You've Got To Be Kidding.

[danconnors]

The England campaign. The Knight occupies a single county near me. I occupy two counties, and he's the next step. Only the Knight wants to attack me. He sends armies totalling hundreds of men, mostly peasants, not every year, but every season. Over the space of a few years he sends thousands of his peasants to their doom. I gradually, over the course of several years, build my own army to knock him out of the game.

When all is in readiness I send my army to besiege his castle. They are met by an army of over 500 men, over 100 of them crossbowmen. We easily defeat the army, but drop below the 500 men I think will be needed to take the castle.

I quickly assemnle another army, emptying two thirds of the archers from my nearbye county's fort and recruiting 100 more mace men. As they march to reinforce the besieging army, they are met by another army of the Knights with over 500 men, including 150 crossbowmen. 350 peasants, and 40 or 50 other assorted troop types.

The relief army of less than 200 men is wiped out, and the attack on the castle fails. In the space of two seasons the Knight assembles armies totalling over 1,000 men, FROM ONE COUNTY111 In the preceding two years he has sent armies against me totalling over 2,000 men. How can the game get away with such blatant cheating?

By the way when I looked at the greatest lord chart, the Knight's population was listed as the happiest.

[Kernel Blimp]

Sounds like they better look happy, if not they might be the next arrow-fodder he sends your way. :)

[Ashlem]

The game lets the nobles cheat a little because they're otherwise laughably easy to defeat once you know the mechanics of the game. The only time they give me any trouble now is if they take over a lot of counties in a short period of time early in the game before I can shore up my defenses in my single county.

Pro-tip, send compliments right away to the nobles whenever you start a new map. If their standing towards you is green, they're much less likely to attack you vs a neutral county.

You can also ally with them, so that they ignore you and take on the other nobles instead, until you can get stronger.

If you find yourself fighting a lot of open field battles, have a lot of macemen. They're fairly cheap to build (4 iron/wood), 2nd fastest unit in the game, behind only the knights, and have a high attack power.

In fact, I use nothing but macemen now in my armies. They can take out almost anything opposing them, and though I lose a lot of them in stone/royal castle sieges, they're dirt cheap to replace compared to swordsmen or knights.

Sometimes I'll purposely send a smaller unit against a larger one, just to whittle their forces down so my main unit can then stomp them with fewer losses.

Some other cheesy tactics you can do to hurt the nobles without directly affecting their stance towards you.

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Send some grain to neutral counties every year, or every turn or 2 if you can afford it. Even 10 grain helps. Try not to send a large batch at once in case an enemy army destroys it on their way to take out a county. So instead of sending 100 grain, send 20 grain each turn for 5 turns.

The idea is to help them get food they normally won't get on their own. With more food, their population grows. With a bigger population, they have more troops during a fight, and more of those troops have weapons.

Okay, obviously that makes it harder for you to take them out too. But, if you're still in the early game, a bigger army for them means a bigger army that the other nobles have to fight too. If the noble takes over the county, you now have at least two counties to take away from them instead of one. Plus it's another county the noble can now exploit resources, and draft another army from.

If on the other hand, the neutral county defeats them, they just lost an army. Some of them may be able to recover quickly and send another band of redshirts, but for others it may cripple them severely, probably enough that they can't send another army out for years, especially if they don't have iron/wood resources in their starting county, and the merchants don't visit them often.

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Another cheesy tactic you can do is if you see them about to attack a neutral county, send a small army of your own, like say 50-150 macemen, against them.

You're going to lose this battle. But try to take out as many men as possible before your army is wiped out. If you win a battle, your standing with the noble goes down. But if they win, it's not affected.

Also, by whittling their army down, combined with the first tactic I suggested, you might weaken them enough that they can't take over that neutral county, giving you a little more time to build up your forces.

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If an enemy lord is on the verge of completing a castle in a county, and you have an army nearby, plant your army in their county, save the game, then reload it. A few things may occur.

The enemy noble starts drafting a large army. Though it could be a fearsome one, most likely he's just drafting peasants. If you have a sizable army, it's nothing to worry about.

They may also send all the grain/cattle from that county to a neighboring one they own. The idea is to spite you in case you take over the county before they can get a castle up.

