Developer Diary 20 – The Mongols
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The worst of it was the limitless demesne. The giant regiments of crack troops I didn't necessarily mind so much, though the zero attrition thing was definitely a stretch. But their ability to control personally every single conquered province wasn't only massively frustrating within the game mechanics, it was also utterly historically inaccurate. Governance was not what one would call the Mongols' strong suit--certainly not of those who ended up on CKII's map.
I think Mongols are fun in a broader scale.
If you intend to play a converted game, e.g. CK->EU3, mongols add quite a lot of flavor, provided they actually do anything good with their huge forces.
Other than mongols, the game is just too easy even on very hard.
There was one very nice AAR by thrashingmad where he had to convert to EU3 prematurely as the conversion gave him the possibility to play as mongol vassal, after his country was destroyed by mongols, and then he had to fight long and tied wars with the huge empire until it finally collapsed in EU3 era.
I think it's a good case where the mongols actually add to the game.
TBH, mongols should be overpowered, let's remember that it was only two tumens (20k of troops) that almost completely annihilated the army of Rus (all the principalities taken together) at the Battle of Kalka River, and then twenty years later split-up mongol forces annihilated the armies of Poland and Hungary on very close dates.
So, militarily they should pretty much be unstoppable as there were only perhaps two nations in Europe and Middle East that could put any kind of resistance - Mamluks, who did (against a "rear guard" of a single tumen) and HRE which didn't have the chance but probably would make some difficulties for mongols by their sheer numbers (and then again, their tactics were pretty similar to poles and hungarians, which pretty much got slaughtered).
It is only through intrigue and diplomacy that one should be able to survive the mongol onslaught, or through waiting out until current Great Khan dies (at which point mongols should lose all their "mongol" units, but still retain "local" units).
The only way a CK player could be challenging Mongols on battlefield is by using his prior knowledge of troop types that can fight the mongols - light cavalry and crossbows/archers and emphasizing on those in research/recruitment.
If you intend to play a converted game, e.g. CK->EU3, mongols add quite a lot of flavor, provided they actually do anything good with their huge forces.
Other than mongols, the game is just too easy even on very hard.
There was one very nice AAR by thrashingmad where he had to convert to EU3 prematurely as the conversion gave him the possibility to play as mongol vassal, after his country was destroyed by mongols, and then he had to fight long and tied wars with the huge empire until it finally collapsed in EU3 era.
I think it's a good case where the mongols actually add to the game.
TBH, mongols should be overpowered, let's remember that it was only two tumens (20k of troops) that almost completely annihilated the army of Rus (all the principalities taken together) at the Battle of Kalka River, and then twenty years later split-up mongol forces annihilated the armies of Poland and Hungary on very close dates.
So, militarily they should pretty much be unstoppable as there were only perhaps two nations in Europe and Middle East that could put any kind of resistance - Mamluks, who did (against a "rear guard" of a single tumen) and HRE which didn't have the chance but probably would make some difficulties for mongols by their sheer numbers (and then again, their tactics were pretty similar to poles and hungarians, which pretty much got slaughtered).
It is only through intrigue and diplomacy that one should be able to survive the mongol onslaught, or through waiting out until current Great Khan dies (at which point mongols should lose all their "mongol" units, but still retain "local" units).
The only way a CK player could be challenging Mongols on battlefield is by using his prior knowledge of troop types that can fight the mongols - light cavalry and crossbows/archers and emphasizing on those in research/recruitment.
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Which means that if the Byzantines can hold together, the Mongols should find them extremely difficult to beat, since the Byzantines knew well the value of both those troop types, and start the game with pretty good tech levels.
The Turk used the same tactics as the mongol, its just the mongol didnt come till centuries after, horse-archers who ride forwards shoot then ride back while the second of the three lines rides forwards and does the same over and over again until they either win or break the line and encircle and win. And they found the byzantines really easy to beat as it was all infantry and discipline but lost to the crusaders really big line of heavy Calvary who were too wide and unorganised to um, wasname, flank? anyway the point is, horse archers can be arsed kicked by heavy just as well as by light.
You shouldnt need to adopt mongol light tactics to beat mongols, there would be lots of different ways to go about it, each with strengths and weaknesses.
Not one strategy that youve got to choose, but lots you can try.
But i agree completely with binTravkin that the mongols should be overpowered, or atleast to should have the option to have them overpowered, cos thats the whole point of them.
