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One Byzantine General...
Fought off my entire army for 20 minutes.
As the English, I'm at war with my only true competition, Byzantium.
Byzantines move a smaller force against my province. A 10 star General joins them from another adjacant province.
With clear numeric superiority, my English troops advance and form a crescent, surrounding the enemy.
Then, the 10 star General, who is 1 solitary Heavy Cavarly, decides to charge my left rank.
Great. Dumb (I think), but great. I position 300 spear troops around him in a triangle and tell them to kill.
Leaving them to their business, I go to work routing the rest of the Byzantine army.
This done, I return to my 300 chivalric seargents, only to find 150 of them dead.
The work of one Byzantine Heavy Cav Horseman.
So I call the rest of my army in. Surround him, tell them to kill.
20 minutes before he died He must have killed, like, 200-300 of my men???
I've seen lone generals wipe out alot of troops before but nothing like this.
Definate A.I. oddness here. 1) 10 star General decides to lead an attack where the defenders outnumber him by over 1/3. 2) 10 Star General decides to charge my advancing spearmen while the rest of his army is backing off. I thought 10 stars were supposed to be smart? 3) It takes 500 spearmen 20 minutes to kill one man and his horse??
Hope they don't have any 11 stars. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/dizzy.gif
Azrael
A.Saturnus
11-26-2002, 17:50
He had God-mode on http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif
MizuKokami
11-26-2002, 18:15
you mean you actually killed him? they usually escape from me, surrounded or not. it also seems funny that my rested light horsemen can't catch a tired heavy cav man.
MonkeyMan
11-26-2002, 18:19
No such thing as a 10 star only up to 9.
BTW are you playing with or without the patch, this really shouldn't happen as often anymore. Although the dominance of the Byz would suggest you have patched. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/confused.gif
oh i have seen it happen post patch. i had a very long fight with the general of a spanish army. we fought him till his reinforcements arrived, routed the reinforcments, played chicken with the jintettes and still had not killed the lone general. i dont think he ever died, i got routed by his second group of reinforcements.
You have made the universal mistake of thinking... "Ahhh my spears will kill him." Well spears have an attackrating like nothing, while a supergeneral has a defensiverating about 12-15. This means that if he was only a normal soldier he would last forever, so a general will last about 10 forevers... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif
It is hard to kill anybody like that, and even harder if he has 10 lives.
What I do if that happens is to dedicate a unit of spears and a unit of archers (anything ranged) to kill him. The spears hold him while the archers kill him. Has worked like a charm in my last two campaigns.
BTW, if you're playing 1.1, there should be a directory called "logfiles" or something in your MTW directory. In it there should be a log for that particular battle. In this log it will tell you exactly how many soldiers this general killed.
Please let us know http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif
We should start a record somewhere, the most number of soldiers to die from a single soldier. That would be pretty cool (although I know of no way to verify the results)
BatkoMahno
11-26-2002, 20:20
I haven't complete an campaign yet. But I always play as a Spaniard and always trying to have at least 2 teams of jinettes to either persue routed or kill nasty never dying generals and it works fine for me.
Try to never move your spears in melee, the best is to provoce the enemy to attack your oncomming spears and stop and hold ground wright before the clash. You don't get anymore that nasty V&V now (what was it's name?) about when you always stop attacks.
solypsist
11-26-2002, 20:24
The valor of generals can go, potentially, beyond 20, if you include bonuses from V&V, and the number of men in the unit. Keep in mind that all leading characters in MTW have Health, so it might've been a good idea to have used your own general to take on the enemy one, if your general's unit was of any value, of course.
Spears don't make good killing units against generals, heirs, kings, etc. Charge and re-charge your cav into him to get the charge bonus a lot.
muffinman14
11-27-2002, 00:20
I got one of my royal knights to be a 15 but man that guy killed 200-300.. thats a butload of guys he killed
FesterShinetop
11-27-2002, 01:38
Is it a bird...? Is it a plane...?
