"Metal Storm" Hungarian defence

Well, it’s official. After totally eschewing the use of gunpowder and playing Early era only (for my first couple of years of play) I’ve become a total gunpowder freak. I can’t get enough of Arquebusiers, Serpentines, and Organ guns. There’s nothing more satisfying to me now than seeing a well-organised advancing army disintegrate in the face of a barrage of lead and bolts. Enemy armour is reduced to a moot point (and there is LOTS of armour in Late).

Here’s my current standard Hungarian Late era defensive army (on any terrain with slopes):

2 x Arquebusiers
2 x Serpentines
2 x Organ guns
3 x Pavise arbelesters.
2 x Halberdiers
1 x Jobbagy
2 x Royal Knights (sometimes dismounted)
2 x Szekely

I mix and match these according to the enemy’s army composition but, as you can see, there are very few “footsloggers”. It’s very missile-heavy, with 3 increasingly deadly stages of missile attack that advancing armies have to weather before they engage with my Halbs and/or dismounted Royals:

1. Serpentines (from relatively close range) and pavise arbalelesters (as soon as the icon is green). – These will pretty much ignore almost all armour and delaying cannon fire until “close” range means that the Serps can score more hits. If it is a very steep slope, I start the Serps at long range due to the blind spot at close range. If the General is stupid enough to advance fron-on, he gets the exclusive, withering attention of the pavise arbalesters.

2. Arquebusiers (start firing from mid-range) and Szekely harrassing flanks (at long range) – the arquebusiers, again, will ignore most armour except maybe for Pavises. At high valour, and in two ranks, they can wipe out half a unit in one volley. They are also used to shoot routing units in the ar$e. The Szekely are mainly for disruption purposes, rather than pure damage. Basically just to draw assault units out of formation to buy time for the missile units to keep shooting. You do NOT want an assault force taking on a missile-heavy army without being heavily depleted first.

3. Jobbagy javelins (as soon as the icon is green) and Organ Gun (obviously, as soon as the icon is green) – These two are the icing on the cake. They penetrate armour like cheese and, with a decent general, cause massive casualties. The organ gun is focused on assault infantry (due to poor loading time), and the Jobbagy concentrate on heavy cavalry.

Anyway, just wanted to share. I had so much fun with variations of this army last night, as 3 massive Crusader armies attempted to make their way through to Asia Minor and were refused passage. The casualty ratio was almost shameful (circa 20:1). I couldn't afford to let them through, due to Hungary's really high zeal. They would have stripped my armies to the bone!!

Awesome - I can see how the casualties on the other side would mount up alright....though if enough of them DID reach your line, things could get a bit iffy with only the 2 or 3 foot to hold them...

Just curious, what unit size are you playing?

Also, having steadfastly avoided and ignored them, I must ask - are arquebusiers worth using?

Arquebusiers can be highly useful or nearly totally useless. If its raining, or if they have to face up hilly terrain, they cannot fire at all, and their value in melee is pretty limited, though they can at least serve as a semi-anvil due to higher armor and decent defense numbers.

I would like to note that this army IS defensive. The organ guns and serpentines are totally immobile, and the enemy could simply await out of range if they were the defenders. If you were attacking, one would be wise to replace them with something more useful, like Szekely.

However, I may give this setup a try sometime. Personally, I do like to use muskets when I get to the late game for flavor. However, I always take care to have reinforcements in case there is a truly terrible storm. Its those organ guns that are so dang tricky. Not just the painfully slow reload, but also the fact that after three or so shots they're empty.

What Seireikhaan said.

Basically, Arqs are good when:

- the weather is good
- they have decent valour, or are led by a decent general
- they have a slope to fire from
- you are facing a mixed force (NOT a full-on all-cavalry / plains/ blitz assault army)

So, they are amongst the least versatile troops in MTW. But they add tons of style and flavour if you're into that sort of thing.

Handgunners are more versatile, but have truly crapulent range. I only take 'em on attack, and then only as flankers/sweepers.

