largest battle you've fought

I just completed my first VI campaign as the vikings. Skål! When I took out every faction except the Irish, thier island was untouched and they had 12 almost full stacks sitting about on the little island. not much threat seeing as i had all of england and more but i wanted to make things a bit.. interesting. so i disabled auto save, gave the irish a few more turns to build up, and made two stacks of mostly elite vikings with all my faction hiers in the stacks and shipped them off to ireland to do some bloody work. When they landed every last son of ireland was moved into the province and next turn they hit me. I had a small hill to defend and two waves of men. They irish had about 11 waves and a surprising amount of cav. Damn but that was some battle, they hit me and retreated over and over again. battle must have taken far over an hour. the field was thick with dead irish. they never brought thier very last wave in which was good cus my last thin line that kept the field was exhausted and weak. I never seen any battle close to it. Huzzah! Anyone had something like this?:smash:

Hi Lycan

I have had a couple of similar ones, with different results.

In VI, my small Saxon force got completely overwhelmed by the Irish hordes - just ran out of energy basically...all of my huscarles got made into Irish pincushions (seemed no end of Irishmen wanting to hurl pointy things at my guys). Wound up being a bit "Little Big Horn" - they just kept closing in all around us and massacred the entire force.

In another campaign, as Sicily (in Late), I had just under 2000 troops in a province that was attacked by some 9000 Danes. My guys held the high ground doggedly, with every arbalest/crossbowman/archer loosing every arrow in their quivers before being rotated out. We won the day, and the Danes came back the next year with a new force around 7000.....and we did it all over again. These two battles took literally forever to get through.

I set my defensive position very close to the edge of the map from which my reinforcements arrived (and far from the AI's reinforcement point), and high on a hill. so the AI troops had to march a long way to the fight and then go uphill, all of which helped. I also had a couple of troops of Turcopoles harrying their reinforcements as they appeared - towrads the end, some broke and fled before even reaching my main force.

A couple years ago, I was playing a campaign as the Egyptians (MTW/VI, Early, Normal, Domination mode). I was by far the most powerful faction: In addition to owning the "Southeast Triangle" (the lands anchored by Constantinople, Georgia, and Egypt), I also occupied North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, Sicily, Naples, the better part of central Europe, and the eastern steppes. Imams were everywhere spreading the teachings of Mohammed, and most people under my rule worshiped Allah with a fervor that was unmatched. By the year 1230, I was well on my way to winning the game.

Now don't ask me how I managed it, but I actually forgot the Mongols were coming. :wall: As a result, I had stationed only a modest garrison in Khazar--maybe 500 troops at most. :oops: (I should probably also mention at this point that I hadn't saved the game in almost 20 years.)

Let me tell you, it quite a rude shock to suddenly see the message about the Mongols appearing. (My then-roommates were more than a little amused to hear me utter a string of expletives that normally would've never left my mouth--and probably would've made a sailor blush too! :blush:) So the GH had arrived, and immediately ran over my garrison in Khazar with little trouble. I vowed revenge, however.

It was then that I first utilized a tactic I'd read about previously, but had yet to try myself: "spamming" Jihads. All across the Caliphate, Imams called for the heathens to be driven out of Khazar....and my people answered. I trained no less than 10 Jihad markers (maybe even more, but 10 for sure), most of them in my hinterlands of the Triangle. Zeal was high in most of my provinces, so I had little trouble picking up more men as the Jihad armies passed through my territory.

When all was said and done, an Egyptian army of some 35,000 troops marched into Khazar to reclaim what they held was theirs. Facing them was a Mongol army of smaller size, though it was still formiddable (around 18-19,000 I think). After a bloody battle that literally lasted all day--I started fighting around 10 a.m., and didn't stop til around 8:00 that night (with maybe a total of 1 hour's worth of mealtime and bathroom breaks)--I finally wrested victory from the Khan, forcing his men to flee.

I should note that I've had very few battles that approached anywhere near the scale of that one, however--I could probably count on one hand the ones that have. (Not coincidentally, those others usually involved the GH as well. ~;)) Most of my larger engagements are relatively modest in comparison, with maybe a total of 10,000 troops in both armies combined.

I should also note that I no longer spam Jihads. After doing it 5-6 times, I realized it was simply too cheesy and too much of an exploit.

