Armoured Sergeants

[A Nerd]

Does anybody use them? I am chugging along in my current Venice campaign, about turn 35-40 and I have yet to build the proper structure to produce them. I am at the moment quite low on funds, but my sergeant spearmen with the chain mail upgrade are serving my armies just fine. They seem to be the same unit once the sergeant spearmen are armored in such a way. Am I missing something? Is there a benefit to armoured sergeants vs. sergeant spearmen this early in the game that I am missing? I realize that later you can armor up the armoured sergeants to heavy mail but otherwise I see no use for them. I fought a battle where I had sergeant spearmen against armoured sergeants and the former defeated the later quite handily. The battle could have gone either way. Just curious if someone had any observations on this topic.

[O'Hea]

As the Italian factions I never really invested much in them, since the Spear Militia are pretty solid and are much cheaper in terms of teching and recruitment costs. As most other factions though, I start building up to Armored Sergeants as soon as I can get the equivalent missile unit (crossbowmen, etc).

[A Nerd]

Cool. I often neglec the missle units. I can produce those crossbowmen with shields on thier backs but have yet to produce any. I don't really know how to use them well. I will probably put off building armored sergeants until I need the barracks to produce some heavies. The city in Greece is about to grow into a fortress! This is the first time I've played as an Italian faction and I must agree with you, those militia units are quite competant indeed. Really stickin' it to the Byz with them!

edit: Can you upgrade Italian milita units beyond mail/heavy mail. I know the papal states can upgrade their militia units, I think papal guard to plate armor.

[O'Hea]

I honestly don't know about Papal Guard, but those guys are a cut above Italian Spear Militia, at least as good as Armoured Sergeants. ISM can only upgrade to Heavy Chain, but they still do reasonably well through the late game if you support them well. And the Byzantines might be giving you a skewed idea of how strong they are, in vanilla those Byzantine Spearmen are absolutely garbage, one of the weakest spear units in the game.

And I really recommend you start training those crossbowmen, they have long range, a powerful armor-piercing attack, and high defense. As a beginner, you should probably deploy them just behind your Spear Militia so you don't risk getting them run down, but if you're confident in your ability to micro you can put them out front (direct line of fire=better accuracy=more kills) and manually move them back when the enemy gets near. I don't recommend using skirmish because this tends to make a mess of things. It really is surprising you haven't been using them, since normally they're the real killers in a Venetian army and the Militia are mostly there to protect them from cav and other infantry.

[dzidek]

The 3 spear formations are really close... they have the same attack value, the only difference is armour. Both armoured sergeants and italian spear militia can be ugraded to a lvl3 armour so a chainmail for a total of 15 armor. Sergeant speramen start with 0 armour and can only be upgraded to leather for a total of 11 armour. They are all trained and have normal discipline, and the same morale. But the armored sergeants have the biggest heat fatigue (4) so they are only usefull in cold Europe, sergant spermen get (2) and intalian spear militia gets (1) it the heat fatigue value. Furthermore italina spear militia gets the best ground modifiers scrub 1, sand 0, forest 2, snow 0. While the rest gets 1,-2,3,2. So it's best suited for desert combat.

[A Nerd]

Ha ha. I know, it's a little funny, but I tend to rely heavily upon infantry and calvary and neglect the skirmishers. My cities in the Byzintine theatre aren't larged enough to produce crossbows yet, but I will start to produce them in my armies for I am not at war with HRE and Sicily. The Byzs infantry is pretty garbage. I defeated a stack and a half with a stack of my own and wiped both of them out while taking few casualties myself. Left Theselonica open, which I am now seiging, and the remaining two cities they posses are poorly defended as well. Will probably take them awhile to rebuild some armies. There navy however, I just can't compete. On an aside, the Pope really likes you when you fight non-catholic factions. Usually I am excommunicated right away!

edit: thanks for the spearman stats. I think I will soon be at war with the turks and move east, north with HRE. I never knew they had different attributes for heat and scrub!