Out of curiosity - what level of difficulty do you play on? I find that gunpowder units loose almost all of their effectiveness when playing on expert, or on hard if their valor is low. The AI doesn't rout as easily and will always make it to your army. I personally play at expert, and have found that gunpowder units, even handgunners, rule supreme once the enemy is broken or their general has died. They basically never make it to your lines, but it doesn't keep them from trying and getting shot doing so.

I also suspect that playing closer to a heavy cavalry power will make it more difficult to build up to those wonderarmies you can produce on turn 60

/KotR

Just out of curiosity,how does that army fare in bridge battles against.say the mongols? I can see the bridge being piled up with many dead mongol heavy calv as they attempt to cross very quickly,but if they did cross and charged your line,you'd have problems quickly,that is if they survived the barrage they'd get..

By the way, I've now been getting casualty ratios closer to 40:1 now! Those Crusades and Mongols just keep coming, because my empire is now at a size where I've suddenly become unpopular with absolutely everyone who can put an army together. Allies: 0

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Originally Posted by Knight of the Rose

Out of curiosity - what level of difficulty do you play on? I find that gunpowder units loose almost all of their effectiveness when playing on expert, or on hard if their valor is low. The AI doesn't rout as easily and will always make it to your army. I personally play at expert, and have found that gunpowder units, even handgunners, rule supreme once the enemy is broken or their general has died. They basically never make it to your lines, but it doesn't keep them from trying and getting shot doing so.

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I play on Hard, mainly because I find the morale boost that the enemy gets on Expert is actually a little detrimental to them, as they will invariably fight until the units are depleted to the point of uselessness before they break. On Hard, they will (more sensibly) break and run after a bit of a hammering, but can still rally later on and return to cause trouble later with decent unit strength (which is actually desirable and more challenging for me) rather than tiny unit fragments.

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Originally Posted by Knight of the Rose

I also suspect that playing closer to a heavy cavalry power will make it more difficult to build up to those wonderarmies you can produce on turn 60

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Not sure what you mean here, bro. Could you explain further?

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Originally Posted by oz_wwjd

Just out of curiosity,how does that army fare in bridge battles against.say the mongols? I can see the bridge being piled up with many dead mongol heavy calv as they attempt to cross very quickly,but if they did cross and charged your line,you'd have problems quickly,that is if they survived the barrage they'd get..

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The army is deadly on bridge defences, except that I would make sure that my arqebusiers had extra armour, and I wouldn't take Organ guns for 2 reasons:

1. Their range is so pathetic that they can easily be shot up quite badly by enemy archers, or even missile cavalry, on the other bank.
2. Everything is so bunched up on a bridge defence that it is quite easy to hit one's own troops with Organ guns, which just plop multiple projectiles into the seething mass of troops (including friendlies!). When I have as few footsloggers as I do in this army, the last thing I want is to rout them myself and expose my many missile troops to an enemy charging down a bridge ramp. As you've noted, the halberdiers (as blockers) are vital and need to be cared for as much as possible.

I would therefore swap out my organ guns for as many serpentines as I could muster and target enemy units at the rear of the pack, or even those waiting to join the fray at a distance.

If there was a second bridge, I would bring more Szekelies and a Royal, and send them around to the enemy's flanks or rear.

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Originally Posted by Roark

By the way, I've now been getting casualty ratios closer to 40:1 now! Those Crusades and Mongols just keep coming, because my empire is now at a size where I've suddenly become unpopular with absolutely everyone who can put an army together. Allies: 0

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Sorry for offtopic, but because I just read it: I've made the same experience. Is it a rule, that the bigger you grow the less allies you have? I have zero, too. Would have thought that they send presents to be friends with me. But all of em hate me, even those against whose enemies I'm at war with. (weird sentence?)

This is true, it's a game mechanic designed to stop one faction from exploding all over the map in a short time.

What I meant was: Your army is missile-heavy and is founded on the idea that the enemy won't reach your lines. This is what gives you 40:1 ratios.

But if you start next to a hobilar heavy french or turks pouring out armenian cav, then you need something else to expand - otherwise you won't be doing anything else than rout as cav beats missiles. But I totally agree that an advanced late army can do a "metal storm" when you

1) Kill the general (siege and guns do this well)
2) Bring arbs (overpowered, wouldn't you say? At least considering how the AI works)
3) Have a lot of firepower

So I guess you build your empire on spears and win the world with guns, at least that's what I do.

