Newb Strat Q. - Dealing with incursions ?

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Kel:
Trying to corner them is a guessing game that seems to take forever and, in addition to destroying PD's with no losses, rampaging armies seem to cause unrest (not surprisingly, I suppose).

PD's clearly aren't meant for dealing with main forces (nor should they be).

As I demonstrated in my AAR several turns ago, you can use PD to deal with an enemy main army. If you have, say, two provinces the enemy can attack, both are defended by the same amount of PD (20 is a good number), and one of the provinces has in addition your mobile army, the AI will almost invariably attack the province without your army. (The AI does a simple total of current combat value of all troops in a province, mobile and PD combined.) So you use this against the AI by moving your mobile army into the other province, the one you expect the AI to attack. Your army will meet theirs, you'll be on the defense (and thus act first) and you'll have the PD to bolster your side. After you win the battle, assuming there is still an enemy army left to worry about, move your army back into the province you left the previous turn and engage the enemy again. Repeat moving to the "weaker province" until the AI has no troops left.