My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatment
 

How do you defend all your provinces from attacks? If I keep all my guys in one province, the AI will just go around that province and attack anything without units in it. If I seperate my units, the AI will gang up on one province. Every game I've played it has resorted to me playing a neverending game of 'chase the AI around your kingdom' until I give up and quit. How do I divide my forces so that I can defend my provinces while still being able to advance into enemy territory? I'm playing as Kailasa by the way.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatment
 

Province defense helps, it gives you free units that will defend a province, although you can't script them to do anything or set their formations. It's on the same window as the province info near the income and all that, just click on the defense and raise it appropriately.

Another thing is to keep moderate armies in the middle of your empire to cut the AI off if you're having trouble keeping them out of your empire and supplement where you think they'll strike with that army and some PD. Or you can siege one of their castles, sometimes they'll pull back to get you off their castle.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

Also, while you're here how do I get over oceans? There's no option for building boats and none of my monkeys can breathe underwater.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

Well, there's a few ways. Some commander units have an ability to sail, in fact there's a mercenary that can do it if you're lucky to find him available to hire. You can recruit amphibious units (right click on a unit to see it's stats, if there's a frog or fish thing there it can go underwater) from provinces you conquer, like Itchyids or Shamblers are somewhat common. There are also items you can forge, usually through water or air paths, that can let your commanders breathe underwater and even lead units underwater. There's also summons you can use, like Sea Dogs that can go underwater. From there, just conquer your way across the ocean.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

you can go with a forged pocket ship, yay it's in the forge magic item, or you may just took a long travel on land. so far there's no "seperated island" w/o a path on land to get on.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

The most valuable trick is that the AI responds to what your strength was in the *previous* turn. So if you move from province A to province B you will often catch a defeatable force moving into B. The Dom2 AI was ridiculously easy to fool - it's better now but still often beatable. I do find that AI is prone to gang up on you and that's hard to deal with. I just barely won a game when 3 AIs jumped me. A high independent setting and lots of mountains help.

Another trick is that the AI is incredibly defensive about its home province. If you can get an army on it, all units in adjacent provinces will attack you every turn. That pretty much locks down an AI; you'll still have to deal with armies already in your territory but you usually won't see more. Of course the army must be very strong and if you can't keep an adjacent province any retreaters die.

As mentioned above, PD helps a lot. A large army seems to discourage the AI from attacking you but it's not perfect.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

Actually the AI is pretty stupid right now, and _doesn't_ seem to respond to strength the previous turn. One of my MP games, Pythium's player went AI real early - I've kept the same army, with the same 31 PD, in the same province, and chewed up 3 attacks from Pythium's best troops. Things like 70 troops attacked, 56 dead, 0 friendly casualties (because the PD kept things from getting near my elite, armored, demonic, longbow samuraiwomen). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

This happened three times in a row in one province (I'm staying there partly because I have a temple built), while a second province also slaughtered 2 attacks, lost to the third because I moved my demon archers out to cut off an army / province.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

Tried playing another game but I got boxed in by these Jotun guys who absolutely destroyed me in every battle. Even my swordsman apes didn't hold a candle to them when they outnumbered the giants two to one. It seems like archery does more damage to my guys then the enemy. At least they're not running through the kingdom unhindered, but they still killed me with little to no effort. But looking at the score chart they were about 2x the size of everyone else in the game in terms of provinces and armies.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

Jotuns can kill even strong heavy armoured troops with one blow. So if you want to fight them you should use lots of troops. You dont need hevy armoured troops as the gigants do lots of damage and kill you anyway but defence helps. Mage support is nice too, as even gigants get trouble with ethereal lucky units.

Re: My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatme
 

You might want to mix the Bandar Swordsmen with smaller apes. If you had 3-4 markata for each Bandar Swordsman, and they mixed evenly, each square would have 2 Markata and 1 Bandar Swordsman (instad of 2 Bandar Swordsmen). When a giant strikes at a square, he'd have 2/3 chance of hitting a markata instead of a Bandar, and the Markata would have a better chance of surviving the hit due to his defence of 14.

In this case, numbers are more important than skill, and Bucklers won't help as much as usually since the giants' incredible strength often allows them to deal damage even when their attack is parried, so you might want to try Bandar warriors with Cudgels.

Also, remember to use your mages. After some Thaumaturgy research, Gurus can cast Mind Burn (which helps but isn't very good against giants) and then Paralyze. Each Paralyze that gets through the magic resistance of a Jotun effectively kills the giant, as long as your units aren't defeated before they manage to kill the paralyzed one.