Tactics Style

Oh my God! How can you people talk about "my armies are comprised of this and that and I usem in this and that way"?? There is no proper way to create an army! There is no proper formation or proper usage! Hell, I'll charge to a frontal melee uphill with horse archers against billmen if I can benefit from it!

Got carried away a bit, sorry 'bout that... :)

What I mean to say is that 90% of victory is in terrain, enemies army and the way he uses it. Only 10% is in abilities of your units. Adaptation to the current situation on the battlefield is what brings victory not Katatanks or Szekely or Longbowmen...
Read Sun Tzu! He derailed my thoughts from "ow these Swiss Pikemen are sooo nice..."

And didn't Sun Tzu spend a lot of time discussing the construction of a balanced army to achieve tactical flexibility, the proper equipping of troops, and the benefits of morale and discipline? Did he not rave about his halberdiers?? (Okay, not Swiss ones, but he did :bow: )

Well "Ping Fa" (Art of War) is, as I see it, all about Tao (the Way). And following Tao is to conquer without a fight, being honorable to your enemy, being fair to your troops. It doesn't say anything about "spear beats cavalry", because he is all about deception. Sun Tzu tells us to keep our units in state of orderly disorder so that the enemy cannot see the obvious (hmm, why does he have fast cavalry far out on his flanks I wonder... - that kind of obvious). Most of the book is about lay of the land, morale of troops and winning without combat in the first place. And the BIG point of that book is to being able to use your main force as a manouvering force and vice versa.

But hey, it's just me... The book was written about 2000 years ago, what do I know what he actually said? Reading Sun Tzu is just like reading Aristotel for example. It's language is archaic and poetic and it doesn't reaveal some long lost recipe for instant victory or instant understanding to the meaning of life.

If the opponent deploys very close to me I preffer to do a head on charge. I try to envelop the enemy so I tend to have a mixed center and cavalry hammering at the flanks. Horse archers are a lot of fun too, espescially when you have an all-out cavalry army. Isolating infantry units and hitting them from all sides, then retreating and repeat.

Tactics tend to work best when tailored to the enemy, and the nice thing about the pre-battle screen in VI is it lets you do that.

One of my favorite battles was as the English desperately defending Flanders from the yearly French assaults. One year I noticed that their initial troops on the field were almost all archers or crossbows, with just a couple of spear units. I put all my cavalry out first, and while deploying my army put them as close to the attacker position as possible, along with a few swordsmen to keep the spears busy, keeping the rest of my troops way back where reinforcements could reach them quickly. When the battle started I was right next to them, and my Hobilars and Royal Knights quickly overran their whole army before they could cause any real damage. They routed en masse and I started marching back to my other forces. His cavalry caught up with my rearguard as I was pulling back, though, but they were so demoralized after the first action that they immediately routed and his whole army withdrew.

Usually, though, I play pretty conservatively with a mixed infantry battle line (mostly spears) supported by archers, with cavalry guarding the flanks. Most factions have enough unit selection to get some variation of that and it's flexible enough to pull through in most situations.