No surprise that they used similar tactics. Considering they were steppe nomads originating from the Mongolia-Kazakhstan-North China-Siberia area.
Not that Strategos claimed that it wasn't...
This question has haunted me.
Not, strictly speaking, accurate. Manzikert was lost by lack of discipline, poor leadership, treachery, desertion, and splitting an army before a projected decisive engagement, in addition to some difficulty in dealing with the Seljuq hit-and-run tactics (which would have been lessened had the other half of the royal army, who included the Pecheneg mercenaries, been on the battlefield instead of doing nothing a good many miles away). The Byzantines were never all about heavy infantry, and had a better grasp of combined-arms tactics than any other culture on CKII's map during CKII's period. And heavy cavalry actually almost always loses to missile-armed cavalry, assuming equal skill on both sides. The crusaders faced a lot of Muslim cavalry that was not Turkic, and therefore employed the same shock tactics as did the crusaders, without the same heaviness of armor or weaponry, so these Muslim cavalrymen tended to get smashed. When the crusaders started to face more Turkic cavalry, it was the crossbowmen who became essential to victory.
I do agree, though, that the Mongols ought to be overpowered, if for no other reason than that I don't find that "oh NO" feeling of despair nearly often enough in grand strategy games. If the hordes turn out well in my first game, I'll play the Byzantines in the next one and see if I can hand the Mongols their hats.
Fatamid heavy cavalry had little issue challenging the Byzantine Cataphracts on the battlefield. They were often mistaken for Crusader knights during the early years of the crusades. It's easy to fall prey to the myth that all the Muslims had weaker heavy cavalry.
Regardless of this fact Manzikert was lost by the Cuman deserters who decided to ditch and the Seljuks managed to get their chance. Before that relations weren't that much of an issue and both the Seljuq empire and Byzantium had issues with the Turkoman raiders.
It's not as if the Mamluks had an issue fighting the Mongols- Ain Jalut wasn't a fluke. Their heavy cavalry-Light cavalry-shock troop combination was specifically created to combat the Mongols and the il-Khans, and the armies of al-Kamil and as-Saleh differed little from those of Baibars or Qalawun.
Regardless of this fact Manzikert was lost by the Cuman deserters who decided to ditch and the Seljuks managed to get their chance. Before that relations weren't that much of an issue and both the Seljuq empire and Byzantium had issues with the Turkoman raiders.
It's not as if the Mamluks had an issue fighting the Mongols- Ain Jalut wasn't a fluke. Their heavy cavalry-Light cavalry-shock troop combination was specifically created to combat the Mongols and the il-Khans, and the armies of al-Kamil and as-Saleh differed little from those of Baibars or Qalawun.
We're talking horse archers vs other cavalry here.
Historians would beg to differ:
1. Mamluks used hit-and-run and feint retreats - mongol usual tactics, mongols apparently didn't (possibly because approximately half of the force was auxiliaries, not used to such warfare, such as Cilician and Georgian heavy cavalry and local recruits/mercenaries).
2. Qutuz, the mongol commander, made a grave mistake and ran into ambush.
And even then, the battle didn't decisively go into Mamluk favor for quite some time.
Mamluk weaponry and fighting style was borne out of their ancestral lands - Russian steppe (IIRC they are cuman origin), so it was in a way similar to the Mongol, but in general should still have been inferior as even a small mongol scout force of two tumens (led by Subedei and Jebe) had little difficulty dispersing their armies, when they arrived at the cuman homelands.
It is unreasonable to expect that Mamluks tailored their army composition to meet mongols as Ilkhanate appeared on horizon (Iran) in 1256, while the Battle of Ain Jalut happened in 1260.
They might have made their troops have more armor, or have some improvements in general quality of equipment, but in the end the fact that they were engaging a small force, the cunning of their commander and the lack of the same on the enemy commander's part were the decisive factors in the battle.
It is not possible to change the "troop type" on a whim, even today giving an infantry division tanks, they don't automatically become tank division - it takes a whole lot of training to make them such.
In the past "troop type" was basically representative of your social status, so apart from minor elevations (extra armor, etc) and tactical moves (dismounting of mounted troops), you couldn't expect them to change easily.
The mongols never made a serious invasion attempt in Mamluk lands.
Heck, even the invasion of Poland was a diversionary raid, yet it managed to devastate the country.
As I said, the main problem of mongols was their lack of political organization - they returned for kurultai each time the Great Khan died and in the later years they were unable to assemble as large forces because of their inheritance laws splitting their forces and the resulting infighting.