Depends on how you define large. Most men on both sides, over 100.000 (and about 99% of them was mine :charge: ), most men in a battle fought fairly and manually, about 5000 vs 9000 and largest the auto-calc battle was about 25.000 vs 20.000 (mongol horde, I usually auto-calc those due to the very long time those battles would take).

For me it's probably the usual Turks vs the Mongols in Georgia and Armenia when they first appear. Some of those battles have lasted, on average, for about 1 1/2 hours with reinforcements continuously being moved in on both sides.

The largest battle I've fought (IIRC...) has been in PMTW, where my 3000 Englishmen (in Prussia, I think) were attacked by 27,000 Russians. However troop quality was heavily in my favour, and I whupped their skinny little peasant behinds with my first 16 units, and most of them ran screaming.

I've had a few 15k vs 15k size of battle, but they just take too long, wave after wave of reinforcements.

In one particularly silly battle, it ended with that little message in the corner of the screen saying "Reinforcements: You have 145 units waiting to enter the battle". Overkill, I thought, in hindsight :beam:

The biggest battles for me are always against the Horde or the Egyptian (fielding loads of crap units).

Typical Horde battle is usually the entire horde (between 15,000 and 20,000) against whatever I have been able to muster (abouty 8,000 at least mostly FS and CS, arbalesters and a few cavalry units to chase mongol warriors and routers). The most tedious part of the game if you ask me (specially since there is no way to win with autocalc.) since that kind of battle last hours. It can be even worse if you make a silly mistake at the end and evenyually loose after so much time rather than getting rid of the GH in one stroke you end up perhaps just killing four of five thousand cause all the units that have left the field running are recovered. Moreover it gives the GH a chance to reemerge in Khazar later in the game since thay have occupied that province... :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall:

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Originally Posted by Jxrc

The biggest battles for me are always against the Horde or the Egyptian (fielding loads of crap units).

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In the case of the Egyptians, and other factions fielding mobs of peasants, modding out peasants will help. In the case of the Horde fielding alot of their warriors and naptha throwers in the first battle (making them predictable and allowing you to adjust your reinforcements to suit) there's not alot that can be done about it.

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Originally Posted by Manco Capac

In the case of the Egyptians, and other factions fielding mobs of peasants, modding out peasants will help.

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Importing the muster field from VI work very well too. The only province were peasants will be common afterwards is Provance, due to that bonus valour.

The muster field was designed for that very purpose, to prevent the AI from peasant spamming, and it works. The VI campaign has many improvements such as a better brothel/tavern tech tree, better farming structure and scalable realistically sized bodyguard units, it's a pity those weren't integrated into the main campaign. Personally, because I find the peasant units to be completely useless, I mod them as only appearing as part of revolts, crusades and uprisings.

I had a campaign one time where I was playing as the Italians. I crusaded to and took Palestine with hardly any pushback from the Egyptians (I had caught the Sultan with his pants down). Knowing the Gypos were never going to leave me in peace, I started spamming spears, archers and militia. I had the entire Venetian trade alliance (Italian peninsula - papal lands, Balkan states, Switz, Tyrolia, Provence, Toulouse, Aragaon & Valencia) spamming every unarmoured man I could send to the holy land. In the end, I probably had about 8000, men stationed there, some of actual quality. After about 6 turns, the Egyptians declared multiple jihads. They invaded with a staggering 27,000 men, mostly camels and peasants. Luckily, I had some good defensive terrain to stand upon. It took me over 45 minutes just to queue my reinforcements in the proper order. The battle itself started at about 10:15PM and raged until 5 in the morning. I only paused to go grab another beer or to relieve myself of one. Needless to say, it was crazy. When I fiinally finished, I could barely think straight. Saving the game was the first thought in my mind, which I did, them stumbled off to bed. Unfortunately, I forgot my wife had signed us up to go out with another couple that day, and she was HOT when I came to bed.... 3 hours later she woke me up to start getting ready... :dizzy2: Now, I'm in the same camp as Ironside... if the battle looks as though it will take longer than an hour to fight, I auto-calc it.

