First thing to do is kill the towers with your artillery ships because they will kill your ships in no time. Only kill the towers that can actually reach your ships since 95% of the battle will be fought on the beach you can ignore the rest of them. Better to use your remaining ammo on any ranged units the enemy might have. Now you park your bow ships as close as you can along the coastline of the town (don't actually disembark though) They will start firing on the enemy and most units can't do anything about that. Sometimes the enemy will walk out of range of your ships. Don't worry, just embark a single unit to lure them back. The AI will smell an easy kill but will get hailed with arrows. It will take long but it's worth the effort. after a while the last units usually give up and walk out of the city => Easy win

- Making use of the sea: You know how you rather not have your land units on sea because of sea attrition? There is a flip side to that story! Winter attrition which happens every other 4 turns and eats up your troops does not apply to sea regions. So if I have to walk my Huscarl army from Scandza to Spain and make camp every other 4 turns because it's winter, I can just as well take them to the sea and not be affected by it at all. Of course keep an eye out for enemy fleets which they still are very vulnerable to.

I have some more though but unfortunately I have to go to work, will post more in a few days!

[Ireland]

The bow ship tip and the replenishment tip about recruiting a cheap unit then disbanding is really quite clever.

[Bramborough]

The amphibious bowman ship tactic does indeed work, quite well (and I don't find this cheap or exploitative...it's perfectly reasonable for a warship's hold to store tens of thousands of arrows). Worth mentioning, however, it does require patience...can take a long time depending on the behavior of the AI garrison. Long enough that you might want to consider ensuring that your battle time is set to "No Limit". For one recent battle, this tactic was going quite well, was on the verge of breaking the last couple of units...and boom, 60 minute time limit expired, resulted in a Draw. It's not that big a deal, you can just reattack again on the same turn (no forced auto-retreat after a draw, and the blockade is maintained). Still, I would've rather finished the job on the first iteration.

I don't really see how hopping on/off the sea speeds things up, as there's a movement penalty for crossing the beach (in both directions). Wouldn't it be equally effective to just fort/camp for the one turn instead?

Closely related to the replenishment tip: Recruiting also boosts Integrity as well. If you have a new army, or one which has been defeated recently (which also means it certainly needs more troops), and time isn't a factor to build, then don't necessarily recruit the max number of units you can in a turn. Maybe just 1 or 2, to ensure you've got several turns to take advantage of the Mustering replenishment and integrity buffs.

[fokke85]

I don't really see how hopping on/off the sea speeds things up, as there's a movement penalty for crossing the beach (in both directions). Wouldn't it be equally effective to just fort/camp for the one turn instead?

It does help, don't forget that rivers and streams also effectively use up your movement points and if you would go from Denmark to Spain you would cross several of them.

[Bramborough]

It does help, don't forget that rivers and streams also effectively use up your movement points and if you would go from Denmark to Spain you would cross several of them.

Oh sure, if you go to sea and stay at sea, you'll get to Spain a lot quicker (or any other such long distance). No doubt. I thought you were advocating jumping back and forth repeatedly between land and sea depending on the season...as I go back and re-read that paragraph in the OP, I realize that's not what you were saying.

[wealthmonger]

Demand money from the green faces in diplomacy. Depending on how positive your relations are, you can usually get anywhere from 300 to 1300. Wait a year or more and ask again.

[fokke85]

Demand money from the green faces in diplomacy. Depending on how positive your relations are, you can usually get anywhere from 300 to 1300. Wait a year or more and ask again.

Yes you can squeeze the AI for huge amounts of money. And not just the green faces. Say a faction offers you a trade agreement or a non aggression pact. Always ask for money. As long as the chance of success is high it will always succeed so the trick is to find the sweet spot. What I usually do is keep asking for a higher amount until the chance of success changes to moderate and then you usually still can get away with it. This also works if the AI wants peace, usually they will ask for a peace treaty when they are getting weaker or when they are at war with a lot of factions. The WRE is a good example of this, almost everybody is at war with them so in my Jutes campaign I declared war on them the first turn to gain favor with some neighbors I wanted to ally with (a common enemy results in a boost in diplomatic relations) 30 turns later when I had my alliance with the saxons I sued for peace with the WRE and got 10K for it. Now bear in mind that I never fought a single battle with them in those 30 turns since they were so far away from me so earning 10K for a meaningless peace treaty wasn't such a bad deal!

Tribute States and satrapies: There was a time when I felt I had to own every region on the map. This was probably my OCD talking and it just felt right that the whole diplomatic map was one color but I never chose to subjugate. I was wrong for a number of reasons. Tribute States and satrapies give you a few benefits, they give you money. They save you the hassle of manually controlling and monitoring a thousand regions which can feel like a drag, especially late game. They also fight for you which make them great buffer states along the borders of your empire. But the most important reason is that they do count toward your victory conditions but they don't count towards your emperium. As you may know, the higher your emperium, the higher diplomatic penalty's you get with all factions.

Groom for command: In my Sassanid campaign I didn't like my king. He had a lot of bad traits. The thing I did was, I found a very young general who only had positive traits who was already married to a wife who also only had positive traits. I adopted him and gave him my best army. I had him campaign in Turkey, the middle east and Africa and he leveled up really fast (both in General traits and army traditions) I granted him every single office there was and in his early 30's this guys was a legend with major buffs to economy, army, public order and upkeep and I declared him my rightful Heir. Now there was only the matter of getting rid of his adopted father. A political assassination would be risky. It was very expensive and could backfire on my candidate. Therefor I thought it would make more sense to strip him of all his armies and let him go on a little field trip deep into the WRE just by himself. Naturally he didn't last more then a year and I could finally crown my worthy prodigal son. Make sure that he had all the public offices before becoming King as you can't grant your king any offices.

Move or attack order? The way the AI works is that it knows when it's units are being targeted and tries to act accordingly. So while you have to visually see that cavalry unit charging towards your slingers and act on it. It works different for the AI, so if you target a ranged unit, the AI will react by moving their unit "out of range" even if your unit is not even nearly within range to do some actual damage. Now if you know this you can pull your advantage since when they are running away they are not shooting at your units which renders them ineffective. Let me give you a good example. I'm defending against a full stack with just my garrison. My skirmish unit has used up all of his ammo. Just outside of my town, 2 units of slingers and 1 merc archer unit are firing at my melee units who are currently engaged by their melee units. I start targeting them one by one with my skirmisher just long enough for them to walk away and then I target the next one. Once you get the hang of this you're effectively putting 3 potentially high damage ranged units out of the fight with one levy skirmisher unit. Meanwhile my towers kept firing at them so after some time they routed without doing much damage at all.

Sometimes though you want to go the other way. Remember how if one guy out of the 120 in the unit is engaged in melee the rest of the unit will stand still? If you are hunting for ranged units with your cavalry and you target them, they will run away and isolate themselves from the group (ranged units are packed together most of the time) Better to issue a move order close to the unit and only at the last moment target the unit for maximum effect. If you are lucky you'll engage 2-3 units at once and even the most basic light cavalry will do a lot of damage and most of the time kill all of them. On a side note, always target skirmishers first as the most basic javelinmen will do a lot more damage then high tier archers or slingers most of the time so they need to be taken out first

[L337 NUB]

BTW if you are recruiting just to buff replenishment, then select a multiturn unit to recruit, cancel it the next turn, and start again...it doesnt appear that you have to actually add a unit to get the buff