Gameplay tips, ideas, tactics - share your experience

[cegorach]

Hoepefully this thread will be useful to some of you, but this depends on the activity of more experienced PMTW gamers.

[Icefrisco]

well, i guess ill post first. my favorite tactic is setting an ambush. heres the battle stats:

enemy: smaller army but with heavily armed soldiers mainly pikemen,corselets,ect.

me: larger army but with weak melee troops but with a lot of musketeers,arquebusiers,ect.

so what i do is set up my men on a slope and wait for the enemy to come up. then i unleash a series of volleys just to slightly weaken the enemy. after that i run up the mountain and continue the process. however, my men do need to be extremely accurate cause once they run out of bullets they are dead. so i place my soldiers at point blank range and fire. eventually when the pikemen reach the summit of the hill i send out my melee troops as cannon fodder. after that i continue firing at point blank range until the enemy begins to retreat.

Note: if the enemy has calvary dont try this. also if they have many units of pikemen you might have to move your soldiers around a lot to stop them from engaging you in melee combat.

[adembroski]

Totally irrelevent post... didn't realize what forum I was in;)

[earl of shrewsbury]

got v. with the spainsih because of lots of money so
1 build big fleet
2 fight their fleets 3 tyre .deadringer. as i have put it

[Spurious]

*Semi-random observations and advice*

I've found that in a singleplayer campaign that I tend to follow a semi-accurate historical trend, that of a move towards favouring lesser armoured infantry with more shot and cavalry. But it does pay to keep some heavily armoured halberdiers or pikemen around as specialist troops, as they're quite useful in siege breaking or bridge battles.

Early in campaigns it works well having a lot of combat troops, supported by shot , as early shot units by themselves generally do not mass enough firepower or numbers to see off a foe. A model for army design in the middle years that I have found to be sucessfull is 2 or 3 shot units per pike unit.

If playing English, try to keep those longbowmen units around in later years, as they start becoming effective again as lightly armoured pike and shot units become prevalent over the older heavier armoured types. They also have worked wonders for me in bridge battles before the awesome mobile field guns come out to play.

In general (and this may seem obvious but a lot of people forget it still), always try and keep a reserve of a unit or two, because when that gap in the enemy lines opens up, you're gonna want to exploit it, and if your whole force is committed at that point you're usually deep in the brown stuff or kicking yourself by not being able to pull of an easier win and having to go for it the hard way.

[Deus ret.]

I mainly played as the Poles in this mod (2 campaigns) and since they are a very diverse faction unit-wise some of the tactics lined out above by Spurious also apply to this faction. Poland loses ground in Late because they become technologically backwards but they rule the field in the first two campaigns, especially during Religious Turmoil.

Infantry-heavy armies were only an option to me after the appearance of Muskerterzy and - finally - the pikemen unit, but it is not these that are the Poles' true strength. Instead of relying on cuirassiers (wonderful units) as supporting cavalry, they can field excellent cavalry as the mainstay of an army with winged husaria (who rip everything to shreds except pikemen) as an elite core. A few low-quality infantry units i.e. any of the early Polish infantry are perfectly sufficient to distract the enemy troops and buy some time for the decisive strike. Most enemy cavalry are inferior to the Commonwealth's so use this to your advantage.

A feature of PMTW is that battles are often rather large due to money not being too tight most of the time...for quite a number of factions at least. Consequently good maneuvring skills are required to really exploit the benefits of cavalry, but if handled correctly a Polish army relying on cavalry is difficult to overcome....which is a good thing because the Ottomans deserve an opponent as well suited to their own army as possible. As mentioned above the longbowmen retain their virtues as time goes by, and the same applies to the good ol' ever-annoying horse archer - of which the Porte sports quite a number. Basically they are even stronger than in vanilla MTW because of the lack of archers after 1572. Their killing powers may be lower than those of musketmen, but their range is far superior, as is their speed and maneuvrebility, and against almost unarmoured musketmen they really hurt. Thus, one has to overcome them either by the usage of many of those light cannons or by deploying massed fast cavalry to trap them.

[thamskc]

Hoepefully this thread will be useful to some of you, but this depends on the activity of more experienced PMTW gamers.

OK, cool!^_^ I just wanted to make sure I didn't do anything wrong :]

[macsen rufus]

OK, so I was taking some time out from Ancient, and thought 'Persia looks interesting'..... Don't open the spoiler if you haven't played this faction yet!!!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This faction is obviously set up for an automatic civil war on the first turn (like, a jihad with no ribat in the startpos )... and there is an obvious hero to lead the rebel faction... BUT I can NEVER get Abbas to LEAD the rebels, he is always only a supporter. My Abbasid dynasty is strangled at birth every time. What does it take to get him on to the throne???? I can get every single stack under a 0-loyalty general, do the stupidest things with the Shah, and whenever a civil war erupts, it's always some no-account nobody who leads it and never the obvious high-dread, high-command, low-loyalty Abbas. It's almost as if the AI knows I'm trying to engineer the perfect palace coup! Mind you, it is great great fun watching the Georgian king repeatedly commit suicide at the gates of Yerevan )