@Don Corleone: :laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4:

I've been in battles in the past that were similarly tortuous affairs lasting up to, and sometimes beyond, an hour. The kind of battles you desperately want to get away from, but can't! :whip:

The worst is when you fight off an epic Mongol invasion with large numbers of casualties on each side, but you win it. Then the following year four or five full Mongol stacks slide back into the province and you have to do it all over again... and whether out of madness or just being a glutton for punishment you do it... again... then those five Mongol stacks slide back in again, this time joined by another one or two!!! :dizzy2:

At that stage, probably around about 3:00am, it's autocalc time, even for the most zealous of anti autocalc players... and then you lose, so all of that was for nothing... :wall:

My largest battle this far does not even come near the size of most other battles mentioned here, but it was stupid enough for me to write about it.

I was playing as the Italians (this was before I DLed XL Mod) in the Early era, Normal difficulty. The game was more of an experiment than anything else. I went for a very unique tactic: Create massive armies of peasants and blitz. Every single battle counted some 1000+ men on my side and 400- on the enemy side, as I fought at least three battles a year I auto-calculated them all. I won roughly 50% of the battles.
The climax came in the 1120-s when the Pope re-emerged with some 5000 men of good quality (FMAA, Milita Segreants, Archers and even some Feudal Knights). His army faced my army 2000 utter crap units (100% peasants). I decided to fight for a change.

I'll skip the tactic part as I can't really remember exactly what happened, but basically I lined my men up, and then took a few really bad punches. My troops spent 75% of their time routing, being rallied, marching, routing again.

In the end, I won thanks to the time limit (it was set to...I don't know, but more than an hour). Around 650 casualties on my side, and about 1100 on the Papal side. 2000 men killing 1100, that's some nice results. I won the day by running away time after time:clown:

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Originally Posted by Manco Capac

In the case of the Horde fielding alot of their warriors and naptha throwers in the first battle (making them predictable and allowing you to adjust your reinforcements to suit) there's not alot that can be done about it.

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Kind of fondly remember the time when the Horde appeared with loads of siege equipment ... Remeber once when their first wave consisted in 14 catapults and trebuchets and 2 MHC units (silly how the AI does that whe attacking) ... Easy battle (especially if as I do you play with the time limit on) ... Casualties less than about 10, killed 300, thousands of prisoners (most of whom did not even reach the battlefield since there was no way I would have disrupted those nice and usuless catapults) ... Probably the only battle that I manage to win playing with full acceleration after I had killed the khan (a MHC or MHA shows up, is shot at by arbalesters, runs away - repeat as many times as necessary ...) ...

These were the days (before the first patch if I remember correctly)... now they only show up with a few mortars and that's it ...

Don't forget that he who fights and runs away...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Lives to run away another day! :beam:

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Originally Posted by Jxrc

Kind of fondly remember the time when the Horde appeared with loads of siege equipment ... Remeber once when their first wave consisted in 14 catapults and trebuchets and 2 MHC units (silly how the AI does that whe attacking) ... Easy battle (especially if as I do you play with the time limit on) ... Casualties less than about 10, killed 300, thousands of prisoners (most of whom did not even reach the battlefield since there was no way I would have disrupted those nice and usuless catapults) ... Probably the only battle that I manage to win playing with full acceleration after I had killed the khan (a MHC or MHA shows up, is shot at by arbalesters, runs away - repeat as many times as necessary ...) ...

These were the days (before the first patch if I remember correctly)... now they only show up with a few mortars and that's it ...

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I remember that. I used to avoid the siege equipment, leaving it alone on the field, and that way the mongol reinforcements would come on at a trickle, instead of 8 units of MHC coming on at once. Shameless AI exploit! :embarassed:

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Originally Posted by Manco Capac

Shameless AI exploit! :embarassed:

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Shameless indeed:laugh4: But was a great way to avoid those long battle ... and to get the skille last stand and skilled defender vices (see the catapults in the GH stack. Withdraw all your troops except a few spearmen and arbalesters ...
A crushing victory nonetheless !!!!
:charge: :charge: :charge: :viking: :viking: :viking: :viking: :viking:

Perhaps not the largest, but clearly the battle when I was outnumbered the most.

