Advancing Tactics

I am playing as the Seleucid empire and am expanding rapidly. Soon, all of the south-eastern provinces will be mine and I will have to expand towards the former carthaginian and numidian provinces (now controlled by Scipii) and towards trace/brutti/greece. What kind of tactics/tips do people here use when expanding rapidly? Do you use multiple armies filled with cheaper units in order to ensure that they will be retrainable in newly conquered provinces without having to retreat back into your territory to retrain? Do you just have 2-3 super armies expanding towards each end of the map? Do you create 4-5 units of militia hoplites + 8 units of peasants as garrisons for each city? I'm trying to avoid spreading too thin, ending up with multiple cities beseiged and running out of funds like I did last time. Also, I'm experimenting with the idea of just sending a general with 19 units of scythed chariots. Will this be effective against the romans/tracians/macedonians? If it is, then it will be extremely simple to retrain as these units only need a blacksmith. Has anyone experimented with anything like this?

Hi Slon,

You’ve posed a lot of questions but I’ll try and respond to each issue in turn.

General tactics/tips for rapid expansion.

Just like in life, break the task down into manageable chunks. Don’t just drift, randomly across the map, seeing what happens, think Blitzkrieg. Look at the map, see where the choke points are, decide on exactly how much territory you can take and hold in one decisive push, work out how many troops are needed for the job, build them (plus 50% for safety) and execute. Consolidate your position, and then repeat. In short, define your goal, achieve it, secure it and repeat.

Multiple armies:
Depends on what you’re going to face…. I know that’s a cop out but it really does. Your line of advance has to have enough armies to take the ground, and block any counter attacking armies coming the other way e.g. if I were sweeping East from Carthage into Egyptian territory I would use 2 or 3 stand-alone armies, spread evenly, with maybe a mixed group at the rear to provide reinforcements or garrisons (not to fight). This issue is so circumstance specific that you’ll have to figure this out from trial and error.

Army Composition
You are completely correct, you need to manage your army according to your likely ability to retrain it on the march. For example, I wouldn’t take Spartan Hoplites on a long campaign far from home because retraining them would be difficult or impossible. However, don’t take this too far. You want to fight/garrison with units good enough to fight, so drop the peasants. I don’t care what anyone says, if you’re paying army wages you might as well have units that can fight, especially when counter attack is likely. Don’t even think about taking peasants to war unless you are desperate and need some cannon-fodder. When considering which units to take (i.e which will be easily re-trainable), consider the tech level of the enemy, the period, the faction type and use spies to suss out the situation.

Also, avoid armies of one unit type. They are inefficient and lack flexibility. Check out some guides, but generally, you want a mix of line infantry, cav, artillery etc. For example, you are going to have a hard time defending your city walls with just chariots etc. You want a well balanced army.

Garrisons
I’m sure everyone has a different preference but….. depending on the size of the likely counter attack, the following is fairly reliable: a couple of onagers, 4-6 hoplites or the like, a couple of cavalry units and 2-4 archers or slingers. More or less depending on what they are likely to face. If your besieged, sally every turn, don’t do anything silly, just shoot the enemy over the walls with the onagers, put your slingers on the walls and carefully use your cav to lure the enemy towards the walls. If you do this right after a couple of crafty turns the enemy army will be down 75% and quit.

Last but not least, as you advance rapidly you can make your life easier:
Slaughter everyone as you go and take the cash to fuel your advance! (Get it? Better an empty house than a bad tenant!), destroy their cultural artefacts and replace with your own, retrain your troops and repair damaged facilities, move your army out and onwards and garrison the town/city with troops from your reserve unit(s). REMEMBER to retrain rather than merge damaged units. You want your army to become veteran fighters and this comes from experience. (another reason to avoid peasants, because even veteran peasants are appalling) Use them, repair them and advance. By the time the advance is over you’ll have a five star general and bullet hard soldiers.

Most importantly, divide your advance into discrete, achievable chunks, smash through, consolidate, and repeat. I’ll meet you in Rome for a goblet of wine and some war stories.

