Grinding for medals and rank ( now updated with pics)

I've been doing HRE and knocking off everyone:P Quite fun to have all of Europe trying to kill you, actually.

The French are your greatest enemy, here. They rely heavily on both their OP generals (only Op because of the units their on, half the time) and your oversight of their flank. Use and abuse these and they'll fall. Hard.

Well, yes and no. This isn't the place to talk about it, and it is. why? French generals are OP, and have high health. Rank/nobility and, I think, medals are based on the damage your unit deals to a unit. The higher health your enemy has, the more you can farm off them. Better nobility (AKA Napoleon)=they can recover, and be farmed more. At least this is how I sometimes farm. Less effective than using normal units, but still useful.

I have saved myself a nice little medals grind. Turn 76/99 on Kindle platform, playing as HRE, I had immobilised Britain by turning it neutral and then occupying all its farms, and it turns out the AI was running food supplies pretty close to the margin because they went into total confusion really quickly. The really good thing is that they had already put a hell of a lot of units and forts down on the Continent, which gave me a target-rich environment for 24 turns and nobody able to shoot back worth a damn.

(Incidentally it seems that the AI's strategy of fort-spamming near the end may be because forts don't consume food while human units do, and if you still have plenty of gold and wrenches and very little food, it's cheaper to place a whole lot of forts close together than it is to put down 2-formation line infantry...)

Okay, so I attempted to duplicate saltin's method as directed in the original post, bearing in mind the platform I tried it on has the 99-turn version (the Kindle is just smaller and easier to carry around). All went reasonably well, but a combination of circumstances and temptation soon had me rolling that wall of armoured cars inexorably westward. Because I don't yet have a lot of strong generals and only one Princess (Sophia), I wasn't too bothered about setting up a proper rank grind. Observations are as follows:

1) The Great Wall of AC's soon degenerates into a series of envelopments of cities, gun factories and stables. This doesn't matter much, as the medal haul can be truly impressive. If you stay in Western Europe and don't cross the Alps southwards, you can surround Milan and Turin and grind them indefinitely; Rome and the other buildings to the south pay for the respawns.

2) Gun factories can be a problem. When the AI respawns a siege gun or a rocket launcher it is like shooting fish in a barrel, but if they spawn light or heavy artillery, soon enough the AC's take too much of a beating to shoot effectively (since damage dished out is proportional to own health). After four or five turns, I tend to occupy these in order to gain the extra tech output needed to build more armoured cars.

3) Stables are also juicy targets, but every now and then I occupy these as well, so replacement armoured cars can be created locally rather than having to travel across the battlefield.

4) Occasionally I was too quick in assigning the next attacker, with the result that I accidentally occupied a city whose defender had just died.

5) Sweden can be a pain in the you-know-what. I had a save at move 63/99, but I now have it at 72/99 because I took the time to turn Sweden (and also Denmark) neutral/hostile. Then I could grind away without fear of having pesky allies ruin everything for me (they stole at least two grinding cities before I did this). So take the time to do that early on (and if you cannot flip them neutral/hostile, then at least starve them out and immobilise them).

6) After a while, the Ottoman Empire stops respawning in Istanbul. I wondered why this should be, but later I found out - I am so used to the 1798 game that I forgot 1815 has northern Africa. There was a SWARM of enemy units gathered around Egypt and extending into the southern part of eastern Turkey as we now know it. Once this starts happening, you might as well occupy Istanbul and cross the straits; there is a target-rich environment to grind rank and medals on (and it doesn't exactly hurt nobility either). When I DID occupy Istanbul, the Turkish units immediately went one-down-arrow; they must be close to starvation given their numbers, and they were using Istanbul to swap gold and tech for food.

7) Especially for those playing on 999-turn platforms, tavern generals are excellent for medal grinding here. Dobeln on an infantry double machine gun, for example, will output 100+ and will therefore kill many light units with one shot.

8) Even if you only have the 99-turn version and have to reload after a short number of turns, the game becomes an exercise in industrialised slaughter. Just don't conquer too much of France, or your respawns will run out! (Once you have the Eastern half, you have about five or six cities that you are constantly grinding medals on, and that's not counting whatever you're doing in the East, the Ottoman Empire, and - in the long game - Africa.

9) Thank you saltin. My medal count is climbing like crazy, and now I have to do some serious thinking about which training general to buy first! (But that's another topic.)

Ypu need replacements then, that's what.