Help needed with nomad gameplay

[Harassercat]

So I'm playing nomads for the first time, as Turkestan in the 762 start. It's surprisingly difficult really, the nomads really seem to suck. Except I can imagine that at some point when you've built a large empire they may be strong. But then any large empire is strong, so... eh.

Anyway, to my surprise one of my vassal clans sent over their horde and raided my capital while I was busy elsewhere. There was no blood feud going on so I didn't except them to be able to do that. And of course they imprisoned half my court and my vassal khan is now spamming me with ransom requests. As if.

I want to utterly demolish this prick, rape all his women, goats, and bastard brothers, then execute him and absorb his clan and basically just wipe everything related to him off the face of the steppes. I've declared a blood feud and raided his capital and guess what... nothing but a few gold coins, no prisoners gained or rescued. I check if I can absorb his clan but it's grayed out saying "Not an enemy". WTF. Game, please understand that this guy (an 8 year old kid in fact) is my most hated enemy. How can I get my court back without paying 500g to my own vassal?

 

[Teonod]

Nomads are incredibly powerful, they can field pure cav armies.

As long as you leave two holdings in any province it will count as settled and the other clans won't desire it, allowing you to personally own the entire world.

 

[CaptainPolyp]

You just got unlucky. When sieging a capital, there is a small chance of capturing people; it is not systematic. You can still try again, and again, and again...
For the "absorb clan" I don't know; maybe you cannot do that when in feud (it means integrating a clan into your own and it could be impossible to do so with an enemy clan). But I don't remember the exact conditions.

One strange thing tho: I did not know you could be raided by a vassal not-in-feud. This make me think that maybe, your court is prisonner of a raiding adventurer coming from the court of you vassal. In this case, your vassal has nothing to do with this.
Are you certains your court is your vassal's prisonner, and not the prisonner of a raiding adventurer?

Hordes can be hard at first but it gets very easy after conquering a few counties. As Teonod says, you can abuse the system and keep 2 holdings in the counties you conquer from feudals (pillaging the rest) so that you can keep the county for yourself without pissing out your vassal clans... this will allow to grow far more powerful than them and they will not bother you (although it can make the early game more complicated since they will be very weak whereas you sometimes need your vassal to win wars early on).

 

[Harassercat]

Yes at first I thought it was a raiding adventurer but then I checked and it was clear that the prisoners were being held by my 8 year old vassal. As if to make it even clearer he then started to bombard me with ransom requests, demanding 110g for each son...

I think I found the answer to my question however. I found out in a different nomad game that if a vassal khan rebels and you defeat him, then you are entitled to absorb his "traitorous clan" without any opinion penalties from others. So the solution in this case should be to revoke the khan's title, provoking him to rebel, then defeating him and absorbing his clan. Then his court would be dissolved and surely the prisoners would all be freed. I didn't try it though because I lost interest in this particular playthrough.

I understand the 2 holdings thing now, having read that advice in a few other threads. I can't say I'm impressed with the nomad design though, because if you have to rely on such a gamey strategy to make nomad empires strong, and that essentially takes you from weak to overpowered.... well it's not my idea of good design.

 

[CaptainPolyp]

Edit: For your prisonner problems, you can also use the intrigue decision to make the prisonners evade but it will take time. For the absortion, I don't know which is worse between revoking and absorbing in terms of tyranny :/ . The other way is to drive the clan to extinction by murdering the heirs of the clan, or marrying them with infertile wives.
But nevermind, you abandoned this game so... [end of Edit]

I don't think relying on the 2 holdings trick is obligatory. You can be very powerful (and not much less overpowered) by burning everything to the ground and giving the counties to vassals when they are cleaned. It is easy to manage nomadic vassals by just giving them the 2-3 empty holding counties and keeping the best ones for you. You can be even more vicious by giving the counties of the same duchy to different vassals to increase their rivalry to one another.

Concerning the nomads design, a lot of idea are good ones but there are still a lot of flaws which make the gameplay tedious (pillaging) or boring (when being emperor of the east with not much else to do than (easily) expanding further while constantly at 100% threat). The main flaw is their overpowerness after a few decades of playthrough... both in terms of military/conquest and in terms of realm stability.

 

[CannotresistDLC]

Yeah, vassal Khans raiding their Khagan is annoying as hell. Try to give any new clan you create a border county first to be certain they have a way to raid someone else from their capital province. It might not be bullet-proof, but it rarely hurts to load the dice.

I also agree you can definitely be more powerful than your vassal khans without leaving 2 holdings un-pillaged in every province. Like CaptainPolyp said, give your vassals the smaller holdings in a duchy. Don't give any single vassal enough counties within a duchy to let him create the duchy title - leave all the duchy (nomadic: you don't care about feudal/tribal/etc vassals' opinions much) titles you won't personally hold the provinces to uncreated so you can hold kingdom titles without "desires xx kingdom" penalties from your Khans.

Horse archers are also currently crap with respect to tactics - and guess what? Every AI nomad uses them. You can skip this. Use either all LC or about 2/3rds LC, 1/3 HC (no more than 74% LC) in your hordes and martial 14+ brave or cavalry leaders (or really just any leader with 14+ martial and no awful traits) and you should crush any AI nomad with vaguely similar numbers.

There's a really nice guide to nomads on Steam that should help too.

 

[Harassercat]

Hmm, thanks for the advice on army composition. It's extremely unintuitive that you should not use horse archers as a nomad power. I had read somewhere that they were bad but was still using about 25%, mostly out of wishful thinking.

What I'm finding unappealing about the nomads is mainly that the gameplay is just so limited when compared to a feudal or even a tribal ruler. It just feels like there is less to do and less to care about. And perhaps it's also the extremely long travel times in Central Asia that are bugging me. Maybe I need to keep giving it a chance and I'll like it later; but I didn't need to do that as feudal or tribal, I enjoyed it right away.

 

[Griff Lancer]

Well I think horde buildings fix some of that.
I think one even increases troop movement speed.

 

[josefrees]

There's a really nice guide to nomads on Steam that should help too.

Is this it?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=486754569

 

[CannotresistDLC]

Is this it?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=486754569

Yep, thanks. I doubt I'll get the urge to read it again but I've bookmarked anyway.

IMO the population & manpower portion of the guide are nice but the general overview of nomadic government below that is even more valuable to new nomad players.

 

[CaptainPolyp]

I learned almost everything about how to play nomads with this guide ^^