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[Catastrophic lolcats]

Any tips on these "fearsome flanks"? Should it be mainly cavalry and heavy troops?

It usually depends on what your cultural units are. If you're playing as the Byzantines there is really no point in not building Cataphract retinues. If you're playing as someone who has heavy infantry as their cultural unit you can make that a lot stronger by throwing in a couple archer and pikeman retinues. Heavy cavalry cultures can throw in a select few light horses to help route the enemy once they're defeated.
If you really want to micro-manage you can make some fast horse based retinues not attached to your main army and use them to completely wreck routing units that attempt to flee.

[Rakonas]

Any tips on these "fearsome flanks"? Should it be mainly cavalry and heavy troops?

That's generally the idea, better quality troops are more useful due to supply limits in general. I haven't really attempted anything archer based but I'd hope highly skilled archers would be effective too.
Cavalry are especially great, though less so in certain situations. My most suspenseful battle thus far has been 14k of my standing army of byzantine Cataprachts and the Varangian Guard versus 20k levies of the HRE which was less heavy but also included large numbers of pikemen. I won, my 23 martial self fighting against my 30 martial brother, but it was close and my attempt to pursue them ended in myself being forced to retreat onto my ships with almost nothing left alive.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see, almost everything that wasn't heavy died on my end.

The lesson to be learned is that a force of heavy cavalry is extremely powerful yet not invincible, especially against pikemen. Culture should definitely be taken into account when considering the perfect army.

[Karlito]

So, I'm playing a game as the Roman Empire, and I've managed to create a situation where my heir will inherit a weak claim on the HRE (which contains large parts of France and Hungary) from his mother. Is there any way I can manufacture a situation where the claim will be pressable? Elective monarchies don't really seem to put women or children on the throne. All I've come up with is hoping that an old Emperor will gain the incapable trait and trigger a regency. Are there any better ideas?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

So do you have to have the latest addon to use retinues?

Either way what kind of unit composition do you chaps strive for? I try to focus my efforts on getting light and then heavy cavalry. Usually with heavy inf coming next and finally keeping the archers and light inf kept up to standards.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Yes you need Legacy of Rome for retinues.

I personally go for heavy infantry, they have the most utility out of all the troops. Heavy horse is great but sadly you have to go through tiers of getting a bunch of light horse. Light horse have actually been proven to be detrimental to your army since they increase the chance of having a light horse tactic which really only buff light horse attack and nerfs everything else. 

[Urist McScoopbeard]

...shit, well there goes my 9000+ light horse.

[DemonOfWrath]

How do people find the faction system? I'm finding that once you get to being pretty large it starts sucking the fun out of the game due to the lack of options with dealing with them (you can use your spymaster but I haven't seen that work yet, and it's not very effective when you have say 6+ vassals you need to discourage).

The only options seem to be to give in to their demands, which for independance factions isn't much of an option especially when half of your realm is in it and for other demands would be alright except for the limit on crown law changes (and giving in to a demand counts for that...), beat the crap out of them which eventually gets as irritating as the old rebel system when it gets to the point of a full-fledged civil war every few years (large realms are probably going to have a huge amount of factions consisting of most of the same people, so the same guys revolt every few years) or imprisoning a large proportion of your vassals which is the only semi-permanent solution but feels really gamey. As it stands now you get a bunch of factions which slowly build up until they boil over unless you imprison people and leave them to rot, because nothing else has any real influence on whether they join or leave (relations with you and the faction leader don't seem to mean a thing). I'm now taking intrigue as the most important ruler stat purely because of imprison chance. Who cares about tyranny if I'm going to imprison every vassal who actually matters anyways?

[EuchreJack]

Well, at least it adds challenge to a part of the game where I would otherwise be steamrolling over Europe.

It would sort of be nice if there was a "Loyalist Faction" that could balance out the other factions and house those vassals who like the player.

[Karlito]

I haven't really ever been bothered by factions. Maybe it's because I groom all my kings to have a bunch of favorable traits, and keep my vassals relatively weak, but I can go years without any factions forming in my relatively large empire. And if they do, I just bribe my relations back up.

[majikero]

I spent 3 generation trying to dismantle the power of a duke that owns half of England. Any unsatisfied Duke just adds him in and BAM instant rebellion.

[mainiac]

Imprison him and he can't make any trouble.  If he is big enough it's worth the tyranny.

[Rakonas]

if 50% of the land in your kingdom is owned by one vassal, just imprison and banish. If you invite new nobles to re-fief the land they won't consider you a tyrant. Hell, just begin your tyrannical crackdown and imprison and banish every noble in the land, then redistribute the land to eunuchs and create a modern state.

[guale]

I've been playing as a homosexual woman ruling over Brittania, Brittany, Normandy, and a bit of coast west of that and I;ve been having no trouble with factions lately. I'm finding the keys to be a. not letting any one vassal have more than 10% of your power. b. Having a very good spymaster with ~18+ intrigue and make sure you always target the most powerful member of a faction or target someone who is a member of multiple key factions. I've also been keeping a standing army of around 90k in Essex so if a rebellion gets started they can rampage about and destroy a good chunk of it's forces before they can get together.

[DemonOfWrath]

I'll clarify the situation I'm having. I'm Russia (started as Poland and have most of that myself) with Kiev, Novgorod, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Saxony, Hungary and Sicily each as vassals (I gave the first two away to shut up a heap of whinging dukes, the rest were by claims so I've never held them). It's annoyingly easy to see 4 or 5 of them join a faction which generally puts it to at least 80% (each probably has 10-20% but there's now so many of them that it jumps up fast) and if I imprison some of them I may as well imprison all of them due to the collossal tyranny hit.

Course I can deal with them if they revolt (with a bit of difficulty, my personal armies are only ~50k) but with the frequency of it it simply isn't fun. I gave away Kiev/Novgorod to vassals the moment I formed Russia to stop it happening with the 20 or so dukes I had then as I'd spent probably 30 game years with ~8 of them revolting every 3 years or so and I was sick of it.

Course I have had games where it hasn't been a problem, but when it does become a problem it makes the game unfun in the same way the old rebellion whack-a-mole did and I honestly don't want to deal with it in a rediculously gamey way which the imprison/banish everyone method feels like because that isn't fun either. And before anyone says anything yes a large empire shouldn't be easy to hold together and I agree but if the game doesn't make it a fun experience then it fails badly.

[majikero]

if 50% of the land in your kingdom is owned by one vassal, just imprison and banish. If you invite new nobles to re-fief the land they won't consider you a tyrant. Hell, just begin your tyrannical crackdown and imprison and banish every noble in the land, then redistribute the land to eunuchs and create a modern state.

Why didn't I think of this before? Well, too bad my own wife and children might try to kill me but no big loss.