City Defense Against Hordes (BI)

Playing Franks on M/M.

I'd like to know how you are defending your cities against Horde attacks...

Firstly when your walls are wooden, and secondly when you have stone or more.

I'm having awful problems with attacks that consist of 6 full stacks of Vandals or Slavs. Sure, I can try to destroy the sige weapons and the odd time my Archers will do just that, but mostly the Siege Towers reach the walls (despite 6 groups of hunters firing Fire arrows). Then the basic spears are slaughtered, and the swordmen/axemen only hold for a small bit before being overrun.

I've tried to have a force of Cavalry to swamp the infantry as they're loading but they get decimated by Horse Archers. Best I can do is kill off the infantry, but most times I lose the gates and the enemy pour in to overwhelm my troops.

I must admit I'm getting a bit frustrated as I've lost three of my Trade centres to new Hordes (I've just wiped out their last city, and suddenly the next round, tehy've gone from an army of Five cavalry, to a horde).

So could you describe to me your standard defensive army, considering you're going to be outnumbered 7:1 and theres likely to be another two hordes directly behind them? (I've conquered Europe and most of Africa as the Franks, but the Slavs, Vandals, and another crowd have just appeared out of nowhere)

A bit in trouble, and my usual formation of Heavy Infantry, Spearmen & Archers doesn't seem to do the job anymore.

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Originally Posted by darklite

I must admit I'm getting a bit frustrated as I've lost three of my Trade centres to new Hordes (I've just wiped out their last city, and suddenly the next round, tehy've gone from an army of Five cavalry, to a horde).

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Well the best piece of advice i can give you is to leave their last settlement well enough alone.

Usually i try to destroy the ram and hold the main defences on the walls (stone) if you have some descent infantry units (5-6) the horde never takes the wall. Once as WRE i slaughtered 8 full stacks of goths, except cavalry. i had 3 units of archers, 3 comitates and 3 limitatei.
Ususally hordes have 1-2 siege tower and same amount of ladders and a ram. so i try to burn the ram whit my archers and then wait for them to climb my walls.
Sometimes, when the first stack infantry is killed it's worth to take you general and try to kill upcoming infantry from other stacks, because tehey come one - two at a time.

very rarely this doesn't worked for me. Of course you must have 2 or 3 good infantry units on the walls.

Make sure that when they are down to just one remaining city that it's one you can isolate completely. I'm talking have it surrounded by two to three stacks. The best thing to do is to make sure that the very last city they have is ALSO the LEAST populated. You may even want to give them a crappy little village just for this purpose in order to reduce the chances of a larger than usual horde appearing. Use one army to take the settlement, and have the rest of your armies somewhat spaced out around likely escape routes, possibly even in ambush position or in bottlenecks. Finally, proceed to cut down as many, if not the entirety of their horde, essentially ensuring that they are either destroyed right then and there, will be easier to destroy later, or will simply never again be able to prove a problem to you again. Provided you hit them hard enough there is a chance that any remnants of each stack will simply end up going neutral if you eliminate all their family members AND cause large enough casulties in their non-general lead armies. Apparently when all the forces they have left have been both scattered and battered, nobody wants to step forward as leader anymore.

stone walls :

put all you melee infantry on the walls, even if the ram makes it and destroyes the gate, the enemy will always wait till the walls are taken before it sends his forces through the gate.

Put you Frankish infantry on the walls and your general under the walls were the fighting is the hardest.
Your surperior axe and swordsmen will hold the wall against the weak horde infantry.

With wooden walls it's difficult, but as the Franks I once killed over 5000 Goths when they decided to attack my well balanced army ( in a city with wooden walls ) with their hord stacks.

I put all of my units exept some archers on the town square, so there would be no routing.

I then waited till they advanced on my position, only taking losses from the enemy HA.

When the weak infantry engaged , I sent my raider cav. to attack their HA who were all bogged up in the streets , easy prey for my warlord and RC.
I wiped out 5 stacks , to eventually be defeated by the last.

