Medieval 2: Total War

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Generals being killed by stray arrow/catapult/cannonball fire seems to be a staple of the Total War games. Both your own and the AI, if you face an army with two cannons and some thrash units and you have a super elite army you can bet your mothers honor on your general being killed by a stray cannonball while the rest of your army suffer barely any losses at all. Same goes the other way around, just put some artillery on fire at will and chances are uncanningly high that they will manage to kill the enemy general.

 

I agree, although when you think about it, if your general's unit is being targeted, then it's not that strange. Your general's unit only has around 20 men in it, so if a stray cannonball hits your unit and kills 2 men, there's a 10% chance that it's your general. And every loss you take increases the chance that the next loss you take will be your general.

EDIT: I got a very unusual mission last night. I was approached by the heir of France, who asked me to assassinate the king of France. I guess he got tired of waiting! My reward for this would be a goodly sum of 5000 florins. Anyway, I didn't have an assassin that was anywhere near good enough to off a king (I only had two assassins and even the "good" one only had a 16% chance of success).

Using the mission list, it would show me exactly where on the map the king was located. It turned out that the king was outside of the city with an army of about 500 men. So I attacked with a full-stack army, killing the king, and just about everyone else (8 surviviors). However, I got a "mission failed" statement after I killed the king. Evidently, it wasn't good enough for the king to die in battle - he had to be assassinated. So now I'm going to kill the prince - er, I mean new king - too.

EDIT2: I finally got a general with a dread rating of 10 (and a not-too-shabby 8 in command). It's actually not that hard to do. All you have to do is execute all your prisoners after battles and exterminate the populace of every city you take. So it's really just a matter of fighting a lot. It's also cool with the pre-battle speaches, speaking of his penchant for blood, with my personal favorite being, "I am death, and I come for you!"

[ January 03, 2007, 17:59: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]

 

I got that exact same mission when I played the Spanish, I also failed. You need a truly awesome assassin and a pretty shoddy lonely king for it to be possible and considering how hard it is to level up assassins it will never really be an easy mission to finish.

 

At least you're in no danger of being kicked off the throne for ignoring your nobles, like you were in Rome if you ignored the Senates requests! 9 times out of 10 I ignore the 'orders' from the nobles, unless what they're asking me was in my plans anyway.

 

I always attempt to follow the nobles orders whenever possible. The three most common requests are make contact with another faction, blockade a port, or take a settlement. Those are all actions that are easily done, and are probably things you'd want to do anyway. A lot of times my ships are just hanging around protecting my own ports anyway. I gladly take 1000 florins for sailing them a little way off to blockade a foreign port.

It is very difficult to level up assassins. In fact, I've found only one way to do it consistently. Even this way doesn't give you great assassins, but it's a realistic expectation to get your assassin up to level 5 or so, and more importantly, to get to level 5 quickly. Follow these steps:

1. Pick a city belonging to a faction you are at war with.

2. Have a spy sneak into the city, and keep him there.

3. Then move an assassin to the city and have him start sabotaging buildings. With a spy in the city, even an assassin with a single skill point has an 80% chance of success. As soon as you get your stealth trait increased to 2, the sabotage success rate increases to 95% (again provided the spy is still there).

4. Sabotage something every turn. It seems you have about a 50-50 chance in the early going of getting a trait increase for your assassin with each successful attempt. As an added bonus, even if the sabotage attempt fails, it seems like your assassin usually doesn't get caught and/or killed in the attempt, so you can just try again the next turn. The trait increases slow down greatly once you get up to a skill level of about 5 - just like everything else, the higher your skill level, the harder it is to move up to another skill level. The only downside to this method is it requires you to dedicate a spy to each aspiring assassin, as the odds are much worse for successful sabotage without a spy present.

