Medieval 2: Damn Mongols

[Steph]

Not much.
But I have a large army to maintain, and the buildings are now costing quite a lot to build

 

[Lucius Julius]

Whenever I play as a faction in the near east, I am always, and I mean ALWAYS AFRAID of the Mongolian Horde....once they capture one city, they become almost twice as powerful as they once were!

I sometimes use cheats though.

 

[Steph]

The Mongols are not so dangerous. They have to many cavalry. If you have good walls, , and retreating to inner walls at the right moment. you can manage to destroy their infantry. Then, the cavalry cannot take walls, climb siege tower or ladder. Pincushionned them with archers, wait till the time is out if needed, and the battle is won.
You don't need to beat them, you need to hld long enough to force them to withdraw, while trying to have a good kill ratio. I usually got 1-2 or even 1-3 with this tactics, even when I was badly outnumbered.

 

[Provolution]

I use to place my units by a ford or bridge. Place some pikemen in a semicircle around the bridge, and plenty of archers behind. You also need 4 formations of heavy cavalry for the countershock as well as some assortment of catapults and ballistas. As soon as the Mongols begin to cross the ford/bridge, you place all artillery barrages at "Fire at will" (make sure the fire lanes do not allow for friendly fire). Also, use "fireballs" for the catapults, as that generates mass death on that narrow bridge/ford. as soon as the first group of Mongols (most likely mounted ones) reach your pikemen, you start firing with archers on the troops in the middle of the bridge. As soon as the Mongols have crossed the bridge, you stop the artillery for a little bit, do the strong counter on their flanks (our side of the river) and crush them there, just be wary of enemy spearmen/ or pikemen.

Then you retreat your cavalry, then hammer again, then retreat and hammer again. When they begin to panic, you send everything you got, as you fire with artillery and archers. As soon as your troops are halfways, you attack them with archers using unsheathed swords (ALT function and mouse).

Then, you bring all you got, in particular you General, as his free kills builds character. This game does not really differentiate between slaughtering panicking soldiers than bravely winning an intense swordfight, like real life.

 

[Ruler]

My experience are little bit different than some of us. If you don't let them capture one city they will stay together forever and thus are unbeatable after they take first city they start to split off and are much easier targets. Even they spawn north or south there's a plenty of bridges or bottlenecks to fight. About 10 archeries, few cannons, trebs etc and rest spears and infantry do a amazing job at bridge and even you lose but if your archeries has used more than half their ammo you know you have done a good job but no doubt they are truly fearsome enemies if they have a 6 armies you want to bring 12. Also, you want to try your luck with assassins too to take out their leaders. They fighting is pretty much based on their leaders dread.

 

[Provolution]

I agree on the chokepoints. Pick your battles well, and you tend to win. Kill-zones is the only way to keep inferior armies alive.

 

[Ruler]

It's been long time when I fought with Mongols last time (I used to play MTW just to fight with Mongols for a while becaues it was alot of fun. ) I just want to point out that don't expect to kill immediately. Use every bottlenecks to weaken them. Cheap militia archeries, and militia spearmens from towns can make a good combination to fight at bottlenecks and should be very fast to make after bottlenecks send your missile cav/heavy cav army to weaken them and try to take out their trebs and cats after that starts the defending, keep at least one heavy cav in every city and send it to kill their rams AI almost ever take another ram to take down the gate if first one is destroyed so you can finish them off on the wall and while you are defending you should make armies to take their cities. I haven't ever succeed to fight with Mongols with cannon towers but knowing how powerful they are I can only imagine how easy it will be with any army.

 

[Maniacal]

Yeah, city streets are great bottlenecks, I miss having shield walls and phalanxs in M2 as those are perfect for defending a city. If you can't hold the walls fall back ot the streets. Even in modern times city fighting is still deadly, the streets are an exellent killing field for snipers and marksmen, the germans and russians fought room to room quite often in WW2.

 

[Provolution]

There are the equivalent to phalanx, English Billmen and so on, that walk slowly in formation to grind down enemies. Just investigate the units, and you find them.

 

[Tank_Guy#3]

As is true with real military, you shouldn't let your enemy pick the battlefield.

And maybe my history is a little hazy, but wasn't Caesarea on the coast down more towards modern day Israel?

As stated before, I don't own MTW2, but on all my TW games I turn the battle timer off.

 

[Maniacal]

I leave the battle timer on. Once I was chasing skirmishers around the map who were out of ammo but were still on avoid combat with infantry, andother time the romans got a guy stuck behind the ram who was supposed to be pushing it.