What is your fighting style?

[Dead Guy]

If I am forced to attack, I split my army in two similar groups, split them to two sides and try to swing one around behind or to the direct side of the enemy. If you do this right sometimes the enemy wont know which to face and with minor movement on your end they will constantly keep rotating back and forth between your two army groups which wears them out. This works espeically well when one or both of your army groups are in trees and can become hidden. Everytime you move one of your army groups slightly and they become visable, the enemy moves. Then when the enemy turns, let your army group they turned to go hidden again and move the other army group and the enemey typically moves back to face them, keep repeating and they get tired. I know... its kinda cheap but you can get a lot of heroic victories this way. I learned this tactic from someone else on the forums, but I couldnt find their original post to give them credit.

I resort to this tactic when I face a strong force with lots of archers that retreats to a hill. You can suffer great losses storming some hills, especially if the enemy has quality infantry up there. First time I did it, it was pretty much inadvertantly though. I wanted to lure the enemy down, or gain local archer superiority on a flank before being forced to assault, the flank was incidentally covered in forest and had another smaller hill on it. So I moved all my archers to that forest, with some spears and naginatas behind, and kept all my katanas to the enemy's front. If he moved to fire on my katanas, I withdrew them so he would be forced to leave the hill and open himself to counter attack on flat ground. As you describe, the enemy were running back and forth across the hill he was stationed on and tired the troops, this happened pretty much at the same time as I was luring out some of his archers with my archers in the forest, and eventually he went for my flanking force, and I ran my katanas up the hill, though he was smart and split his force to counter my potential hammer and anvil. I still lost quite a few katanas fighting uphill, despite his infantry having orange or even red feet (i.e. tired, very tired I guess).

So hills are still very effective, just not for archery.

I, too, love those hills with limited access points, chokepoints even. Yari Ashigaru in spearwall can really hold the line on those slopes, while flanking and enveloping with hidden units becomes much easier. Alternatively you can force the AI to move some units out of the melee to react to cavalry threats for example, and fire on those units now in the open with your archers.

[aimlesswanderer]

My armies tend to be heavily spears/naginatas, katanas, and some monks now I'm Uesugi. Plus a few cavalry, and a few archers. I love melee, though if the enemy has lots of archers I prefer to let them come after me. Archers being a bit dumb doesn't help their cause. If they won't come to me, I try and get my units as close as possible while getting shot up as little as possible. Once in hand to hand range I'm normally ok.

My brother as Chokosabe had 100% samurai archer armies. He found attacking was sometimes problematic.