By the time your assassin is level 5, he's good enough to start performing assassination missions with some success. Level 5 is more than adequate for most non-military characters, such as merchants, diplomats, and priests. It's even adequate to go after some low level inquisitors and some princesses with low charm ratings. Assassinating these characters can get your assassin up to around level 7. Once you hit level 7, all but the highest targets are within your reach. About the only thing you won't be able to kill (of course) are faction leaders. My level 5 assassin only had a 16% chance with the king. While level 7 would have improved the odds, I doubt it would have been more than 30ish%.

Given these conditions, it would seem that you would need a level 10 assassin to go for a king, and I have no way of knowing how you would do this. Your % chance of success never seems to go over 95%, and even if you fatten up on low level targets, that still means there's a 1 in 20 chance of getting caught. As you will need to perform far more than 20 missions to get a level 20 assassin, it seems like luck is going to play a big part in this as well. It's not like other traits like command for generals, where as long as you don't do something stupid like throw your best general into a fight where he's hopelessly outnumbered, you can reasonably expect him to have continued success and an ever-improving command rating.

 

Just take out diplomats, captains and merchants first. Then princess's, then take out crappy generals and you'll then be able to head for the big fish once you've maxed out his stars. It helps to upgrade the assassin building to it's max level in at least one city too, then your assassins start with 4 or 5 stars to kick off with.

My problem with the nobles is that they always want you to declare war on people. That ruins your reputation. You might be the English and you get asked to blockade a Spanish port. That declares war on them, even if it's just for a single turn. If you did what they told you all the time, you'd be warring with 3 or 4 factions at a time! Recipe for disaster is that.

 

I have never had the council tell me to blockade a port or take a settlement unless it was rebel, or we were already at war with that faction anyway. I agree that if I wasn't at war with a faction, I'd never start a war by doing that. I agree that having multiple wars going on is a bad thing, even though I'm doing it with some success at the moment. I'm playing England, and I'm currently at war with Denmark, HRE, Milan (of course!) and France. I currently have four generals out on the field - one for each front. I occassionally have to slow down my attacks because of warnings from the Pope, but currently Denmark and Milan are excommunicated, so they're getting beatdowns laid on them.

 

Thanks I didn't know much about assasins so I'll have to try your tips out, is it possible to assasinate the Pope? Sounds like a good laugh.

 

It's possible to try . I've never managed it though.

 

I can't get over how annoying the Pope is in this game. First, he wants me to tie up one of my faction heirs to lead a crusade. Then he won't let me take the fight to the catholic neighbour that declares war as soon as the Crusade army is sent. To top this off, their inquisitioners start pruning my family tree...

What I'd like to do, is ist down and actually figure out the camera in a battle. I've been automatically resolving the battles up to this point...

 

Whats so complicated about the battlecamera? My mousescroller is broken making me unable to zoom and I still do fine. The battle map is really the core of Total War the strategical map is just an addition which has worked very nicely.

 

Hi, I'm currently playing the Egyptians on medium battles and hard campaign difficulty. I'm usually strapped for cash, though (believe it or not, I suppose I haven't built enough income structures), and I'm feeling like other factions, like the Byzantines, seem to be able to upgrade their cities much more often. Then again, they aren't exactly a poor nation anyway, and I try to churn out units as much as possible. I extended into the holy lands, and took lower Armenia as the Turks and Byzantines were duking it out. Strangely enough, while in MTW the Byzantines were stronger, they'd usually get wiped out - and here it seems to be the other way around, when they start fighting the Turks are the ones in trouble. However, I got some crusades coming my way, and things got bad in a hurry. For one thing, the Byzantines decided that they might as well join in the fun, and blockaded Alexandria.

