Compendium: (under construction)

[Lord Preston]

Does everyone remember the first historical battle on M2, the English versus the French?

What deflects the charge, besides the stakes, is before you even approach the enemy, a hail of armour piercing missile fire tears these horsemen to shreds. Granted, those were rather good longbowmen, but good crossbowmen or massed javelins can accomplish the same thing, or better; they usually have much more punch than an arrow, and crossbows in particular seem to be very, very dangerous to charge towards, providing they fire at the correct time.

EDIT: Of course, perhaps any missile troop works better en masse. Don't just use one or two... make a line of these guys and watch the missiles fly!

True, some of your late xbowmen might not be able to retreat behind the line in time, but if you spread crossbows lengthwise (helps them all aim directly anyway, no crossbows in the rear...) they can more easily disappear behind a line of spearmen, who take the rest of the charge. Then they can continue firing at a safe distance, providing your spearmen are in a deep formation which leaves gaps to fire into and helps them keep formation when charged.

Best advice of all:

Try a bunch of custom battles, spearmen and missile units versus a bunch of cavalry and infantry. Play around with the units until you get the hang of them, and learn to cause the most damage. Win the battle!

Guess this was in reply to my post. Took me ages to win that battle

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I wasn't backing away from the spikes to give my archers the extra time to shoot while the enemy troops were slowed moving through the spikes

Typically how many missile units do you use? Early on (say < turn 30) using a european faction I only have 4 X-bow in a stack (usually < 12 units in stack till economy is up and running) as most of my gold goes towards replacing infantry to win seige fights.

Maybe this gets more effective as the ages go on, without looking at unit stats I would suspect the effectivness increases due to:

1. Early on units are typically un-armoured or low-armour so difference between AP and none-AP is minor.
2. Early on I think units are typically quicker so cavalry close quicker giving you less shots.
3. The improvement in missile damage over the ages helps more than the defensive improvements cav/inf get (while also potentially being slower) with AP reducing the armour value, skill not counting leaving only shield upgrades that are fully utilized yet can still be reduced by firing position.
4. Better trained troops so lines last longer (not as much death on contact or quickly routing) so more time to move missiles out to a flank to shoot into the rear of enemy troops. Using militia/early low quality trrops they typically die/rout so quick I don't have time to get missiles onto the flank making high shock better.

I remember some of my first games with England, there famous for longbowmen so I made use of them... i'd have 6 to 10 units in my armies, awesome for field fights but I ended up with most stacks having only 5 so I could do seige fights better.