Difficulty for Celts vs Romans...?

**aaronishappy** · 01-23-2011, 13:06

Hi, I'm playing as the Arverni and it's roughly 248BC. I decided to leave Belgium alone and make way into Italy, so I've already taken Tolosa, Massalia and now I'm on my way to Liguria. My plan is to sack Rome and maybe the whole peninsula then make headway to the Balkans. However, out of the 3 engagements I've fought with the Romans, I noticed it was considerably a good bit harder than fighting other Celts. I've won all of them, but, 200 Romans vs 800 Gauls, and I can kill all of them yet sustain 350 casualties... I consider myself a not-bad field commander, I've had battles where I fought 2000 other men but only lost 100 of my own, but this is a lot different. It also took much longer to kill the damn Romans. I know Romans were a lot tougher in real life, so I'm going to assume this is reflected in the game.

But can someone confirm this firstly :) And if this is the case, does anyone know any good tips for Gauls vs Romans? I don't think my 3 stacks will make it to Rome if they're this hard, and I haven't even engaged their 4 full stacks down along the line :)

**Lazy O** · 01-23-2011, 13:43

IM assuming you are facing pedites spam, even so, its not that hard to insta rout them. Bataroas and Celto Hellenics with Leuke Epos were what I used.

**antisocialmunky** · 01-23-2011, 16:07

Alpine axemen, the ones that are 200 in size pretty much shred heavy infantry.

**Lazy O** · 01-23-2011, 16:38

There are Rhaetics too. But I never found out where to recruit them, just found them as mercs. For 1300, Celtohellenics hold the line reallly well

**Biowulf** · 01-23-2011, 16:40

If you have gaesatae you should take advantage of their fear effect. They're not bad fighters, too.

**vollorix** · 01-23-2011, 17:39

You´d need some good healer traits and ancillaries for your generals on the Roman front - you might take heavy causalities, but the recovery rate makes, at least, partly for it. You don´t need superb troops to hold the line - levy spearmen do the job quite well on guard mod ( medium battle difficulty, of course ). Deal with their skirmishers first - Gaeroas in loose formation will take lot of damage, but they are spear armed infantry, so no problems with cavalry charges. Knock out Roman general(s), and their pathetic cavalry, bring your missile troos ( slingers for Triari + Pedites; expend the missiles of your shock infantry, aka Botroas + Axemen; bring some Leuce Epos too, to get them some range kills ) around the flanks and shredder them to pieces. Once they are decimated, their general dead, Velites routed - charge your fresh swordmen/axemen in, followed by a double charge from your Brihentin ( Bodyguards etc. - the more you charge, the "braver" will get your general, and the more chevrons he´ll get in short time, just "rally" before impact, to prevent him to be nailed on some random spear ) + Leuce Epos, which should have depleted their javelines by know. A unit of "wild" infantry, aka Gaesatae or Nakes Spearmen, won´t harm, but is not nesassery, imo. Oh, and if you play on BI.exe be carefull of Romans performing "shieldwall" - a nightmare i have experienced couple of times. Good luck :)

**aaronishappy** · 01-23-2011, 18:58

Thanks all.

Where/how can I recruit the Gaesatae? And a whole host of other units for that matter? At the moment all I can recruit from my towns is Lugoae, Bataroas, Vollorix and Iaosatae. Makes pretty boring armies, I can afford the odd merc or so. I'm in the process of building 4 Dauerdanochs (sp), which I've heard allows reforms and thus new units...

Yes, I'm new to EB, but I've looked about on recruiting different types of units and apart from how to recruit foreign units I haven't had any luck.