I must have disabled the game showing enemy moves, and it was no fun at all when a full hungarian stack appeared near Jerusalem, when I had some measly 400 men (mostly militia, 1 unit of arab cavalry and mamluk horse archers each). First time around I got beaten, as the enemy breached the gate and swarmed the entrance. I missed the boiling oil from Rome... Anyway, the second time around I concentrated my archers' fire on the ram (the Hungies had absolutely craptastic infantry, the best being militia spearment that were completely unupgraded, mine were at least with an armor bonus), and it burned down right before the gate. There were few siege machines anyway, 1 backup ram, 1 ladder(they tried using it, it didn't work) and one siege tower. They managed to get 1 unit of militiamen through it before it got burned down too. From then on, I waited the battle through. Apparently the computer archers have endless ammunition - even when I stopped mine firing (they had a few shots left, and I wanted to be prepared if the AI decided to use their backup ram), they fired for over 5 minutes on 3x speed. Bug, I guess. The good news is that after their defeat the crusading army (which had a LOT of heavy cavalry, and would have been a total pain in the posterior to fight) seems to have vanished. Now I am stalking a HRE crusade that is heavy on the light infantry near Jerusalem with an almost-full stack of my own, and I've reinforced Jerusalem to almost a full stack, including a unit of Hashishin. First time I'll be using them, hopefully they're good. Oh, and I've taken Ceasarea, and plan on taking a shot at Iconium when I take care of an incoming Byzantine army, which I suppose I could stop at the ford of the nearby river. Oh, and after my 7 star assassin finally kills that prince he's been having a 67% chance of killing since, er, 4 turns ago. I try to kill the bugger every turn, and he always misses.

Anyway,I'll be trying my hand at the Byzantines soon. I did a short campaign with them and the Spanish to unlock all factions, and I'm itching for more - although they have neither jihads nor crusades (grrr!), their position is great if one can exploit it more fully. I usually pillage cities, though: even after I repair the buildings, I still get more money than with exterminate, and it decreases the population for those larger and more unruly cities. Is there something later on that sours the deal?

[ January 04, 2007, 13:34: Message edited by: The Shaman ]

 

The number pad on the right side of the keyboard works too (provided you have number locks on)

The game can be paused at any time during a battle. If you're having difficulty getting your camera properly positioned, just pause the game. Note that you can only pan your camera into areas where your soldiers can see. If an enemy unit is clear across the other side of the battlefield, you won't be able to zoom in on it, because your troops can't see that far.

Oh man, don't do that. That's the whole attraction of the game. Plus, I have found that the human controlled armies tend to experience far fewer losses than when the AI controls it.

I tried this once, and gave up about 1/3 way through. It sounds like a really good faction to play at first, but it quickly becomes a royal pain. I had two seperate crusades called against one of my cities. I eventually ended up losing the city when I had full stack armies from HRE, France, and England show up on three consecutive turns. Then the Mongols show up, and they lay a beat down too. The Crusading armies always seem to come via land, so the key here would be conquering all of moder day Turkey, so that you can intercept the Crusading armies before they actually get to your target city. It seems like if you can survive the early Crusades and the Mongols, you should be OK, but that's a big if...

Yeah - the population, while smaller, has a much higher level of unrest than with the other two options. You get the most money through pillaging, but you get an unruly city as a result. Unless you are seriously strapped for cash, I don't recommend pillaging. The population is easier to deal with when you either occupy the city (recommended for small settlements who have the same religion as you) or exterminate them, in which case you gain control through fear.

 

One way to avoid crusades, if you are a playing a non catholic faction, is to create an alliance with the papal states as soon as possible. Playing as Byzantine , I have done this and it has worked so far even if I am in a state of war with Venice, Hungury and HRE.

 

Maybe playing the tutorial might help...

Also, building economic structures over troop buildings first will also help...

 

Gnarff,

I would recommend the tutorial. It takes about an hour to go through both battles, but they take you through it step-by-step.

As far as holding off building a lot of troops early, that's also recommended. One thing that can really get you into trouble early on is if you hire mercenaries. On the first turn of the game, you will have enough gold to purchase mercenary units, but don't. Because of all the structures you have to build early on, you are going to be spending more money than you are taking in. However, you typically start with several thousand gold in your coffers on the first turn. The idea is to spread that money out over several turns to get everyone building financial structures.

