Tips for an Eastern Faction Noob

[Fish-got-a-Sniper]

Well as the title says, I have little experience in playing with an eastern faction. I was considering a campaign with either Parthia, Pontus, Armenia, or Bactria and I was wondering if anyone had any tips or advice on which one to choose as well as tips for using eastern styled units and how to face eastern style units. Also, any tips for how to stick with a campaign because I never seem to make it past the 240's.

[satalexton]

shooty. lots of shooty. dakka, more dakka and more dakka. just make sure there's something reasonably durable between your boyz and the humiez. pantodapoi works wonders, their choppas own.

Always throw in a handful of HA, and a kata or 2 to finish them off when you run out of shooty things. if it still doesn't work, tell everyone to WAAAGH!!! and hopefully the shooty would have killed enuf of them humiez to make them runz.

[stupac]

Well as the title says, I have little experience in playing with an eastern faction. I was considering a campaign with either Parthia, Pontus, Armenia, or Bactria and I was wondering if anyone had any tips or advice on which one to choose as well as tips for using eastern styled units and how to face eastern style units. Also, any tips for how to stick with a campaign because I never seem to make it past the 240's.

Each of those factions plays extremely differently. Bactria has one of the strongest mix of units available to it, can effectively equal the suleukids in infantry with good phalanxes and elites and has a good mix of archers and some excellent medium-heavy calvary too, plus elephants. Pahlava is pretty much horse archer dependent early on, so pretty much play like saka or sauromatae, mass horse archers with a few units of melee calvary to break the enemy once reduced. Hayasdan is similar, but has to rely a bit more on infantry which is not up to par with their seleukid foes. Pontus is interesting, early on they seem to have a very weak roster with not very many good units to draw on, they definitely require a little creative tactics. Once you expand though you get access to a good variety of units including skythian calvary and galatian infantry. The real trick with the east is to be ready to adapt to the wide variety of styles of all the enemies you will face, you have to quickly change from facing nomadic foes you can't pin down to rock solid greek phalanxes. I would say of all of them, Bactria or Pahlava would be the easiest, Bactria definitely if you don't have experience with steppe factions. They will still provide much more of a challenge than the other eastern greeks and the more developed empires of the west.

[Khazar_Dahvos]

I would have to say Pontus through my own expiience they have one of the hardest starting positions with some very interesting unit reqruitment. Have fun with any of them since they are all unique though!!!

[Cambyses]

I'll give you three tips:

1. Dont engage in melee till youve run out of arrows
2. Use the terrain, in ranged battles the hills are even more important.
3. Every unit in the game will rout once very tired+ and charged from multiple sides at once by decent cavalry

[Tabeia]

Use horse archers, the computer can't defeat horse archers, so it's extremely easy
Some katas(FMs) are also good to kill the remaining enemys, you can also flee the battle to replenish your arrows

Pontus don't get so many horse archers so you will have to use lots of mercenarys instead, as their initial troop selection is weak, you also start poor, so you will need to get some cities quickly, i like to get byzantium asap

[socal_infidel]

Use hit and run tactics with the horsearchers against Baktria or AS. Be proactive. Once you're at war, don't hide behind walls or in cities. That negates your strength. Send your horsearchers to seek out and engage incoming armies. Empty quivers. Retreat (if you're still too outnumbered to charge en masse and cause a chain rout). Repeat.

With Pahlava, I never bothered to train infantry in the early going aside from garrison duty. Send spies to open the gates. And again, during sieges, empty quivers and withdraw if you have to. Repeat until the numbers are on your side and you can mop up the depleted infantry.

In the early-going, against units like Eastern Skirmishers, Persian Archers, Hellenic Spearmen, Hellenic Levy Phalanxes, etc., a horsearcher unit can take out 100-125 units each battle before you have to retreat.

It can be tedious fighting so many battles, but this tactic is brutally effective. Especially considering how many units the AS can throw at you each turn.

With Pahlava, I conquered up to Persepolis from the AS using nothing but horsearchers and cataphracts. The only infantry units I trained or hired were to keep the peace and defend my newly-conquered cities. Infantry slow your armies down.

[Bouketsu]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this but remember, surrounding an enemy with missile units is a great tactic. Of course if your arches are all in typical line formation facing the enemy they can brace for impact, but that's not what they're meant to do. Firing at them head long you're just gonna hit shield and that eats up arrows with little casualties, especially against elites.

It takes more effort than normal but try to run circles around your enemy. If they have cavalry you'd might as well forget this strategy but figuring if you're in the east, you're gonna be against the AS a LOT and they specialize in slow, tough as nails pike men, which any archer unit can run circles around. They'll start dropping like flies and to also give you a tip, hold your fire. Don't let them waste arrows shooting at shields.

Finally, when you're on a hill, spread your archers out. I had to figure this out the hard way, because they would fire up at the enemy, then land on the other side into my own men firing at their other side. .-.;

Be creative with the tactics though, and when you're just starting out, be conservative with your ammunition, you only have so much and you don't have it in your budget to be pumping out soldiers every turn from the casualties you shouldn't be getting.

However, once you get a few mining settlements you'll be good to go for the rest of the game.

[tapanojum]

With horse archers, I sometimes make a straight line, and have them run in colums along the outside of an enemy army, and then running around the back to the opposide sides, and doing the same thing again. Of course most of the time, either a heavy cav will start chasing them, or infantry.

Ussually, battle ends up with half my cavalry running around the map trying to loose the enemy while the enemy army is completely disorganized and my Cataphracts isolate groups and tear them up.