Dimitrije Šuković You do take a huge penalty with the pope for attacking orthodox factions on hijad. Not that it matters, because in the ver hard the guy just hates you because you’re breathing.
Grenadiers in Napoleon TW sucks. Their grenades sucks (only like 10 kills per throw) The have less men per unit (120 instead of 160 men) Unlike Empire’s grenadiers they aren’t good at being grenadiers. So they are good line infantry, right? No, they have less men and cost more.
@@johnmartinez12347 I would say Grenadiers in Empire Total War are the worst. At least Grenadiers in Napoleon Total War are 120 instead of 80, and they can form squares.
Shogun total war: first total war. Use all archers. Retreat outside of map border, then tell your archers to attack. They will stand still outside the map line and shoot with impunity. AI will line up to be slaughtered. Its hilarious.
I scanned the comments and did not see anyone mention this bug. There is one in Medieval 2, if the enemy has an agent you don't like (merchant, witch, ect.) but do not want to risk reputation or agents by assainating/confession/merchant take over; if you surround the unit on all eight sides (up, down, left, right, and all diagonals) then move a single unit on to the square the agent is on they will auto die since they have no where to retreat to. Super broken and kind of funny.
Improvement to battle AI from M2TW : AI in open field battles can't be tricked into retreat-advance-retreat and getting peppered down by ranged units like it used to in M2TW
"One thing you absolutely not supposed to do is being able to attack people of your faith whilst in crusade or jihad." Boniface: uhhhh...yes...yes, of course.
Was it really worth cutting out an important feature like being able to detach units because of a bug that few people know about and that barely anyone would use anyway. I ain't got the attention span for that lol
Its removal came with the new feature of being able to choose and improve the garrison of any city, without having to pay for it. I don't remember how it works in Shogun 2 but it's still true for Empire and Napoleon.
@fancyncv110 Was that garrison made only of peasants/local militia or could you improve it and expand it by constructing specific buildings? I never played Medieval 2 and all the previous games but I played Empire and all the following ones.
Exploit for Medieval 2; all your merchants on one spot. If you take a general and place a fort on top of a resource, you can plant 20(?) merchants in that fort. They will suddenly all start making money off that one resource. So one moment you are playing the English, you send a small army on a ship to Algiers and declare war on the Moors. Then, you B-line it all the way down to Timbuktu and take it from the rebels. Then you take your general, put him on the ivory nearby, set down a fort, have your merchants form a conga line towards the fort and boom, you get 2-3K from just one resource. Congratulations! You are now the Brittish Colonial Empire in the 11th Century. Another trick that comes right after: Since you are miles away from London, your merchants will have a 20% chance of gaining the trait "worldly merchant" if you end them on a resource. If you want to diversify quickly and shuffle the merchants around, then place a fort on the gold resource nearby, and one on the slaves. Next, simply change them from one resource to another every turn, which resets the 20% chance that they gain that trait. This will get eventually get all of them more finance skill, allowing you to make even more obscene amounts of early game income. Moreover, if you manage to do this fast enough, and you reach the resources there and hoard it from the Moors, then for a while you'll be the only faction trading in those three resources. This allows your merchants (yes, all of them) to gain the trait "monopolist" from trading the same resource of slaves, increasing their financial skill and giving you even obscener amounts of money. God, do I miss infinite merchants...
Grand Battery of Convention is a more powerful cannon (12 lber I think) but it has TWICE the cannons witch makes it twice as powerful. This unit is in the Napoleon Imperial Eagle Pack which is free now.
They also cut the feature to stop deathstacking (pile up "dead troops" e.g. yari spearman) there was little advantages to going higher tech in these games but in newer games it's really good and mostly required to tech up and not just spam recruit 1 unit type and drag them generalless behind
It's not the only time they did this. It goes all the way back to Med II, where they cut out all mention of the year a character was born in. So you couldn't notice that while the game advanced at 2 years/turn, characters only aged one year every second turn. Walls that are impregnable to infantry or cavalry without equipment? Gone because AI is a dumb-dumb. This also means no battle can end in a draw anymore. "Give settlement" option in diplomacy. Probably because no dev thought of implementing it in the newer titles yet. Interception mechanic from Empire. Or, alternatively, the ability to completely cut off an army's retreat path so that they are annihilated if they lose (from Rome/Med II). Instead we got the "if you are currently retreating from another battle, you can magically ignore Zones of Control from any army, and you can retreat AROUND obstacles, as long as your starting and ending position are one "retreat distance" from each other as-the-crow-flies.
