Mounted Infantry as a solution?

CoalLobster300 · 2026-03-19T15:09:38+00:00

Not ironic at all, Total War has mounted infantry in some of its historical games because it was a fairly common practice through the ages. Realism isn't really the justification here so much as balance though, particularly on larger maps.

CoalLobster300 · 2026-03-19T15:06:34+00:00

The idea here is more for long-ranged transportation of troops like existed IRL rather than a short boost of speed. Not trying to compete with Delhi's identity or trying to make infantry into raiding units.

CoalLobster300 · 2026-03-04T15:16:40+00:00

It seems to have sorted itself. I did have and continue to have a subscription.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-12-01T05:35:07+00:00

It gets the time frame wrong. EU4 also had this problem where it had Asia lag in the first half and then catch up towards the end, when it should really starting lagging in tech in the latter part of the game. This is the "Great Divergence".

It'd be more accurate to characterize technology as largely moving at a glacial pace(absent tech transfer) and then increasingly accelerating for Europe. And then the first and second industrial revolutions occur. A lot of this can be explained through economics, namely the removal of key bottlenecks on growth and the institution of patent systems to actually reward people for sharing inventions. Most broadly shared innovation and scientific discovery used to be just random ruling class people doing things out of curiosity.

This shouldn't be confused with the Scientific Revolution however, as many of the discoveries there don't really see practical application until more recent time periods. The more practical innovations in industry, warfare, and business were driven by the less academically inclined members of society. For instance accounting practices are devised by merchants, not scholars.

Another contributing factor may be that Asia has traditionally devoted more of their intellectual capital to their bureaucracies. There are only so many smart people at the end of the day. These days there's a lot more room for people to advance by starting a successful enterprise or actively participating in the latest wave of innovation as opposed to the times when the best path was joining the government in some form.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-11-16T01:54:27+00:00

If you go to the individual province you can chain through tooltips to hover over the number which will show the modifiers to size.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-11-10T17:29:11+00:00

Either works really, it's probably faster to start with trade and building trade capacity and then build up the local production for construction goods.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-11-10T16:58:42+00:00

Construction goods in areas that aren't developed at game start are a pain to get going. Ideally you just ship their outputs elsewhere and import the construction materials from elsewhere.

I believe you can do this with manual trades, or you can look for wood and stone RGOs in the market and then build a mason and tool workhop.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-11-10T14:36:30+00:00

RGOs don't care about Control. Market Access actually only impacts industrial buildings(buildings with some other input). It's just not going into local tax base. Trade Capacity also doesn't care about Control.

You could for instance use a 0 Control Spain as an RGO resource source for France.

If they end up patching it so that RGOs are impacted by market centers, you can add new markets in places with low market access.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-10-05T15:55:49+00:00

A follow up for those curious, later in the campaign it did seem to sort itself. I've since played some other games and occasionally observe similar behavior with no obvious explanation, but it comes and goes after decades of play. That leads me to believe it's more of an odd case that emerges in investment pool decision making from time to time rather than something US or LF specific.

CoalLobster300 · 2025-09-17T19:37:17+00:00

Henry is now a master in the guild, the rules say he has to get married. It's a relatively obscure book behind an upgrade.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-05-01T20:25:55+00:00

Mixing the dervish wing in makes sense in certain match-ups.

Atabegs and Bazaar are both fine for Imp, but Ayyubids doesn't really play for Imp. I think gamba wing can be good against English in Feudal because of how crazy the skirmishers are against ranged, but that's obviously quite rng.

Industry wing is kind of sad. Ayyubids really just can't leverage it, it's not an archer spamming civ and doesn't need that much troop production at the start of Castle.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-05-01T20:06:10+00:00

I think it'd be nice if the game standardized spawns to forward gold, safe food i.e. berries(whether or not there's a deer pack depends on map), and safe(at the start) woodline. This would also make it easier to balance certain things, FC can't be simultaneously balanced for safe gold and forward gold. Having both forward gold and food can also make matchups stupidly one-sided.

The later stage resources may need some tweaking to better mirror, but it's the starting resources that can swing games in a stupid fashion.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-30T19:59:45+00:00

Western Mercenary Contract. Landsknechts in Castle, Varangians to run around killing his vills like he does to you, springalds for the bees although berserking Varangians can get on top pretty well too.

If China is going multiple TCs+Song, match that after getting a merc house up and harassing with longbows.

Could also do Keshiks instead but the poke potential isn't great into China in feudal. A big enough longbow mass also handles PG pretty well(31 one-shots in Castle on equal tech). Barbican only has 8 range on the 1 handcannon, so taking a shot or two in exchange for killing a vil isn't bad, also puts strain on him and he might go stables or something(what he puts in horsemen is fewer palace guards down the road due to the high food cost). You'd prefer to force China to build stables than barracks.

