haha...congrats. I hate the French too.

So...anyway, I've rebuilt all my destroyed armies and continued onward a bit. I participated in a crusade and managed to capture the city (whcih was in Russia, of all places), improving my rep with the pope (which, once more, isn't mine). Mainly I've just been holding my place and building, but I had a major battle for Constantinople.

It's a massively large city with cannons and all, but a full stacked hungarian army decided to try its luck with me. A full stack of Milan army was on the other side of the city and I think got sucked in by mistake. I ended up massacring the hungarians with cavalry charges, then took a bite out of Milan too. A pic of the resulting carnage is attached.

heheh...I ended up with almost 500 hostages...I offered to ransom them back, but both Milan and Hungary denied me...so I executed alot of people.

Ox, a Ribault is a cannon with six small barrels. It's the destructmaster for infantry in the open field.

Oh yeah, I think I can make those in some of my cities. Are they really that effective? They looked kinda meh to me, but if they actually pwn then I (obviously) might reconsider. I can't wait to ship off to the New World with an army packing cannons and muskets!

Very nice win btw Satis...minimal losses too. I love ransoming, you can get some real nice cash out of that - especially if you capture a king or something. With my previous king (Rodrigo, died by now ) i used to just execute prisoners because I didn't have much breathing space, earning him a lot of 'dread'. With my current wonderboy I tend to release prisoners; I want him to become a chivalrous playa.

As far as the story of my game goes:

After staving off the French at Toulouse I was amassing forces for a counterattack; but the Pope told me I couldn't attack France anymore. So, I sent a diplomat over there and got a ceasefire and some cash out of them. Strangely enough, ever since then I didn't have any trouble with the French at all. A few spies in my cities was the worst they did. The Northern part of my kingdom has been relatively quiet ever since the wars with the French, apart from some minor struggles with the Milanese near Toulouse.

So I decided to expand Southwards and start christening the infidel muslims. The re-christening of Spain went well, I think most provinces are at 95% christian again. I was also gaining massive representation in the college of cardinals, with a good 4-5 guys at the same time in there (which obviously helped in getting my guys on the throne). I've had 3 or 4 popes by now, with a Dane and a German sometimes taking the title.

Anyhoo, so I put together a small but experienced army and put my most promising commander at the head of it, and sent it down to Marrakech (Northern Africa). It fell pretty easily, and after stabilizing it (retraining, establishing a garrison, churning out priests and building chapels and churches ) I moved him on to the east. Meanwhile the Pope had called a crusade on Tunis!! I heeded the call, obviously, and shipped off an army headed by King Rodrigo The Merciless to Tunis. Ridiculously enough, Tunis was taken by rebels in the same turn as my crusading army landed near it. So the crusade was off. Rodrigo took the city regardless (with the other army marching in from the West anyway) and died a few turns later because of natural causes. RIP.

I captured the city in between Marrakech and Tunis and reorganized my army so that the promising commander actually had a big army to lead towards the Nile delta, with some crusaders and Santiago Knights in it (special unit). The entire march turned out to be a bit of a disappointment...the next city was Libya and held by my homies from the papal states. So i had to march on, but there were no roads between Libya and Alexandria which means I was taking AGES. After a few turns I just dispatched a fleet from Tunis and sent it to the army so they could reach Alexandria way quicker. I stopped playing when i was at the gates of Alexandria.

Some remarks on the side: my rep as a holy bastard is taking quite a beating. i'm not even halfway the "crosses" ranking with his Holiness anymore! I don't freaking get it...I have done everything the Pope ever told me to do, I'm good friends with the papal states, build cathedrals and even freakin' HUGE cathedrals wherever I can (I was the first faction in the world to build both a regular and a huge cathedral), I have a gazillion priests roaming the land christening and purging, I'm taking back land from the muslims and ACTIVELY converting them (most of North Africa is already 80% Christian), my lands are all super-religious and I'm a triggerhappy little crusader. So yeah, what gives? It's even my own Pope that's in power! I still have to actually finish a crusade, maybe that has to do with it.

Oh and I lurv gunpowder!! I don't have too many cities with the proper facilities yet, but I sieged one city with a regular cannon and shiiit...the steel badass gate went down in 2 salvos! I don't want to imagine what that gives with a Grand cannon. How long does it take to breach a huge stone wall with one of those? Anyway, glad I didn't invest in siege facilities...they'll obviously become obsolete with the superior aim and power of the cannons.

Oh and one more question: what exactly do the master thieves' guilds etc do? Deliver better trained assassins? I only saw one actual effect from one of the special facilities; the priory in Tunis which deliverd the Santiago Knights. But the explorers' and thieves' guild...nada. Some pics attached

haha....good job. Looks like you're on a roll.