@@jusfab9897 If you wanna stop people from spamming certain units you do it through the recruitment system, (or even better, by balancing the units better,) not by removing whole strategic options.
@@franzluggin398 To be fair, the time-discrepancy in M2 wasn't really a bug they were lazy to fix, more like a design compromise. If they synced the character aging to the years, they would have died in 20 turns each, you would never have the time to get value out of your experienced generals. If they synced campaing years to the characters aging the campaing would have been too slow, with no pressure to actually push forward. (You can actually implement the latter by modding one line in a file.) On the other hand, the retreating in R1/M2 had its peculiarities too, sometimes armies retreated over a longer distance then their normal movement range. In some cases it resulted in situations like when I attacked an army and it retreated through a bridge nearby outside my movement range. Attacked it again next turn, it retreated back to the previous side of the river, again out of range. Not to mention fleeing armies, sometimes they walked halfway through the campaing map in a turn to get back to friendly territory.
@@plcdfa i liked shogun 2's system better then rome 2 or WH, but yeah it does not makes sense that 1 general runs around and commands 100 units also "balance the units right" if a unit in let's say shogun let's pick 2 melee ones would perform based on just cost/upkeep some units of 40 men could kill 1000+ men, also there is the problem of +flat increases like the unique buildings in shogun 2 provided being near game braking on cheaper units since it boosted their stats up to mid/high tier stats
In Empire you can use a single unit of cavalry to repel a full stack of enemy army if you have a 20m time limit. Just run around the battlefield without engaging. After the time is up, you win and the enemy gets a lot of casualties for some reason. I besieged cities having full stacks in defensive with just one unit of cavalry and took them with no problem. It doesn't work if they have multiple units of cavs in their army, they just hunt you down and you lose.
The exploit that I think is quite interesting is the Wooden Pole exploit in M2TW. It only works with archer units that have the wooden poles ability. This exploit allows you to successfully defeat EVEN 4 stacks of Mongol/Timurid armies which besiege you with all cav units except a single unit for a battering ram. what you need to do is have 2 of the archer units in a castle/city. and set up in front of a gate (works better in castles) and set down the poles in a V shape. these never break and when a cav unit comes into contact with them they *PERISH*. So when they break the gate, the cav will just run in flooding thorugh the gate and will be *ABSOLUTELY DISINTEGRATED* granting you a free win since the infantry unit will just break since the armies will just die in like 4 seconds
I think they fixed this in Attila, so now the poles break after a certain number of units die. It's a really useful way to defend forts and cities. Once you get good garrisons, a Western Roman city becomes like a massive castle, able to destroy Hunnic armies that even dare come close to it.
So forgive me if I'm wrong, but when you were explaining the first layer of the sally out exploit, you didn't explain what saving then loading actually did.
One exploit I always found ridiculous was the recruitment of generals in Empire. Late game, when you had more money than you could spend, being invaded or attacked in a vulnerable spot far from your own armies was no problem, because if you had just one regular unit in a nearby garrison, you could simply spam endless amounts of general units at the enemy. It was by no means effective, but even the strongest armies get problems when attacked by 400 general units...
So they got rid of one of the most useful features -- delegating the military to captains -- simply because there's an obscure bug that allows you to tediously move around the map?
And all of you actually believed Legend on this one? It wasn't because of that, who cares about a silly exploit. It was because the AI kept sending massive amounts of one-unit armies (and worse, fleets) and annoying the player in the late game. Also Empire was unplayable at a certain point due to the Ottomans trying to move a billion one-unit around Palestine (and if you killed them, someone would take their place, usually Sweden). FOTS' lategame was also very annoying with a ton of gunboats running around and three dozen separate corvettes bombing your ports, forcing you to play cat-and-mouse with them. It was that kind of crap that CA was unable to fix, hence why they removed the feature entirely. Not some obscure and tedious exploit.
