Medieval 2 Total War Sicilian Chronicles 01 Under attack by the Holy Roman Empire

This is the first "official" episode of the Sicilian Chronicles. It started on turn 98. At this point My Sicilian Empire broke out of Italy and started invading the North, The East and The West. The reason the war is on multiple fronts is because the Pope excommunicated me. He did that because I was at war against Venice and took Constantinople back from them, resulting in excommunication and the start of 5 crusades against Constantinople. That made me lose a very good general and very good army. Mainly because the battle kept crashing... So the auto battle didn't win the battle...

Since that time my eastern front is very static due to the lack of generals around. The Northern front against the Holy Roman Empire and the Danish is very active and if it wasn't for the lack of loyalty of my captain, I would invade them far faster. The Western front is also static. The war against Spain, at this point, is defensive until new generals can come and take the command of the elite troops in my fortress, or that I gain control of the pope siege with one of my Cardinals.

Now on the tactical level. In this battle I'm under attack by 2 Holy Roman Empire Armies. The one attacking me is composed of 2 units of crossbowmen. My cavalry took care of them very easily. Now the other army came and sent crossbow in front. After some exchange of arrows I noticed the enemies also had a catapult. Those siege weapons are very powerful so I ordered my troops forward. Now the important thing you MUST notice, is the fact that all of my troops converged on the crossbow. Even if that wasn't my order. This lead my army to be surrounded by enemies and made the battle a very bloody fight. So why is that? Well it comes to a feature they added in medieval 2. I love it, but you need to be cautious when you use it.

So as you all probably know, you can group some units so that they keep formation and move as a group. (using the "g" button) Well in Rome they kept formation but not much else... Now in medieval 2. When you order them to attack a group, all of the units choose a different target! So now they all charge in line toward the closest and most logical unit. Very very good feature. But in this battle it didn't help me at all and in fact it nearly made me lose. The reason is that all of my troops chose the crossbow unit as a target. As you will notice, that won't happen to me anymore. The strategy I now use it to order the troops in front of the target I want. And once the archer and crossbowman are out of the way, I order the charge.

Ok now for something completely different. I would like your opinion on the videos quality for the blog, as you might have noticed I used mostly youtube, but lately I used a little Dailymotion and personally I think the quality is better visually, but it might be sometimes slower to load the videos... So what do you guys think, Youtube or Dailymotion? (I will keep uploading on both, but just want your oppinion for the blog) ;-)