That sounds very interesting. For garrisons, I use the peasant units because by the time the city becomes huge, I usually can barely prevent it from rebelling by having 20 units of peasants, which is the same as 30 units of militia hoplites (number-wise). Yes, there are levy pikemen, which cost 150, I guess I might get them now that you mention this. Also, I find that keeping large garrisons's is kind of a waste. If an enemy assaults the settlement, 3-5 units of levy pikement will easily hold him off in the small city passages as they cannot be flanked. If the enemy just waits for me to surrender, I use a different strategy. Instead of filling each city with a meager garrison, I create one fairly large (although not first-rate) army between 3-5 cities. If a settlement gets beseiged, the large army can simply travel to the site and attack the beseiging army.

For my attacking armies (the biggest ones), I use 2 units of armoured elephants, 4 units of silver shield pikemen, 2 units of silver shield legionaries (to hold flanks/absorb arrows), 2 units of companion cavalry, 1 unit of caraphracts, 3 units of onagers, 3 units of scythed chariots (to panic the enemy a little bit before they hit my phalanxes, now if only they didn't run amok into my silver pikemen's flanks...) and 3 units of archers. I usually use my faction heir/leader to lead this army. I'm not afraid of being unable to retrain because I am currently moving into parthian/armenian/pontic territory and their cities are pretty advanced by now. When I start to attack the barbarians/greeks/romans, I'll just leave the armies behind to serve as guarding armies, just in case the enenmy breaks through my defenses. My problem now is that my family members are too few and too horrible at management. I had a 72-year-old guy who had "Stunningly Incompetend" and "Despises Farming" as his traits. Still, when I moved him out, the city actually got worse public order-wise.

Also, what do you mean by merge armies? I've never seen this option. Oh, and I tried the "attack, use up ammo, retreat, repeat" strategy. For some reason, when I tell my units to withdraw, some of them are missing when I look at my army in the strategic map. Why does this happen?

Hi Slon,

Sounds like you have figured nearly all the important stuff for yourself! You are totally right re pikemen, garrisons and using a roaming army. The reason I usually do it differently is that I always try and guarantee that production in all of my cities is never interrupted by being besieged. Also, every city rebels periodically, you can delay it, but not prevent it. I like to have a garrison that’s just big enough to instantly besiege the town/city, and start doing damage every turn. (using the onagers to put holes in the wall, burn down critical structures and shower the occupying troops with flaming ammo). Maybe I’m over cautious…..maybe I’m not.

A quick note on garrison size and squalor: squalor increases exponentially as a function of garrison size, so there is a catch 22 between public order and the increase of squalor. That’s why when you get a squalor problem somewhere increasing the garrison rapidly makes less and less of a difference to public order. There are loads of post about this….

I like your army composition. I did exactly the same when I played Seleucid….silver shield pikemen “corked off” at each end by legionaires to defend the flanks. The only thing I did differently was I gave up using chariots once I got the elephants because they freaked out so many times I didn’t trust them. Instead I used one unit of the biggest elephants I had, and 1 or 2 units of cataphracts on each wing. I used slightly more pikemen and I did away with archers all together….as you may have guessed, I am fanatical about developing highly experienced batteries of onagers as the main artillery line. Sounds like your going to have fun in barbarian territory, I love leading a sophisticated well trained army against fanatical, but largely clueless barbarians. It kind of makes all that building, development and training worthwhile.

As for your useless governors: Even a total sh*t head of a governor can help public order if he has high influence. His other traits may make income reduce when he’s governing! I have read that governors pick up some bad (or good) management traits related to their activities as governor. Eg if they under tax they get associated bad traits. Generally speaking, I like my governors to have seen some serious battle action first because they tend to get improved influence, great retinue and better traits. Also, always manually set taxes every round so you never under/over tax AND squeeze every last penny out of your empire.

When I say “merge” I mean that if you have two depleted units you can drag the guys from one into the other unit to make one bigger unit. Unless you are desperate NEVER do this. Always retrain them because you keep the unit experience bonus when they retrain, so instead of one merged veteran unit, you get two re-trained veteran units.


