Tips dealing with pike phalanxes?

[panten]

I believe Phalanx-dominated armies are more a pain in the butt to fight than other armies, and somehow the engine seems to interpret phalanx units always to my disadvantage. Having them myself they get molested and cavalry just walks right through them. If I don't have them myself, they molest my troops and my cavalry dies in droves if they stay for more than the charge in the back.

In my Roman campaign it's the first time I had to fight strategically and tactically to gain an advance and counter the phalanx-full stacks the Seleucids throw at me. It's too early for you to have access to horse arches but taking Kallatis has been the best move I have made for my campaigning in the east as it gave me access to angry Scythians with bows and horses. Together with some Leuce Epos I use them to basically "seek and destroy", to hunt small units of phalanxes down before they join other troops and kill generals whenever they are dumb enough to wander around with only two or three units. I also use them to randomly lay siege to cities to engage relieve-forces or to sack them and cripple their war economy.

In battle, relying mostly on a somewhat "historical" army composition, it's actually challenging to engage a whole army of pikes without risking too many casualties, especially when my own troops are green as Irish plains and they have atleast several silver chevron untis. In sieges I try to single out units, pepper them with spears from behind, encircle them, charge them, make them rout and chop them to pieces before the next units arrives. In open battle it's harder, especially when he's brought some other decent troops. I usually sacrifice my Hastati to pin them down and take a beating while my other units hopefully can make a turn around and engage them from the flanks or allow my cavalry to maneuver into their rear and finish them off there.

I also use defensive chokepoints when I march my armies around to avoid landing in the middle of a forest where I can't see anything, or to defend at the bottom of a hill. Recently I had to engage a veteran pike army near a bridge. I hired a merceneary phalanx as sacrificial lamb and to pin them down long enough to allow my skirmishers and Cretan archers to cross the river and launch missile mayhem in the back of the army. Protected by some Pedites and my cavalry they made some decent killing but I still had to engage them hand to hand. Medium Phalanxes with loads of chevrons are not going to break without horses trampling them into the ground - bridges being bridges that was hard to do - so I still had a lot of hand-to-hand combat where I was actually driven back, positive thing being that I finally could charge in and finish them off.

It is an interesting learning curve though - never having played as Roman so far into the campaign before it is interesting to test out units and tactis that use mostly Roman units and work against the Phalanxes of the Arche.