How to do win England as William? And how do you keep it?

Leviathan07 said:

LOL! No you can't. Unless a lucky arrow hits Harold in the eye, which I haven't had happening in my last attempt.

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I've had a successful battle at York instead. Your starting forces are actually enough to defeat Harold's stack about half the time you try.

If you want to have the battle in Sussex, then you have to wait quite some time before he bothers to counter your invasion. If he does just hire a stack of mercs and converge on the battle with your entire force. Shouldn't be any problem to win that.

kentonio said:

That's why I'd recommend taking all holdings in each county, it prevents them respawning behind you. Apart from that, just kill them before they have chance to group together if you can, it's not too hard.

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You have to occupy all the counties in a province to prevent the armies from spawning, and that takes on average about 3 sieges/province.

The Blood Eagle said:

You have to occupy all the counties in a province to prevent the armies from spawning, and that takes on average about 3 sieges/province.

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Yep, but the others go quicker usually, and the time you save not chasing little groups of troops around is worth it in the long run.

You need to keep a force large enough to have an efficient siege assault. You use your huge warchest to do that with mercs. Assault everything. Even the cities and chuches, because they are much more weakly fortified and safer to assault and they give you loot.

Keep some Saxon vassals around. They will revolt, and when you crush them with your remaining mercs you can take their castles that don't have penalties.

Leviathan07 said:

When I became king of England, the north (mega-Lancaster who had inherited Northhumberland) and Cornwall didn't even become my vassals. All I got were the counties I controlled

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I've had that happen to me on more than one occassion. Though the reasons why escape me, it seemed to only happen when you capture provinces via assault, since I was able to get them as vassals in the peace deal with Harold when I relied only on sieges in two seperate playthroughs.

SlyEcho said:

You need to keep a force large enough to have an efficient siege assault. You use your huge warchest to do that with mercs. Assault everything. Even the cities and chuches, because they are much more weakly fortified and safer to assault and they give you loot.

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This is actually rather brilliant, as the main gripe with using mercs seems to be their salaries, not their hiring costs (~10 months salary). Dead mercs don't get paid. Throw a company against the walls, use the loot to hire their replacements. Payday coming up first of the month? Assault.

The real question ought to be "How do you win as Harold Godwinson?"

In this game, he's got the odds stacked against him even more than in real life!