The turning to kurultai part saved Europe (1241 - Ogedei's death) and Mamluks (1259 - Mongke's death), after that the Great Khan started focusing on China (Kubilai Khan) and the West and Middle East were thus saved.
Militarily they were pretty much unstoppable once they focused to defeat/conquer someone.
This was a result of more than one factor though:
- training and general quality (incl. material quality of equipment) of troops
- organization and discipline of troops
- experience from constant fighting or hunting
- excellent commanders in large part due to meritocracy
- unseen mobility
Note that numerical superiority was almost never the case - most of the times the size of armies was either similar or in favor of the enemy.
Even more so, when taking into account that often large part of the army was composed of other steppe auxiliaries which were on average lower quality troops.
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The Mongols never were an unstoppable horde.
Europe unassailable to the horde historically for a variety of reasons I'd like to see In Game.
Primarily I'd love to see the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. Those crack troops at some point should disappear as the emperor (and he was an emperor) dies and all the major mongol generals withdraw to china to decide who gets what where.
Second, the mongols never arrived in force large enough to really threaten the much larger kingdoms of Europe. Mostly because transporting a large enough army from china would be disastrously expensive.
Which come to a third point, logistically the mongol forces that arrived in theatre could not have played the mongol tricks in the forests of central europe like they did one the steppes of Hungary. Europe is a logistics nightmare. Everywhere good fodder is, you have a castle (Europe didn't have the biggest castles, but it sure had the most). You send foraging parties out that are too small, and the castle's knights sally out and scatter them. Send out parties that are too large and you don't get enough food. There isn't a limitless expanse of grasslands to graze on. Any large force has to go to where the food is. This means that mongolian mobility is stripped down. And the reason the mongols won so often was in large part to that mobility. This combines with the relative power of the HRE compared to the Russian principalities and the kingdom of Hungary (which lost due to internal strife more then mongolian skill) makes Germany a particularly daunting task to attempt to engage.
Also Europe is dirt poor compared to China and the Mongolian Empire was already about as stretched to the limit as it could be.
Europe unassailable to the horde historically for a variety of reasons I'd like to see In Game.
Primarily I'd love to see the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. Those crack troops at some point should disappear as the emperor (and he was an emperor) dies and all the major mongol generals withdraw to china to decide who gets what where.
Second, the mongols never arrived in force large enough to really threaten the much larger kingdoms of Europe. Mostly because transporting a large enough army from china would be disastrously expensive.
Which come to a third point, logistically the mongol forces that arrived in theatre could not have played the mongol tricks in the forests of central europe like they did one the steppes of Hungary. Europe is a logistics nightmare. Everywhere good fodder is, you have a castle (Europe didn't have the biggest castles, but it sure had the most). You send foraging parties out that are too small, and the castle's knights sally out and scatter them. Send out parties that are too large and you don't get enough food. There isn't a limitless expanse of grasslands to graze on. Any large force has to go to where the food is. This means that mongolian mobility is stripped down. And the reason the mongols won so often was in large part to that mobility. This combines with the relative power of the HRE compared to the Russian principalities and the kingdom of Hungary (which lost due to internal strife more then mongolian skill) makes Germany a particularly daunting task to attempt to engage.
Also Europe is dirt poor compared to China and the Mongolian Empire was already about as stretched to the limit as it could be.
I already pointed before that their lost battles were mostly in smaller-size engagements or due to mistakes by commanders.
I find it unproductive to dispute their military abilities, at least before the breakup of the empire as most failed campaigns were due to Great Khan dying or due to some mistakes that were mostly fixed in the subsequent moves (if they happened).
Tell that to Khwarezmian Shah, Polish and Hungarian kings back then.
Or, alternatively you might want to look up how exactly "nomadism" works.
I think you should really do some research on Mongol actions in Russia (especially Subedei's winter campaigns), Hungary and Poland.
The things you are claiming cannot be borne out of knowledge of historical realities, both in regards to Mongol logistics and the knights ability as skirmishing force.
Hungary being divided is also irrelevant to the discussion and only serves to reinforce my point as HRE was no less united at the time and possibly never after either.
Nevertheless, Hungarians still managed to gather ~25k troops, which was around what you could expect of a feudal country of it's size.
It is also wrong to point out to fortresses as being a significant strength of Europe.
Historical records indicate that Mongols learn't a lot from sieging in China, they used chinese siege engineers later on and even employed gunpowder (but not guns yet).
