DateyourGame’s Blog

To start a Crusade you will need the right diplomatic context, because you have to get the blessing of the Pope. So maintaining good relation with him in the previous turns is crutial. One advantage of starting a Crusade or Jihad, over participating in one, is the ability to choose the targeted city.
The Jihad works similarly, but in the case of Muslim, it must be started by an imam following the loss of Muslim territories. Since Imam are under your command, it quite easy to start one compared to the
Christian factions and the diplomatic requirement they face. It’s important to note that to join a Crusade or a Jihad, you will need a general with an army of 8 units.

Crusades and Jihads have few advantages.
The armies participating move twice as fast then normally.
The units participating cost nothing to maintain and many units are only available as mercenaries in the crusade and jihad.
When a crusade or jihad achieves its objective, the generals participating will win a lot of traits and gain commanding experience.
For a Christian faction, the relations with the Pope will improve in the case of a victory.
The fact that your army moves around fast may allow you to loot many cities on the way making your empire richer.

While the crusades and jihad can look attractive, using them at the right moment is very important. You need to know how to gain from them, since they offer interesting opportunities.

Before joining a crusade or jihad, you need to consider the following aspects:

Make sure that the objective isn’t too far from the territories of your faction.
Conquering a city far away brings with it many problems.

A newly conquered city in the middle of hostile territory increases your military cost and divides your forces.

If your crusade doesn’t advance fast enough the desertion rate will increase and weaken your crusading army. If many factions are participating to the conquest of the objective, you need to remember that only one faction will control the city by the end of the crusade.

This means that at some point you can have a general and his army in the middle of an hostile territory without any place to retreat. The process of bringing him back can be dangerous making his army ineffective and costly. It can then be considered a waste of resources.

Here are two battle I did long time ago against worthy adversaries in Medieval II Total War Multiplayer. I have choose to show those battles because they are fairly “usual”. Their isn’t any amazing strategies. Both army are equal in numbers and no units are overpowered. In clear those battle from my point of view are the normal kind of battle where both side clash into a bloodbath and the issue of the battle is the result of micro choice and moves

In this first battle, i think the key of the victory was mostly the fact that I kept the enemies heavy cavalry busy, away from my stronger infantries. My Militia cavalry thanks to it’s mobility also did ambush the enemies slower cavalry and ultimately made it a none factor in the battle. I guess the high point of the battle remain the glorious ending of the enemy general that killed many of my troops before finally falling

This battle was against the Dane. it seem that it is a very under estimated faction but by experience the Huscarls are stronger then they seem. They can beat knights and heavy cavalry even if they have light chain mail armors. I think what is special in this battle is that as the byzantine I didn’t ordered my cavalry to charge and by experience the huscarls would have won if i did. Since the huscarls units attack faster then knights or byzantine heavy cavalry. So my keeping my cavalry in dense formation that neutralized the huscarl fast attack in a melee fight and forced them into a line infantry type battle where my heavy cavalry and some infantry could neutralize the huscarl, also the fact my i have deploy my elite infantry in the front of my army allowed my forces to make his infantry panic very fast.

I played a game of Medieval II online with Attila since I’m a long time user of this blog. He played as Venice and i played as Sicily. It was a hard battle to fight because both sides were even in numbers and we both started with 15k for our armies. Most of the dead that were caused in this battle were the horses because both armies took plenty of horsemen. In the end it was whoever could hold out the longest won because troop morale was disabled meaning a fight to the death.

Well last night I have reached 3 000 000 views. So to reward my most loyal and steady audience since the beginning, I have specially came out of my days of retreat from Medieval II Total War and recorded two battle for you to enjoy. Those two battle are against Spain a faction that I rarely fought and I’m playing with the English. I think you will find interesting to see how I fight differently with them then what you saw in my Chronicles. I must also say that I’m a little rusty.

This second part in the series shows a simple and quick way of moving your missile units behind your infantry in a nice straight line with 2 keys: shift + 4 (’Sorted Double Line‘ formation)

1. Place your missile units in a line with your infantry behind them, also in a line.
2. Group the missile units and infantry together.
3. When the enemy get close or prepare to charge:

• Disable ‘fire at will‘ for missile units (’A’ key).
• Press shift + 4 to move units into ‘sorted double line‘ formation.
• Press ‘R’ to make them run. (you can select the group and press ‘R’ before you change formation also).

This can also have the effect of the enemy units still try to attack the missile units and so bunch up towards the center. The diagrams explain a little better:

note :

• red = enemy
• orange = missile units
• black = infantry

If the enemy bunch towards the center then you can wrap around their flanks as shown in the video which gives a morale penalty for the enemy, not to mention it is effective against enemy spear units.

The video is not as fluid as i would like, so ill make another to go along with this one, practice makes perfect. This was the 1st time ive tried this strategy, but you can see it works quite nicely, and again as with part one, you can imagine and implement your own variations to suit each situation.

At the very least this offers you a nice technique of moving you missile units behind your front line without dragging a line and risking changing their formation and depth etc.

Regards,

iRIDS

This is my new series of videos showing interesting and effective tactics that can be employed during a battle.

Part 1:

The ‘Double line’ to ‘Single line’ formation tactic…

This tactic exploits the way in which units target each other:

Things to note:

1. The enemy units are in red.
2. Set up your units in ‘Double line‘ formation.
3. When the enemy is close set units to ‘Single line‘ formation (Shift + 1).
4. Dont forget to make sure your units ‘run’ whilst they change formation.
5. You can have your cavalry together on a far wing (check the video).
6. As the enemy flanks and center is exposed, charge your cavalry into the enemy

From the video you can see how well this works and you imagine loads of variations on this theme, for example you can see that your center opens up too, so you could charge reserve infanrty or cavalry right through your center and the enemies center and ‘u-turn’ into their flanks.

