Longbowmen Stakes

Okay, I’m just not seeing it. How do I put stakes infront of my longbowmen?

You can only deploy the stakes when your army is in Deployment Mode, before you click the "Start Battle" button. Also, you can't deploy stakes on certain terrain. For example, I have trouble deploying stakes on roads or in front of bridges.

Good to know. Thanks! :)

Be careful to choose their placement wisely and remember it. When I used this for the first time, I forgot about them and ran my general into them on a chase. It kills even your own horsies.

Yeah true, eaven your own cavalry is not imune to them...

Did you knoe:
you can put them bahind your castle gates ;)
If you place two longbowmen just right on top of wall you can eaven stake the ground on two locations outside the wall ;)

And yes, you can place them infront of bridges ;)

One more tip:
Place your stakes, then when the battle begins move your bowmen back and put swordmen on (just behind) teh stakes!!! :smash:

It took a while to learn how to use them, as they seemed to hinder the basic hammer and anvil defence I mostly use... Slightly modified, they proved one of the few ways of stopping ueber cavalry charges, as everyone knows :).

One fun way to use them in bridge battles is to position the stakes near the bridge on both sides, so that when the enemy cavalry routs and the routing horses miraculously push through from your defensive line, they'll run to to the stakes and get killed, you know, something like this:

The enemy side
________________
__ |XX|__________ The river
> \____/ <
Your side

where the '<' are the stakes, the XX is the bridge packed full of AI horse archers and the U is the defensive formation full of anti-cavalry units at the end of the bridge.

Great for "chivalrous" strategies, if you want to get rid of routing family members and cavalry. If they're dead, they can't be released, right?

Good strat.

However if they're dead you can't ransom. Dude ! Where's my gold ?

The funny thing is that cavalry can die evan when riding on the stakes on the oppsite side (the side without the spikes)

About the ransom thing, the point is, if you want to have a Chivalrous general, you'll let the prisoners go. How chivalrous the tactic itself is, that's another question...

what i've noticed is that placing them under loose formation seems to work better than when in tight formation in regards of gaps between stakes placed by adjacent units