In Rome 1 I would use the phalanx/pikeman wood wall glitch during sieges. When the AI would build rams to bust in, I line up my pikemen right up against the wall with spears raised, then I would lower them and they could glitch through the wall and kill the ram carriers before they could even get a hit on the wall. Doesn’t work in Steam version so obviously CA knew about it, but I never have heard any one else talk about it. It was really broken during early game and saved me tons of money on upgrading to stone walls. I would never lose a settlement. Anyone else know about that one?
The Hypest I remember I discovered it when I knew that placing pikemen or phalanx on a wall breech was super powerful. I tried getting them as close to the wall as I could to fill any gap that they could pour through. I lowered spears and saw how it glitched and used it ever since. I was also a shameless user of add_money 20000
There's a 4th part of the sally out exploit. The "unrecognized reinforcements" bug. If you siege the city with one unit and then stick an army on the other side of the city, but not sieging it, the enemy will sally out no matter the odds.
I think it works even if the other army is sieging. The reinforcements just have to be over 1 tile away from the besiegers (ie: they wouldn't normally be counted as reinforcements outside of a sally). Works in Rome1 as well.
1-Inca, maya or Aztec period central americas 2- 19th to mid 20th century (this would be a difficult one to make, needing at least 3 methods of war, 3-4 economic and political systems with a revolution/civil war mechanic to match, extensive diplomacy and the whole planet as a map, so won't ever happen)- whole world 3- Bronze age middle east 4- Central or west africa medieval period might be interesting if enough factions can be justified 5- India to south east asia just about any time before the colonial empires started showing up
For more fictional stuff warhammer's build is pretty decent for a lot of fantasy-based crossovers (amending it for GoT and LOTR would be pretty easy for exampke) but i haven't got a preference.
not sure if this counts as an exploit. but in total war: warhammer when playing as the vampire counts. if you have an entire army of throw away units sugh as zombies or skeletons. and cause as much casuslties as possible to your enemy (and yourself) so that the battle itself will become a mass grave. (this wil show on the campaign map) the effectively allows you to recruit mortis engines from turn 3, aswel as grave guard, blood knights, veriations of corpse carts. basicly everything. its really broken.
@SmashStomp Inc Yeah but you just spent your first turns making and destroying an army to buy high upkeep units at increased cost. You're better off just having an extra army and playing aggressively.
@@gal5245 correct. Plus The empire movement can get you way further than in Rome 2. I once traveled from Morroco to India in one turn with it. Rome 2 requires you to have ass loads of generals in reserve in order to do it and the first time you capture a settlement you're done. In Empire you can capture 50 regions in 1 turn with it.
@@LegendofTotalWar I don't get why fixing the Empire movement bug/exploit was so hard. I mean just add a rule (if/then/else) on stacks that you cannot move a selections of units outside a stack (split) if the selection contains a unit with not enough movement (0 or near). How hard is that?
In RTW there is an exploit so you can get into to a city without losing any troops. At the start of the battle place all your units apart from one in the same place. Now take the lone unit and give it a ladder or a siege tower (or some way to mount the walls) and place them closet to a towerless wall ( all the cities have at least one blindspot on their walls). The AI will put all of it's troops on the walls to counter your main force, so the lone unit and climb the walls and capture the undefended gate. Then simply march your army round to your captured gate. The AI won't move till it is too late to stop you. I prefer to use a missile unit, as you can then sniped the enemy as they retreat off the walls. Don't get to close the enemy on the walls thro' as this will trigger them to attack the unit.
It also works in M2TW. But I don't consider it that op; I mean, yes, you can capture a gate without losing any men, but that's it, when you move your main army to the captured gate then the enemy army will move back to the center, with perhaps some moving towards the captured gate and starting some street fights; but in any case, you will still need to kill the enemy and conquer the center. Also, if the enemy has more units than you, it's highly likely that the AI will put at least one unit to counter your lonely unit. With a lot of units, the AI will also have many units along the walls, at least in M2TW, where the walls aren't that big and units with huge scale cover a lot of space. In fortresses or citadels, the AI will just run to the next layer of walls as soon as you capture a gate (if there's any AI unit there, then that unit will put up a fight of course, but the rest of the army that is not there will move), and you can't get to the next layer of walls faster than them. It's more of a way to minimize casualties when atacking a city with a small garrison, while you have a lot of units (auto-resolve is still the more efficient thing of course). In the end it's just the dumb AI facing a human who will not throw men to the main gate while he can just make a detour. Altough, throwing the majority of the men to the main gate is exactly what the AI generally does, which makes me feel a little bad about it.