The AI always places their general unit behind their center, and with this tactic the enemy general unit is exposed… easy pickings. Obviously the enemy army in the video has basic units but this will still work during you campaign games with a bit of skill, timing and variation.

Im interested to see what you guys think of this,

regards,

iRIDS.

This is the last part of the ‘English Tactics’ series, the next will be tactics against the mongols and other faction tactics.

In this episode the army is put to an attack rather than defense, with the enemy routing not long after the infantry cavalry charge. A very quick battle.

The strategy will be ‘double edged’ from this part onwards, as after being excommunicated by the pope, the best defense is offense, keeping check on any enemy armies gathering near by.

By double edged I mean any battle I fight will be set up as a defensive position but with the decision and intention of attacking.

In this fight, having dispatched enemy re-enforcements (not shown), I use my cavalry to wither away the enemy crossbow infantry under cover fire from the longbow. My cavalry destroy the enemy spear wall allowing for an effective charge using my spear units, under cover fire again from the longbow.

In terms of defense, if the enemy engaged the spear wall, the heavy infantry on both flanks would attack the enemy and attempt to rout them, they would then be used to flank and rout the remaining enemy engaged in the center of the spear wall. Cavalry would engage the enemy cavalry and chase down routers.

Looking at the way my campaign is turning, it looks like theres gonna be some serious assaulting from now on.

Also I’m working on this new ‘Envelopment technique’, when its perfected ill make a video. basically it involves a half-circle formation of 7 spear units in schiltrom formation when the enemy cavalry approach the center, the spear units are put into standard formation and told to attack. This creates a full circle of spear enveloping the enemy cavalry as all the spear units are selected to attack. This is mainly a cavalry trap with use of stakes on the left and right flanks to force the enemy cavalry to attack the center.

I hope you enjoyed this,

iRIDS

Third installment of the English tactics series from a campaign (part 2 was included in part 1 as it was more or less the same).

In this part I was forced to attacks, the AI would not, even though they had re-enforcements which i dispatched with my cavalry (not show in the video). I deployed 5 units of Longbow in front to entice the enemy to attack, even though the enemy had crossbow they would have been out of range at first, after the enemy charged with cavalry my longbow remained behind my spear wall for the rest of the game, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy, and decimating their charges, theres a great part in the video where you see the longbow kill the enemy general.

Things to notice:

1. With missile units on skirmish and set to run, they will most likely be able to retreat in time, i always select them and stretch out line formation for them in a safe spot in case i see they wont respond in time (shown in the video).
2. Concentrating Longbow on the same target will decimate there charge, you can see the enemy cavalry stop dead due to the amaount of arrows.
3. I think its best to use missile units against enemy infantry rather than just their missile troops, your cavalry can do that whilst the enemy infantry or cavalry is not near them.
4. At the point when the enemy is about to rout i switch to flaming arrows, which damages their morale even further causing a full rout.

Note:

the last section of the video cuts off for some reason, but the results are:

• enemies killed: 562
• casulties taken: 83
• Longow inflicted kills: 192

This videos mainly show the effectiveness of missile troops when used correctly, and gives an idea as to why the English longbows where so feared.

I remember seeing a quote from some French knights during the 100 years war who said day turned to night due to the sheer volume of arrows the English longbows fired. Thats so ace

I hope you enjoyed this.

iRIDS

The first part of a series showing examples of good tactics to adopt when playing as the English. Most tactics in this series involve those actually used in the ‘One Hundred Years War’ against France.

Campaign Battle 1

This is the deployment I used, with a building blocking and protecting my left flank, Longbow extrude from the right flank with stakes in front. Cavalry are behind the archers to defend them and strike out easily to the front of the spear wall for a enemy flank charge.

Things to notice:

1. The Longbow can shoot easily at any enemy engaged at any point at the spear wall, this is devestating.
2. Cavalry must be used to protect the Longbow as they are still vunerable.
3. This is pure defensive strategy, which is how the English beat the French most of the time in the 100 years war.
4. The spear wall units must be on guard mode.
5. The longbow should be on guard mode and set to hold position.
6. The longbow should be used to shoot at any enemy units that are closest to them, i.e. on the enemies left flank.
7. Any enemy that turns to engage the Longbow must be selected by the Longbow, and cavalry must be dispatched to engame this unit

The stationary spear wall lets you concentrate on your longbow and cavalry units, you will find that it is best to keep switching the units the longbow fire at as the fight develops. If you get the chance to fire at units that are engaging your sprear wall, take a look and you will see the arrows rip through the enemy line like butter as you will be shooting across them and they are deeper in width than they are in height. Plus friendly fire is extremely unlikely and rare (I’ve checked :D).

NOTE:

when missile units are grouped and you select an enemy unit, they might not all shoot at that enemy unit due to the feature of each unit in a group selecting a ‘logical’ target that corresponds to them. Hold shift to see the way points to make sure they all have the same target. If not select the group, press G to ungroup, select the target again, then press G to group them back.

When the enemy are beginning to retreat, switch to flaming arrows, as this causes moral damage further.

thats about it hope you enjoyed, battle was a little short as it was so effective the enemy decided to withdraw half way through the battle, which the AI doesn’t normally do! (AI was on Very Hard as I always have it).

Hope you enjoyed this, and can take these tactics and even apply them to other factions etc,

iRIDS.