Question here: How exactly do most people wage medieval wars? I do them and I conquer cities, but they seem very costly compared to all the other eras. (including classical!) With my enemy having castles in every city, my catapults and trebuchets seem to only whittle down 4 - 6% at a time, meaning you either have to sit outside the city for three or four turns or attack with only some of the defense removed. Is this normal?
Also my city raider trebuchets don't have a perfect survival rate against longbows... they kill them, but not without losses. Which only compounds with my barrage problem at the next castle. Even when churning out trebuchets back at the home front... trebs don't grow on trees! They're freakin' expensive.
And no, I can't use spies to remove city defenses. At that point in the game I don't nearly have enough espionage for that costly mission.
At low difficulties it doesn't matter, but at high difficulties I'd advocate a combination of spies and siege, and using the siege promotions very carefully.
First off, you'll probably know who you'll be attacking, so focus EP on him early to build up some EP. A medieval war implies successful REX, so you should have at least 8-10 cities and hopefully be picking on someone that isn't too advanced/huge.
Bombard cities that don't have castles. Put spies into cities with castles in advance to get the stationary discount, and you should be able to drop 2-3 cities this way, more if you use the EP slider (if you have the crappy PRO trait or stone, or especially both, you might as well put up castles too, given their cheapness, trade route, and EP multiplier).
Now for promo and unit mix. I like knights a lot, but they're even later than trebs normally. This means your stack is probably trebs, maces, pikes/elephants, and perhaps a couple horse archers or longbows or whatever to keep xbows off of you. I like putting some trebs down the barrage line and others down the CR line. Barrage is better when you have very low odds of winning, might as well max out collateral. CR can be the difference between keeping the unit or not though so it's also helpful and I use both quite a bit.
Also remember that when you have few defenders, you might be better off using a withdrawal horse archer or other unit on the longbow rather than the treb. You want as many attackers surviving as possible.
It's definitely doable on all speeds except quick IMO, but obviously epic or marathon make this much, much easier.
I guess early warring is not a bad thing at all... and to my suprise I managed to pull of some tough rolls, like 45% chance of winning but my swordsmen managed to finish archers without losing one man...
I often use them to surround enemy cities to supress them...
Besides the barrage promotion (which I assume is what you're talking about) is easy enough to reach on your own, you just need a barracks and vassalage/theocracy/settled GG. But barrage catepults only take 4% off a castle, and trebuchets 6%. It's slow eating.
