Simple Tactics for Simple Folk

[Trithemius]

I had a couple of enemy stacks attack a settlement I had taken in a naval landing party raid - they seemed to have rather a lot of Parrott guns and blew my defenders around quite a bit!

[quadalpha]

The hordes of bog standard AI levy infantry seem to preferentially target your most expensive line infantry in a stand-up fight, so I've taken to deploying them a bit recessed/on the flanks.

The early AI armies of spear levy and levy infantry can be countered by an army of similar composition if you flank with your spears and set your levy infantry to skirmish away from their charging spears (needs a bit of micromanagement and room to manoeuvre). When your spears are through with their line, engage their spears with your shooters to fix them while your spears hurry and charge them in the back. Of course you should look to have fixed any enemy cav/general before this.

[Kurisu]

Is it just me, or do your gunpowder units no longer indiscriminately shoot your own troops in the back? Not that there aren't still friendly fire kills, but it seems like parts of a unit will actually hold fire if there's a mass of your guys in their direct line of sight. Or at least they seem somewhat smarter about it than previously in Sengoku S2. Something I thought I noticed last play.

If so, that makes all spear/gun tactical combinations far easier to manage.

[Peasant Phill]

Is it just me, or do your gunpowder units no longer indiscriminately shoot your own troops in the back? Not that there aren't still friendly fire kills, but it seems like parts of a unit will actually hold fire if there's a mass of your guys in their direct line of sight. Or at least they seem somewhat smarter about it than previously in Sengoku S2. Something I thought I noticed last play.

If so, that makes all spear/gun tactical combinations far easier to manage.

I can confirm this.

[frogbeastegg]

On my completed hard Choshu campaign, I was winning my battles averaging around 200 losses against 2,300+ kills. I destroyed the entire enemy stack each and every time, and on many occasions destroyed two entire stacks in a single battle. Japan was covered in commemorative statues!

I've found Parrott guns to be the most important unit. When I fight without them, the AI sits in its starting deployment and will not move at all. That lets me surround it easily and attack with strong advantage regardless of relative army composition. As soon as I add a Parrott gun to my army, the AI will come to me every single time no matter what. Whilst that does mean it gets blasted to bits by shells, it also means it tries to flank and adjust its formation to match mine. IMO that makes it the lesser of two evils - at least I feel like as I am playing against something.

I only used four unit types in the entire campaign: levy spears, levy infantry, line infantry, parrott guns. Well, I threw in a pair of US Marines for my final battle just for the sake of getting the steam achievement. :cough: I started out with 6 levy inf and 4 levy spears, then swapped the levy inf for line inf when I could afford to, then added 2 parrot guns as soon as I could afford that (reduced levy spear to 2 at this point), then life was easy street. I made sure to research kneel fire ASAP. Form a line 3 men deep and 6 or 8 units long, turn on guard mode and kneel fire, wait. Place a parrot gun on each flank, begin bombarding the enemy line as soon as it comes into range. Trigger the arty's special abilities each time they come off cooldown. Always aim for where the line is thickest to maximise chances of hitting something, and change targets as soon as the unit dips below 40% strength and/or gets a good distance away from the main blob. Let the levy spears and/or any extra line inf guard the flanks. A very battered army arrives in rifle range, my men open fire and pour bullets into the enemy without need for direction from me, massive casualties for the enemy. Occasionally they will manage to reach my lines and engage in melee - that's fine. Line inf is decent in a melee, and it will be facing tattered remnants which it can easily beat. This is why guard mode is on: I don't want my soldiers breaking formation to chase routing enemy. Later, I added another parrot gun or two, and filled out the rest of my slots with more line inf. I used that extra line inf to guard my flanks; anything about 8 units makes my main line too unwieldy.

It's not exactly a case of camping. I moved my infantry around a bit to react to enemy moves, generally seeing off cavalry on my flanks and then shifting my flanking forces around to fire into the main enemy line. The difficulty is, parrot guns are very slow and take time to set up. Attempting to move them forward wastes the advantage if the AI is coming to me anyway. Moving the infantry line too far ahead of the guns wastes potential bombardment time. Staying mostly still is clearly much more efficient - and boring. It's the style of warfare.

When faced with siege battles, I'd choose to maintain the siege instead of assaulting. The AI would attempt to sally as soon as its turn came around. I'd then blow them to smithereens in a field battle. I did a few successful assaults but when comparing the efficiency of the two tactics, it was clear repeating my usual field tactic was far superior.

When defending a castle, I plonked the guns at the highest points I could find without blocking their field to view with too many walls. I put my rifles on the inner-most walls, and the levy units on the outermost. I blasted the enemy as they moved up to the walls, then let my levies slow the enemy down whilst my rifles shot over their heads. If any units made it to the final set of walls, they were so weakened and scared my line infantry easily saw them off in melee.

You might be wondering why I didn't get bombarded by the AI's artillery. It's obsessed with wooden cannons, which it then deploys at the rear of its starting zone. They can't move and are thus out of range unless I move a long way forward. Occasionally it did bring parrott guns of its own. It doesn't seem to know how to use them. It would either leave them walking slowly along behind its army, or set them up somewhere where my own guns could team up to pound them into dust with help from the accuracy boosting 'killzone' ability.

Gunpowder warfare is not my cup of tea at all. So very dull and overly-efficient.

[Sp4]

Sounds like a brilliant AI for a brilliant game =S *headdesk*

[Trithemius]

Gunpowder warfare is not my cup of tea at all. So very dull and overly-efficient.

I think it'd be more interesting if the AI could cope with linear tactics - it seems a bit dense when it comes at you with large blocks of infantry rather than nasty ribbon-like echelons.

[frogbeastegg]

To be fair I don't see much that the AI could do, aside from bring lots of artillery and use it decently enough so the player is the one eating shells. That would be even less fun, and I'd attempt to counter by blowing its guns up with my own. If it strings out, I'll counter by bringing more artillery at the expense of some reserve line infantry. These cannon fire across most of the map with good accuracy, there's no real way to bypass that or reduce exposure time sufficiently to make a difference.

It's a problem which history didn't really solve until tanks and aerial bombing runs. The usual offensive/defense balance got rather skewed when gun technology improved to enable rapid reloading and good accuracy. Or perhaps you'd have to move the focus to a theatre level instead of battlefield level. Bypass the defenses with a flanking force which is several miles away from the main line, that sort of thing. Not very Total War.