The battle in PMTW against armies consisting mainly of Rebel Pikemen ( in terms of 'vanilla' MTW they would be equal to the Chivalric Seargants).

https://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b...superbitwa.jpg


It was also most unusual since the Wallachians fought their neighbours losing most of their 8 000 or so. The second enemy was erazed and in the end I lost only ... 7 dead killing 3000 and capturing another 600+.

Basically I stayed on my side sending few scouts to guide my artillery which killed 300+ men and to watch the tide of the gigantic battle changing slowly to the Wallachian side.

I shot anyone daring to cross the river so it was indeed bloodless victory, though I felt like a bug watching two lions killing each other... I would be crushed - the odds were just to big...:inquisitive:

Wow, cegorach; that's insane. :jawdrop: I can't believe you won that battle....talk about divide and conquer!

for me - i had a battle with about 90,000 participants in all.

basically, i did the conan cheat and became the rebels. then i moved all the troops to khazar, with the intention of sitting there for the entirety, raiding just to piss off all the other factions.

this did require a lot of dead ringer cheat, but i hired merceneries practically every turn, and if there was a stack in europe with no heir in it, chances are it would be bribed. all these troops were moved back to khazar, and if you add this to the amount of troops i got every time someone rebelled, that is a lot.

i reckon that my army contained pretty much every unit in the game, except knights hospitaller - i made special efforts to bribe armies with rare units, and the Italians were the only crusader faction who didn't crusade so i couldnt have access to the hospitaller.

the novogrod, turks and egyptians all sent huge armies stupidly into khazar and were beaten back with ease. the golden horde were repelled with ease (at least from khazar). however, in 1432 they staged a revival and attacked my army.

REBELS

General: Lord Comnenus, Duke of Pereyslavl, 9*

Troops 81, 463

GOLDEN HORDE

General: Khan Ogadai V, 5*

Troops 11, 220

I won the battle (it took about 15 mins to load) and 45mins or so to fight. I simply put all my archers on and skirmished, and the mongs spent a lot of the time routing. easy. then my cpu crashed. from memory, i left them with 3000 or so men left (i always killed prisoners) and lost 800 or so of my own.

Biggest I've had was when I was the Byz and the last provence I had to take was Rome controlled by the Rebels. However, the Pope re-emerged ended up a 15,000 vs 25,000 slugfest.

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Originally Posted by Innocentius

The climax came in the 1120-s when the Pope re-emerged with some 5000 men of good quality (FMAA, Milita Segreants, Archers and even some Feudal Knights). His army faced my army 2000 utter crap units (100% peasants). I decided to fight for a change.

I'll skip the tactic part as I can't really remember exactly what happened, but basically I lined my men up, and then took a few really bad punches. My troops spent 75% of their time routing, being rallied, marching, routing again.

In the end, I won thanks to the time limit (it was set to...I don't know, but more than an hour). Around 650 casualties on my side, and about 1100 on the Papal side. 2000 men killing 1100, that's some nice results. I won the day by running away time after time:clown:

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2000 peasants and "winning" vs cav? :inquisitive: It's clearly easier on normal than expert.
My biggest (that is the largest numerical superiority) loss was with 4000 UM and peasants vs 800 rebels, a lot of them regular steppe cav. It was a slaughter. While the UM did quite well, the peasants routed almost always after the initial charge, causing chain routs.
And it was quite good quality on those troops, as they were Jihad waste (was experimenting, about 70% of my total troops were from Jihads in that campaign).

Edit: Jihad waste = silver/gold armour with morale upgrades

Well, with "even some" I meant one unit:clown:
After watching the replay, I can now tell that most of the killing was done in the very start of the battle, then my troops mostly fled, were rallied, fled and rallied over and over again.

Had a long one last night while mopping up in my VI Scots campaign. I'm pretty much finished, just killed off the Mercians and have the Welsh isolated. The Saxons re-emerged, with several stacks in Welsh territory and a few in the left over rebel Mercian lands. Took out the smaller stacks, then the Saxons invaded Hwicce from Guent. 17,000 troops, no upgrades but a lot of mounted nobles, celtic warriors, and armoured spearmen. I only had about 1,200 troops, but they were all teched and had pretty high valour, so I wasn't really worried. Took forever, since I had to be careful managing fatigue. The battle ran for about 4 hours, with breaks for beer and recycling. Wouldn't have been so bad, except this started around 11pm. ~:doh: The missus was not pleased when I crawled into bed at 3:30. Oh well. I was dreading the eventual fight to eliminate those stacks, they did me a favor by allowing me to defend.