"attack, use up ammo, retreat, repeat"
Correction, “attack, use up ammo, pull back to the edge of the map, let the battle time-out, repeat”. If you withdraw or quit the battle you get screwed because you bottled it from the battle. If you let it time-out you don’t seem to get the same penalty. Also, take care to watch out for generals when you use this strategy because they will frequently clock up “Draw” s and “Defeat”s which can reduce their star rating. I regularly remove my general from the battle group if possible to avoid this.

I know what you mean about the chariots. They're good at scaring troops, but are VERY unstable. I once had 2 scythed chariots run amok even though the enemy hasn't even ever been near my army. So, basically, I ended up with 2 routed scythed chariots before any close-combat action occurred while they were "Impetuous" and "Fresh". Perhaps I should just bring along 2-3 extra onagers or maybe 2 onagers and another unit of pikemen. Also, I can't wait until I get to fight the barbarian light/heavy infantry. They won't stand a chance against Cataphracts and Companion Cavalry (I probably won't risk losing a single elephant since I won't be able to retrain).

Also, is there a cheat to make the game never end? I don't think I'll be able to win in the alotted number of turns.

I know what you mean. I have also had them rout instantly when I sent them forward "to smash the enemy lines" or whatever it says in the manual. Unless your general is really brilliant they just wet themselves and crash back through friendly lines. Still, in the early game, when you don't have much by ways of specialised units they can be pretty handy at a pinch.

Fighting barbarians rocks Slon. Watch out though, some axemen have brilliant anti-armour stats and I have occassionaly sent my cavalry in just a little bit too early and got a nasty surprise......but you will still crush them like the filthy scum that they are.

As for the cheat....the game gives you the option to end or continue....I think you'll get at least 40-50 years. I was cracking the faction file last night but I didn't see anything like that. Maybe search the forums and you can let me know what you find.

The best bet for the Seleuc army is:
4 SS pikemen
3SS legionaries
1-2 war elephants
1-2 onager Depending on the enemy you can just drop the onagers to trravel faster (Numidia, North, Far east) or take 2 of them in densely populated areas.
1 gen
2 companions
2 militia cav
2 greek cav/cataphracts/companions (again depending on your enemy, you might need speed instead of shock power)

And you will have a couple of slots free for mercs to do the odd support job (or manning your siege equipment as the SShields are pretty expensive).

That army can beat anything except probably a well organized and smartly used numidian army or a Parthian one, but as the AI is neither smart or well organized you'll be ok.

Very interesting strategies. My main problem now is basically ending up with casualties in an undeveloped settlement with advanced units. I'm moving into the Sahara so I decided to give the Seleucid empire a rest and try a different faction for a while (playing the same faction and using identical strategies gets boring sometimes). I chose Germania simply because their best units can all be retrained in fairly undeveloped settlements (highest Germania can get to is Minor City). The spear warband is already awesome. The only downside to playing as the Germans is that unlike the Egyptian cities, their population doesn't breed like flies. I guess this will pay off eventually since I won't run into as many squalor problems.

As for the Seleucid army tips, I found that my spearmen very rarely get used. I normally plan by placing elephants at flanks and placing everything out perfectly, only to have my precious elephants bombarded with fire arrows and being forced into attacking. The only casualties (or action) that my SS pikemen see is friendly fire from archers. Once you get armoured elephants, you can probably just use 4 units of them to make any of the roman infantry and cavalry rout (they don't have any good spearmen). Combine that with 5 onagers (and alright, 3 units of SS pikemen to discourage the enemy from charging the artillery) and you probably won't lose any units.

i have played and come close to disaster time and time again the best tactic i've used when spread thin as leave areas around mountains and the sea (especially rome greece turkey mountainous areas) basicly unguarded gurd th main thoroughfares and keep towers near unused roads. in the mountains you will see enemies long before they navigate enough to attack. by then you can gather a ragtag army to weaken the enemies armies[SIZE=7][COLOR=Red]KILL THEM ALL

I'm finding it useful to keep low quality/small garrisons in cities. If you keep a large garrison, then the enemy won't attack until he has a large enough army to defeat the garrison. However, if you have a small garrison, you can send a roaming army to intercept the sieging army and either break the siege or kill it. The smaller the garrison, the more often the enemy will attack with small armies, and many smaller armies are easy prey as opposed to one to two big armies. Plus, you won't have to go through the painful procedure of sallying forth AND your army won't degrade (well, your attacking army) if you wait. If the roaming army gets attacked, then the spearmen can basically defend against anything if you put them in organized phalanxes at the corner of the map. Also, it is cheaper to have a few good roaming armies than smaller armies in every settlement (just keep 2 units of peasants, or more if public order decreases, and possibly a governor).

