Saxon Generals

[CountMRVHS]

Hi all,

Just started a Saxon campaign in BI. Everything I've read indicates that the historical Saxons did not appear to use heavy cavalry in battles, and my traditional image of the Saxon general's retinue is one of a stout group of foot troops gathered around their lord -- not a group of heavy cavalry who dash around the battlefield.

So my question is, can anyone point to any historical basis for the Saxon general unit being heavy cav? I suspect the decision had a lot more to do with wanting to keep the Saxons on equal footing with all the other factions, who have heavy cav bodyguards for their family members.

And secondly, if my suspicion is correct & there's no indication Saxon generals dashed about on horseback, has anyone ever modded a general unit to be a foot unit? Is there an easy way to do this? I'm reminded of the original BI flaw whereby a WRE general actually commanded a unit of archers, so presumably it can be done. I think the perfect solution would be to take the Saxon Hearth Troop unit and tweak its stats to make them more competitive -- because as we all know, the general's cav is the most powerful unit in the game.

Any thoughts?

CountMRVHS

[DisruptorX]

Every Faction has heavy cavalry as a general unit, this was the case in medieval, too. Its a real pain when you crush the entire enemy army, but all of your 600 light infantry combined cannot kill his single unit of general's bodyguard because of the way Rome's combat works.

[snevets]

It is definately true that the horse was not a very big aspect of saxon warfare. Many southern germanic groups were but the northerns like the saxons and their relatives were infantry and to a lesser extent at this time sea people. I don't see anything wrong with having infantry bodyguards for them, the team I'm on (Hegemonia) has infantry bodyguards and as far as I can see they're fair and work well.

[CountMRVHS]

Nice. Yeah, I'm thinking about co-opting the Hearth Troops as the general unit altogether; maybe makethem completely untrainable. Of course I haven't tried this at all yet so will see how it works in practice.

[x-dANGEr]

It is that each general would get a horse to ride if he can. Horses provide mobility mind you, that is needed for the general to command his army right.

[Ciaran]

Not to mention that sitting on top of a horse gives a definitely better field of view. Plus it´s more comfortable and probably a sign of wealth and status.

[econ21]

RTR experimented with infantry bodyguards for Romans and Greeks. (Does EB still do it for Germans?) I was happy when they went back to cavalry. Partly because cavalry is often rare and so having some with your general is very useful, even if only for chasing routers. And partly because often you want your general to be mobile, rushing to a key spot of the line, and not stuck duking it out in a big infantry combat unit.

I think the case for Saxons having infantry bodyguards is stronger than with the Romans and Greeks though - think Harold and his huscarls at Hastings.

I've come to dislike 2 HP generals' bodyguards though - they are too strong and it is too tempting to win your battles with them.

[Antagonist]

I can't say I have tremendous first-hand knowledge of this myself, but Arthurian Total War's historians are a knowledgable group, and they determined an infantry bodyguard unit, Gesiþas, was accurate for the Saxons and Angles (although their third Germanic faction, the Jutes, have a cavalry bodyguard)

Antagonist

[CountMRVHS]

Hrm.... well, more research will be needed on my part, obviously. I thought it would be as simple as changing some stuff in the export_descr_unit file, but no luck. I made the Saxon Warlord untrainable by the Saxons (by deleting the word "saxons" after "slaves" in the end of the unit info), and added the attribute General_unit to the hearth troops. When i started a new game the Saxons still had cav Warlord generals rather than hearth troops. Off to the modding forums...

But yeah, I've done quite a bit of reading in the early anglo-saxon period and everything indicates that horses were used mostly to get troops TO battle, rather than to carry warriors DURING battle. There are a couple places where it might seem like cav was used -- in Beowulf, Hrothgar's saddle is referred to as his "battle seat" I believe, and there are a couple of ambiguous symbols on Pictish carvings in Scotland (though now the horsemen are generally believed to be Strathclyders rather than Northumbrians) -- but generally they're supposed to have fought on foot. Apparently that's what most of you have found as well.

In a VI mod I did for myself, I made all the Anglo-Saxon factions have infantry bodyguards, which was easy enough thanks to Gnome. But Rome is a bit more obscure for modding in some ways. Of course, the best thing would be if cav could dismount, but that can't be done.

Thanks for the input everyone

CountMRVHS

[snevets]

Did i miss something about the cavalry dismounting in RTW? Can't you just change the skeleton to one infantry use within the coding and remove the information about the mount and change the unit type to infantry? Or do you mean within the game?

I don't see why infantry bodyguards seem so ridiculous, the greeks certianly used them and they work well within hegemonia, why not for the saxons?

[professorspatula]

Rome is much easier to edit on the whole I find. The sheer amount of mods in comparison suggests that also, but then I suppose RTW sold a lot more copies.

But anyways...

Remember to edit the descr_strat.txt file for the campaign before starting a new campaign. It's in the data\world\maps\campaign folder. Find all the Saxon generals listed, then change their starting unit to the new infantry unit you specified in the edu.txt file - or hearth troops if they're your general unit. If you don't do that, all your generals start with the same old cavalry unit.

I'd make a copy of the Hearth troops unit rather than just add the General_unit tag to the normal version, and call the new unit, 'Saxon Hearth General' or something. That way you can give them better stats or whatever, as befits those who are the close bodyguard of a general. Leave the dictionary entry alone though unless you want to mess around with unit cards and new unit descriptions. Also remove the general_unit tag from the normal Saxon general unit if you haven't already or there may be a conflict.

[CountMRVHS]

Right - I realized after I posted that I should have changed the startpos file, or at least played until another general came of age to see what happened then.

As it is, though, now I have bigger fish to fry... can't start BI at all after I double-clicked on an "updates_bi" icon in the data folder. That file and several others were blue, and I wondered what the updates thing was all about... Anyway, since then no BI.

Wondering if I need to re-install, and if so, how I go about that. I assume it's like this:

uninstall RTW
uninstall BI
reinstall RTW
reinstall BI
reinstall 1.6 patch

Ugh. What a pain this all is.

CountMRVHS

[professorspatula]

You'd probably need to uninstall BI first. I think attempting to remove BI will automatically require RTW to be uninstalled. It's possible either option removes both parts, although I know from past experience with addons, patches and so forth you sometimes get start menu entries left behind etc when done out of order. I've uninstalled RTW and BI before though with no probs.


The order of everything else seems correct.


If you reinstall RTW and BI, after patching make a backup of the data folder for both RTW and BI, or the entire game. Then if you anything untoward occurs again, you have the backup on hand which you can just revert to, hopefully meaning no need to reinstall again.