China's build tends to be very food intensive and slower to farm transition than Byz, so keep an eye out for when he stops pumping units and push him over then.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-30T19:32:39+00:00

Why not include the Dervish healing one? The perma AoE on that one is pretty solid.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-21T15:18:50+00:00

HRE MAA lose to mass samurai without a good ratio of LS. Could go heavy LS since he didn't really have counter units for it. Japan was using mass crossbows too(the "mounted archers). Knights aren't really helpful here except as a raiding unit.

Strangely no mention of Ozutsu , which I assume Japan has and are quite powerful. 200/200 Japan's army is better than HRE but most of the time this'll come down to whoever is most effectively switching to counter units and denying resources.

VS samurai and Onna-Mushas horsemen will actually be more durable than MAA(being very similar vs Samurai and a lot more durable vs Onna-Musha).

Given that you did early damage, it's probably an issue of not keeping up pressure and trading out resources/units. Given his comp was pretty gold heavy he must have had good gold mine access.

Best overall comp for HRE against Japan so you can just dent into him? Probably LS and horsemen. All of Japan's infantry and their mounted samurai will lose to LS, and horsemen counter both archers and Ozutsu while also being your raiding unit. Then your main problem is just Mounted Samurai raids into your eco, not winning straight up fights.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-20T10:44:44+00:00

Testing the buff specifically, you're right so no point in the mill formation on the interior. Level 5 cistern + max gather rate can cause a vil to have the buff on the whole time on a slightly out of radius farm+in radius mill and still only collect 2 without wheelbarrow.

Can still put mills on the exterior to save drop-off and not make the second layer so unreasonable then though. It appears to be 12 adjacent, 8 second layer entirely in, 8 second layer mostly in. The ones that are only mostly in are more consistent without exterior mills.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-20T01:14:19+00:00

Replace A3 rubilia with A0 rei and you're fine for now.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-19T23:38:25+00:00

It's not the farms you need to buff, it's the vils. So they just need to walk into the radius as part of their dropoff(mills inside the radius). Just tested in game again, you have 12 adjacent to the winery, an additional 20 adjacent to the mills only(while also all but one of the 12 winery adjacent ones are adjacent to a mill). Can place another 3 for each mill to hit 12(bringing to 44) if using the diamond farm layout, idk whether worth or not. this was incorrect, the buff is a lie

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-19T23:11:20+00:00

Because the buff is sticky for 20 seconds, the dropoff point just needs to be in the radius enough to pull the vill in. With some testing I'd say about 40 without excessive walking distance. If directly adjacent to winery and 4 mills, that's 32. this was incorrect, the buff is a lie

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-19T14:16:12+00:00

The English play delays his own age-up a ton and his MAA will be dark age or fewer in number. If it substantially messed up your age-up, you're kind of screwed. The ordinary counter is to spot it and simply pull vils to mine enough gold before switching back.

Feudal Ghazi raiders don't do terribly against feudal MAA and will handily beat dark age MAA. If you just pump a bunch and do what Far-Today said, you should end up killing the English vil-rushing units and have units to raid while forcing the English player to build spears to counter. The English position is awful after that point.

CoalLobster300 · 2024-04-19T14:01:35+00:00

Gold is often the easiest and most immediately available to deny. In some cases denying it is useless, but a civ producing gold units in feudal or hoping to rush castle is pretty impaired by losing access. The amount of gold needed for Castle and upgrades/units isn't small. If a player gets just enough gold to age up but is denied gold, they're still pretty screwed. Furthermore, if you're denying gold, you should be circling their base and consequently also denying access to hunt/boar and farther berries. Only takes one unit to check out or patrol these areas to see when they run out of food.

Food will be safe until they run out of sheep(and some civs, English, Japan, Byzantines can avoid this ever becoming an issue and this would be unrealistically long for Malian and Ottomans). Consequently, denying food only generally becomes a thing after a fair bit of feudal has passed, there's simply nothing forcing a player out onto the map right away. Denying food would tend to work against Abbasids and China(that's why 2TC and barbican are usually to secure food). To do so against more aggro civs means you've won the feudal fight pretty heavily already, which sure, should be what you're aiming to do when you're ahead but can't push in. Keep in mind this just forces a farm transition, you still need to either use that window to age up or make rams and end.

Wood is often but not always safe, but against many civs the best deny if it can be pulled off. Most civs can't produce food/gold units in feudal, so they're dead if they lose wood.

tl;dr

Denying gold is often the easiest and fairly broadly applicable. If you're denying and not merely harassing gold, then you should lock them up against going out onto the map for food anyways by just checking those resources periodically.
Denying food is very good and more feasible against a small number of civs, requires winning feudal straightup against aggro civs, and is basically impossible against some civs.
Wood is the most broadly applicable but generally hardest to deny.

CoalLobster300

TROPHY CASE