I've never had it work in M2TW, that's why I said RTW. In the early game the AI invariably moves most of it's units, one at a time mind, towards the centre but usually where you have entered. This is predictable behaviour so it is easily countered or exploit, if you will.
@@winstonsmith3092 Interesting, I tought that in RTW it was the same as in M2TW (haven't play RTW in a good while, and I never got too into it). Thanks for the extra details, I will make sure to remember it the next time I play RTW.
I like how the they removed that entire feature because of an infinite moment exploit and then in their very next game, Rome Total war 2 they have a far less tedious and easier way to that exact same exploit. Yay well done CA!
I realise I'm a bit late to this, but there was a bit of an exploit in naval battles in Empire. You could plant a small, fast ship in front of a huge enemy fleet and wait for them to attack you, then kite them around the entire battle arena until the timer ran out. The game would conclude that you won and you'd sink or capture several of the enemy ships, all without firing a shot in the actual battle.
I just read this and I tried this in NapoleonTW but it seems CA fixed this in between those two -> you can still 'win' the battle meaning single small/fast ships can freely raid trade routes but the 'defeated' fleet doesn't lose any ships; instead they just retreat (and, maybe this is just coincidence, it seems the AI just gives up on attacking that 'fleet' -> Nelson did and my sloop is sitting right in front of London raiding the channel trade)
I would have thought the save-scum auto-resolve would have taken #1. Just make a save, attack an enormously superior force, auto-resolve, load save. Repeat until you win. I'm pretty sure everyone has done this at least once to cheese out of a sticky situation in their Total War careers.
I have the Medieval II definitive edition on Steam and the "second layer" works for me. So after entering the battlefield, hitting exit results in a draw. I just used it in my Britannia campaign.
Still you can play the game normally, also without rolplaying And especially, WITHOUT these stupid exploits. Why would you even bother playing the game if you only play it with those exploits
@@tiagomendesvisscher9030 I'd only have used it to grab a rebel settlement that my ally was about to capture. Playing France and want to ally with Genoa? Your army busy up north battling the English? Genoa are mobilising and about to take that settlement which is RIGHTFULLY WITHIN THE BORDERS GOD BESTOWED UPON MY KINGDOM??!?!? Send a unit of cavalry to besiege it. To avoid having to declare was on an ally
There is a movement exploit, but it isn't great because it takes time to set up, and your enemy can disrupt it while you have it ready. What you do is you have a bunch of ships on a shogun 2 map (I'm not sure if this works in other TW games). And you have your army and/or agents in a ship. If you move your ship to another ship, you can transfer your army to the new ship. Rinse and repeat. I'm pretty sure you could get from one side of the map to the other with this, but I haven't taken the time to test it. So while it is powerful, it costs a lot of money because ship building and upkeep, and of course your enemy can still attack your ships as normal on their turns.
In ETW, you can go to diplomacy and offer military access to your neighbours for 2000-3000 coin. If they accept, instantly cancel the deal and repeat. You can drain the AI of funds this way and use the money to buy their techs up, saving you time. Then you can just repeat the process and get all that money back again. Note: it works best on friendly nations that border you. You also dont suffer diplomatic penalties for the scam.