I had some money problems, but I just sold my maps to the Romans and managed to earn enough to survive on negative income until I took some settlements.

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Originally Posted by Slon

3 units of SS pikemen to discourage the enemy from charging the artillery.

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Totally. Most of the time my spear don't see too much fighting but on the odd occassion that things go wrong I am always pleased that I have solid infantry that can hold a line against most cav.

Re elephants. I usually pull them back slightly from the end of my infantry line (and cav too), that way they are out of archer range and frequently tempts the bad guys to make a dash at the infantry lines flank. At this point I send them forward inot the flank of the attackers and that is usually the end of that.

Have you fallen in love with onagers yet Slon?

My attacking army as Carthage is:



2 Bel slingers or normal sligers........
2 Num Mercs (Skirmishers)
4 IB infantry for flanks
4 Poeini/Sacred band (Sacred band are preferable)
4 Long Shied Cav/SHC (whatever is available)
2 Elephant Units
The Gen Unit
An extra slot for an extra cav or unf unit...depends of faction being fought, if romans then def inf...bcos i already have enough cav and need to hold the line.


Tactics..........use the MTW MP tactic of putting long rande missile out front protected by cav the 4 units of LSC, any early-middle game enemy AI army wil have problems dealing with that, in the later game try and use cretian archers instead of slingers.. Try and draw the enemy towards you using missile fire, esp if you have missile superiority. The main inf line is there not to knock a hole into the enemy but to hold it for the cav to flank..
The Inerian inf is for localised flanking attacks and to get the line togeather to stop any great holes appearing before the cav attack begins. The eles can be used as flanking or shock forces if the ib inf is not used to plug holes.

The javs are there to keep the enemy casualty rate slightly higher than yours, theyare also pretty cheap expendible troops to run into combat to give a precious few more seconds.

When attacking try and make the neenmy play on your terms, ie if you can take out their cav early. or shoot the main inf line up as much as you can to shorten the main melee.


Thats about it really....

Cretan archers are brilliant. They have the joint maximum range of the archer types.

If you are ever bored and have nothing else to do......try this out and tell me how it went.... Use exactly the same line up but replace all your missile and skirmishers with 5 onagers set on fire-ammo.

Hell, I should try and get a job as an onager salesman, I'm obsessed with them...

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Originally Posted by Jonny Dangerously

Totally. Most of the time my spear don't see too much fighting but on the odd occassion that things go wrong I am always pleased that I have solid infantry that can hold a line against most cav.

Re elephants. I usually pull them back slightly from the end of my infantry line (and cav too), that way they are out of archer range and frequently tempts the bad guys to make a dash at the infantry lines flank. At this point I send them forward inot the flank of the attackers and that is usually the end of that.

Have you fallen in love with onagers yet Slon?

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The thing about using "wait for enemy to charge you" tactics with high-end units like armoured elephants and SS pikemen is that you WILL take losses from enemy archers. Those few losses will take you a long time to retrain in a faraway city. The thing about using armoured elephants to charge immediately after archers come in to range is that they won't have enough time to kill any elephants (even with 3 bombardments of fire arrows). And I think elephants are faster than archers so they will just trample them in melee (and shoot them with arrows, for that matter). Also, each elephant has 2 archers. That times two is 72 archers, which is almost as big as a archer auxilia unit. When you want to avoid attrition, quality beats quantity.

This is also why I am enjoying the Germans. Their units are dirt cheap and can be retrained anywhere. So, I can just autoresolve or charge them at the enemy if I feel like it and be up to full strength in 1-2 turns. Unfortunately, I don't think Germania has onagers. It's a shame I can't hire merc onagers (like in MTW), since they don't see any action and don't need retraining, anyway.

