The Golden Horde is too strong?

I wouldnt say they are too strong, but i agree that there should be times when their Tumans go back to Mongolia too see who's gonna be the new great Khan.

Nope, they aren't too strong, but they should be some change. They should focus on south (Hungary, Poland) not Norway/Denmark.

"The territory of the Golden Horde at its peak included most of Eastern Europe from the Urals to the right banks of the Danube River, extending east deep into Siberia. In the south, the Golden Horde's lands bordered on the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains..."

Has anyone played a game where they only got this far? Seems like they get much farther west then that in every game. I held them off well enough when playing Hungary but they take Sweden and Iceland every time.

One problem i have noticed is that they can't really conquer Empires as they would have too occupy every single province too actually get the land. (Since emperors can't be made vassal of other Emperors.)

The main reason, why they tend to conquer north of europe is because of that gap between russia and that black area I prefer to call Mordor. This gap is usually owned by infidels and russia does not seem to care to conquer it at any time for some reason. So when the golden horde is declaring an invasion on these infidels, it will take over all these lands and by that move their interests up to the north as well, which will then be next to their area.

You can avoid this by filling that gap on your own. As scotland I owned this gap and some areas in the mid of the territory of the golden horde. They did not care about me there. This way they never made it up to the north.

The 'Mongol Invasion' casus belli needs to be just a tad less hacks. In the case of nations with more than 10 provinces, they should not be able to eat all of it in one swoop. Seriously; the mongols ate the entire Cumans in one fell swoop in one of my games, essentially giving them a landbridge into europe within half a year of their arrival. In another game, it was even more ridiculous; They invaded Seljuk Turkmeni territories, but then got drawn into Azerbaijan and conquered the entire Seljuks???

Obviously some nations fell quickly to the Mongols. Others did not, and the Cumans, being an amorphous, horde-like entity, can't really surrender all their land to the Mongols; they'd need to conquer it themselves.

Isnt their strength random? some games they will be weaker then the real goldenhorde, others roughly the same and others even stronger?

Similar experience, the Mongols showed up in my game and promptly steamrolled over modern Russia to reach my eastern border as Bohemia (still a loyal vassal to the HRE). Just when it seemed they had too many revolts on their hands to deal with, I strike out to grab a couple border provinces only to have a stack of horse archers show up and promptly take down my armies and throw off out my occupied provinces. Then I waited for this first warlord to finally die and hope for some outright civil war. There was a huge war with nearly every vassal trying to break away from them at once only to have my emperor successfully put in place absolute crown authority preventing me from attacking at all. The Horde's civil war didn't last long and most of rebels have been brought back under their banner...

Yep, they can got sometime more army, sometime smaller army.

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The mongol hordes do need a serious boost. The Timurids for example were killed even before they could get control over a single province. The Golden horde usually does decent/good but the ilkhanate is permanently stuck in civil wars.

Yep, Iklkhanate sucks. : (
matnormyth89, you playing in pirate version, you should get banned.

Golden Horde ate up everything east of the HRE in my campaign. Poland, Bohemia (which broke off from HRE), most of the Balkans.

I play Sweden and since I made the Scandinavian Empire they leave me alone. Still, despite owning 7 kingdoms, the entire Baltic shore, most of Scotland and Ireland, and half of Spain, I can still only field 75K troops which would mostly starve to death before they even got to the enemy, who has had a stack of 90-100K running around for 15 years now which apparently doesn't need to eat. I tried to invade Mongol-held Poland (which I also control parts of) while the Mongols were finishing off the rest of some Russian duchy on the Black Sea, hoping the super army would be otherwise busy... but before my troops could even get fully mobilized the super army showed up and I had to declare a white peace or lose my entire army.

Golden Horde is a little ridiculous I think. The fact that they can have huge stacks of troops that NEVER STARVE despite have 80K too many in a county is really frustrating. I was hoping to just let them starve out or force them to split up, something like that. Nope. They still just go around conquering everything. Unstoppable. At least they leave me alone, but the game was a lot more fun when I was fighting Russians.

Oh, and Ilkhanate is actually doing pretty well in my campaign. They've made it all the way through Turkey, no thanks to the Byzantines falling apart a long ass time ago.

I usually gift either the Ilkhanate or the Golden Horde when playing an Eastern based empire. You really don't want both of them coming after you! With that said, the Golden Horde is easily manageable if you grow big enough and expand west ward. If you have an Empire sized kingdom by the time they show up (i.e. 150k+ levy minimum), you will lose a few fights but can eventually beat them back. The Ilkhanate are more dangerous in my opinion due to their 120k unit stack (Golden Horde tends to split to 50k stacks that are easier to kill). You might lose the first 2-3 wars you fight against them, but after that you can generally crush them since the 120k stack for the Ilkhanate is a one time thing and once its killed they only have normal armies.


The main issue with both the hordes are that they tend to have grouped up units and you can't really afford to stack more than 20-30k in a location. You can use a ship trick (load 100k units on ships and offload them on the horde in a coastal location) or just wear them down over several wars. If you only have a small Kingdom though, they will usually crush you unless you play in the Western side. With the Aztecs in the new DLC no area is truly safe though. You have to grow big if you want to hold any of them off.


Below is my latest game showing how big the Golden Horde/Ilkhanate can get when I play in the West. I did try to stop them, but had to take a decade or two to deal with the Aztecs (chain holy war/broke truce/repeat to kill them off), so the Mongols had free reign.

They aren't too strong.
In my game they took the most of Russia(dejure empire) and now Russia is in Norway (married)
But the Golden Horde which is of my Dynastie because some good assassinations will die because of
the Timurids. Thank you my Mongolian Kinsmen, you gave me alot of total Score...

Just dropping this in here, if you need to buy some time from the mongol onslaught, and happen to have good intrigue and a good spymaster, assassinating the khan grinds the mongol war machine to a halt for some time, exactly to simulate the horde going home to pick the new leader.

The game I'm playing right now they never did much but take a little of the Cuman lands, about a hundred years later the Ilkhanate wiped them out completely.

The Golden Horde seems to be getting weaker with each patch. At least in my games since LOR, the Il-Khanate decimates the Seljuks and has no issues defeating the Horde's initial invasion. If the Horde is lucky enough to take land in Russia, they do not get very far before converting. I miss the days when they easily reached Scandinavia and beyond.

My Mongols(GH) didn't convert until now, even when the one of my family who married the female khan was Catholic.
There should be a tendency to convert them to the catholic faith now!