It really sounds ridiculous, glad I have never experienced that before. I really like this game because of it's realism but this is just plain crazy.
He tried to get away.
It was crazy trying to stop him from escaping.
He kept slipping closer and closer from the centre of my troops to the edge, and I had to peel a Unit off and set it up to block his path and charge about three or four times.
He must have had the deadliest combination of bonuses from command and virtues.
A few times I was tempted to hit the F2 screen or saved the battle to keep a record of this Kodak Moment.
Oh well.
Azrael
MizuKokami
11-27-2002, 22:30
granted, spears don't have a good attack, but 200-300 men with spears surrounding one man on a horse should be able to at least keep him from escapeing. have you ever tried getting out the k-mart exits during christmas time? and those are just little old ladies with shopping carts.
Leet Eriksson
11-27-2002, 23:06
i've seen wonders before,but never saw something as spectacular as a katphrak killing 300 meni've seen 4 chivalric knights with 12 or 13 valour vaporising all of my 4 ghazi units(240 in total only 50 survived)janissaries came in time to kill em off..
Kokami, it is worse than you think. If he has some 15 defence and your spears only have 1 melee, the spears have about 0.5% chance of killing him every attack, two men can attack him every round. He on the other hand has a much better chance at killing due to his melee is around 16 or something while your spears are only 7-8.
But not only have your men got a lousy chance of killing him, they have to kill him many times before he dies. A general has at least 6 lives and his rank on top of that, so that certain general had 15 lives at the very least.
So if the soldiers had to do about 200 attacks to kill one life they had to attack about 3000 times to have a statistical chance of killing him. And I'm not even sure the chances would be that high.
Hippolyte
11-28-2002, 01:34
Although I've never experienced a general even remotely as difficult to kill as yours (usually, at the very least, they eventually die after all the others in the unit have perished--if it takes a bit longer), I do remember one battle where a 5 or 6 star general (some type of heavy cav) eluded my light and medium cavalry during his retreat. This was extremely frustrating because I recall that should he escape I would certainly face him again. Regardless of the skill or valour of such a general, it is highly implausable that, especially with his back to pursuing cavalry, a heavy cav unit could escape from faster, if less deadly, cav.
My most effective answer so far to TUGFH (The Unkillable General From Hell) has been Arbalests.
Not only do they have the punch needed to actually kill him, they also have the numbers since 60 arbalests can be brought to bear in a single firing, whereas perhaps only a dozen spearmen are actually in a position to attack.
Thats also the official response offered by Gil.
I saw someone post that they autoresolved with a bad prince he wanted killed and he wound up with over 1100 kills, still alive and sitting alone in a newly conqured province http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif
Arbs are good at killing generals (can take 4 lives for each kill they make), but they can't fire over their own men, so I prefer Archers, so I can hold teh general with my own spears.
Since one of the devs explained that one man can only be engaged by two of the enemy at any one time, it's been easier to accept some of the antics of TUGFH as far as melee is concerned but the imperviousness to arrows is less believable.
Why should valour, star rating, morale etc act as some sort of force field against missiles? True I've had a trebuchet or somesuch take out the opposing big cheese in the first few shots but usually he's been 0, 1 or 2 star.
As the Turks I massacred a Spanish army all except their 7 star general who emerged from a scrum of some 300 Turks and made it back to the castle. About par for the course so far, albeit more like something from a Spaghetti Western than a game with token pretensions towards realism.
Next turn, to my amazement, this solitary figure sallied forth and launched an attack upon 625 Turks who were led by a 4 star prince. Over 400 archers emptied their quivers on him to no effect. 35 Sipahi of the Porte surrounded him but with breathtakingly convincing realism he fought his way out and in full armour, having galloped all the way across the map he galloped all the way back-to his castle, seemingly fresh as a daisy, outrunning 60 supposedly fresh Turcoman Horse.
Autoresolving an assault on him next turn cost 125 men
Ought to be a law against it.
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