Fun exploit in Napoleon Total War campaign. 1) Bring more cannons than your enemy but minimum infantry/cavalry 2) Find a bridge linking friendly to enemy territory, stand on the enemies' side of the bridge. 3) Once attacked, set up your cannons in front of the crossing and watch infantry/cavalry/anything die in canister fire
Bridges are indeed fun in Total War games. In Rome Total War i would usually stand on the bridge on a strategical map, waiting for the enemy to attack. Then, at the start of the battle, I'll just wait for enemy to cross the bridge and attack them using all my army. The thing is, while their morale shatters, they will always try to escape from the battlefield ASAP, and the AI doesn't count your troops while choosing the path. So the enemy army will try to escape, through your army, which will get them massacred, as they aren't surrounded from all sides, and it snowballs extremely fast, so you could completely wipe out superior armies with minimal casualties
Oh god the #1 detach bug. How could this happen? I'm kinda pissed that this is the reason why units can no longer leave and join armies in "modern" total war. I hope they reconsider this eventually
Merchant is not *BAD AGENTS* Are you had to do is go to Timbuktu and send one unit around gold resource and then merge to that army ( need a lot of authority) but if you can't then they no reason to *HIRE THEM*
There's an exploit in RTW when you are getting attacked by two armies from two sides, one of them will be made as reinforcements directly behind you, or from the corner. You can freely place your troops in their way as they march through the red line. Unless they have done it fully as a unit, they won't resist your men killing them, so you can wreak havok on them with almost any troops, but of course most efficient way is roman shield wall or greek spear wall. This way it is really easy to get 2-3k kills with next to no casualties. Only downside is that enemy routs pretty much emediately, and they manage to get some troops back through the red line, so you need to be creative if you want to kill all of them.
There is an exploit in M2TW, for which you need to have canon towers on your walls. If the city or fort is attacked, you just need to selly out, and the ai puts its units into formation inside the range of the walls defences, so you dont even need to send your troops out, just man the walls so the towers fire, and wait for all the enemyies to die. Since the towers have infinite ammo you dont even need to worry about that.
I think that there should be also a second bug with number two: AI leaves only 1-3 units to garrison places (at least in medieval 2). They are so easy to conquer. Especially when there is only one enemy in the city (most likely a general). You just shoot gates down (if you attack without ladders, ect) from point-blank-range, march into the city center with your lowest tier of unit, and capture it. The enemy (general) doesn't attack it , even if he sees capturing enemies right in front of them. And that leads to close victory, even if I have full stack of army, they have only a bodyguard, and nobody suffer any losses. They just sit in the middle of town square. 100% guaranteed victory.
Wait, so they removed the detatch feature to avoid the slower Warscape movement bug in Rome 2... while adding a new, even easier to use movement bug in Rome 2??
The №2 exploit for MTW2 works fine in Steam version, too. :) Usually, when the AI enemy sallies from a besieged castle, the gate remains open. If you act well and you have swifter units, you actually may outmaneuver the enemy army, take the open gate. and close it, thus remaining in the castle while the defenders remain outside. But you must have this in mind: such a maneuver may produce a draw if you're doing it with only one swift unit. It will lead to victory (that is, to the conquest of the castle) only if you enter the castle and close the gate with at least two units. Only thus you may HODOR and take the central plaza at the same time. And, of course, it must be a one-layer castle ;) One of my favourite sieges was with the Byzantines against the Sicilians in Tunisia. I had a small Greek army of horse archers besieging a rather numerous garrison consisting of armoured sergeants and heavy Norman knights. The enemy sallied and routed most of my units. I tried another exploit, starting to move my last light cavalry unit around the border of the battle zone (and thus, around the castle). This would normally lead to a draw because of time limit for the attackers. Then, I realized the castle gate was still open. I entered the castle, I closed the door and I even tried to reach the plaza and keep it for three minutes. Still, finally I lost the battle because when I left the gate, the approaching enemy regained control of it and reentered the castle. But I used similar tactics with the Polish against the Teutonic Order in the Baltic campaign and this time my two light cav units just escaped from the heavy troops of the enemy, entered the gate, closed it, garrisoned it, and I took the centre of the place with the second unit. Ta-ta :)
I like how there's an even easier movement bug in Rome 2, which introduced the armies-tied-to-generals mechanic due to the attach/detach bug they couldn't fix...LMAO. And they didn't even ever fix it, it's still present in Empire Divided!
How are these bugs not fixed?! They are easy to replicate and probably solve! How do they not polish their product and keep just selling more DLC? I don't get why fixing the Empire movement bug/exploit was so hard. I mean just add a rule (if/then/else) on stacks that you cannot move a selections of units outside a stack (split) if the selection contains a unit with not enough movement (0 or near). How hard is that?
