So, as the upstart Sparthenos family of Napoli (1066 start) I have managed to form Sicily, take Rome, Venice and Genoa, expand into North Africa (Tunis and Cyrenaica) and conquer large parts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Later Kings successfully obliberated Muslim resistance in Abyssinia, and conquered all the way down to Harer. However, the Ilkhanate has possession of all of the non Byzantine (the Byzantine Empire is fairly strong, but not overwhelmingly so. They managed to even some win offensive holy wars against the mongols, by quickly capturing the target duchy before the mongol main horde showed up)/non Sicilian Middle east. Which includes the holy land. The Ilkhanate does however own the duchies of Damietta and Awsan in Egypt.
While I have managed to keep the ilkhanate focused on Moslems (send 26 Skill chancellor to ilkhanate leader, profit), they have now ran out of Moslems (there are some left in Ghana, but those are currently being eaten by England) and are now going for me!
My plan for a mongol invasion relied on quickly mobilising my forces (they ganked me while my retinue was busy enforcing a claim on the scottish crown that I got via marriage), using my sizeable navy, use my retinue stack (15K cataphracts) to snipe small coastal mongol stacks and build up warscore by rushing the mongol possessions in Egypt and along the levantine coast, while ensuring via bribes that bordering castles are well manned and would extract some kind of blood toll for being stormed.
Unfortunately, the Damiettan and Axumite holdings were to well held to be assaulted with acceptable casulties, so I had to starve them out. What worked well however was the destruction of numerous small mongol stacks in detail, which included one 30K stack which they have from the initial invasion (down to 30K from 140K, propably due to Byz and earlier Moslem fighting).
Unfortunately, the second big Mongol stack, still at 90K has shown up.
Given that I suffer attrition, and that there is scant heavily defensive terrain in Egypt, I can not beat that stack directly.
A second problem is the fact that this stack can assaut even a fully build up fort with fort level 8 and a 2.5K garrison suffering less than 1K losses (I do not think that this is realistic. Assaults are insanely messy, especially on a well prepared garrison in propably the most heavily fortified regions of the game). A third problem is that the mongols fully occupying a single Egyptian county is already nearly 50% war score. I had about 12 holdings occupied when the big stack turned up, and killed about 60-70K in enemys so far. This was not sizeable more war score than the mongols got from a single county they captured.
The Mongol main stack also moved significantly faster than my stacks, which makes maneuvering off the coast very iffy. My Abyssian army has to move with incredible caution.
Other than assassinations (which are iffy, the mongols may well have a cleaner succession than I would), are there any viable way to deal with the enemy? I generally dislike complaining about the difficulty/balance, but I do feel that something should be changed regarding either the attrition free ness or the fact that assaulting castles causes nearly not casulties to a Mongol superstack. One of those would be reasonable, in combination things get incredibly iffy.
Is there anything I am missing? Should I actually accept battle with the Big Stack (I can propably engineer a river crossing penatly, but not more, not much in the way of mountains in egypt, It will be something like 50K for me vs 90K for them, and while I actually have more heavy cav, most the the mongol army is light cav and horse archers)?
If I loose Egypt, the next mongol invasion will be for/Iraq/mesopotamia, where my navy wont help much. There are also no remaining weak targets of opportunity (HRE has Tunis and lands west of it, England became a major blob in North Africa).
The only alliance I have is France, and they are not doing a whole lot.
While I have managed to keep the ilkhanate focused on Moslems (send 26 Skill chancellor to ilkhanate leader, profit), they have now ran out of Moslems (there are some left in Ghana, but those are currently being eaten by England) and are now going for me!
My plan for a mongol invasion relied on quickly mobilising my forces (they ganked me while my retinue was busy enforcing a claim on the scottish crown that I got via marriage), using my sizeable navy, use my retinue stack (15K cataphracts) to snipe small coastal mongol stacks and build up warscore by rushing the mongol possessions in Egypt and along the levantine coast, while ensuring via bribes that bordering castles are well manned and would extract some kind of blood toll for being stormed.
Unfortunately, the Damiettan and Axumite holdings were to well held to be assaulted with acceptable casulties, so I had to starve them out. What worked well however was the destruction of numerous small mongol stacks in detail, which included one 30K stack which they have from the initial invasion (down to 30K from 140K, propably due to Byz and earlier Moslem fighting).
Unfortunately, the second big Mongol stack, still at 90K has shown up.
Given that I suffer attrition, and that there is scant heavily defensive terrain in Egypt, I can not beat that stack directly.
A second problem is the fact that this stack can assaut even a fully build up fort with fort level 8 and a 2.5K garrison suffering less than 1K losses (I do not think that this is realistic. Assaults are insanely messy, especially on a well prepared garrison in propably the most heavily fortified regions of the game). A third problem is that the mongols fully occupying a single Egyptian county is already nearly 50% war score. I had about 12 holdings occupied when the big stack turned up, and killed about 60-70K in enemys so far. This was not sizeable more war score than the mongols got from a single county they captured.
The Mongol main stack also moved significantly faster than my stacks, which makes maneuvering off the coast very iffy. My Abyssian army has to move with incredible caution.
Other than assassinations (which are iffy, the mongols may well have a cleaner succession than I would), are there any viable way to deal with the enemy? I generally dislike complaining about the difficulty/balance, but I do feel that something should be changed regarding either the attrition free ness or the fact that assaulting castles causes nearly not casulties to a Mongol superstack. One of those would be reasonable, in combination things get incredibly iffy.
Is there anything I am missing? Should I actually accept battle with the Big Stack (I can propably engineer a river crossing penatly, but not more, not much in the way of mountains in egypt, It will be something like 50K for me vs 90K for them, and while I actually have more heavy cav, most the the mongol army is light cav and horse archers)?
If I loose Egypt, the next mongol invasion will be for/Iraq/mesopotamia, where my navy wont help much. There are also no remaining weak targets of opportunity (HRE has Tunis and lands west of it, England became a major blob in North Africa).
The only alliance I have is France, and they are not doing a whole lot.
