So easy now...

[Dirty Mirror]

After playing every single Total War series, this game's economy and production is pretty easy to manage.

If you haven't noticed, the AI likes to garrison its' starting castle very quickly. This takes away from the labor force. They also like to take over counties very early, within about 10 turns or so. They are spreading themselves too thin. Within the first 10-15 turns, they have successfully sabotaged their production and increased their borders with armies of peasants, maybe a few archers and pikemen, and if the AI is The Countess, a little bit of macemen too.

The biggest thing to note is every AI has a seriously damaged economy and production. They've got hundreds of peasants in each army... empty towns... ruined fields... high taxes... unhappy populations.

I've found the -best way for me- to deal with this is to spend your first 10-25~ turns spending ALL OF YOUR MONEY on IRON and WOOD, leave your forestry, mining and quarrying OFF. You can make up to 100 weapons PER TURN this way. As you're doing this, make sure your garison is at maximum troop levels. Archers and pikemen will hold anything. I particularly like to have a garison of 50% archers, 25% crossbowmen and 25% pikemen.

So you're making tons of weapons, having a happy and healthy population of over 1700 people. Meanwhile, poor defenseless counties are being invaded one after another. No worries, your enemies are spreading themselves thin, crippling themselves with peasant armies and terrible economic management. ALL GAME you must keep spending your money on Iron and Wood. Unless a food shortage is imminent, spend some money on that, but by then, you'll have tens of thousands of coins to waste. On the England map, I made a Stone Castle in EVERY county, by buying most of my stone, and/or turning off any production that is not STONE in counties with quarries.

This is basically a HEAVY defensive strategy but when you're rolling around win tens of thousands of coin, with over 3000 weapons, NEVER using PEASANTS in your armies... it really doesn't matter how many counties the AI have. You will crush them.

Have no more than 4 wheat fields in a county with a large amount of total fields. 3 Wheat fields is pretty standard. Put tax at 7% when you're at 100 happiness. Put tax at 5% when you're around 80~. When you're below 60 happiness, have 0% tax, and buy some damn ale if you can.

It's pretty easy to be the greatest noble with the most coins, most troops, happiest people, most castles and most counties. The easiest way to get there FIRST, is to have the happiest people and the most coins... except you will be spending all of those coins on Iron and Wood during early game meaning, you will have the MOST and HAPPIEST people. Have a solid defensive garison and victory will be yours. The AI will try very hard with its peasant armies and crippled counties to take your castle. Be sure to keep an eye on SINGLE TROOP armies, which consist of 40~ peasants whom will raid your crops. You can easily ungarison your troops and auto-resolve these pests. 40 Peasant armies don't arrive until after you have smashed a greater army.

You can easily defend your castle against 2, 3, even 4 or 5 times the odds. Sometimes I just say, "Hell, I'm gonna let them in", and I lower the bridge. Prior to this, I make sure all of my men are at the last and final chokepoint inside the castle. For a Motte and Baily, It would be the tiny palisade surrounded by water. Pikes at the door, archers and crossbows off to the left or right so that they may shoot over the flag tower. Royal castles are particularly easy to defend, especially in combination with the 6 boiling oil pots. Just send all your men into the flag keep, pikes at the door, crossbows and archers behind, and just lower that damn draw bridge and let em' in. Have your oil pots at the front gates and just dump on them as they come in. Aim for their pikes and archers if you can. As for a Stone castle, that is an easy defense too. Just put all of your ranged ontop of the flag, and pikes at the only two stairways that lead up to the flag.

Have at least a Motte and Baily, because that second wall that they have to break through is where the money is, in any castle. Let them in through the first wall, don't allow them to use any other siege equipment by Letting Them In! Then just dump oil on them till their crippled force reaches your second gate, followed by a pike wall guarding your archers and crossbows.

There is no need to compete with how fast the AI takes counties. Don't be intimidated. Be a Prang Mantus, wait for your time to strike, preferably with over 600 men, including a majority of maces followed by swordsmen, then crossbows, then knights. Make sure to engage with your swordsmen first, with macemen following right behind your swords and/or with a hefty group of maces to hit the AI in the flank. ALWAYS use your knights to engage in the AI's flank AFTER they have initiated your melee units. Crossbows will sit right behind the melee lines and fire away. As for the AI's boiling oil pots, just send in 1 knight to tip them over before sending in your main force.