12:18 "You could very easily get all the way across the map, from one side of the map, to the other" Weeeelllll, idk about "very easily", lol. Not to take away from how game-breaking that obviously is!
It is a very simple and easy exploit, just tedious and annoying if you do it every turn because you're going to be doing the exploit more than you play the actual game, and you will run out of stuff eventually
@@viptech_c5286 right. I guess i don't separate tediousness from consistency when talking about things like this... Otherwise, by that same metric, taking 100 million papers with numbers written on them and sorting from largest to smallest is "easy" :)
Set a time limit for battles in Empire Total War, when you're being attacked by an entire fleet just sail away til the time is up, the whole enemy fleet wil sink in the campaign.
On my first playthrough of Empire i fund out that when you order your units to climb a wall (during sidge), and back the down when they place the ropes, enemy units on these walls will switch to melee and climb down towards my cavalry and infantry like a lambs for a lttle bit of slaughter :-)
The "the AI attacked my cavalry unit and I can't retreat so I'm just going to run around until timer goes out" exploit is pretty big because it spans all total wars except rome 2. The flags were added to combat this. In medieval 2 (and other games), using this exploit you can stall any enemy army by just having a unit of light cavalry and making the enemy attack it.
How did you even found out about the Rome II bug? That is so advanced. Also an exploit in SG2 is that you can actually kill agent of your multi-player buddy. Works in CO op don't know about man against a man and of it works in other titles too but if you want your friend not being OP this is a good thing
I busted a gut laughing at the Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 exploits. I already knew about the latter's tax exploit where you jack up tax rates, get a warning for city unrest next turn, lower rates for the new turn, play it out, then repeat. But your "Realm Divide" trick is absolute genius and had me rolling! I'm currently playing the Takeda on Legendary (both a first for me) and struggling a little, but I'll hold off on using this until AFTER I beat it legit. Got about 20 more provinces to go, so fingers crossed. Love your vids (especially your top 5 lists)! Been binge watching several these last few weeks. Cheers!
Rome 1 has a massive exploit: at a bridge fight (wooden or stone) put 2 phalanx units with the front men's toes against the start of the bridge in their phalanx formation. Now normally phalanx armies will have to poke quite a bit to get enemys to die, but as experienced players will know there are exceptions like chariots who will just instantly die when they meet a spearpoint of the phalanx army. Well at this location near the bridge this instant kill mechanism will work for all units in the game (even elaphants!) and the whole enemy army will drop down on the floor. this way you can hold off an infinite army as long as they dont use too many ranged units. Also V formation in cities near every gate or breakable wall is overpowered, but at least they wont drop dead immediately.
So basicly CA didnt like this attach/dettach movent bug, so instead of fixing it they removed att/dettachment of armies alltogether, but that backfired when they introduced a completely new movement bug where you only have to hire a new general at the last second of army movement and you have full movement again……... *sadclap you played yourself CA Its as if they said: "We didnt like you waste time on the old bug so we introduced a new faar quicker bug, so if you want to exploit, u migth aswell do it faster. Improvement! Improvement first and foremost!" -CA Would it rly be that hard to make new engine where all units have their own movement cap and moved on a invisible grid like it was in the old tw games?
How about in Empire where if you could get an enemy navy to attack a single fast naval unit and just evade until the timer ends. You'd wind up capturing several enemy ships
Gonna add another exploit I found from Rome 2; it isn't game-changing but it's kinda cool anyway. Movement bug. Say you want to sail an army across the sea to somewhere. While it only works if your army has enough movement points to actually reach the sea, it's pretty good. Say your army is land-based, but it's so far away from the sea that its movement points that're left once offshore are very low. To counter this, click your army that's on land, right-click on the sea within where your movement points are, and then immediately double-right-click the same spot on the sea. Your army will suddenly skip all the land it had to cross and spontaneously appear next to the closest port or landing area, where it will continue moving to the point you clicked on the sea. You'll then have as many movement points available to you that you would have used if you'd crossed the land to get there. Granted, it's limited, and you also can only use this when going from land to sea, but again. It's useful, and you don't have to change generals while doing the exploit.
don't know how much of exploit it is but in medieval 2 total war when you want to put other merchant out of bussines or auto resolve battles you can save before you try to do it, if you fail, you reload the save and try again.