And yea, ribaults are like a crapload of little cannons mounted on a wagon. Monster ribaults are the same thing but on steroids. Assuming you can get them deployed and keep the enemy infantry away, they are absolutely evil. A good use is:

use cannons to blow holes in someone's walls. They never go out of their walls when you're sieging them that way, so wheel your ribaults up to the hole(s) and let them tear up the enemy behind.

Err...and yes, the best cannons are culverins, and they totally own. With 3 units of culverins, I can take out anything in one salvo....a tower, blow a hole in a wall, whatever. Too bad they're so inaccurate against troops.

The explorer's guild once gave me a mission to capture a city, and I believe a merchant's guild has given me missions to get trade rights, but I'm not so sure about that, could have been the council of nobles too.

thieves' guild gives your spies that are trained in that city an experience bonus.

Respect for that 20 y/o 8 star general!

Ribaults are a bit poo, i found. The range is too short. I found culverins very effective. They do area damage so one direct his will effect about 10-20 more soldiers.

Basilisks are the best. Theyre Culverins, but with much more range, as if culverins didnt have enough range Its a pity you can't load grapeshot in either of the two though. My standard english army used to have 10x culverins.

haha....10 culverins...like 5 units, or 10 whole units?

Anyway, I found an excellent use for my master ribaults. It was an accident....but anyway, I had taken a Hungarian castle...the kind with the outer wall and then an inner wall. But before I was able to fully secure it, the hungarians came at me with a huge army. I set up all my guys in the inner courtyard with my monster ribaults doing a kind of crossfire...totall annihilation. I just chewed up his army and spit it out.

a few pics I took of the event. Plus one of my family members.

10x units of culverins, so that means 20x culverins. Makes a very entertaining battle. If you line up the camera along the cannons so you see them all horizontally, its like watching those old man-o-war battleships.

Holy shit @ the crossfire!

Jesus christ, that pic with the master ribaults is insane! I haven't even used or seen a master ribault yet so I can't say if they're very effective yet myself, but I think that pic speaks for itself.

I actually only drag along cannons for breaching the gate, I try not to blow the city I'm sieging to pieces. I'm just gonna repair it anyway once I take it so...

On that note, it kinda bothers me that, when taking a huge city/citadel from an enemy faction with a different religion (like the Egyptians) you really HAVE to exterminate the population or you'll lose it to rebels in a turn or 3. I've built 446415 town watches and lowered taxes, changed policies, built buildings...nothing helps. Well, something helped: the general leading my armies in Egypt (the 20-yr old 8-star dude) has a lot of 'popular' traits so he could keep one of those cities under control. But since I can't split him up over two cities...

Ended up exterminating Cairo with him, which dropped his chivalry from +9 to +6 or something. Too bad, I would have liked him to stay uber chivalrous: releasing prisoners, not exterminating or sacking cities. You know.

I used to "occupy" settlements in my earlier campaigns, but they used to rebel all the time. So now i just "sack" everytime.

Isn't extermination a better idea? Even less people = even even less problems. In the meantime you get the chance to christen the city and build a lot of leisure buildings. I only use sacking when i'm not interested in taking the city.

Ironically enough the Black Plague was a blessing for my kingdom. It whacked a good 30% of the citizens in most of my cities, giving me a lot of room for taxing measures or even just crowd control. The economy taking hits was just a minor problem, I had enough to spare anyway.

Even less people also means even longer before those cities can support your advanced armies again. You can also try to move priests into the enemy territory before attacking the region itself, to soften up the population. Priests don't cost shit anyway.

Good point. Otoh, I'm so filthy rich that I just buy my way around in terms of mercenaries or bribing enemies (which seems to be a lot harder than in RTW, btw).

Anyway, I was gonna play some more MTW2 today, except I just made a backup (two DVD's) of my documents and savegames in order to install that new HD. So would be kinda dumb to play along and then have to start over 20 years earlier on the old save again.

Wish me luck...gonna take out this HD, get the other one up and running (and the C: and Windows partition) and then try and re-insert this drive as the secondary HD for storage and stuff. So technically I should be able to copy all my data from my current HD to the new one regardless, but better safe than sorry I s'ppose.

Ok, I'm back. Installing the new HD and putting a new copy of windows and all supporting programs took a while, but it went flawless (it seems). I managed to copy most of my old HD to my new HD so stuff like "my documents", my desktop maps etc are all back as they were...so it feels like nothing has changed. Oh and I even downgraded MSN from live to 7.5 again cos live was fucking hogging resources and has a crappy design.

Other observations: the new seagate HD seems to be a tad slower than the old one (a maxtor) but is extremely silent. The maxtor one screeches and turns like it was a blender, but that might have something to do with it slowly dying.

I just hope that 2 HD's won't give me any complications. One is attached to the same power connector as the DVD drive but my power supply should be able to handle it. Oh and let's hope there are no heat issues....but I left a good space between both HD's just in case.

Anyway...now I'm gonna reinstall MTW2 and get back on-topic!