Attack or Defend?

[Lord Of Storms]

Yeah bridges can be tough always creates a log jam of bodies..

[Jabberwock]

Defending with a hugely outnumbered force on top of a hill is great fun, particularly with Catholic forces in the desert, where you know you can't afford to chase down routing units until they're well and broken, because your men will get clapped out. You've just got to let them rally and come at you again.

Having said that my personal fave has to be attacking on a flatish map with shed loads of heavy cavalry.

[NateEngle]

NE>substantial portion of Master Sun's text deals with the greater desirability of setting your army in a way that the enemy has to march a long way to get to you, exhausting themselves in the process.

>This is false in MTW, the distances are relatively short by the time your men start fighting they're still fresh.

That may be the case on flat ground, but the cases I'm thinking about are ones where I deploy high up on a hillside at the very back edge of the map, and ideally out in the desert when I have some light cav or camels to lead enemy shock troops around in a further-exhausting game of follow the leader.

I've seen cases playing at expert level where I've crushed enemy halberdiers with militia sergeants after they've had to march across a big stretch of desert. Obviously the terrain plays a big factor in how much you can expect your opponent to be worn down, but if you manage to exploit it the differential is well-worth seeking.

NE>Typically I don't attack until I have a preponderance of force, but give me a couple companies of halberdiers and arbalesters and a steep wooded hillside to stand on and I can hold off thousands of horsemen and spearmen.

>So can anybody else.

That's just my point. Defense allows a reliable, repeatable way of defeating a larger number of enemies with a smaller number of defenders, and you don't have to be the Duke of Wellington to make it happen.

NE>If you examine the tactics of someone like Stonewall Jackson or the old "King of Spades" (Robert E Lee) you find that their more decisive one-sided victories are ones like Fredricksburg (pure defense)

> Which was the result of Union stupidity, they had the opportunity to ford the river and get into the town before the Confederates got there.

Unfortunately fording a river in the age of gunpowder has less attraction than it did in earlier periods. The firearms used at Fredricksburg were largely muzzle-loading rifled percussion cap muskets - prone to unreliability when wet.

If I had been Burnside I would have seized the town, dug in like crazy, emplaced my heavy artillery, and simultaneously sent another large detachment up-river to cross the Rappahanock with a view to turning the Confederate left, always on the look-out for what would be the best defensive position to fall back into when Lee was forced to either counter-attack or give up the heights and retreat towards Richmond.

NE>or better yet 2nd Manassas where Jackson swings wide around the Union left and then seizes the railroad junction where he simultaneously re-provisions his army and forces the Union to backtrack and attack him as his men shelter themselves behind the railway embankment.

> This was a flanking attack with surprise, which I will give credit to Jackson for. But once again Union stupidity prevailed with lack of recon.

> Your arguement lacks credibility, whats more is the all your claims of defensive success are based on overtly great mistakes of the opposing sides.

History is abundantly populated with errors no less egregious. If your point is that I deploy my units so as to trick or lure the enemy into making tactical errors, then I would agree, but I might also add "So what?"

All I can say is that I defend with armies that average about half or less the size of my enemies, and I consistently beat them with losses of around 1 of mine for every 5 of theirs - often even better than that.

[NateEngle]

> I love to set ambushes in the trees, so that I seem to be defending but then out flank and attack myself, I will always choose to defend in case of a bridge, I hate attacking those

I'm actually finally getting the hang of bridges both on attack and defense. The key when attacking is first to have good missile troops, and second to lure the enemy into a position where you can bow them down at no risk to yourself.

I had one battle attacking against a bunch of knights and swordsmen where all I had were arbalesters and 2 companies of plain old spearmen (no command bonus at all as I recall). The key was to first get my missile troops set up to cover the bridge (and naturally the enemy stayed out of range). Then, when I was ready, I would slowly start a spearman marching across the bridge.

You could almost see the enemy's minds at work ("Aha Spearmen, easy work for our swords"). Their swords would make a rush for the bridge at which point I would reverse my spearmen and march them back to my side of the river. The swordsmen would approach into range, lose a couple dozen men, and then fall back when they saw that there wasn't going to be anyone marching into their trap after all. If they had kept marching to my side of the river they would have had a field day and chopped me to ribbons, but they were the defenders so every time I backed off they backed off too.

I must have sent my spears out on that bridge a dozen times or more, and I don't think I ever did any melee at all. Eventually the enemy knights just retreated off the field after their swordsmen had taken about 500 casualties vs none at all on my men.

Defending a bridge is similar - set up the missile troops for support, and position a halberdier at the far end of the bridge just where it slopes down towards the bank - a custom-made hill to defend (order them to march across, then have them halt when they're in the right position). Sometimes the AI gets so frustrated it even charges with its archers (probably so as to move into position to be able to fire more effectively on my archers). In both cases the key is to think of the bridge as a focal killing ground into which you try to lure/funnel the enemies so that you can whack 'em.