Thats called save scumming. A lot of games have that so I dont thing its a "total war exploit" more like a general exploit. Like binding weapon shoot to mouse wheel.
there is an exploit in empire and napoleon, where you can get supersized fixed artillery units. it occurs when they’re in a reinforcing army during a battle. the artillery units will get swap number of men with cavalry/infantry units in the same stack. it isn’t particularly effective on the upper two unit scales, but on lower scales it is very effective. on the lowest you can have a battery of four cannons where infantry units have at most 40-50. i have yet to test if it still works in the most recent update, but it’s a thing.
Shogun 2, heavy gunners right when they were released. Rekt the mp community and were equally dumb in campaign haha. They literally one shot-killed anything.
In medieval 2 there is another game changing exploit. When you are defending a settlement and enemy has rams and ledders/towers you can force AI to abandon rams. Get your worst unit out of the gates and attac the unit with the ram. They will abandon it to fight oyur unit and afterwards in 99% cases AI will never use any of their rams again. Infantry will fight for the walls and cavalry will be useless. Even if the enemy have like 10 infantry units and only one ledder they will still use it, absorbing tower fire. Great exploit agains the Mongols.
I know I'm a year late on this... but if you are attacking a city/fort in Empire and camp all your units right next to the corner of the walls with howitzers right behind them, the enemy will flood all its infantry onto the very corner of its fort but won't be able to shoot you. You can then use howitzers to decimate them with lime shot. If you have two infantry battalions and two howitzers, you can win every siege battle you ever face no matter how many units the enemy has.
Military Access Exploit. Empire Total War.The AI way overvalues military access. it will almost always accept it for money. with Russia for example you can trade access to sweden and poland for 1-2k money and cancel and re do as many times as their treasury can handle in the same turn. once the AI is out of money it will usually start offering territory. In addition its a good way to keep peace as most countries will not declare war with an empty treasury, this isn't as reliable though.
The most game-breaking bug I saw in MTW2 was the diplomacy bug where if you demand 2000 gold for 999999999 turns, it makes the deal super generous as opposed to demanding, to the extent that if they have at least 2000 gold you can both bankrupt their country AND buy all their territories in one swoop. This also makes them like you a lot since it's such a good deal. I think I saw this in a Spiffing Brit video, but I've used it a bunch of times when I'm doing a silly playthrough.
There is one thing i would mention. Im not sure if this works in Shogun 2, but what i did in Fall of the Samurai constantly was raising taxes to promise vast sums of money for deals, calling everyone to go to war against someone and then making peace with them, declaring war on others and making everyone attack them and then making peace etc.... and then i would simply exempt all of my taxes and go bankrupt for one turn, and then get everything back to normal. It works less well on higher difficulties, but the AI does keep falling for it for quite a bit. Also, when there is realm divide in FotS, you can attack anybody who is on your side of the divide and they will always accept peace immediately, the only resistance they do is during the battle and you can basically just annex territory. Also, before the realm divide you can use agents to incite revolts in all the territories that are supporting the one youre supporting (Shogun or Emperor), and no one is going to take notice that youre doing anything in anyway aggressive. Then you just switch sides when you have backstabbed the side you were previously on, and youre in league with the winners.
If attacking a settlement, first send a crappiest unit in sparse forrmation and run it right next to a wall. The defender's range units will use all it's ammunition trying to shoot your unit. Usually it loses just a few men. After the defender has no more arrows, you may begin your assault.
I remember in Empire I could get money or tech in return for military access, then cancel it and repeat. Or just any deal for military access, Empire AI loved it for some reason. Once got East Prussia as Poland (free port) for 20 turn military access I remember.
they got rid of a feature that made the game better because people were inching across the map, that is so dumb, like it doesn't seem worth it and if it is then your game is obviously going badly. just seems to tedious for most people to bother with. now we are stuck with tactical choices and being able to reinforce armies in a better way.