So, even if they didn't immediately take the walled settlements, it was just a question of time as they controlled the land.
By the sheer amount of fortresses they must have taken through their conquests and in such a short time, they must have had a great amount of expertise in siege techniques (call it "siege tradition" if you will).
If it's dirt poor on EU3 map, it doesn't mean it was useless IRL.
It is also irrelevant to larger discussion of mongol military abilities and irrelevant in the larger scheme of things as it doesn't appear that Mongols gave special care as to the relative "richness" of the places they were conquering - they just seemingly wanted all they could get.
As I said - militarily they should be pretty much unstoppable, given similar quality of leadership on both sides (though mongols mostly had it better).
It was politically that they were "defeated", first by interruptions in their campaigns, then by infighting and finally, by break-up of their empire.
Europe got lucky two times - 1241, when Ogedei died and 1255, when Batu died.
Mamluks got lucky in 1259 when Mongke died.
India was a tough nut from the beginning and there wasn't a real, full-scale campaign to conquer it, so we could say they got lucky by virtue of distraction and again, break up of the empire after Mongke's death.
Indochina was hard for Mongols due to their guerrilla tactics and tropical climate, which was again less of a logistical challenge than challenge for the physical health of the army (Mongke is rumored to have died from an illness contracted in South China, he was even advised to leave the area due to illnesses) and they agreed to pay tribute, thus buying just the time they needed (they were still harassed later during Yan dynasty).
Here, I pretty much named all the places the Mongols didn't conquer.
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I wonder if it will be possible to remove Mongol troops by event as well as create them, or if it would be possible to make a version that does suffer attrition. That could be useful for better representing the "cycles" in Mongol power.
The most significant defeats the mongols faced were in indo china actually. Where the terrain was unfavorable to their campaign technique.
Calling the mongols "nomads" Is a tad disingenuous at the time period. The heart of the empire was a settled China. Some segments of the empire reverted to nomad lifestyle after the empire as a whole dissolved, but they were never the threat the unified mongolian empire was.
Also the strategic realities in the middle east are much different then those of central Europe.
I have. They executed clever raids on the hearts of Rus' populations. Problem is that Europe is more densely populated all over and will be until the black death devastates the continent. There is no one city of a few ten thousand people to knock over. There are dozens. With hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of smaller villages.
The mongolians did not win against the hungarians so much as the hungarians lost against the mongols. And the army of the Emperor was much more united, and larger, then that of the hungarians with their "allies". And it also happens to be raised. And in northern Italy.
Engineers and equipment that had not been brought with them. They'd have to import it from China. Except they can't, because the empire dissolved. That isn't divorced from the reality that the mongols can't take Europe, but inherent in it. The empire was never stable enough to mount the effort it would take to conquer, or even raid the continent effectively and the forces they had available before the empire collapsed were insufficient to do so, and in fact gathering the forces required to take europe would probably have collapsed the empire even if it wasn't well on the way to dissolution already.
And once again it is not the size of the fortifications, but the number. Europe has the most castles in the world. Not the largest. This means that anywhere of minor logistic or strategic value has a castle sitting on it. Which helps deny the area to mongol foragers. Which means they have to knock over a dozen castles of Baron von Buggerall to feed themselves. Or they go to where there is available food and fodder. Which is right where the european armies will be. Armies that are up to five times larger then what the mongols have available in the area before the dissolution of the empire.
No no, Europe is, compaired to China, dirt poor. China is massively wealthy and Europe is not. Well western Europe. The Romans were wealthy, though not from their european holdings as much as from holding the gateway to the black coast. But really, compaired to jewels like persia and China, Europe has nothing the mongols want.
It is relevant in the effort the mongols would take to mount a hypothetical invasion. Or large scale raid
The mongols are not magic. They can be defeated in battle. And historically were, several times, in a region of heavily forested land (despite them ultimately just throwing enough bodies to make the kingdoms of indo china into tributaries). And the break up of the empire cannot be divorced from their military ambitions. The mongol empire was inherently weak politically and when instability sets in, as it must, ll the mongol leaders will turn their attention on what is worthwhile. China. Not some backwards backwater filled with castles.
The Mamluks legitimately defeated the mongols.
Ironically india would later be conquered by someone claiming to descend from Timur
Yep, all the mongol soldiers got sick and died, luckily indo chinese soldiers have magic immune systems. It was the terrain. Admittedly harsher then europe's, but less fortified with smaller kingdoms and RIGHT NEXT to China. The mongols aren't marching their armies through frozen tundras to get to them.
