Cordoban strategies

[Bamboozle]

Hey, I would like to know some good strategies to use for:

Spanish spawn
Portuguese spawn
Berber barb spawns

I normally use Berber Cavalry rush the Spaniards, either vassalizing or destroying them, but my stability isn't great and my cities suck for the first few centuries. The Burgundians and French declared so I had to defend myself from them.

The Portuguese were a threat, I didn't know they had such a strong starting stack.

The Barbs aren't too bad but they do abduct plenty of Workers.

 

[Chep]

are you playing the SVN-version? because there were some recent changes to Cordoba making them essentially "playable" by giving them Sevilla as another starting city.

The barbs are/can be annoying, I usually try to place some defensive units + 1 horse archer in Sevilla and don't improve the land there using my workers to focus on Cordoba and Toledo instead.

I'd recommend destroying the Spanish as they will always try to remove Islam from their cities even if you vassallize them. You don't have to keep all their cities, just burn down those that your stability can't afford.
So far I never expanded in Northern Africa with Cordoba and instead always tried to own the complete Iberian peninsula.

Usually you should be able to play the French and Burgundians against one another so you never have to fight both of them, quite often I managed to get the other one to join the fight on my side, thus almost completely diverting the war. But if they come, just be defensive. You should have walls in all important cities and they have only 2 attack routes along the coast...

The Portugese...Well just give them ~10-20 turns of peace (no open borders), more if you are at war with France/Burgundy and by then you should have Knights and Trebs to deal with them. (Or you could just, you know...leave them alone, open borders and convert their cities)