Marrying a claimant

[ironchitlin]

Ok so I've been playing a new game with Diplomacy and loving it so far with one small exception.  I went ahead and put Arwa on the throne and then got the bring idea of marrying her, unfortunately its not quite as simple as marrying one of the other ladies.

Firstly she said that I didn't have enough of a claim to the throne.  Fine, so i raised my right to rule and then she tells me that I need to be marshal.  Whatever, so I became marshal, only to have her tell me that I should spend at least two weeks at the job.  So two weeks later we have another chat only to have her tell me that my controversy is too high.

Seriously... I have to not only be the marshal for at least two weeks but also keep my controversy below twenty... That seems a little insane to me, especially since every lord that gets defeated, every village that gets raided, or really any little thing that goes wrong sends my controversy sky high.  How is that even possible? Or am I just really bad at being marshal?

 

[English_Knight]

There are ways to drop it, are there not?

 

[InFi[D]eL]

The trouble is, as the Marshall your controversy will go up everytime another vassal of your realm is defeated in combat, one of your realms villages is raided or if a town or castle from your realm is conquered. .

Two weeks is a long time in M&B. You'll want to try get the job during peace time and make sure you're a dam good Marshall. Have all the vassals patrol around the key "entry" points of your kingdom. (if your kingdom is huge then I don't know if you'll be able to do this) When ordering vassals to patrol make sure you use several lords with atleast 300 combined troops. Use patrols of 50+ Heavy Cav (ie Swadian Knights) to support the area's in which your vassals patrol. Make sure all garrisons are VERY srong. So you don't loose anything. You you're self should have perhaps two-three mid sized vassals follow you (80 Troops each) have the others on the patrols I mentioned and then keep an eye on where the enemy attacks. Once you see an ENEMY group chase them off and if you can cut them down to size. In my opinion an army of 90 Swadian Knights can beat anything, even a combined enemy army of 500. This assumed you set the damage options to 1/4 - you 1/2 - your troops. If the enemy army is SERIOUSLY large. Reduce battle size to 30 and solo them. Order what few troops you get to hold position way out of the way until you have a good number to assist you. (remember, the battle size option will not give you 15 troops per side if you set it to 30) It will give the larger army more troops than the smaller. So in 90 VS 500 it will likely be 4 VS 26 or something of the like.


If this still doesn't keep your controversy down then I really don't know what to suggest. I could be wrong but I don't think taking enemy stuff lowers it, so play a purely defensive game until they peace.


Good luck.

 

[morphwan]

I could be wrong but I don't think taking enemy stuff lowers it, so play a purely defensive game until they peace.

Actually as marshal takeing enemy territory is one of the few ways you can directly lower your controversy. From my experience I've never seen controversy go down as a result of defeating enemy lords, but take a castle or town from them and it does decrease. The more you do it the greater the increase I believe so it's quite possible to knock your controversy down to zero with a really successful campaign. Bon Chance!