If you save/reload a few times, they may draft so many peasants that now they don't have enough to finish the keep in the next turn.

Alternatively, if your army is big enough, and you can reach the town center before the end of the turn, just attack it directly. If you're lucky and didn't have to kill too many of them, they'll still finish building the castle in the next turn, and give you free troops in the castle as well.

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Keep in mind that this isn't always a surefire method that'll work every time. If the neutral counties are really far away from you, your grain may not get to them in sufficient time for their population to grow. Or the noble cheats and sends a second army within the next 3 turns. Or another noble attacks that same county.

And in some cases, especially if you take one of their castles, they'll immediately send an army to attack that town center before you can station any troops in it. Chances are you'll immediately lose the county right after taking it.

So have a second army on standby babysitting the town center while your main one attacks the castle in case they try this tactic on you.

But sometimes it's enough that you keep them from getting stronger, while you bide your time, build up your own forces, and eventually take them out.

[3 Ducks In a Man Suit]

In the Germany campaign I was trying to finish off the Bishop, and my little bands of peasant raiders kept everything in his single county burned to the ground for like 5 years while my main army was fighting elsewhere, but he was still able to crank out 200+ man armies regularly, and when I finally captured the county I find that he's got hundreds of people left, they aren't even at 0 happiness and there's enough food to feed them and my army for 3 more seasons.

It also seems like it's impossible to starve enemy armies out. I know there's no food because my crop-destroying peasant bands are starving, and sometimes the counties even revolt because of no food, but the enemy troops there are always "healthy."

[Ashlem]

I tried sieging them that way before, but never really found it to work. I think I managed to get them to lose a county once, but it took a long time, years, before that happened. It is annoying when the NPC armies do that to your counties though, especially since they can create less than 50 man units to do it with.

Concluded that it's faster to just siege their castle, and minimize destroying their county aside from production things like mining/forestry/blacksmithing/quarry, because unless that's the last county you have to take, you then have to fix it up afterwards.

[Printesa de Aur]

thing is, game is already trivially simple once you get the hangs of the game mechanics. even on impossible and every setting as unfavourable as possible, if you know the game, you can only lose if a lord is right next to you, you don't use diplomacy at all and he's fast expanding attacking you first. other than that, you'll have at least a motte and bailey with 150 archers (at turn 8-10) which is more than enough to stop anything AI can throw at you at this point in the game. after this point, the game becomes pretty easy and you can't lose unless you do something extremey stupid.

[Pokey]

I find going aggressive early is key, compliment everyone and maybe send a gift of 100 crowns to the person you don't want to attack/attack you. It also depends on your starting county. If you got cows, screw em, sell that ♥♥♥♥ or eat them for extra happiness so you can plant grain. Then make a solid standing army, macemen are great early if you have both wood and iron in your county, otherwise pikemen with lots of archers is a good substitute. And always get to 80 stone before you conquer something. Just building a motte and bailey with the free 150 archer bonus is huge. You can use them for defense or reinforce your army to take another county.

If you can get a solid base with all the resources you can just build up your castles. I have never lost a battle with royal castle that was fully garrisioned with archers, even against 1500 man armies. Then build swords for castle attacks, knights for the open field, and some archers to draw the enemy out of position. It can be a grind in the late game, but this works for me everytime.

[sfnhltb]

If we want to go cheesy, I always went with the dancing bowmen for sieges - have enough melee units the defenders don't sally forth, but keep them over in a corner. Get your first bowman to test the range of the defenders, then step one square back and left or right. Line up the rest of your bowmen on the same row but further left/right of your initial guy (at least a couple of squares away). Move the entire line up, and have your initial guy move left and right as the arrows come at you while the rest of your archers kill off all the defending archers/oil cauldrons - just ensure the guy you are moving always remains the nearest to the defenders.

At this point move your archers a bit closer and speed up time until all the static defenders die - for some castles you can kill everyone without ever entering, and with zero or near zero losses, otherwise send in your melee just in the front gate with your archers massed behind and that should trigger the last few units to attack and be massacred rapidly. It is pretty boring but it saves a whole lot of resources/manpower compared to having to rebuild your army every fight.

If you have large enough forces in open field battles so that the AI defends in a corner, similar tactics work there as well.