Breaking up a confederation?

[Edmund Greyfox]

I started a new game after the update, playing as Bohemia. I've managed to create the kingdom of Bohemia and have been expanding north and south, but I'm completely blocked to the East by the "polish confederation" because they have an empire sized army of 9k to my 3.5K.

Question is, is there some action i can take to break up the confederation? If this was an enemy kingdom I'd just be patient and wait for the leaders to die/for their alliances to end, but this whole confederation thing is new. When the individual rulers die do their heirs automatically stay in the confederation, or is their a window of opportunity where i can attack them without needing to fight all the others?

[gav.cratop]

From my experience in my own confederation, the heirs do automatically retain their allegiance. So far I figured the only way to beat a confederation would be to get stronger overall or be significantly stronger than each individual member. Confederation armies spawn as separate parts of the whole so if you are stronger than than the strongest confederation member there is a chance you could pick them apart without fighting them all at the same time. Hope this helps

[Edmund Greyfox]

Originally posted by gav.cratop:

From my experience in my own confederation, the heirs do automatically retain their allegiance. So far I figured the only way to beat a confederation would be to get stronger overall or be significantly stronger than each individual member. Confederation armies spawn as separate parts of the whole so if you are stronger than than the strongest confederation member there is a chance you could pick them apart without fighting them all at the same time. Hope this helps

It helps a bit, but given how the AI fights wars it's going to be a pain unless i get lucky and win the war quick by taking the enemy capital. Otherwise I suspect I'll spend all my time running back and forth breaking up sieges and trying to chase down their armies. Either that or they'll all clump together and steamroll me with raw numbers.

[brownacs]

Originally posted by Edmund Greyfox:

It helps a bit, but given how the AI fights wars it's going to be a pain unless i get lucky and win the war quick by taking the enemy capital. Otherwise I suspect I'll spend all my time running back and forth breaking up sieges and trying to chase down their armies. Either that or they'll all clump together and steamroll me with raw numbers.

You might want to invest in more siege weapons so you can quickly capture enemy territory. If you're fighting a say two county ruler for a single county, you'll often only have to capture that one county before winning the war which you should be able to do before their buddies show up. Them besieging your territory doesn't matter that much if your sieges are significantly faster.

[Edmund Greyfox]

Originally posted by brownacs:

Originally posted by Edmund Greyfox:

It helps a bit, but given how the AI fights wars it's going to be a pain unless i get lucky and win the war quick by taking the enemy capital. Otherwise I suspect I'll spend all my time running back and forth breaking up sieges and trying to chase down their armies. Either that or they'll all clump together and steamroll me with raw numbers.

You might want to invest in more siege weapons so you can quickly capture enemy territory. If you're fighting a say two county ruler for a single county, you'll often only have to capture that one county before winning the war which you should be able to do before their buddies show up. Them besieging your territory doesn't matter that much if your sieges are significantly faster.

When i wrote my first post it was around the year 890, and i was still about 25 years away from being able to build Onagers. It's 918 now, and being able to siege a town in only 4 months makes a real difference. It also helped that Novgorod turned into a power house and hit them from the other side around 912. I waited until the confederation had been beat down a bit, then attacked the Duchy of Silesia. Between losing that Duchy to me and Polania to Novgorod the whole confederation fell apart, and now I'm snapping up as much as I can grab.

[-Norbert-]

If you can get any leaders with army movement bonus, that's immensely helpful in outmanouvering an enemy with multiple smaller armies and take them apart one at a time. Even when the AI moves multiple armies together, they tend to have some delay between them, which may allow you to move in behind them and take out the stragglers, before the main force can turn back.

Also don't forget about mercenaries. If you have the money for it, they can make all the difference.

And if you can provoke the enemy to attack you accross a bridge, you'll also get a pretty big combat advantage, that might allow you to bring down much larger armies than yours, especially if they come at you piecemeal, due to how inefficient the AI moves at times.

Oh and of course you can try to get allies to help you.