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When you cross a swamp, try to do it fast
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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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OK maybe I remember the basics, but I sure was avery slow learner
Like, I remember being genuinely puzzled about why lancers infantry was immune to a cavalry charge
I remember the Mongols getting out of control after conquering a city I holded just because I opened the gates to fight them outside my walls instead of just fucking waiting.
I ain't kidding, my 16 yo self should have read Soon Zoo
Horses are really good at climbing walls. The mongols really forced your hand.
"Just a few hundreds horses, I can chase them out easily with my lancers since they are immune to horses"
Roach, staring down at you from above.
God any campaign where you were situated in the Levant turned in to a death slog in 1266 when the Mongols showed up.
I remember exploiting that with a horribly outnumbered army being sieged in a castle by horse archers: I'd repeatedly sally forth and then just wiggle a unit in and out of the gate to draw the AI into range of the towers and a unit of archers on the wall before closing it again, repeating this until the attacking army had obliterated itself.
From what I understand of history, the Mongols IRL struggled badly with sieges until they were able to kidnap enough skilled siege engineers so the Mongol commanders could delegate. Apparently throughout most of history the surest way to survive a war was to yell "I'M A SIEGE ENGINEER AND I KNOW HOW TO BUILD SIEGE WEAPONS" in as many languages as you could - Your engineering expertise was so valuable you'd always be captured instead of killed and treated pretty well. I mean, shit, that's out Verner von Braun ended up in the US working for NASA.
The only problem there is that AFAIK the point where the mongols were unified and motivated to carry out full fledged warfare instead of small raids is immediately followed by them conquering a large swath of China and incorporating their engineers and technology, and the kinds of fortifications they'd be dealing with there (heavy sloped wall earthworks) were both intrinsically resistant to siege weapons and vulnerable to large scale infantry assaults. So by the time they were waging war in eastern europe or the middle east they were both an experienced, professional military machine with excellent logistics and in possession of enough engineering knowledge to build siege weapons.
And of course it has to be said that they didn't pursue that advantage for further conquests because basically their whole motivation was conquering and unifying the various nomadic steppe peoples and their goals for waging war against sedentary kingdoms was either pursuing and subjugating other steppe peoples or responding to attacks/affronts. They weren't some conquering force of nature out to paint the map like a grand strategy game player, they had clear and concrete goals and conquering and holding sedentary kingdoms' land wasn't one of them.
So in TW:M2 they'd be at the point where they'd both have engineers, but also probably wouldn't bother with a castle unless they needed to. They also, obviously, could have dismounted and stormed a castle defended only by a skeleton crew without any trouble. IRL horse archers aren't glued to their mounts any more than knights were, and so horses could just as easily be used for infantry mobility as they could a weapons platform.