Yo legend I told you about the sell military access bug in empire before, couple of years ago though. Pretty effin overpowered Basicly you sell and cancel and sell again military access, You get a shit ton of cash and buy land, then sell and cancel to get cash back Buy more land and repeat. With that exploit someone could beat you're world record man 😉
If Rome 2 has its own movement bug, what's even the justification for removing detachable units? They took out a core feature to remove a bug that's still present in a slightly different form.
In medieval 2 you can build castle structures in cities or city structures in castle, all you have to do is place a few structures in the queue, then convert the city to castle (or viceversa), then drag the structures after the conversion in the queue. Very useful for getting some special unit in cities or public order buildings for castles far away
Another exploit that works upto TW Attila is that of you have a cavalry heavy army and you kill the enemy cavalry in a battle in which you are outnumbered, you can simply run around the entire map till the timer counts out. It can also be done with a single general unit or an unit with high moral though they sometimes end hp wavering and fleeing. A super cheesy way to win all battles in which you are attacked.
How about a classical 'force-sally-out' glitch where you besiege a city with your lonely unit and put the rest of your army a bit far but still touching the city. The AI will sally out even against your fullstack. This exploit works in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 (and is heavily used during your videos).
I actually found that #1 exploit back in the day, but it never crossed my mind that you'd want to repeat it over and over again to get use out of it. It's just too painfully slow, inching away that way.
I would say corner camping with a phalanx wall with missile units behind in Rome 1 was a pretty massive exploit. Certainly allowed me to build a huge empire as the Greek Cities without losing a battle (that I can remember). I am not proud!
In Medieval 2 take one cheap depleted militia unit, place it on a valuable trade resource, and attach a dozen or so merchants to the army. This lets you have 20 merchants trading gold near Timbuktu.
Found a small one in Warhammer I. Take a single settlement faction's last unwalled settlement (example: wood elves vs crooked moon) while their army is in the field. They will come back and attack. Defend and kill everything you can but let them flee. Don't chase on the world map. Since you have to fight a second battle to wipe them completely out they will slightly regenerate. Let them break against their own walls for a turn or two until they are only a general and 1 or 2 units. Pull the army out and leave a single general and any hero. Their remnant army will attack the garrison/general/hero every turn with only a low health general and 1 or 2 other low or at best half health units. Manually fight and just rush forward on fast forward. DO NOT auto resolve. Every turn, free general/hero xp and it seems to be as much as a full stack battle. EVERY TURN.
In Shogun 2 FotS you can merge a fleet with embarked units to a fleet with fresh movement points, then remove the ships that have used movement points from the merged fleet and the embarked units and fresh ship can continue. If this is repeated you can travel the entire map, given enough ships that is. It is similar to the exploit in the no.1 slot and if you have a somewhat secure coastline it can easily be used to not much of a cost as gunboats are cheap as shit.
You can move entire armires anywhere in the same theatre in empire by using any ship that has movement as long as you have ports with a ship in them. just embark and disembark in another port with a fresh ship next to it
Big fan of ‘oh I can’t reach this settlement to siege it with my full army, but if I siege it with one horse then the rest can reach just enough to merge back with that horse and now the whole army is sieging’
Biggest exploits I saw in those games: Shogun 2: -Giving the neighbours military access for a lot of koku (you can get 10.000 koku with that in the first rounds). -high skilled priest starts revolution in allied territory, to capture the province afterwards. -honma island put 2 yari ashigaru on the beach and the enemy can’t invade you anymore. Play only ashigaru and bring 3 stacks against each army to auto resolve. Warhammer: -as wartooth Sack the own provinces to start rebellion, to defeat the army and get a shit ton for looting.
Top 6 Exploit. My dad played a guy in Shogun 2 multiplayer. The guy was talkin shit about how we had a near perfect record. My dad was kicking the guys ass, and just before the guy lost, he dropped the game. This caused my dad to have to exit, giving him the loss, but the sparing the guy his loss. It basically instantly answered how the guy actually got his like 199/2 record......
I really enjoyed the elite unit exploit in Shogun 2 coop, where you gift your elite units to your ally temporarily so you can recruit more units and thus exceed your elite unit capacity.