By that time in the game, my pieces were all queens so it only took the Mongols to provide any kind of challenge. The so called onslaught can barely dent the player when you can call half a million people to arms.
Unless you cannot raise 40k armies from a single province, (Constantinople 320% stewardship etc) I don't see how not having Mongols can be a fun game.
So to summerize what I'm seeing:
-If you ignore all the battles that the Mongols lost, the Mongols never lost a battle.
-Judging by the fact that they did well, the Mongols were invincible and them doing poorly would be as impossible as the Green Bay Packers losing a game this season.
-When the mongols suffered setbacks, it was due to flukes. When they won battles, it was what we should expect.
Am I up to speed here?
-If you ignore all the battles that the Mongols lost, the Mongols never lost a battle.
-Judging by the fact that they did well, the Mongols were invincible and them doing poorly would be as impossible as the Green Bay Packers losing a game this season.
-When the mongols suffered setbacks, it was due to flukes. When they won battles, it was what we should expect.
Am I up to speed here?
I'll just randomly throw here a plea for more human approach to the Mongols themselves. More interaction and negotiation options.
Let me give you some "what ifs" from the original CK and CK2:
What if you pick a start date after 1066, but before the Mongols show up? You don't have time to build up a huge unified empire that can raise 500,000 troops in levies. In that case, having overpowered Mongols just results in a frustrating game over, especially since in CK1, you couldn't pay them off or ask to be their vassal (you know, like some rulers ended up doing).
What if CK2 makes dynastic intrigue so interesting that you don't need a military "boss fight" to keep the game interesting at the end?
What if you don't want the last century of the game to boil down to a 2 state super war between you and the Mongols? Notice I didn't say losing to them. In every CK1 game where the Mongols had any significant impact, it always boiled down to the entire last century being only about the Mongol invasion and nothing else.
What if I get tired of conquering the entire world because the Mongols annexed everything else besides my kingdom?
What if I want the non-Christian states in the east to potentially be strong enough to hold back the Mongols sometimes, meaning that I never fight them because they never get to Christian Europe? (i.e. I get tired of seeing the Il-Khanate reach Alexandria and the Golden Horde reach Berlin every game)
My point isn't that the Mongols are stupid, or that I think they shouldn't be in the game. My point is that your experience in CK1 (the "I have a bunch of queens myself so I need a challenge") assumes that the only way to make the game interesting after 150 years is to have a massive invasion from outside the map that gives you a military challenge. What I want in CK2 is a game where the Mongols are not the only game in town after 1250 because all the remaining feudal states are scrubs.
To put it another way, I want to play a game as Ulster where my goal isn't to build a huge Irish Empire just because I need to ward off the Mongols later. The game is supposed to be character based anyway, not Mongol invasion based.
It looks as though it's going to be extraordinarily difficult to raise massive armies from your own demesne. Secret Master, over in the Questions thread, remarked on being able to raise 10,000 men from his own demesne in Sicily, with the clear implication that 10,000 is quite a considerable number to be raised. The change of the demesne limit to apply to holdings, rather than counties, now means that we'll all be much more dependent on our vassals to raise those enormous armies, and the amount they send depends on both crown authority and how much they like their liege. So the days of raising hundreds of thousands of men from our own demesnes are, I think, long gone. That could make warfare in general more of a challenge, but I agree that the Mongols, if done right, will make the game much more enjoyable.
I've gotten to around 100,000 total troops I could levy in an earlier preview build. I was really big at that point and ridiculously powerful, and that was before the AI got really good at plotting and exercising its feudal rights under various forms of crown authority. I'm sure after I play the final version a few times, I'll be able to game the system to get massive levies again.
The difference, though, is that I can probably only raise that much when I have a ruler on the throne for 10 years, he's well liked by vassals, and he's already dealt with pretenders one way or another. New ruler? Forget it. Does my ruler have three brothers with claims on the primary titles and their own duchies? Forget it. Do two of my kingdoms have different succession laws than the other kingdoms? Forget it, I'll be sorting through succession issues for years. Is the head of my religion a farkwad? Forget it, I'll be wrestling with religious politics for years to come. Moral authority of my religion is screwed up? Forget it, heresy will render political unity a moot point.
None of these things were problems in CK1. Now, in CK2, even smart, capable rulers have real obstacles to their domestic agenda.