The Saxons had 17,000 men in a single battle? In a VI campaign? :inquisitive: That's not a typo, is it? (Because otherwise, that's one hell of a re-emergence!)

It's not a typo, and it wasn't even the whole re-emergence. I had killed off the Mercians first (killed off the royal line, not conquered all provinces), so there were a few rebel provinces scattered about. I was working on both those and the Saxons (who took out the Welsh in the meantime), when the Mercians re-emerged in both rebel and Saxon lands (I had spies going for unrest). The Saxons died off quickly from that, and the Welsh made a decent-sized reapperance in a couple of provinces. So I killed off the Mercian line at the same time I caused rebellions in some Welsh lands, and the Saxons reappear in 5 provinces with tons of stacks, most of them in Defet, Guent, and Sumorsaete. They kicked the Welsh out of Defet, I took West Saexe and Sumorsaete from them, and then they attacked Hwicce.

The large number of rebel provinces fed this. When the Mercians died off there were some large rebel stacks left over, both ex-Mercian and ex-Welsh, and these were assimilated into the re-emergence, along with a decent sized chunk of new troops (mostly mounted nobles :sweatdrop:). Fortunately there weren't a lot of huscarles left over, I don't think I would have won if the first wave had significant numbers of them (they only had 2 units in this fight). For a bunch of Saxons, the army had a definite Welsh feel to it.

It's been a fun campaign, ever since I moved south into Saxon/Mercian/Welsh lands, it's been a whack-a-mole game with re-emergences, since there was a lot of province turnover before I started the invasion. I didn't build enough troops to just steamroll everything all at once, so I'm guessing it's my fault, but it's been fun. All that's left is Guent/Defet(Saxon), Poius/Guined(Welsh), and a little naval invasion to Domon(Viking) for the win. Then I can finally start that Irish game I've been wanting to try.

With the release of M2TW, I was browsing these forums to get an impression of the game and saw this thread. So while it has been a while, I do remember one truely epic battle. One point I must make first is I used unlimited ammunition so this did make the battle slightly easier.

The first was when I defended Khazar from the mongol invasion of 35k with about 4000 stout englishmen. My army only contained 15 units of billmen and the rest in longbowmen. The battlefield actually suited this army as I was able to set up a half-square snugly between two large patches of forest and against one edge of the map.

Subutai died in the first wave to a well aimed volley from 5 units of longbowmen. But the mongols kept coming and coming and coming. After the first few waves, their archers changed their aim from my billmen to my longbowmen, but fortunately I was able to bring in new units to replace battle losses. The monhgols made a few attacks on my flanks through the forest, but they were no match for my billmen in the woods. Likewise, the few charges on my front ranks were repulsed.

Mostly, they just rode up and milled around in front of my army for easy slaughter. Finally, the infantry came, but they too were easily exterminated. This went on for about 4 hours and I could clearly see the range of my longbows as the area in front of my army was carpeted with dead horses and men.

It was with relief more than anything when I finally got the message that they were retreating.

One other battle was in the VI campaign. A massive army (15k) had attacked one of my newly captured provinces and my only defenders was a single stack. I decided to sell their lives dearly. This battle lasted about 3 hours, yet I actually won that battle. I still have a screenshot of the final results.

EDIT - I remembered my Photobucket account.

https://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y2...ed/valhala.gif

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Originally Posted by Qilue

One other battle was in the VI campaign. A massive army (15k) had attacked one of my newly captured provinces and my only defenders was a single stack. I decided to sell their lives dearly. This battle lasted about 3 hours, yet I actually won that battle. I still have a screenshot of the final results.

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With teched-up Joms Vikings, that's not a surprising result! :medievalcheers: Those types of battles are lots of fun, you know you have the superior troops, you just need to use them wisely for them to last the whole battle.

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Originally Posted by drone

With teched-up Joms Vikings, that's not a surprising result! :medievalcheers: Those types of battles are lots of fun, you know you have the superior troops, you just need to use them wisely for them to last the whole battle.

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Lucky with the weather though, a blizzard and your troops will not go over exhausted, due to the armour upgrades. Truly a pain.