Thoughts on the Utrecht Campaign

I keep coming back to this mod :] , it's amazing what you people who made it have done here.

I've particularly come to enjoy the campaign as the Union of Utrecht. The campaign selection says that this campaign is really easy, but it's actually quite brutal, at least early on on Very Hard campaign difficulty.

I always choose "yes" when the game gives you the option to spawn giant stacks for the Army of Flanders, which is what gives this campaign its particular flavour. The Army of Flanders has a lot of Spanish Tercios. Now, I've experimented with building the Dutch barracks all the way up to Regional Defences, and you get nothing in terms of infantry that can stand against the Tercios in a battle on the open field. You do however get Peleton Grenadiers which are appallingly destructive to everyone around them, but not very practical for an open field battle in my opinion. They're very useful for sieges, though.

So, at my skill level at least, the Spanish are invincible in a straightforward field battle, which feels historically accurate. From what I've read, at least early on, the Dutch didn't win by defeating the Spanish in big battles, they won through a network of alliances, naval domination, powerful merchants, and wearing the Spanish down with a combination of many small skirmishes over a large area and forcing them to engage in expensive sieges that they couldn't afford

I'm still working on getting the French and the Swedes and the Protestant Union to ally with me. I think it's a combination of my not being as powerful as they are, and also they're scared of my Hapsburg enemies. I'll get there eventually, though. Köln has also been poking around, but they're not really that much of a threat.

The rest of my strategy though, is actually working really well. I've got a lot of basic musketeers and pikemen of foot doing the main work of holding down my cities, while outside them I've got groups of cuirassier cavalry roaming around harassing the large Spanish armies I actually learned something new about the game itself too, haha. I've been playing Medieval 2 and Rome Total War for years and years and I never realized you could hold down alt to have missile units perform a melee attack.

Anyways, all that is to say that it's a very unique campaign unlike anything else I've experienced in Total War :] . Thanks again.