It's okay to train up a ton of army after you have made tons of weapons and garisoned your castle. If you've got 25 happiness, that's okay, either tax your people 0 or 1%. If you're gonna run out of money because you've been spending it on iron and wood to make weapons, just sell 10 or 15 swords, or knights here and there. It's okay to lose some more population due to unhappiness after raising an army. Because with an army at this size and professionalism, it can smash any AI army, because they all have peasants. Just make sure to front line with your armoured units, flank with your fast units, and dont let your ranged get touched. Super easy. Easy game. Fun though. Never thought I'd get to this point when I was a kid when this game came out. I couldn't even get past the first level when I was 8 years old. Now I just watch the AI be feeble and aggressive while I build up my ONE ARMY TO RULE THEM ALL. It's a pretty nostalgiac feeling to have a 1500 man army with zero peasants and stone castles in every county.

Let your people build and repair! Buy those goods my lord.

Without trade, you cannot expand your empire to ridiculous sizes.

Without patience, you cannot secure your realm.

http://i.imgur.com/uUYgGFI.jpg Politics do not matter. No amount of words will change the idiocy or willingness of the AI.

Mid-game screenshots http://imgur.com/a/yFqLX

[Warsmith Honsou]

feel the same way. used to find the game extremely difficult but after spending years playing total war on hard and very hard i still enjoy the game but the challenge is gone.

[Printesa de Aur]

yeah, the game is pretty easy even on impossible. try fiddling with starting options, use advanced farming, start with low economy, no money/castle/army. it's a super fun game but yeah, not much of a challenge.

[Ashlem]

Some extra tips:

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1. Send 10-30 grain to neutral counties every turn or every other turn for a few seasons if you can afford it, especially ones located next to the AI nobles. The earlier in the game you can do it, the better. This will give them better health due to having more food to feed their people with. If enough time has passed, and the AI noble has really crappy troops, they can often defeat the AI army on their own.

The advantage of this is that if the AI noble fails to claim the county, they just lost not only their army, but they don't have another county to exploit troops/resources/taxes from. This means it takes a while for them to recover. Meanwhile your own army should be able to easily defeat said neutral county.

This won't always work though, so it's a gamble. But if they manage to defeat the AI noble army, the neutral counties will slow down the noble's expansion plans considerably.

The other reason for sending small amounts of grain is to avoid having all of it accidentally destroyed. If an enemy army destroys 30 grain, no big deal. If they destroy 300 grain, on the other hand...

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2. If you want to lower the AI noble's chances of taking over a county, make a small group of soldiers, say 50-100 macemen, and then have them attack the AI noble's army. Your goal isn't to defeat them. Rather, you just want to weaken them, so when they attack the neutral county, their weakened army will be unable to defeat the neutral county's militia.

This tactic works spectacularly against the Bishop, who likes to field large peasant/archer armies and attempts to win by sheer numbers. But 50-100 macemen can easily kill 2-4 times that amount before they're taken down if their archers don't start nailing you right away.

Plus if you beat an AI noble's army, your standing with them goes down. If they beat you though, then their relationship is still the same.

Note that this will not work with tip #3, unless you terminate the alliance first, as your army cannot attack an allied army.

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3. Near the beginning of the game, send a compliment to each noble. then ally with the one that's closest to your starting county.

The higher your standing with them, the less likely they are to attack you until all the neutral counties have been taken.

For the most part, don't expect your ally to do anything remotely useful. They will either not send help, or demand that you pay a ton of money, and then sometimes they still won't send the help.

I've found that the only real use for an alliance is to just prevent them from attacking you until you're strong enough to take them out. The Bishop and the Countess seem to expand the fastest, so if they're near you, it might be a good idea to ally with them.

Even if you're still stuck with just one county, keep building it up and creating a bigger army every year, so when they inevitably break off the alliance, you can then start claiming their territory.


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4. A literal one man army, which can be created by trying to garrison say, an empty castle with an army that's too big to house them all, putting 1 guy in there when splitting the army, and then immediately having them leave the castle, is a great way to destroy enemy resources/crops.

Additionally, if you have at least 1 soldier, even a peasant, garrisoned in the countie's castle, then the enemy lords have to siege it, meaning they can't just attack the town center. Very useful if you need to delay them taking over a county while a relief force attempts to reach it in time.

