Stealing sieges

From EU2Wiki

"Stealing a siege" is what EU2 players call it when a country moves a leader to an ongoing siege, and thereby takes control of it.

A human player can often ruthlessly exploit AI allies to siege for him, if he has a leader. Get an AI with a decent army into alliance. Ideally it will not be a major power, since they tend to have leaders of their own. (You can mouse over a potential ally's armies to see if there are any leaders currently; you can also look at their leader file.) Now you DoW a third party, and invite your ally to the war. The ally will send his armies to siege an enemy province or two; you should concentrate on covering and sieging the enemy's other provinces, avoiding all battle except for sure wins. Eventually the enemy will blunder into your ally. Once your ally gets a siege into the "yellow" zone, where there begins to be a chance of taking the city, you move in your leader and take control. Once you get to land 5, you may want to assault; in this case, follow the leader in with a small infantry unit to kick off the assault.

When you are using a leader as a siege thief, you'll want his army to be a few hundred, up to 1000, cavalry. Cavalry are fast, allowing him to move around faster. You don't want more than 1000, because the unit should be moving a lot, thus taking movement attrition, but also because it is likely to take attrition at the dogpile sieges that the AI does.