:balloon2:

Thanks guys. I'll try what you've suggested. This has been my best game so far decimating all the non-horde (and the british ones) forces, and I'd like to retain my empire. :charge:

Cheers

I've been sallying against them. I leave my hunters on the walls firing fire arrows and try to lure them in close enough to whittle them down with the hunters and towers. I doubt that it would work against six stacks but against 2 or 3 it helps especially if I have a strong enough force of heavy cav to sally out and crush their weakened inf.

Thanks guys for the advice. End the end I bribed the Romans to attack, and got them to whittle down their numbers. And then launched two full stacked armies of cavalry (mostly mercs & basic light cav), and wiping out all three hordes (except for a few family leaders that escaped). Went on to conquer the needed regions in less than an hour thereafter.

Fun, but I'm finding the sassinids alot more interesting with their almost unlimited money.

Just another note on stone wall sieges, keep your infantry away from the seige towers until they are at the walls, or you will get hammered by the ballistas they carry. I find keeping the infantry on the next section of wall ,just the other side of a stone tower keeps them close enough to rush over when it gets there. You might as well not bother with attacking seige towers with archers. keep them around the gate(s) to attack rams then once they are all out of action just pick off the enemy as they run around the walls to get to the seige tower. once the reinforcements are being sent to the tower you can usually rout the unit before it even gets close to your infantry!

I had been defending Constantinople from the Horde turn after turn. I managed to kill off all their foot soldiers as they were sent up the siege tower so they had nothing but cavalry left. :charge:

They still kept putting me under seige even though they had nobody to hold the ram or storm the walls. I didn't trust the auto-resolve so every couple of turns I had to fight a battle only to see the Horde immediately turn and run.

I did send an army of infantry and archers and reduced their numbers, but once my archers ran out of arrows their horse archers cut me to ribbons.

Eventually the city revolted and the Horde moved on. They're now outside Thesolonica and I fear the worst!

I'm playing the Selucid campaign right now, i dont even bother to put my forces on the walls, i just get the higher wall upgrades so they fire the ballistas and the fire thing by the gate. But how i defend against hordes of Egpyt and Parthia attacks is very symple, if i have about 6 phalanxes, i put 3 on each road, or all 6 on just one road if they come down the road.:duel:

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Originally Posted by WhiteProphecy

I'm playing the Selucid campaign right now, i dont even bother to put my forces on the walls, i just get the higher wall upgrades so they fire the ballistas and the fire thing by the gate. But how i defend against hordes of Egpyt and Parthia attacks is very symple, if i have about 6 phalanxes, i put 3 on each road, or all 6 on just one road if they come down the road.:duel:

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They are talking about BI not RTW 1.3

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Franks, M/M here...

If you have stone walls or higher, all you need are one or two missile units and three or four melee units of varying quality. (In one of my cases I had two peasants, levy spears and two merc. melee units, some half depleted.) Place all of them on the walls. If the enemy has towers, place them somewhat further away from their side until the tower parks. The stupid AI will send its infantry one by one and your units, with the support of the magic walls/towers/gates, will make easy meat grinding. ~:)


As for wooden walls, I abandoned the town after razing it to the ground and upping the taxes to very high. It revolted with a full stack garrison back to WRE. No more my problem. ~;)
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Reiterating what's been said, stone walls and above are well-nigh impregnable with a few decent melee infantry units, so if a settlement has wooden walls, upgrade them ASAP. If you can't, then the town is clearly not big enough to worry about anyway.

I've also found that jamming a bunch of spearmen in the gateway is great for if the gate is broken, as once the AI infantry is slaughtered, the cav will try to get in. The spearmen will stop them at the gate for long enough for wall defenders to come down over the enemy ladders and flank rather nastily (some berserkers of mine did this at one point - 3 Frankish family members died in about half a second of each other). Plus, the spearmen will hold the enemy just in the right place for buckets and buckets of boiling oil to cascade down...