Cool tactic

[Malachus]

I was playing a battle a couple days ago where one of provinces had a rebellion of 120 archers, and i had a garrison of 200 peasants and 20 sipahis of the porte (valor 11)... well anyways, in the battle, I lured the comp into attacking my general (the sipahis of the porte) but i ran his unit up a hill and set him up behind my peasants. now, seeing as the archers were trying to hit my general's unit, the marched up the hill, right in front of my peasants... so i set my peasants in a loose formation and had them attack the archers. Seeing as the archers were in skirmish mode, they ran away, but i still kept my peasants chasing after them... while my peasants chased i sent my sipahis of the porte in for a melee attack, so due to their faster speed than the peasants they rode in behind and then through my peasant ranks and were able to catch the still skirmishing archers.. needless to say, my SOTP killed their general on impact and the unit of archers routed, being easy targets for my sipahis to capture as prisoners. I end up killing all 120 archers and i did't lose a single soldier... this is a pretty cool tactic if none of you have tried it. Very useful in small battles involving archers like this one, but very effective in the bigger battles too, but it requires some good micromanaging...

[Papewaio]

Peasants make very good units to train with flanking and attacking archer units.

They are cheap and large enough that they can keep the archers running until a cavalry unit has time to engage them (after slaughtering other archer units).

[dessa14]

personally i don't like peasants due to the fact they can't hold against anything really in battle.
so i don't build them.
but that sounds pretty good.
thanks, desmond

[katank]

I regulalry use peasants for archer chasing. They are lightly armored so don't fatigue badly.

however, slav warriors are far better as they can actually catch the archers and shred them due to superior speed and better melee stats and they are only a bit more expensive.

[Spartiate]

I only train peasants for garrison duty in inner non-border provinces.Once past the first few years in the campaign i don't have any use for them because you just can't trust them to hold against anything.I have even seen horse-archers out of arrows about face and attack them with swords and the peasants scatter after maybe 5 seconds.
I have 2 rules as regards Peasants

1. Never trust Peasants
2. NEVER TRUST PEASANTS


p.s never trust peasants http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-jester.gif

[KillerKadugen]

Actually, you CAN trust peasants...to perform poorly on a regular basis. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/bigthumb.gif

[Malachus]

Yeah, well in this particular battle, i had peasants garrisoned and i knew there was a rebellion of archers, so i sent in some SOTP to help out the peasants... my entire goal was to see if I could scatter the archers without losing a single soldier.. and I did that, by chasing them off with peasants so they couldn't fire, and then using my SOTP to catch them while they were running off and slaughter them... it was purely by chance that I had peasants in that province. I would've done the same with any other infantry unit.