/KotR

Yeah, after having fought about 12 battles now with my line-up, I do agree that pavise arbalesters are somewhat overpowered. My kill ratios are now up to about 90:1. Total massacres. I don't even take Royals now (escept maybe as a General), because all the cavalry needs to do is mop up routers. Szekelies are much better at this than Royals.

RE: Spears. I used to be a die-hard half-hex man. But, in Late I train zero spears, and focus on Halberdiers because there's so much armour in Europe in Late.

In spite of your post, Halberdiers seem to be getting a lot of unmerited bad press. I never understood this, Halberdiers are among my favorite units. They're hard to take down, and with them staying in the fight for so long, enemy casualties will start adding up. They're armor piercing, and except for Arbalests, there's no good counter unit for them! They can tangle with the infantry heavy hitters (due to sky-high defence and armor-piercing), and they eat anything mounted alive. Thus, Halberdiers are a good backbone for your armies.
Keep them right behind lots of Arbalesters, and accompany them with light and heavy cavalry, Halberdiers alone are not versatile enough to win you the day (no unit is!). Oh, and do guard against their awful morale, build churches, abbeys and reliquaries, and don't put them under cowardly generals. That's about it.

I found out how good Halberdiers were when I began developing an interest in the Russians. They don't get any good spearmen, so my usual spear backbone wasn't gonna work. I ended up using armies consisting of only (Pavese) Arbalesters, Boyars, Steppe Cavalry and Halberdiers. This was more than adequate to utterly humiliate the Horde, and European armies never stood a chance, either. With such an army, you're not very mobile, but you don't need to be. You're the immovable object, let the other side try to put together some irresistible force! Not bloody likely! Of course, Halberdiers are not what provides the killing power in such an army: That's what the Arbalesters are for. But whenever melee ensues, Halberdiers will see you through just fine.

Halberdiers have high requirements, low base attack and low morale and they are slower than an 19th century train. They cant flank and cant force engagement and when they engage high level spears or swords they run away. As they are in vanilla they hardly worth it.

Other faction specific polearms like Billmen and JHI are about a million times better - Billmen much more than JHI due to low requirements that make them available earlier and in larger quantities.

Noir

Yes, I've never rated halberdiers. If you want a decent, all catholic factions, anti-cav polearms unit in high and don't mind exploiting the game a bit, then Chivalric Foot Knights (dismounted Chivalric Knights) are the very best. For the english go with Billmen and for the Turks it's JHI. Halberdiers are only worthwhile for Russians/Novgorod as they have nothing else comparable. The Byzantines, Almohads and Egyptians lack this kind of unit, so you have to improvise...

A slight correction - the Almohads have Militia Seargents that with upgrades and bonuses can play well the polearm role - not frontally well like billmen and JHI - but at least with spears and flanking they make a deadly unit.

It doesnt seem like much but its the best low end polearm the Muslims/Byzs get - and it does make a difference for the Almohads.

Also the Byzantines - do not really need a polearm unit as such as they have the Varangians, that open armored targets (mounted or not) like cans, have very good morale, good armor and good base attack and defence.

The Egyptians and Turks on the other hand while they have axemen (ghazis and abyssinians) they cannot stand in the same level with the varangians neither even with the Militia Sergeants, because of low armor and in the case of Ghazis low defence - this means they are really falling like flies - they have low survivability in melees and even lower when receiving charges.

Noir

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Originally Posted by Noir

A slight correction - the Almohads have Militia Seargents that with upgrades and bonuses can play well the polearm role - not frontally well like billmen and JHI - but at least with spears and flanking they make a deadly unit.

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MS do not have anti cav defense/attack bonuses, this puts them in a different class to CFK, Bills, Halbs, Swiss Halbs and JHI. MS are AP infantry like Vikings or as you mention, Varangians. But yes they can be used to "fill in" (I do this all the time) which is what I meant by "improvise".

:bow:

Noir and Asai: I'm talking about XL Halberdiers, which have the same speed as normal infantry. Needless to say, most factions don't have access to Billmen or Janissary Heavy Infantry...