For a one-post AAR I wanted to keep my actual campaign objectives pretty simple. Although I've always been more of a Shogun AARtist, I do enjoy Medieval 2 a lot and the Byzantines are far and away my favourite faction. Mimicking Belisarius' reconquest of Rome seemed like an easy, quick and fitting goal to work with (and should be a theme familiar to people who have played the Attila DLC). I decided to play on m/m, because I'm not really fantastic at the game and I also didn't want the campaign to get too bogged down. On reflection though, it was very easy to capture Rome quickly, so maybe I should have upped the difficulty a bit more. In my test campaign, I got crushed autoresolving the pitched battle with the Pope, so I was worried about that battle when selecting the difficulty. But when I fought the battle myself in the actual campaign, I was able to rout him with minimal losses. The amount of elite cavalry that the Byzantines can recruit from the start of the game is crazy! I thought invading Italy would be a very difficult prospect right from the get go, but going through Sicily as opposed to Venice was surprisingly simple. Although Venice look menacing, I was actually much more concerned about getting caught up in a war with the HRE, who control the gateway to Rome in the north. So that pretty much made up my mind that I would take Rome from the south.
I went about the campaign in a reasonably normal manner. I invested most of my early gold in economic buildings, then just pumped out cavalry units at Corinth. Taking the castle at Smyrna with my faction heir is standard, and gave me four units of vardariotai for completing the mission. In my trial game I also took the rebel province of Durazzo, but Sicily or Venice usually want to take it afterwards, and I didn't want to open myself up to any trouble there - especially when most of my money is going into funding my army in Italy. It probably wouldn't have made a difference to the story if they had taken the province, but I was hoping it would either stay rebel, or Venice would capture it - then I could destroy Sicily in one campaign. Unfortunately, and as in my trial game, Sicily took it anyway. Not that it really matters of course.
I was also lucky to get an early marriage proposal for Anna from a young general with a cool name and nice picture, which gave me a nice protagonist to work around (and meant I didn't have to restart a whole bunch). Obviously they married then, otherwise I wouldn't have the general available, although for story reasons I moved it to the end. After allying with the Turks (a scene I cut from the opening part of the AAR, because it was very dialogue heavy compared to the rest of the story) and securing my eastern front, I sent my army off to Italy and never looked back.
From here on out I focussed on my campaign in Italy. Sadly Sicily was no challenge at all. They sent the bulk of their forces to take Durazzo, so Palermo and Naples were basically undefended. This was still helpful though, because if I had taken serious casualties then, I wouldn't have been able to fight the Pope's stack outside Rome that easily. In my trial game the Pope didn't even bother to come and stop my siege of Rome and I had to go to him, but in this campaign he was kind enough to come out and try to stop me before I even arrived at the city. But once the rout chain reactions began, it was largely over. I also had a high ground advantage in the fight, so he didn't really stand a chance. The final siege of Rome wasn't an epic affair, but they put up more resistance than the other two cities.
Mercenaries were a huge help in keeping the momentum up, especially because I arrived in Italy with no infantry and no access to siege equipment. Luckily there were two mercenary regions, so I could grab a few units in Sicily and Southern Italy, then stock up on 8(!) more at Rome, which was really useful. Sacking each settlement was also a boon, because recruiting so many early game cavalry really put a dent in my economy.
The whole campaign only took 16 turns, which worked out to 8 years (obviously). I set the timescale down from 2.0 to 0.5, in order to scale the ageing better. Setting the timescale like this means characters age correctly - so Voulgariotes was 17 when he came into the game in 1082, and 22 when Rome fell in early 1088. I definitely prefer this and it avoids a problem a lot of Medieval 2 AARtists can tend to run into. Other than that, the game was entirely unmodded and unedited. Two of the screenshots did come from custom battles though (I and V), although the rest were all from the campaign. |