Cheesy or valid seige defence tactic?

I'm currently playing as the Carthaginians (H/H), and having taken all of the Italian mainland, I'm running into some problems from the last remaining Roman faction, the Brutii (?) - anyway, they weren't much of a threat until they had the Marian reforms, now they're constantly sieging my cities in the north of Italy with centurions and the like. So, that's the history out the way, bring on the cheese!

Now that they can field decent units, my only successful counter tactic when defending is to let them take the walls virtually unopposed (apart from a couple of slinger units to soften them up). I then have a unit of Sacred band and a couple of Poeni (?) infantry in phalanx formation in the streets in front of my town square, with some cav and Libyan spearmen behind them to plug any gaps/charge down routers. The basic effect is to channel them into my phalanx for some meat grinding fun. I've done this 3 times now, and although my supply of phalanx infantry is dwindling (the town I'm defending can't retrain them), I've killed more than I've lost. I may be able to reinforce them, depends if I can get the troops in before the next stack of Romans beseige me. My point being, if I'd left these troops on the walls to defend the towers/ladders, I'd have been wiped out.

So - is this a gamey exploit, or a valid tactic? Cheese or best use of available units? You decide...

(sorry for the poor historical unit/faction spellings!)

Of course it is a valid tactic! You are not salling and waiting for the enemy to be killed byyour archers. Your goal is defending the square, and if fighting in the streets is the best way, do it. In fact, you partially lose the advantage of having walls, because your units don't fight well there.

Zatoichi you just discovered urban guerilla warfare. ~:cheers:

Yeah I guess you're right - I guess my definition of cheesy tactics can be viewed in different ways - I hadn't considered it in comparisson to the real gamey sallying tactic. Anyway, unless my reinforcements can make it through, this will be a moot point, as forming a phalanx with 8 sacred band infantry isn't going to be a siege winning street fighting tactic...

That's not cheesey. As stated above it's smart and not at all gamey. What is gamey is not repairing your walls so that the entire enemy army rushes the one breach point even if the hostile army is deployed far away from it.

Its not cheesey, its all a matter of adapting your tactics to match your unit-types. If you dont have decent (or any) swordsmen (ie phalanx units) its ridiculous to defend the walls against the legions. If the AI is too stupid to bring up archers to slaughter the pikes thats not our problem.

I also vote for non-cheezy...

Not cheezy at all. Cheezy is sallying, running a single unit out of a side exit, having them run towards it, running it back in, then watching them slowly die as they stop within tower range and get cut down, then repeating the process 6-12 times. If the sentence describing the tactic has as many commas ads the one above, it's probably cheezy. You aren't exploiting the AI anymore than by just being a thinking human against a rigid AI.

No cheese there IMO.

That could be countered easily by bringing some archers to the assault, altough the AI is not capable of that. Archers could move very close to your massed spears and slaughter them...

...Reminds me of the ability to move archers to just a few meters behind a AI phalanx unit standing on central plaza... that's cheesy.

Zatoichi

It's what I do when I am horriblus out number.

It is Urban Warfare at it's best imo, I quite enjoy using the streets as killing zones.
I enjoy putting heavy infantry blocking the street and then firing over the top with archers. I also employ archer units on the walls to hammer them as they attack. Then move my archers back to side walls when the enemy has entered or looks like taking the wall they are on.
Therefore allowing me to still save my archers, and continue firing at the enemy inside the town.

fenir

A cheesy tactic would be placing an onager in every border town, and sallying forth multiple times in a turn if you are besieged. mmmm....death by fireball....