Unusual things that worked

OK, here's a strategy that I discovered by accident. I was one territory away from eliminating the Gauls, and suddenly I was attacked by the Germans and the Brits at separate towns on the frontier. The Germans were no sweat, but the Brits attacked my five-unit garrison with a full 20-unit army--the biggest army I have seen yet in my campaign.

I first tried to get reinforcements close by and then sally forth, but I ended up with a very small army that I controlled and a very large (but still very outnumbered) AI controlled army of reinforcements. As seems to always be the case, my AI reinforcements attacked in the most completely retarded maneuver I have ever seen and they were quickly routed. Major loss.

This was my first experience with the AI of reinforcements, so I was pretty flabbergasted and I quit and loaded my saved game. I tried one or two more maneuvers to try to get troops that I could control to break the seige, but I was SOL. So I let the seige go on for a few turns while I tried to amass a capable relief force.

To my surprise, after about four turns, the Brits just left! They got bored, I guess, and wandered back to the northeast, perhaps to face another threat, or maybe just to invent fish and chips and have a nice supper. I couldn't believe the luck. The threat disappeared and I was able to go on and defeat the Gauls without incident.

The moral of the story is, if you are outnumbered but behind your nice walls, then as long as you have enough food to last a few turns, there is no reason to make any desperate, suicidal moves. Stay canny and the barbarians might get bored and shove off.

Also if you sally forth and lose, provided you have some troops left inside the fort and the timer runs out, its a "draw". This is a good way to weaken the enemy force for your enroute reinforcements.

I've seen that too. Sometimes when if you start moving troops to their location they will break and run. Also, if you are beseiged but don't have a big enough army, go and put a seige on one of their towns. They will break their seige to go to the rescue and you can break yours and come back to fight them another day. Parry, parry, thrust! :duel:

So much better than the old province system and you don't have small armies constantly retreating to create giant ones anymore.

I have come across the same situation also. I was attempting to hold onto a Gaullic City that I had just taken, when a large Gaullic force (lead by thier faction leader) besiged the city. I sent some light cavalry out to try to thin the Gauls, as defeat was inevitable, or so I thought. I mangaged to destoy thier siege equipement, lost all my cavalry and fought them to a draw (aka hid in the city till the timer ran out). Then, the Gauls sieged again, but with no cavalry to take out thier equipment I resigned myself to defeat in 5 turns, but then they just up and left, the reason for which still escapes me.

I don't know why the AI is so skittish about attacking a fort. I have theories and have posted them in other threads, but this reluctance is shared by "civilized" factions. I've had Macedonians fail to attack a fort that only had a couple of militia in them.

I think a fort hides the amount of troops it's in, and the AI doesn't attack until it knows the odds. Either that, or the AI doesn't attack a fort when the odds say it will suffer more losses than it would inflict.

hmm, but this was about cities as well. Am I wrong, or when you dbl-click on a city you _do_ get the correct number of units in there - but not what they are, instead showing question marks ? Because if that's true, well, it should be the same for the AI.
So at least it can have some idea of the forces inside, and if you only have 2 units, it should attack anyway !

in my game the AI just cant seem to handle the Salie forth action especially when I place my forces outside close the walls the enemy just sits there really easy to flank them