That having been said, you don't want to completely neglect your military either. A good thing to consider is building the cheaper units early on. Avoid expensive units like cavalry. Spearmen and peasant archers are effective early units that are relatively cheap. Stay away from peasant militia, because they are pure rubbish. Their morale rating is so low they run almost as soon as they enter combat. About the only thing they are good for is pushing the battering ram up to the enemy gates, because there they act as cannon fodder.

 

I usually look at town militia and spear militia as well as archers...

 

Town militia are the better choice for defense of towns, because they get free upkeep early on. Spear militia have slightly better morale ratings, and so they are the better choice for your standing armies.

The English are ridiculously easy. The year is 1264, gunpowder units are just coming on the scene, and I already have 39 territories. So I haven't even used up half my turns, and this game should be over by 1300. My rating with the pope is as low as it can go - I have zero crosses in my column for what the pope thinks of me. However, I have successfully avoided being excommunicated.

 

The English arent ridiculously easy... they're just hard. Oh the best units to garrison using the English are heavy bill militia, theyre better than town militia but also get the free upkeep.

 

I'm currently playing Sicily, and comparing it with the English, I have to agree with Aldeth, the English are able to expand much faster. On the other hand, my standing with the pope is outstanding, as I've been expanding mostly at the expense of the Moors and Egyptians.

The Iberic peninsula should be up for grabs too, as the Spaniards are making a habit of attacking every neighbouring faction, one of which is me. But I'm actually having a lot of fun repelling their attacks. Nothing beats watching their full stack army get teared up by my long range defense.

But I'm having one problem with that. My ballista towers aren't working. Is there anyone who knows if there are any requirements for them to work? I'm currently just going with the wild guess that I need a military unit (or rather a non-militia unit to take on the general role). I should have a more conclusive answer when Spain decides to throw away more lifes in front of my walls. In the mean time, though, my catapults and mortars are having a lot of fun.

Not that it was always that much fun. I had to repel Spain's first attacks with nothing more than two half stacks of armoured sergeants, backed up with half a stack of muslim archers and a catapult. While they had a 1000+ army, with loads of knights and pavise crossbowmen, who would have torn through my army easily. Luckily, I managed to torch their battering ram, and the silly AI decided they should all scale the single available ladder. And completely ignore anything else, like me driving my catapult out the gate, bombarding them at exceedingly close range.

Lots of fun when missed shots tore down my own wall, killing the enemy general and a good portion of his army with it. Then it was just scouring up the rest of them as half his army routed (fire missiles ftw!).

Following that attack, another one came. This time they actually broke through the gate, as I didn't have enough missile units left to torch their battering ram. At least I had 3 stacks of spear militia by then, to replace the nearly annihilated armoured sergeants. Still, things got desperate enough that I actually set my catapults (2 units by then) to fire at the troups pouring through the gate, hitting my own men as well (or what was left of them). It worked, though, as they routed after their general was killed.

The moral of the story: Close range catapult and fire missiles kick ass!


One other thing I've noticed, though, is that the exterminate option after capturing a town does more than just kill the people. After capturing Alexandria (silly egyptians, defending a huge city with only 2 spear milita and 1 catapult), I did my normal thing, and exterminated the entire populace. Imagine my surprise when I found that half the buildings were suddenly gone! I always thought that that was supposed to happen with the plunder option. Gone Docklands and Great Market. Costs a sh*t load of time and money to rebuild, so...

Power word: reload. Wasn't I glad it was so poorly defended? After capturing it again, I did have a rebellion on my hands (which is exactly why I always exterminate the bastards), but at least this time I kept all the buildings.

Another disadvantage of exterminating the populace is that it takes forever to get the populace back to what it was. Which is annoying if you want to reach that Large City, with its awesome catapult towers (bring it on Mongols and Timurids!).