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Originally Posted by Slon

The thing about using "wait for enemy to charge you" tactics with high-end units like armoured elephants and SS pikemen is that you WILL take losses from enemy archers.

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Dude,

I don't sit there like a turkey, reading a copy of My Pet Donkey and scratching my nuts whilst hoards of archers trash my VERY precious troops. Keep in mind that my standard army comprises 6 onagers shooting fire pots. The enemy get's mullered all the way.... then sure, some semi-battered archers get into range of my infantry.......cool, they shoot some arrows, I return fire with 6 onagers....I loose a couple of guys, they loose maybe 30-50 per volley. Hell, if a particular unit of archers is getting some good shots in, (and they usually do this from front-left or front-right of my battle line) cool, I'll whip the fastest cav unit out from the same flank and hit them just hard enough to make them poop-it and run. Then I pull them back and watch my BBQ progress. At this point, if they are still up for a fight and charge, then the following happens..... A battered, depleted, and exhausted army hits my as-yet-unmoved, eager line infantry. Ok, my onagers are tired, so I'll let them rest for a few minutes.....hell, I'll need them on top form when I open fire again on the enemy as they run away......usually because at just this point I use my totally rested and probably as-yet unmoved flanking cav to smash in on both flanks. It's a pretty reliable strategy, it's been used for thousands of years and I consider myself to have had a BAD day if I have a kill ratio of less than 10 to 1.

But yes, I do wait for the enemy to charge me, but whilst I'm waiting, they are getting crispy.

Unless you have really experienced onager units, they will probably critically miss their targets when the enemies get into archer range and closer. It only takes one screwed up fire pot to ruin your whole day. Another tactic would be to place 1-2 units of Legionaries just in front of your SS pikemen line in Testudo formation. The enemy archers will attack the closest testudo unit and just waste arrows that way while the onagers rip them to pieces. How skilled are your onagers? Did you just get them that experienced by killing enemies? Do they get experience by destroying walls?

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Originally Posted by Slon

they will probably critically miss their targets when the enemies get into archer range and closer.

It only takes one screwed up fire pot to ruin your whole day

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The crucial word being "probably"....try it out for yourself.

Any old onager has a range of 300, as oppossed to the archers, where only the superior types like Cretan and Archer Auxilia have ranges of 170. Forgetting advantages for height, experience and weapons upgrades, in equivalent circumstances, an onager has nearly twice the range of an archer unit. Now the enemy has to cross the field under fire from say, six onagers. Now if you target units in the middle, most of the shots that miss will hit other units as well. There is no "probably", it works really well.

As for the one screwed up shot......there is never a shot like that. Because of the minimum range issue with onagers, if you place them in a line directly behind your infantry line, it is physically impossible for them to hit any of your troops. You never, ever hit your own troops in these circumstances.

As for the issue of experience and upgrades, sure, their aim sucks at the start, but they are not precision weapons, they are for bombarding large armies. However, since you can get them fairly early, and they are never superceded, you can use the same units for the rest of the game. It is inevitable that they develop into veteran (and highly accurate) units. When they are experienced enough you will regularly take out the enemy general before the fighting even starts, and butcher the enemy before they are anywhere near you. I consider this to be a reasonably effective tactic.

I thought it was wierd, too. The onager took out part of my phalanx that was near it. Perhaps it was the slightly awkward elevation, or maybe I'm not remembering all the details, but it happened to me. I had a line of archers in front of the onagers and phalanxes in front of archers. They were all pretty close so I'm not sure how it happened, either.

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Originally Posted by Slon

The onager took out part of my phalanx that was near it. .

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If you place all of your onagers in a line directly behind you line infantry all of you troops will be well within minimum range.... you'll notice that enemy troops will become too close to shoot at just before the close on your ranks.