Notice how the enemy noble sometimes sends a small force of 30-40 peasants to destroy your crops? You can do the same thing with said 1 man army. But you can create a lot of them, and cripple their economy with say, 10 single man units.

Note that they will die if an enemy army engages them. But if you can destroy several crop fields and their foresty/mining/quarry, along with their smithing location, it's well worth the risk.

Keep in mind you'll have to rebuild said county if you take it over shortly afterwards, so this is best used on more distant counties that you won't be conquering any time soon.

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5. This is more of an exploit, but can be fun to use once in a while. Notice that normally you can't create a bigger army than 1500 soldiers? However, there's no limit to how big an army can be when you conscript them from a population.

Normally you can't have more than 2000 people or so in a county. And when you disband an army, other than mercenaries who just simply disappear, the army goes back to whichever county they originated from.

However, if you start splitting up your armies, the game starts getting a big odd. Instead of an army from say, Lincolnshire, you may get "An army from Aliens/Infidels/Here Be Dragons/Barbarian Lands".

Once you have an army from one of those weird places, if you disband them, they will join whichever county they were in when you disbanded it.

So draft large peasant armies, pick a county, split and recombine several thousand man armies while moving them to said county, then have them all disband in the same county. Make sure said army is from one of those weird places, or else they'll rejoin whichever county the game says they're from.

You will now have a population of say, 7000. Immediately after disbanding them all, conscript an army from there right away. Though you won't be able to draft the entire population, you'll probably notice that your army from that area is in the several thousands, probably 3-5k.

Once you have an army that big, they'll easily crush any enemy noble armies they run across, and if you're really lazy, and assuming it's a good mix of various troops and not just all peasants, you can easily win auto-calc royal castle sieges. Though admittedly it's faster just to take it out the conventional way. Hence my disclaimer at the beginning.

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6. So your sieging a stone or royal castle, and you're losing too many troops due to the fire cauldrons? Instead of sending say, half of your troops to dig the moat, send 6. Any less and the cauldrons normally won't attack. Macemen or swordsmen are the best bet as they can move out of the fire faster than pikemen can. As soon as the fire shows up, move your men out of the fire as fast as possible, preferably back to your main army.

If you want to shield them slightly, build extra siege weapons, then have them sit close to the castle. As your troops move back and forth, the enemy archers will target the siege weapon once your men are further away.

As the soldiers die off, send a replacement in. They will turn into human pincushions from the enemy archers, but that's fine. The sooner you can fill in that moat and bust down the door, the sooner you can win.

Stone castles have 4 cauldrons, while royals have 6. Once the enemy has used up all of their cauldrons, if you haven't reached the door yet, then send your entire army to dig the moat. Yes, it's pointless, but this many soldiers digging means the enemy now has more targets to shoot, meaning they're less likely to kill someone before all of your men can clear the way for the battering ram.

It helps to move all your troops as far down the map as possible, then hot key your entire army first by selecting them all, then pressing Ctrl + 1 (so that pressing 1 will select all of them). Keep the 6 digger troops on a separate hot key so you can quickly recall them out of the fire

[Zerrubabel]

Or to save on postage, you can just sit back, build royal castles, stuff them exclusively with archers, and build only macemen for offense (mercenaries can be anything you like though). That way you only need to focus on two weapon types. Also, so long as you have 10 fields or more in a county, go exclusively grain as it is much easier to manage. You could also just ignore cattle regardless of number of fields, and just draft your soldiers from counties with fewer fields so they don't eat as much (assuming armies eat is toggled off).

[SumatranRatMonkey]

Static AI not changing since the expansion together with human players capable of learning makes for a quite one sided game eventually. Does't mean the AI is super bad but there are lots of little things you learn over the years that stack up. "Impossible" game mode is on many maps where you have time to build up is quite trivial.

[Madman ︻气デ ✰]

play with Advance farming only and army forging on. Then play defensive. plus on impossible still winnable but it will take a while.

[Jimmy Hunter]

Originally posted by Madman ︻气デ══✰:

play with Advance farming only and army forging on. Then play defensive. plus on impossible still winnable but it will take a while.

Army Forging is more of an advantage for the player. If a county ends up with little to no food, it won't end up recovering unless you take it over and manage it yourself. The AI will waste time and effort squabbling over it while pulling out their workers to go suicide into a Royal Castle filled to the brim with Archers and Crossbowmen.

The AI seems to be happy to throw away more of their populous the higher the difficulty.