The only possible mishap you can have is when you have a row of onagers and you target all of your onagers at something to the extrem right or left of the line. Since the onagers have a large profile (i.e. they are high) the onagers are easily capable of shooting each other "in the back". I would suspect that if your troops were genuinly within the minimum range, the only possibility was either a deflection from one onager hitting another, or they were far enough in front of the onager to get hit by a truly wild shot. The added advantage of keeping the distance between your onager line and your infantry line small is that the onager ammo leaves the onager at a certain distance above the ground. The closer the two are together, the more impossible it becomes for even the wildest shot to hit anything friendly since it starts some distance above the heads of the infantry (sorry, too tired to explain the geometry).

Set up a custom battle and play around with them. At best you'll be converted, at worst you'll have a nice firework display.

I usually advance with a main body of crack troops to attack and destroy settlements. I enslave it to the max using the multi-enslavement tactics. So the resulting settlements gets reduced to 1500-2000 pop.

If you dont like using this then, another way is to have a full stack of peasants following ur main troops around and securing the cities u have acquired.

If u use Seluc, make sure to bring Onagers to attack the settlements, as the phalanxes are next to useless fighting in the city walls. If u have SS Legionary, then its another matter. But come on, its hard to retain these bad boys. Better to just destroy the walls and let the phalanxes through. They are awesome in city fighting, if u make sure they dont drift to the right too much lol.

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Originally Posted by m4rt14n

If u use Seluc, make sure to bring Onagers to attack the settlements, as the phalanxes are next to useless fighting in the city walls. If u have SS Legionary, then its another matter. But come on, its hard to retain these bad boys. Better to just destroy the walls and let the phalanxes through. They are awesome in city fighting, if u make sure they dont drift to the right too much lol.

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That's how I do it. Batter the towers, batter a hole in the wall, then flame-ammo any troops stupid enough to stand in front of the hole trying to block my path. Then I send in the phalanxes and start beating a path to the central plazza. Cold......but professional.

Do you bring your absolute best troops, the second best or some worse troops? As the romans, I think I'll bring a few legionary cohorts this time instead of the Urban/Praetorian cohorts. They are just too damn hard to retrain! Their upkeep is also huge, as opposed to the relatively cheap legionary cohorts which aren't that much weaker (almost the same armor/weapon).

I also have a question about the Brutii. Do you recommend taking Syracuse and Labaeum in the first few turns? It looks like a great idea because it opens up southern trade for you early on (and you know how great Mercury temple is) and those settlements generally finance your early advance through the poor/worthless rebel settlements along the coast east of Italy. Plus, there is the added bonus of greatly weakening the Scipii. As weak as Carthage is, I can't believe how difficult it must be to have the first settlement that you take be located across and island and across a sea and the capitol of Carthage. So you also weaken the Scipii, who will end up the most powerful faction that you will have to take on during the Civil War. I managed to acomplish these tasks. Unfortunately, I lost that first settlement across from Italy because it was taken by the Greeks. Still, this was obviously because I decided to leave the settlement protected only by peasants instead of militia (big mistake).

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Originally Posted by Slon

Do you bring your absolute best troops, the second best or some worse troops?

Do you recommend taking Syracuse and Labaeum in the first few turns?

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As far as the troops go, as a rule, I always take the best troops I have readily available. Obviously, the choice of troop type depends on several factors, how early on it is in the game, how advanced your tech is, and how advanced the target territory is.

eg. If you're heading into Egypt in the late game, and the Egyptians have done well for themselves, then chances are that their advanced cities will produce/retrain any kind of unit. Worse case scenario is that you have to wait a couple of turns to build an ungrade building.

Similarly, don't wang an army of elite troops into barbarian territory in the early period. The settlements are unlikely to be capable of training archers, let alone Urban Cohort.

However, one tactic that dispenses with the issue all together, can be used in target territories with reasonable sea access, as long as you have decent naval power. Just build lots of troops, park you ships on the coast, have your battles, swap out your depleted battle damaged units for fresh ones from the ships and return them home for retraining. Job done.

There is no "perfect" answer to choosing troop types, you have to make the decision based on the situation on the ground.

As for Syracuse and Labaeum, this is generally considered to be the standard opening. It's what I do and the guides advise it.

Well, I managed to take Labaeum early from the Scipii, but they took Syracuse before I could get there. It isn't a complete loss, since I still have trade in that sector.